Hope and glory

I woke up early on this day when the days begin to grow longer, and sat for a while in the glow of the Christmas tree lights as the sky brightened in the window behind me. Daytime will be just a little bit longer today, one day after the winter solstice. For now, at 7:15am on December 22, 2020, I'll let that be a sign for me of growing hope for a better world in 2021. Or, more realistically, of the presence of hope and grace even in sad and painful times. 

Easier said than done. Hope and grace are more easily felt in the early morning quiet than in the late afternoon, when the sun goes down too soon after too many hours of screens and stress and clamor. Of  trying to construct or reconstruct real human voices behind the black and white paragraphs of news or the endless strings of emails. 

I have felt at times like I am holding my breath through this pandemic. Or letting go and then quickly holding it again. Tears creep into my eyes and throat too easily these days, often cued by singing or memories of singing or trying to sing. I have been in church every Christmas of my entire life (with the possible exception of the year I was in first grade and didn't get to say my "piece" in the Christmas Eve service because I was sick). Christmas at home, without the familiar rituals of church-going, choir-singing, and family gatherings afterward will be tough. And Christmas without music-making -- dear God! When it comes to music, it's the making of it that matters most to me. 

I have spent very little time making music during this pandemic, but I am making hats. I think it's an even dozen, or will be when I finish the one I cast onto my knitting needles last night. I've also knit two sweaters, finished a third one, knit a couple pairs of socks and two lace shawls. There is no sound in knitting, but there is rhythm and sensation in the hands. The product does not float on air and then disappear. It lasts. I don't find tears welling up in my throat when I pick up my knitting. I find comfort there instead, and breath.

Oh, this post, more labored over than a reader could know. What meaning can be found in breath-holding, music-making, post-solstice sunrises, yarn and hope and grace? And why even try? These are dark days, even under a brightening winter sky. I've prayed this morning for peace for the dying.And prayed for grit and determination for the rest of us.

“Glory to God in the highest heaven," sang the angels, "and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” They lit up the night sky, those angels. Had the shepherds ceased to be "sore afraid" by then? Did their fear dissolve into wonder? Did the light in the sky illuminate their hearts, as the rising sun is now showing me the inner branches at the top of my Christmas tree? Did they find hope and grace in the morning light of the manger?

"Marshfield Christmas Dawn II" by docmartini is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Perfect rejoicing

"Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." That's St. Paul, of course, writing to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 4) from prison. 

I can't hear that text and the verses that follow it without also hearing this 16th century English motet. It begins with an upward leap of a perfect fourth on the word "rejoice." 

Why a "perfect" fourth? It may be one of those things we were just told to accept in music theory class. There are major and minor seconds, thirds, sixth and sevenths, but fourths and fifths -- they may be augmented or diminished, but they are never major or minor. They're perfect, and one is the inversion of the other: C to F is a fourth, F to the C above is a fifth. And C to C, of course, is an octave (despite four and five adding up to nine, but that has something to do with counting the F twice. Which reminds me of certain math errors I've made while knitting in the round, or spacing buttonholes. Or something.) The fifth above is the second overtone, so there's another layer of math here, and then there's the thing where you're going from the dominant back home to the tonic. It's the "Here Comes the Bride" interval. It holds a certain majesty. 

(If you'd like to cite contrary examples in music, if a perfect fourth has an entirely different character for you, or you say it functions differently in some dissonant or atonal music of the early or late 20th century, well, that's your problem. Your sorry little problem. Excuse me.)

A few years ago, a visiting English choral clinician, Tim Brown, formerly of Clare College, Cambridge,  told our St. Matthew Passion rehearsal at my church that a singer could never sing a perfect fourth high enough. You had to aim high to get it exactly right -- to make it perfect in sound as well as in theory. That little piece of advice, offered as an aside to whatever it was he was trying to get us to do with the Bach, has stuck with me, so that when I see one of those things coming (or used to see one, when we could still sing in choirs) I aim high. Maybe with my eyebrows lifted, maybe -- and more to the point -- by making plenty of space to hold the sound, plenty of room for it to resonate brightly in exactly the perfect place. 

It makes perfect sense to me that a composer would set the word rejoice as a perfect, upward-moving fourth. It's a call, a sit up and pay attention gesture. It lifts spirits to say, to sing, "rejoice!"

Are there other instances of hymns and sacred songs rejoicing on a perfect fourth? In Advent hymnody there's "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers." Tomorrow in our mid-week worship services we'll sing the Advent hymn "Awake, Awake and Greet the New Morn," with a dancing fourth on both "awakes." Other examples?  It's 9:30 at night and the hymnal's at the other end of the house. 

Paul rejoiced from prison and exhorted his readers to virtues beyond rejoicing, or perhaps rooted in rejoicing: gentleness and/or moderation (depending on translation); don't worry; pray and give thanks. Trust that the Lord is, in 16th century lingo,  "e'en at hand." 

And now I've thought of another hymn that begins with an upward leap of a perfect fourth: "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," which I think is one of the most beautiful tunes ever. 

Somewhere in time and space, Christ on the cross met Paul in prison, and Paul rejoiced. Christ meets us too, from that cross. Perfect rejoicing. 

Thanksgiving surrender

This is not the year to host 18 or 20 family members for Thanksgiving Dinner. And it's the first time in more than 20 years that I have not done so. I'm hurting. I put myself in charge of that tradition and now I'm not in charge. No table to set. No gravy to excel at. No red Jello setting in Grandma Masch's glass bowl in the refrigerator. No flipping back and forth between the stained pages in the poultry, stuffing and pie and pastry sections of "The Joy of Cooking." 

On the other hand, there's no stressing out about all the things to accomplish between getting home from the 10am Thanksgiving service at church and the arrival of family at 1pm. 

Another upside of this comes directly out of a minor household crisis: my gas range seems to be leaking gas, sometimes but not all the time. Not enough to convince the technician from the gas company who came out last week that something was wrong. But enough that I pulled the range away out the wall last night and turned off the gas. The repair man is scheduled to come on Friday. He's taking care of people who need their ovens tomorrow. I can get along without this year — though this brings an additional disappointment. 

The one thing I was counting on this year was an apple pie even if (or especially if)  I would mostly eat it myself. The crust is in the refrigerator, waiting to be rolled out and filled with the cooking apples from the Farmer's Market that I've been saving since the end of October. Now, I'm delivering an unbaked pie to my sister this afternoon which she says she'll mostly have to eat herself.

I don't care all that much about the turkey or the mashed potatoes. Some years my Thanksgiving experiments with vegetable sides turn out great, some years not so much. The apple pie, however, is for me the raison d'être for Thanksgiving dinner. It's also the food of choice for breakfast on the day after. Last night, about 10pm (yeah, don't ask) when I discovered the problem with the oven, no pie-baking felt like a final blow, or one blow too many.

It's the little things.

This morning I learned from about fifteen seconds of googling that I can roast a whole chicken in my 8-quart Instant Pot--the Instant Pot that I've never been quite sure why I bought. So there will be something special for dinner tomorrow -- my daughter's favorite drumsticks and potatoes "baked" in the crock pot. Later in the day, I think we'll have a family Zoom to share pictures from childhood -- the myriad old slides that I'll continue scanning after the replacement scanner from Amazon is delivered tonight. 

"What does your family do for Thanksgiving?" is always useful small talk this time of year. What do we eat and who do we eat it with? What are we thankful for? The lists for most of us begin or end with "family and friends, of course"and that is a big part of what is missing this year. I'm sure there are inspiring essays being prepared for publication on news and other websites tomorrow, on gratitude, blessings, faith, what really counts. I'd like to deliver something of that here, but I'm tired. Tired of today's rainy weather. Tired of the pandemic. Tired of worrying about it. Tired of reflecting on grief and loss and loss of control.

So I'm surrendering, at least for a day or two. The good dishes will stay in the cupboard. No cooking with gas. No big clean-up either. But time to be. And time to be thankful for just being. 

Ties that bind

Not sure what it says that while browsing through music on Spotify I settled on Wagner's Overture to Parsifal as the thing that felt most right. Moody, mysterious music, with little strips of cool redemption flickering at the upper edges, like a scrap of cloth tied to a central air conditioning unit so that you can look out the window and see if it's on. (I am certain that this description would appall Richard Wagner. If he could understand it.)

In any other year at this point in November, I would be sizing up the cooking and cleaning tasks ahead, looking at recipes, making lists, getting ready to host Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. I think we were eighteen last year, from baby Chloe to 87-year-old great-grandma. 

But it's not happening in 2020, the year of the covid-19 pandemic. And while I"m trying to forge ahead and make alternative plans (and also help my daughter plan one or more Zoom birthday parties for her 30th birthday in December) I fell off that slow-moving barge of making-it-work at some point. I just need to grieve a while. 

To grieve is a very non-specific verb. What do you do when you grieve? Cry? Think about the past? Worry about the future? You sit and feel sad. You tear up at all kinds of things. Yesterday my day started going south while listening to Governor Pritzker as he talked about his family during a press conference on covid precautions in Illinois. He choked up a little and my throat went there, too. Empathy. The thing that holds us all together as humans. That thing whose absence makes a wide crack where anger and cruelty grow like black mold. Something we've seen too much of lately.

I don't need to chase out the spiderwebs from the legs of the drop leaf table which in other years handles the overflow seating on Thanksgiving Day. And I don't need to put the leaves in the dining room table either, which frankly is not easy. No need to figure out which white wine to serve -- the ubiquitous and safe chardonnay we fill our glasses with as the meal begins, the sauvignon blanc that I and my older niece like, the sweet stuff brought by the youngest of the nieces. Or maybe a nice rose? Instead I'm going to roast a chicken on Thanksgiving Day, because I do not wish to eat turkey for weeks on end. I'll do it in a 400-degree oven, so there's a good chance I may still have to wave a dish towel under the smoke alarm at some point before dinner. And I may bake more of the usual pies so I can share them.

Something I read yesterday morning pointed out that Thanksgiving is the only major holiday where the traditions are shared by all Americans, regardless of religion. ( I wish I could remember where I read that so I could link to it). On this Holiday, people all across the land worry about the white meat drying out before the dark meat is cooked, and everyone has an opinion about what should and should not be on the menu. At my house there are mashed potatoes that I don't really care about but everyone else does, cranberries that almost no one eats, over-sweetened sweet potatoes, and cornbread baked in Aunt Clara's cast iron molds. (Someone will request the plastic bottle of pancake syrup.) 

But that Thanksgiving is more or less cancelled this year. And the many layers of meaning I attach to it will have to be settled back into place to wait for next year. Like the cobwebs behind the chairs in the living room. 

Gratitude, of course, remains, and is a proven strategy for coping day-by-day. So what am I grateful for today? Sadness shared -- that catch in the throat. 

We share our mutual woes,

our mutual burdens bear,

and often for each other flows

the sympathizing tear.

"Blest be the tie that binds" stanza 3

 

Knit from stash

This morning's Gospel lesson was from Matthew 25:14-30, a parable about three servants given money by their master. Two invested what they were given, got good returns, and turned it into more. One buried the money, afraid to lose any of it. 

I listened to the sermon, which began with a little story of a child who couldn't bear to give things away but instead kept them under the bed. My mind jumped to what's under my bed, and in the cedar chest, and in baskets in the living room, and pretty soon I'd found the meaning of the parable for me today: knit from your stash.

Stash is a confessional theme in the world of fiber hobbyists. We invest in yarn, or in fabric, in beads, floss, patterns and project kits. And the investing, at least for some of us, runs ahead of the making. If I were to finish two projects for every one that I bought yarn for, I'd start to clear things up in a decade or two. But the satisfaction of finishing something, along with the temptations from yarn stores that fill my email inbox, means the buying runs slightly ahead of the finishing six months out of the year. The other six months I put myself on a yarn diet. It works like most diets -- you can stick to it for a while, but when you go off the diet, you do so in a big way. 

But back to the Bible, or rather, back to considering the "knit from stash" mantra. 

Often it's the especially beautiful skein that lingers in the stash, or the really gorgeous piece of fabric. The one you didn't buy with a specific purpose in mind, you bought it just because you loved it. Because you were at an outdoor yarn festival and the August sun made the reds and oranges so warm and festive. Or because you picked it up and carried it around the yarn shop and it was made of alpaca and felt heavenly. Or because the bright floral print on the quilting fabric lifted your heart on a grey day. Or because you truly want to make something lovely for someone you love -- like hand knit Christmas stockings or a new pink quilt for a young woman's bed.

But once the fabric is cut, it's cut, and it can't be anything else. Once the yarn is knit and you've put all the time into it but don't like how it's turning out -- well, it's a lot of work to unravel it and use the yarn again. Sometimes you start something and you just can't get it to work the way you want it to and it gets shoved into a bag and then into a corner. (If it's blog post, it stays on your dashboard with a red DRAFT label on it, until without even reading it again, you click the garbage can.)

It's better to be knitting than not knitting. It's better to be sewing pieces of fabric together than just admiring the folded yardage on the shelf. It's better to start the project and give it, if not your best effort, a good effort, and to learn something from the doing. I just finished knitting a hat, for which I chose the colors and the patterns. It's pretty and bright, and much smaller than I intended. I'll take what I learned and start another one soon. 

The servant who buries his talent in the parable is cast out by the master. Focusing on fear and anxiety, or rather, on these things above all, do not advance the kingdom. Hiding the stash away, or feeling guilty about having it do not lead to happiness or creativity or warm quilts and sweaters. 

Make something out of what you're given, or of the things you've collected -- thread, fiber, experience, stories. Knit from stash and carry on.

Mortal

 Here I am drinking beer in the back yard, late afternoon on a warm day in October. I've got 22 minutes until sundown, which might be kind of a metaphor for treasuring warmth and light on the way to a COVID winter. 

I've been a little freaked out this week by dead birds. Specifically a perfectly formed but stone-cold dead sparrow that was lying on my back steps Tuesday afternoon when my daughter and I left the house. We hurried on to the garage, only to discover that the automatic garage door opener was not working. Fortunately it had only been a couple months since I'd unwedged the service door from whatever it had been stuck on for a couple years, so I was able to go inside and raise the door. When I came back home, alone, I picked up the dead bird with a plastic grocery bag and deposited it in the empty garbage cart out back. It clunked when it hit the bottom. I also called the garage door repair company, using the number on the well-worn sticker on the pegboard inside the garage.

So the broken gear in the opener was fixed on Wednesday morning. All should have been well. 

This afternoon I brought my laptop outside to do some writing in the fall sunshine and the seventy-degree weather. I went to pull a chair up to the table and a bird, a sparrow, lying on its back twitched out from underneath the chair frame. It was paralyzed on one side, helpless, breathing, and struggling to move. I went inside for a few minutes, came back out, looked again. The bird seemed still, dead. I thought, because I had seen it alive, it was too sacred to pick up with a plastic grocery bag and drop into the trash. So I got a shovel from the garage and dug a hole near the forsythia bush, working my way through some tough roots to go six or even eight inches down. I went back to pick up the bird with the shovel — I'm sadly squeamish. I cannot tenderly pick up the creature in my own naked hands, despite last week reading a lovely nature writer's story about holding such a dead bird in her tender hands. I scraped the shove on the pavement and the bird moved again, twitched across the patio a few inches, frightened or reflexively enlivened by the sound, the action, the threat.

I know this bird will die. But I couldn't think of burying it alive. I know that a country person, a person with a better heart for animals, someone else — would know how to kill it, how to put it out of its misery. But what to do? Smash it with the shovel? I imagined how awful the smashed bird would look. I imagined it not dying even then and me needing to smash it again and again. 

So I left it. I sat down to do my work, talk on the phone, drink my beer with the dying sparrow just beyond my peripheral vision. I made one more attempt with the shovel about twenty minutes ago, but again the sparrow had enough life, enough movement to skitter and flip a fewinches across the patio into the dirt. It may be breathing still, even now — though perhaps I'm done with looking. 

God's eye is on that sparrow. 

I guess I'm there, too, though only in God's peripheral vision. Mortal, yet so uncomfortable with mortality. 

Parking place

I've been caught in dreams lately in which I cannot find my car, cannot return to where my car is parked. I'm going up and down streets parked solid with vehicles that are not mine, with a sense that my glacier blue Honda CRV should be where I think I've left it, and yet I can't find it. The streets are near places I went late at night with fellow theatre people after shows in the early 80's. Or I'm on streets near the high school where I dropped off and picked up my kids a dozen or more years ago. Those kids are waiting on corners for me, Kurt in one dream, Eliza with Kris in another. But I can't do what they're expecting of me, can't make it work. 

This morning, as I whirled through the bathroom, putting in contacts, pushing my hair back into place, almost late for a coffee date with a friend, it hit me. Those dreams are about chaos. 

In other words, 2020.

I'm taking a few necessary days off from work, to slow down, think my own thoughts and clear out stuff from my home. Yesterday I cleaned the garage and filled the garbage can with junk and dirt and stuff bought fifteen years ago to fix twenty-year-old problems. There's an old bicycle and an old push lawnmower out by the garbage cans which I expect will disappear on Sunday or Monday, before the regular collection day on Tuesday. One man's junk is another man's garbage-picking prize or something else to add to the pile of scrap metal that can be turned into cash and used for rent and groceries. 

There's less than a month left before the election, and it's twelve weeks beyond that, I believe, until Inauguration Day. Then, I hope, with new leadership in Washington, we start to pick up the pieces and set things right after the four-year tornado of the present administration. I'll be dropping off my ballot in the next few days (vote yes for the Fair Tax in Illinois!) and then phone-banking this weekend to encourage Wisconsin voters to get those ballots in early. 

In the meanwhile, there's beautiful fall weather, golden orange and still-green in bold contrast to deeply blue skies. Warm afternoons in the sun this week, and early mornings and early evenings cool enough for wool and fleece and hats. 

The earth goes on. The trees stayed rooted in the parkway. I don't have to look for them to find comfort. The birds and squirrels, bees and butterflies go about their business. Yesterday a red-headed woodpecker made a brief visit to my patio, close to where I sat -- like I was seeing it stuffed in a museum case. It was a young bird, still spotted in places and tried to perch on the metal pole that holds up my grape vine. It's rusty enough to look like bark. The bird slipped a bit down the pole, then quickly flew away. 

It is hard to stay rooted, hard to stay grounded in these pandemic days.  So many things look the same in substance but are different in how we allow ourselves to live them. Restaurants, choirs, shopping, baseball games--nothing is the same. Snatched up by chaos, dislocated by the virus, whirled into confusion by the all-day onslaught of crazy news,  I can't find where I parked my car. I'm not even sure where to find myself.

I close my eyes and breathe, cool fingers held to my face. Shielded thus, I search for reverence -- another word for gratitude according to Diane Butler Bass. What is sacred on this day? Where is God — and God's greater and more graceful world — breaking in around the edges?  That is where I will make my home. I'll park my car. I'll be able to find it again.  

Spinning

 It's been a gray day here in Illinois. The air is moving, tree branches are bending in the wind. Leaves closer to the ground are lifted by the wind within their own limited space, anchored to stems and twiny branches. Everything around me is in continuous motion. 

As am I. My brain feels like that spinning rainbow or the circling dial you see as a web page is loading or a computer is searching for something it can't find and is stuck, in that way that necessitates a reboot or a restart or a force quit of the software. 

It seems that I just can't make sense -- human sense -- of this COVID pandemic life. I am not wired for this.

Do I even remember what I used to do on a Saturday night -- though, to be honest, it was not much. But this "not much" is different from then -- fewer possibilities, less freedom, and always the questions about what's the sweet spot for staying sane while minimizing exposure to the virus. There are lots of things that people do that are relatively "safe": there's the long, socially distanced line to get into the Farmers' Market here in Oak Park on Saturday mornings. There are the young adults laughing and talking at sidewalk tables outside restaurants. (I'm old enough to be a little suspicious of them.) My email inbox is full of links to programs on Zoom from museums and arts organizations, but I despair of keeping track of such things and actually showing up to listen. And then, I fear that while listening, I'll be let down.

I have nodding acquaintance with three or four people who walk their dogs past my back fence every morning as I sit outside to drink my coffee. Cold weather is coming -- how much longer will I see the very tall man with the very little dog most mornings before 8am? The dogs will still need to be walked in winter, and their walking humans will be warm enough. Me, sitting in a chair, bundled in wooly things, coffee cooling too quickly in the mug -- I can picture it, but I shiver down to my sit bones as I do.

Seems like we should be homing in on some essential values or on the meaning of life, some great lesson from this pandemic. I don't know why I expect this -- or maybe it's only that I yearn for such transcendence. Life is suffering, says the the Buddha, echoed by other wise teachers from many traditions, including the Lutheran -- though perhaps less explicitly, in different words and wrapped up in theology. 

A time for this and a time for that, says the wise author of Ecclesiastes. Time to sign petitions and support Democrats say my text messages tonight. I'm there, sure. But I am just one person, in one raggedy suburban backyard.

Last Sunday a righteous attempt to clean hair and gunk out of the drain in the bathroom sink resulted in a broken pipe and a twenty-minutes-before-closing trip to a local hardware store. I hate it when I start a simple project and end up in a mess, unable to put pieces back together. I am sure that there's some technical expertise, some knack just beyond my grasp, that keeps me from solving the problem and more important, feeling competent. 

In hardware stores I waste no time trying to figure things out for myself. I march up to wherever the hardware store guys are hanging out, show them my broken part, and pretty much demand they solve my problem. And so it went last Sunday with the pipe, but I was dismayed to learn that the only solution was going to be installing a whole new drain assembly. Even with half my face covered by a mask the hardware store guy could see I was unhappy. He patiently opened the package, pulled out the new pieces out of the package, showed me what to do, gave me a couple of very sensible insider tips. He also responded to my incredulous-about-the-whole-thing face. It's only hard, he said, if you're frustrated and angry. In fact, it's much harder if you let yourself get frustrated. 

It was good advice. Maybe it's something he often shares with customers. I don't know. But it cheered me up. Something about being seen and understood and called to be my better self. I went home and did what he said, and even without the tool he had shown me (giant, plumber-size locking pliers), the old parts under the sink came apart without too much trouble, and the new ones went right into place. For a while last Sunday I stopped spinning. 

I'm outside as it grows dark this evening. The air is still swirling around me. There's cooler weather coming in for the week ahead. A friend reminded me today via text that nobody is super-happy right now. How could we be? When I look back on 2020, and maybe 2021, too, from four or five years in the future, I'll remember a long period of flattened emotion. Nothing really great, but much guarding of self to prevent being kicked into the hole of despair by repressed anger and frustration. 

The trees that I see from my seat in the backyard have been my companions these last six months. A few weeks from now I'll be raking their leaves from the parkway and heading inside for a long winter. I'll be lighting candles in the living room, and doing what I can to hang on to wonder and freedom and imagination. 

Island poem, 2020 (revised)

 

From the tree tops the birds 

claim territories, call for partners, warn fledglings.

Chattering, chirping, checking.

Where to fly? Where to watch?

Where to find fish 

this one morning

in one more summer's life?

Leaves on the Quaking Aspen

(yes—that’s its name!)

Shimmy in the shore breeze.

The pines cast their shadow over the lawn

and sing to the far shore.

Caught on the updraft

gulls screech 

Har-eee, har-ee — here.

Forever in my heart

I glanced down at the kitchen floor while cooking dinner tonight, at the colorful Free Trade runner that protects the wood from spills and wear and tear. Against the bright blue and green I saw a butterfly, a black and yellow butterfly, spread flat on the plastic threads, flat like it would be if pinned to a collection wall. It was perfect, beautiful, a sharp and startling contrast everything around it. 

How did it get into my kitchen? Why was it flat on the floor? Had it flown in through the back door and I hadn't noticed? Had it hatched from a caterpillar hidden somewhere in the fuzz under my kitchen cabinets? I thought about these things for less time than it takes to form words around them and then snatched a cubical Rubbermaid container from the dish drying rack with its red lid. I bent down, touched the plastic box to the floor, tipped it up and used the lid to urge the butterfly inside.  It went in easily and I held the lid over the top. The butterfly struggled a bit inside as I rushed to the back door, went down the steps, took off the lid and tossed the butterfly toward the meadow of Queen Anne's lace that used to be the grass in my backyard. It flew away and I returned to the kitchen, back to the task of pulling together a quick dinner for Eliza and me. 

The proverbial "set it free" moment. 

Twenty minutes later, when I took my plate of lemon chicken and healthy vegetables out to the patio table, podcast going on the phone tucked under my arm, the beer opened while cooking in my other hand, I thought ... Kris?

I have friends who've asked if I had "sightings" or "signs" or times when I felt my son's presence in the days and weeks and now years after his death. He died three years ago tomorrow, on July 24, 2017, after a brave and refining battle with ALS. It was a losing battle, of course, because that's what ALS is, and thus, perhaps, one should not call it a battle, because it's not fair and how hard you fight doesn't determine the victor. It doesn't even determine the meaning of the outcome. The point for Kris as he lived and died with ALS was grace. Grace was what he discovered and trusted in and told the rest of us all about -- God's grace. And what we saw, even in the battle, even in the obscenity of the disease, the awfulness of his fate -- what we saw was God's grace merging with what Kris called "Gronk's grace" — Kris Grahnke's grace. Something transformative. Something that transforms our lives into gratitude and reverence and awe at a world made by, made for, made of God's redeeming love. 

Butterflies are symbols of resurrection, symbols of Easter, of new life and beauty and freedom. I am more sad than liberated, more mournful than lifted up, as I think about the delicate wings of the butterfly I tossed into the wilds of my backyard earlier this evening. The son I love so much is three years gone. Three years without a phone call, three years without a hug, three years without someone who shared certain family jokes with me, who loved his siblings almost as fiercely as I do, who had planned for his own family and a new generation of good times when he married his wife, Michelle. 

He is free, living eternally with God, and what I know and can envision of that is dim. But Kris is, somehow, still here in surprises: the butterfly restored to the outdoors, the way I thought of him this afternoon and how much he and I enjoyed his sister's malapropisms, how he could imitate and understand her better than anyone. He's here in the approval that his friends bestowed on his younger brother's Instagram photo of himself and his girlfriend of the last year, two people who seem happy and well-suited for one another. He's here in the encouragement I've taken from his blog in the darker moments of this pandemic. He's here -- once it seemed in a startling tumble of books and papers at a certain moment not long after he died. He's here in the old snapshots I find of him and his friends in third grade clambering over each other on the playground. He's here in my heart. Always.

Island poem 2020

My toes surf the wet grass above the beach.

The wind brushes past my ears, my cheeks and temples.

Overhead the birds talk 

With purpose. 

They claim their territory, warn of predators, 

Call for partners, guard their fledglings.

Checking, always checking.

Chirping, chirruping 

To one another —

Where to fly, where to watch, 

where to find fish this morning. 

This one more morning 

Of one more summer’s life. 

The leaves on the quaking aspen (yes—that’s its name!)

Glitter in the breeze.  

A chorus of pines at water’s edge stands tall to sing to the opposite shore. 

The lonely cedar on the hill 

bent by the past, leans east

toward that far shore.  

Oh where are you?  

Over the lake the gulls rise on the updrafts,

screech insistently to one another. 

Har-eee, har-eee. 

Here, here. 

I came outside early yesterday with my iced coffee and my morning book (non-fiction in the morning, novels in the evening, that's my rule) -- I came outside, sat down at the patio table, looked up at the sky and said, "Oh, wow."

It was that deep, that blue, that -- I don't know -- that over-it-all.

Today, awake too early and once again outside with my iced coffee and my morning book, I'm listening to birds. A noisy chorus is going on,with a cardinal soloing over the top. A goldfinch is sitting on the far fence. This early in the day I can hear traffic sounds in the distance -- a far-off mash-up of sound, that I don't notice in the afternoon. The expressway is more than a mile away -- am I hearing all the cars and trucks between here and there? The sunlight is making occasional appearances, so that the maple leaves overhead are dark green and light green, the bits and pieces of contrast you might be confounded by in a large jigsaw puzzle. Early morning walkers and runners pass by, solitary. (Funny how when I get out of bed I am never struck by the impulse to go for a walk.) A squirrel stands up and pounds her white furry chest not six feet from my chair.

June 9, 2020. There will be storms this afternoon, with high winds according to the weather alerts on my phone.

And what else will the day bring? Floods of words, torrents of words, in emails, news feeds, social media. Solos from those with a platform, like the cardinal on the electrical wire a few minutes ago. Mostly a roar in which no one thing stands out for its beauty or clarity or depth. Chest-beating, like my friend the squirrel. Push and pull, light and dark, no firm truth. Humanity's self-consciousness at loose flooding the world.

I might rather be the squirrel who just now leaped across the grass in one, two, three, symmetric arches, gentle feed leaping from the ground, now threading under the weeds and reappearing with a rustle near the fence. Uncomplicated, with a consciousness all her own, as mysterious to me as the depth of blue in the sky.

Two Poems
Spring 2020



It’s warm for early March and drizzling.
Inside the coffee shop the barista
Presides, pulls the shots and clatters cups
across the counter.
Customers find their corners, stare at their phones.

Sisters share the brocade sofa,
And recite their news to one another
In the shelter of a tall potted plant.
“She doesn’t.”
“It’s only.”
“Who knows?”

Spring is far away.





My house, my house, my aging house.
Popping, peeling paint,
windows rotting lightly through the years.
It stands. It shelters,
Leans a little less than square.

Weeds grow tall, forsythia wild
Around the basketball hoop
Straight and sturdy in the yard.
Where are the boys who dribbled,
Turned, and shot from the court below,
Bouncing their angry edges hard
against the fiberglass backboard?

My house, my house, my aging house.
Herbs tumble over the dirt
New shoots green on last year’s woody stems.
Ancient chives and tarragon sweet.
Sage for blessing, thyme for spice.

My hand brushes the lavender,
Whose ancient fragrance
Guards my woolens from moths,
My senses from sleeplessness.

The spider web

This morning's gift: a tiny spider web in my backyard.

It is an eight-sided world all to itself, maybe three and a half inches across. It is a single plane that bends and curves in the wind. A long single strand of spider silk connects each vertex to a leaf or stem in the wilderness of the 50-year-old grape vine next to the patio.

I am lucky to be sitting here, at exactly the hour, exactly the right angle of the sun, to see the web glitter. The camera on my phone can't see it, and I may not have seen it either were it not for the breeze that gives it motion to refract the light this way and that. The strands that weave from radius to radius are packed close together. They'll snare some mighty tiny bugs for
 the worker who built this glittery trap.

I brought my knitting outside with me this morning, along with my coffee, thinking to redo the unsatisfactory work I ripped out last night. The openwork lace, the bright pink yarn, the shiny chrome needles look like materials for Jack's giant above the clouds compared to the delicate craft and threads used by this tiny arachnid.

From Wikipedia: 
Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all orders of organisms.

How does she do it? How does she warp her loom among the leaves? How long does it take to spin and stick together so many tiny threads? I noticed the beginnings of this work yesterday, but I didn't pay close enough attention to answer these technical questions. Robins and rabbits are much larger targets for observation these days in my weedy, wormy yard. I'm glad I walked only on the fence side of the patio table yesterday, however unintentional this was. Walking around the other way, brushing between the table and the grape leaves, would have destroyed this web before it was so perfectly. Mistress spider would have taken her business elsewhere, begun again, just another day in the chanciness of nature. But I would have missed this morning's moment of magic.

When I wake up in the morning, slowly, I inevitably reach for my phone. I wish I didn't, I vow not to do so the next day, but there it is. A press of my thumb, a touch, scroll and soon I'm reading the morning's news, not that much different from the news the night before. And last night's news was about looting, protest, fires and the angry, hurt, frustrated voices of black Americans who have waited far longer than anyone should have to wait for justice, freedom, prosperity. Does it do any good for me to linger over the details? To tweet, or retweet, or lecture others, mostly like-minded, about the evil I see, the change that needs to happen?

If I am to live mindfully, faithfully, filled with the Spirit, I must weave those things into my living too, be as mindful of the pain around me (and within me) as I am this morning of the wonder and beauty of nature.

The spider spins, needing nothing from me. In God's kingdom, lilies of the field and plain brown sparrows receive the tender care of their Creator and the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. God desires life and love for the created world.

I must invest in that creation.

Green, green, everywhere

Green, green, everywhere.

I have a friend whose favorite color is green. This friend is also someone who appreciates hand-made gifts, so I have knit things for her from green wool -- socks, a scarf. I've made them from hand-dyed yarn whose depths of color add warmth to the sock and invite the eye into the twists and turns of lace in the scarf.

Green is on my mind because this week everything outside looks about 80 percent greener than it did last week, if that's possible in spring. We've had so much rain that living things seem sodden with new growth. Leaves on maples are flourishing. The tips of the branches on the evergreens in front of my house are bright with new needles. The grass in the parkway is green under the haze of dandelions going to seed. The blue-green of the lilac leaves shows off what's left of the clusters of tiny purple flower. Nature's riches turn out, turn over, float on the breeze. My living room window is so crowded with green that it seems less a color than a condition, like water to a fish.

I finished reading "The Overstory" last night, a novel with human characters that is crowded with the voices of trees. So it's not surprising my morning imagination peers into maples and looks for mystery. I listen for voices, but only recognize my own irrelevance.

I'm older than the trees around my house. In the time when I was a child this street was likely lined with elms, lost to disease. The maples that replaced them were flourishing but young when we moved into this house. How much they've grown is evidence of how long I've lived here. The corner maple has to lean out over the street to find its light and keep growing.

No moral here. No wisdom. Just this one life form,  me, in a beige sweater made of plant and animal fiber, contemplating others.

What does your day look like during -- what exactly are we calling this? The springtime of eternal snow days?

I wake up in the morning and try to remember what I was dreaming. But before I can grab a mental screenshot of what will surely help explain me to me, reality steps in.

Oh. This.

I grab my phone and scroll through email. Devotions from Luther Seminary sent shortly after midnight. Junk. Charity appeals. Headlines from the Washington Post -- should I read them?

No.

Another day stretches before me of trying to do meaningful things in a vacuum, without brushing past other humans at less than six feet of separation, avoiding something, scrubbing away something -- a virus -- that I can't even see.

I don't know where it is, I don't know where it is not. I don't know if I'll have symptoms. I don't know if I'll get sick.

My brain is not wired for this. Nor has it evolved over the last six or seven weeks to meet this challenge more effectively. It will take effort to stay in balance again today.

Sunshine helps, and warm socks, and days when you go barefoot in your shoes and remember that summer will come soon. Masked strangers who nod as they walk past my fence with their dogs. A sister who brings chocolate cake and stands at the gate to talk. These things are real, if altered by isolation.

Screens on the other hand -- it takes effort and imagination to see real people and personalities inside the Zoom boxes online on a screen. We have all flattened out over the weeks of isolation. The lags and bumps in wifi are spontaneous, but we are not.

My living room has little piles in each of the places I sit. The book pile, the cookbook pile, the wooly yarn pile rich in blues and greens, browns and golds, the abandoned project pile. It's the way I lived in graduate school, with papers due at the end of the semester: the theatre history text on the floor, with 19th century plays and notes; the script for playwriting in the typewriter on the desk; the seminar project strewn across the bed. It would all be cleaned up, the room restored to order, when finished.

What does your day look like? This post was started yesterday, abandoned because it seemed to be going nowhere, with no appropriate tone or take. The day went downhill from there, and then climbed back up. Today, on a brighter, sunnier morning, my fingers and brain are itching to cast-on caps and shawls,

and words are flowing with less disappointment into my notebook and onto my screen.

I begin again.

Second Sunday of Easter: Wounds

It is a beautiful Sunday morning here in my corner of this wounded world. The sun is shining. It's warm enough to eat breakfast outside, at least while wearing a wool sweater. I'm wearing my hand-knit purple sweater with a pink turtleneck underneath, I'm a veritable hyacinth or May tulip sitting outside in the breeze. The forsythia blooms along the side of my house survived two nights of wet snow this week. The early red tulips, the small kind that hunker their blooms down close to the sturdy green leaves, also made it through the storms and are full-on open as the sun climbs to the top of the sky. I've heard the birds and seen the bunny. My neighbor sits outside on her patio next door. The occasional biker or runner streams silently past in the street.

And yet it is a wounded world. God's wounded world.

I spent some time with the story of "Doubting Thomas" this week, in order to make an online Sunday School video. Growing up, in the Lutheran Sunday School and grade school of my childhood, the telling of this story always shamed Thomas for his doubt. Doubt was a bad thing, born of fear and a too-shallow understanding of who Jesus was. Jesus' words at the end of the story, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed," were an opportunity to congratulate ourselves for our own faith, which didn't require the physical presence of our Savior entering through a locked door on cue.

It will not surprise you that I am trying to think about this story in other ways today. And what's at issue isn't the question of doubt. Let's just all accept that doubt can be a very good thing -- a prompt to explore, to be curious, to question, test, grow, even challenge God to show up. Or to learn how to live with uncertainty, because this is the life skill we need now.

The children's Bible story book I used for Sunday School calls this story "Thomas Wonders."

 "What?" Thomas says to the ten disciples who were in the locked room on the first Easter evening, when Thomas was absent. "Whaaaat? You saw Jesus?"

Honestly, why would Thomas trust the other ten -- cowering ex-fishermen, soon-to-be ex-disciples of an itinerant failed rebel against Rome? These men — and let's assume there were women in the room, too —were traumatized. What would come of their fright?

When Jesus appears again, eight days later, Thomas is there. And he gets what he asked for -- he touches the wounded hands, the wounded side of Jesus. Back in the Sunday School leaflet, or second-grade religion class at St. John School, this part of the story was the proof. Proof that this really was Jesus, the one who had been crucified. So believing in him was the logical thing to do.

It's interesting that in the story -- this part of the larger, mythical telling of Jesus' resurrection -- it's the wounds, the humanity that are the proof. Not a halo or a radiance, or even the power of coming through a locked door -- none of the things that might make the witnesses say, "Ooooo! God!" No, it's in the evidence of human suffering and pain that the disciples recognize Jesus. It's an important enough point to make that the gospel writer's account (and the oral tradition that preceded it perhaps) has this happen twice -- first to the ten, then to Thomas with the others present.

Christ walks, wounded, in a wounded world.

Much as I am thankful for the peace and beauty of this morning -- the bright red cardinal in the branches of the budding tree, birdsong mixed with the sound of conversation from next door as my neighbor chats cheerfully over FaceTime with family -- I remind myself that God is not just found in the beauty of nature. God is with us even as we ask "Whaat?"

In the wonders of how we're all wired temperamentally, I think there's science that shows some of us are better at certainty, some of us are more restless. But for all of us in this time of pandemic, may we, like Thomas, seek and find the grace to recognize Jesus in the wounded places.

Sunday School video is here for the curious. Touch the wounds tonight in your own hands as you pray.

"This is the night"

The devotion I read a couple days ago -- on Good Friday, I think -- described Jesus' death on the cross as a negation of what God is. A negation of life and creativity. And then invited readers to ponder this emptiness, this contradiction. What does this mean? as we like to say at The Perverse Lutheran.

We Christians move on from that negation on Easter morning, as we hear the news that "Christ is risen!" proclaimed everywhere -- this year on Facebook, on YouTube, in text messages we send one another. We follow Jesus through death and into new life, to the portals of heaven, to the "bliss untold" of the final stanza of the hymn "Awake, My Heart, With Gladness."

But today, April 12, 2020, is different, an Easter Sunday when we,  because of the COVID-19 pandemic, have chosen not to gather in churches. Public worship is online, but we are alone in our homes, perhaps with a few loved ones. There might be live chat along side a live stream video, maybe messages from friends on the phone, but still, it's a quiet Easter.

I went outside to drink my coffee this morning and listened to the birds before it was time to go to YouTube for my church's worship service. It is quiet out here, more so than usual, and the birdsong has geographical depth. I hear the sparrows close by, the cardinal in the maple in front of my house, other birds farther away down the block. A mighty robin made a ruckus in the garden, yanking a worm from the dirt. Two geese flew overhead and let me know they were there with their honking.

Across the street a different sort of sighting -- the Easter Bunny, in a blue hoodie, came out the front door, opened the garage, and carried bags of Easter swag back to the house.

I am enjoying the absence of frantic Easter activity. Any other year I'd be crazy busy this morning, singing, supervising, chatting, worrying about dinner. Instead I'm sitting in the back yard watching the forsythia, too yellow almost to be believed, bounce in the breeze. I'm admiring the early tulips, blooming red and cheerfully out of last fall's fallen leaves.

"This is the day the Lord has made," we sing in a Psalm antiphon on Easter Sunday. The words and tune were the first Easter thing that came into my mind as I woke this morning. And they are true, always. God is good. God's days are good.

But the first words of Easter Day are the words, "This is the night." They were chanted in the Easter Vigil service at the beginning of the Easter celebration fifteen hours ago. "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day," says Genesis. The dark vigil, then the sunrise.

"This is the night, in which, breaking the chains of death, Christ arises from hell in triumph."

In the night of death, of negation, the night of absence from one another, of sorrow for many, Christ arises from hell in triumph. And while it's good to make joyful noise about it, full on with choirs, organ, brass, it's not about our noise and celebrations and churches. Easter is this great mystery, where Christ walks among us, bringing life and hope and transforming our grief, our death into God's eternal life.

Refraction

Things I observed today.

This, in my kitchen. The glass of water on the windowsill produced the rainbow in the sink, in the late afternoon, as the sun streamed in from the western sky. 

A small moment, I guess, in the days of the big concerns and worries. But one that made me stop and wonder for just a moment. I'm sure there's some physics of light involved -- refraction through the water, the curved glass -- but the science makes it more wondrous, not less. 

My morning devotion, again from "Lent Is Not Rocket Science," by W. Nicholas Knisely, was about the special light of sunrise, special because of the way it's filtered through more of the earth's atmosphere. The question at the end was, "Will you pause today to see beyond the the first impressions and see the poetry of what is before your eyes?" and "What do you see?"

It's a good writing prompt, and since it was a warm for the season, sunny spring day, there were good things to see. Lots of people out walking their dogs throughout the day, past our church atrium, where I worked for much of the afternoon. Lots of runners out too. 

We're all keeping our distance, but I had to brave the grocery store this afternoon. I did my share of bobbing, weaving and swerving so as not to get too close to other people. My face, like many around me, was fixed, mouth closed, resolute. Get what I needed, or get what I could, and go home. After a while, though, I tried to smile across the social distance, when someone looked at me and I looked back. I smiled extra hard, or tried to smile extra warmly, to cross that scary gulf, the one that might too easily turn into fear of one another. 

I voted, too, again keeping social distance in mind and washing my hands well when I got home. I discovered that I had inadvertently cut in line when I entered the polling place -- misinterpreted what those distances meant. When I realized this and apologized, the two women now behind me smiled graciously, said it didn't matter, and we agreed, "It's all good."

I know this is not what the world was like for everyone on whatever day this of COVID-19 comes to America. Some of you struggled through another day of e-learning with children who must have been tempted by the sunshine. Some of you had your own aggravations with work (and I had some of those, too). Many folks were working at grocery store and at Walgreens, and in many places doing the things necessary to keep us all going. It can't be easy. It can't be easy to be elderly and isolated these days. It can't be easy to be a healthcare worker preparing for the onslaught. 

I observed myself often today, rattled by dreams, rattled by memories, not at all sure of how to meet the days ahead. But it was good to observe this, to name this, before springing into action. Stopping, observing, listening, watching, and occasionally muttering something about being grateful for the hard times as well as the easy ones, I found some measure of peace, some sense of living in the presence of God. And of God's presence reflected and refracted through me. 

Bigger -- because

My church live-streamed the worship service this morning -- if "worship" is what you call a Service of the Word in a sanctuary with no people in the pews, just an organist and a singer in the balcony and a preacher, a presider, an assistant minister and a lector in the chancel.
A friend commented this afternoon in an email about -- what else? cancelling plans:
Watched most of it, and was moved by how reassuring--and powerful--it was to be reminded that something bigger than us, bigger than the coronavirus, is at work in the universe, caring for us.
I wouldn't know about how it was to watch the livestream, because I was the lector, and my mood is never improved by watching myself later on video. A screen shot on Facebook showed me at the lectern with a pale face and frizzy hair. I should perhaps have heeded that twinge of vanity last night that asked, makeup in the morning?

As the church communications staff person, I was also the copier-and-paster of links—onto Facebook, a web page, email, all complicated by a little technical problem (no audio) that meant we started the whole thing over -- at a new URL -- about 15 minutes in.
This was the first time our service was live-streamed. Plans had been in the works for a while, with a scheduled debut of, what do you know, March 15. Apparently God had a hand in the timing. With gatherings of more than 50 people shut down for the next couple months, YouTube and Facebook and, God help us, Twitter, will have to get better at reminding us of things bigger than us, bigger than the coronavirus. And since we are the ones who provide the content for social media, that means we ourselves will need to get better at thinking bigger.

This evening it all feels like a dystopian movie to me, and frankly, I'd like it to end and the credits to roll, so that I can get up and walk out of the theatre into a bright sunny day in another place and time. (Denial is not just a river in Egypt.) I've planned and started knitting projects today, talked and texted with friends and family, struggled to get ahead or simply catch up in Scrabble games on my phone, and wondered and worried about everything from is it okay to pick up my new glasses at Walgreens to the global economy. These worries, and new ones are likely to reappear in a few hours -- long before the alarm goes off in the morning.

I grew up believing things work out somehow and I myself could rise to meet any challenge. Decades of experience have dimmed my optimism. Does this have something to do with what Paul wrote in Romans 5:1-11, about suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope -- and "hope does not disappoint us"? Those last words were an anchor for me when my son was diagnosed with ALS in 2014 and died in 2017. Early this morning, as I practiced reading them out loud, I noticed there was no period after "us," and I was going to have to vocally connect that wonderfully rhetorical crescendo leading up to hope into yet one more clause before the paragraph ended:

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

I don't think I succeeded in doing this during the reading this morning, at least not with the little trick that worked so well in the kitchen while the coffee was brewing, but there it is: "because God's love." The thing that makes us bigger.

Social distancing, day one

Saturdays are days when I often do nothing, or get nothing done. I'm more likely to engage in purposeful behavior on a Sunday afternoon. Today, Saturday, March 14, day one of social distancing in my neck of the world, is no different. So far:

1. Started a shopping list so that in one more trip to the grocery store, where I need to pick up a prescription, I can also get all the things I need so that I can stop going to the grocery store.

2. Took the Enneagram test, because I thought it would maybe provide insight and help me think about things in all the thinking time ahead. Also, didn't have anything more pressing to do. My highest score was a tie for Type 1 and Type 5; my second-highest score was a tie between 6, 3, 4, 2 and 8. The PDF file I received via email with my results is 37 pages long. Apparently I contain many worlds.

3. Met my neighbor across the street via text messaging. She was responding to a note I left on her porch before Christmas with a package that had been delivered to my house by mistake. Said she'd been meaning to do that for a long time. Seems like we may get to know each other better. Curious that today was a day to make a new acquaintance.

4. Limited my news intake to 15-20 minutes of headlines on my phone before getting out of bed. Very effective for reducing anxiety.

5. Made gluten-free pancakes with Eliza. Okay to eat / but they ain't wheat.

6. Noticed the many corners and floors and cluttered spaces in my house that, were I to use my time at home profitably, ought to be thoroughly cleaned.

7. Thought about starting my taxes. Thought it about for maybe 10 seconds. Baby steps.

8. Thought about doing some yoga. Visualizing that now. I think late-afternoon light is best for yoga, don't you?

9. Read yesterday's and today's devotion from "Lent Is Not Rocket Science." Contemplated whether there might be life in other parts of the universe, and what this might mean. Five or ten minutes of cosmic thinking lightens my heart.

10. Read through the lessons for tomorrow's livestream worship service. Will need to reckon with Paul in Romans saying that suffering builds endurance, which builds character, which builds hope. Hope does not disappoint us. All true, but still hard in practice.

Alleluia

Looked in the mirror to brush my hair this morning and remembered what I had been dreaming maybe an hour or so earlier. A friend had driven me to Madison Street, the downtown of the next suburb over, to get a haircut. I'd sat in the chair in the window of a salon while a short, stocky blonde man fussed and waved his hands around my head telling me what should be done. He went off somewhere and my friend grabbed some scissors and did the cutting. Later in the dream I looked in a mirror and wow, it was one bad haircut. Nothing left on the sides, strange knotty sticking-up places on top. I had wanted to go back and pay the salon guy for my haircut, but my friend said, no, why pay him, he didn't do anything, let's just go. And then we were in a neighboring, empty storefront, and someone threw a body through the half-open front door and gosh, sigh, we were going to have to figure out a way to get rid of it.

We couldn't identify the body. And, dear readers, lest any of you are concerned, I can't identify the friend who cut my hair dream either. It was a composite of -- well, many of you.

Madcap adventures that some psychologists would ask me to pay deep attention to, and most would suggest I just disregard. Yes, as we like to say at The Perverse Lutheran, what does this mean?

I try to post at least once in my blog every February, to mark The Perverse Lutheran's beginning in February of 2006. I wish I had something more coherent than a dream this Monday morning, but here are three things from the weekend I was still pondering at 5am this morning:

The dissonance of yesterday afternoon's Bach cantata. But how does one write about that? Words can't do what music can. That's why it's music. Even the text of the cantata itself pales next to what Bach did with it.

Transfiguration Sunday and the "burying" of the alleluia until Easter. In yesterday morning's children's sermon, the pastor asked, what does alleluia mean? "Rise up," said one child, which is not exactly right, but is still intriguing." Alleluia means praise God," said the preacher, when there were no more answers from the kids. This is, of course, true, but not enough. I say, alleluia means what it means: vowels and consonants sung in many keys, many melodies, through joy and sorrow. Praise, triumph, victory, heavenly longing, communal singing. Majesty. Easter. Not a word, but an orientation.

Thing three: some highlights from the creative writing showcase at Friday afternoon's tenth anniversary celebration of Opportunity Knocks, the program for disabled teens and young adults that is such an important part of my daughter's life. At the microphone: Sonya with a song lyric, Claire with a poem, and Eliza, my daughter, with a bit of romance. And finally the always radiant Jessica, declaiming her biography from her wheelchair. I typed her final sentence into notes on my phone: "I will never give up no matter how hard life gets."

Bad haircuts, crazy dreams, chromaticism, chaos -- I keep trying. And on Monday morning I say, Alleluia.

Requiem aeternam

My Aunt Shirley died earlier this evening. Not unexpected -- she was at home in hospice care, with the promise of no more trips to the hospital for congestive heart failure. She was, I believe, ninety-one years old, almost four years older than her sister, Marilyn, my mother, who will turn 88 in a few weeks.

My cousin Sue called my sister to tell her of Shirley's death, and told her that they'd had a "nice party" this evening. Shirley's sister-in-law and niece had come from Massachusetts to Michigan to stay for a few days. They'd had a family dinner, visited for a while — "visited,"  which is Midwestern for pleasant conversation — and shortly after that, Shirley put her head down and was gone.

Gone! Gone to a heavenly banquet, a heavenly party, a reunion with those who've gone before: her husband, her brother, her son John, who died of cancer two years ago and who she must have missed so much. And maybe Kris, my son, is sitting nearby.  If John is at the heavenly table (and he surely is!) it's a jolly party, with laughter and bemusement and love and silliness. There are tall tales being told by brother Dave, true mostly, with laughter from Ed, the husband and country pastor, who, if they have farm food at heavenly banquets, has brought home more corn on the cob than even ranks and ranks of angels could possibly eat.

Just last night I had thought about writing a blog piece for Shirley this week, remembering her presence in my life, remembering things we shared, good times we had as kids and young mothers and older adults under her roof -- at the old parsonage and at the new house she designed for herself. She wasn't the person who taught me to knit, but she taught me to knit better, and set me up with my first successful project when I was 8 or 9. She laughed and called me a "stomach knitter" because of the way I steadied the right-hand needle against my body. At the time I suspected she thought this was not a good thing, but I've always remembered it, and it's actually the key to whatever relative speed I have as a lifelong knitter.

A small detail. I'm sure Shirley would not even remember.

Shirley did many things beautifully. She had beautiful handwriting, so beautiful it was intimidating. I remember her cutting gladiolas from her garden and arranging them -- for the altar in church, I think. She sent handmade presents to my daughter, Eliza, for her birthdays -- bags and zippered cases that I've appropriated and used for knitting projects. She quilted and collected pitchers (as do I) and arranged colored glass bottles on the windows of her sun porch for the light to shine through in the morning. The house she laid out for herself had spaces for the big pieces of country furniture she owned -- her grandmother's table, the pie safe, the desk from the old church with its towering hutch. And she kept the family stories along with the family furniture.

Shirley was my mother's older sister. So yes, that means she was there to try to fix things, to be the boss, the one in charge, whether that was helpful or not, because that's what oldest sisters do. This could be hard for my mother, and the frustration that ensued could be hard for Shirley. (I speak as the oldest of three sisters, born myself to be in charge!) We both worked on letting go.

There will be lots to remember in the days ahead. Lots to smile about. And so many things that people will remember from Shirley's years as a first grade teacher, as a mother and grandmother, and a quilter and friend, that I, who visited Michigan only once or twice a year, don't even know about. Things to think of and wonder about, knowing some family stories have now passed, along with Shirley.

I'm having my own party as I write this, a glass of decent red wine and the best of the Christmas chocolate. I'll get out my knitting, maybe text my sisters, put my feet up on the ottoman. I'll have a nice visit with all the things and the presence that I remember about Shirley.

Rest eternal grant her, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon her.