Christmas Eve 2022

"Enjoy the darkness."  

We'd done legs-up-the-wall, Downward-Facing Dog, lunges, Warrior 2, Warrior 1, and even a sort-of-half-handstand supported by the wall. It was late-afternoon yoga in mid-December. As I'd come into class, the instructor asked (as yoga instructors do), was there anything in particular I needed today, anything I needed to work on? 

"Slow me down," I said. As usual, I'd rushed to get there. 

"Mentally or physically?" she asked. 

"My brain," I said. "It's so busy."

I rolled out my mat by a corner of the wall, collected a blanket and blocks from the shelves at the back of the room. Five or ten minutes of quiet rest with my legs up in the air, supported by the wall, slowed me down, as did the deliberate practice that followed. 

Yoga classes end with Shavasana, also known as Corpse Pose, where you lie still on your back, relax, and let go. The lights are dimmed and the almost-darkness of the room is comforting and enfolding, something to enjoy, like sleep, but aware.

In these days around the December solstice and Christmas, darkness is everywhere. The house is dark in the morning when I get up. Darkness shows up in the afternoon before 5 p.m. We had a stretch of rainy, gray December days last week where even at mid-day I found myself starting conversations with "It's so dark." In these final days before Christmas 2022, extreme weather is a reminder that winter can be dangerous as well as dark.

But there's light, too. Lights on the Christmas tree. Lights up and down the streets, brighter than used to be thanks to LED bulbs. 

In the last two weeks I've spent time working with the 8th graders who are reading the scripture lessons this evening at the Children's Service of Lessons and Carols at my church. I make sure they understand what they're reading and help them share it out into the congregation. Mostly I remind them to slow down and look up occasionally. Their bright faces will reflect the wonder of this night.  

Contrasts between light and darkness show up often in these Christmastide lessons read year after year. Isaiah prophesies that "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." In a reading from Genesis 22 God directs faithful Abraham to consider the stars in the heaven; his descendants will be that numerous. There's the "glory of the Lord" shining around the shepherds as the angel announced Christ's birth over the fields of Bethlehem. There's the light of the star that led the wise men to the unexpected birthplace of the new child king. 

The final lesson, a grand theological summation, is John, chapter 1: 

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. (v. 5-6)

Life, light, glory and good news -- memorable images, all good things. 

But what about the darkness? 

Consider the darkness of the manger. My oh-so-Lutheran book group celebrated Christmas last weekend by gathering to read out loud from "Martin Luther's Christmas Book," a collection of excerpts from the reformer's 16th-century Christmas sermons. As he told the Christmas story from the pulpit, he added lifelike details from his own imagination to help his listeners enter the story and have a more intimate encounter with God made human. Mary, he emphasized, gave birth in the dark, with only Joseph to attend her. No water, no light, no midwife. No carefully prepared baby clothes, no place to lay the infant but a manger -- and that manger was in a very dark stable.

Luther's age experienced darkness more directly than we 21st century city-dwellers do. Street lights and headlights light up the roads in front of us, and flashlights on our phones show us where to walk on the way to the bathroom at the campground. We have to drive far out into the country to find the darkness that makes it possible to see the multitude of stars that Abraham saw. We aren't directly acquainted with moonlight nor its absence when the moon is new and all the landscape is in shadow.

But we do know of dark times—metaphorical darkness, times of spiritual struggle, grief, and depression when we are afraid because we are not sure about what's in front of us. Dark in this sense, however, has become a word to use with caution. Blame Jung, blame "Star Wars," blame Christianity -- dark is often used as a metaphor for evil and and has been used as a racist tool for instilling a sense of inferiority in people of color. We could banish the word dark (and perhaps should banish some usages), but that won't make our fears of the unknown go away.  Meanwhile, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Learning to Walk in the Darkness,  we miss a lot of truth if we look for God only in the bright and shiny things. 

Christmas Eve brings us to the darkness of the manger where the newborn Jesus emerged from the darkness of Mary's womb into a still-dark place. But in this dark world he was held and supported in Joseph's calloused hands, settled against Mary's softening belly, wrapped firmly and securely in swaddling bands, and laid in a rustic but sturdy trough for feeding animals. Human parents did the best they could for their God-made-human infant. And Mary pondered all the things that happened that night in her heart for a long, long time and recalled them weeping when they laid Jesus in the tomb following his crucifixion.

The list of people I know going through dark times seems longer than usual this December. Perhaps that's because I'm getting older. I've typed "you're in my prayers" into Facebook messages, emails and texts too many times in the last few weeks and felt the dim insufficiency of the message. Really, when are people not being hit hard by loss, grief, illness, failure, days of reckoning? 

The first Christmas in my life that was like this was in 1983, when my 57-year-old father was diagnosed with a brain tumor that would take his life well before spring appeared. One of his gifts to me during that dark time was a closer acquaintance with Paul Gerhardt's hymn "Once Again This Night My Heart Rejoices." There are many stanzas, most of which no longer appear in Lutheran hymnals. But this is the relevant one:

Hark! a voice from yonder manger, 

Soft and sweet, doth entreat, 
"Flee from woe and danger;
Come and see, from all that grieves you
You are freed; all you need
I will surely give you."

I was young then and in the year that I grieved for my father, I looked for an end to the darkness, the time when I would emerge again happily into the light and return to a life disturbed only by more quotidian problems. 

But if you follow Luther's imagination, his story-telling, you have to picture that voice promising freedom is coming from a dark manger. To come and worship the child who lives there means entering that darkness, not sure of where to put your feet, not sure if there's clean straw where you'll kneel. You're trusting a voice you can't see; it's a baby, a voice you can't understand except on the most basic level of wired-in empathic responses to newborn cries and needs. 

I've been working on this blog post for ten days now, wondering where it would end up, trying to make it come out some place where "enjoy the darkness" would make some kind of sense. It's 5:45pm on Christmas Eve; the darkness has fallen here in Illinois and a beautiful choral arrangement of "Silent Night" is playing on Spotify. The setting is right, but much as I feel this blog post should arrive at a satisfying ending tonight (like a Hallmark Christmas movie), I don't have one. 

It's Christmas Eve. It's dark. It's unknown. But God is here—whether it's in the eyes-closed Shivasana, Corpse Pose, of yoga practice, in eyes-closed prayer for others, or in very personal encounters with grief, sorrow, death and dying this Christmas tide. 

May you find all you need in the Christ Child this Christmas.

Feeling conscious

This week I read a little book by Antonio Damasio titled "Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious." Damasio is a prominent neuroscientist and author. "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" is another of his books; you get the idea. He's an atheist, interested in explaining consciousness in materialist terms. (Materialist: a person who supports the theory that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.)

A dozen or more years ago I read part of an earlier book by Dams -- I think it was "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain." I gave up before finishing it. It seems to me that he defines his way toward explanations. If you define things a certain way, you can build them into a theory of how it all works, but this means you have to keep those specific definitions in mind as you struggle onward through the text. Since the words he defines are ones that are used broadly in non-scientific contexts (i.e., mind, emotion, conscious) you have to keep reminding yourself of the narrowness of the terminology as you read. You also encounter names for regions in the brain, which are unfamiliar to me. The science of consciousness comes out of knowing something about what kind of information each of these areas process and how they interact. I was reading this earlier book at night. There was more falling asleep going on than there was  comprehending, and eventually I gave up. 

"Feeling and Knowing" was on the new book shelf at the library. It is literally a little book, small in format. Though it's more than 200 pages, the chapters are short and there's plenty of white space where one chapter ends and the next begins. It seemed readable. In the intro, "Before We Begin," Damasio explains that this book chips away at all the "connective tissue and scaffolding" of earlier, longer writings to present the ideas he most cares about in concentrated form, like poetry. 

So it was an easier read, 20 or 30 minutes in the morning for several days. It reads more like philosophy than science, so it seemed an appropriate book for a time of day when I often read something spiritual or devotional. I put enough effort and intention into reading that I feel it merits a book report, to challenge me to put this all in my own words as a check on whether I understood what I read. 

Basically, says Damasio (I think!) minds become conscious when they recognize themselves as the ones doing a thing or having a perception. They can do this because feelings that originate in an organism's nervous system connect body to brain and, importantly, brain back to body.  In the 17th century Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Damasio's version is "I feel, therefore I am." 

Okay, that's grossly over-simplified. You need a longer and more exacting discussion of what feeling is in neuro-scientific terms before you use it in a materialist understanding of consciousness. Feeling arises in the nervous system, which is the body keeping track of itself. The nervous system has millions of cells and sends billions of messages to itself about feeling. There's a distinction between perceptions of the sensory system and information recorded by the nervous system in feeling. Sight, hearing, and touch perceive things that are outside the body and independent of it. Feeling is the body interacting with itself and thus aware of itself, aware of being in the world. 

As I read I thought back to being a young child in the dark, confined to bed because, you know, bedtime, but unable to fall asleep as quickly as my sisters in the same room. With nothing to hear, nothing to look at (and no reading lamp next to my bed at that age), I would start to wonder who or what I was. Was if I was a machine or a robot in the middle of a world inhabited by some other kind of creatures, who were not machines? Who or what was living in my interior world? Funny, at age six or seven I didn't wonder about how the world looked to other people, to other children my age. I was conscious of my own singularity. I assumed I was a one-of-a-kind consciousness. Maybe I didn't yet have the necessary neurons or the necessary experience encoded in neurons to think about other people being conscious in the world. Even now, it doesn't come naturally. I have to step on the brakes, put my hands on the steering wheel, and maybe turn on the headlights before my brain can see through another person's windshield. 

Bessel Van Der Volk's book The Body Keeps the Score fits into this world of feeling and knowing, as it details how the nervous system records experience as feeling and how feeling and knowing are more than verbal, conscious exercises. If you've had the experience of grief unexpectedly welling up in your gut or your tear ducts, you know this, just as you might know it from the feeling of wordless awe, even joy, you experience when you see the colors of a sunset or the majesty of a mountain. A pile-up of feelings produces how we react to all kinds of things, and it takes some introspection to pick that all apart and understand it. 

Words are helpful. Just like money. They turn values into currency to exchange with others and use for our own planning purposes.

This is  The Perverse Lutheran blog, so I can't very well finish without talking about the traditional Christian concept of a human soul and of God. These don't have a place in Damasio's materialist world, and I confess, I don't know what they mean in my world. That Gwen-child becoming aware of her own consciousness had already had plenty of religious training; naming the mystery of it all "God" made it scarier. I could take the creationist view and say, yes, science is great, but with the complexity of it all, the many remaining unknowns -- well, you need God to explain all that. But jumping from science to superstition seems to easy. It shorts the circuits. 

So I'm left wondering, awed, brain exercised, on a bright Saturday morning. Feeling, thinking, knowing -- I still have to load the dishwasher, find a tablecloth, maybe bring down some Christmas decorations from the attic. Consciousness getting real and changing the input it's getting from my surroundings. 

Thankful

Driving to church this morning, I saw a squirrel run across the street. It ran right at the car in front of me and I thought for sure it was doomed. I was already picturing the splat of squirrel on pavement. But no -- it hit the car, or the car hit it, or maybe it didn't hit the car at all. What it did do was a perfect backflip, impressive height, stuck the landing, and kept right on going, straight to the other side of the street.

It all happened right there before my eyes. So I began Thanksgiving Day 2022 thankful for bounce and resilience. What other things are there to be thankful for today? What special things, what everyday things? What things that are not things but still gifts? 

Here are some thoughts. (You think, too -- it's good practice.)

Things I'm thankful for this evening.

Yesterday's wifi repair. Yes, it sounds shallow, but I truly missed Alexa. She's back. She tells me the weather. She plays NPR, and sleep music, too.

Brunch, today's alternative to a big family dinner. More and better conversation when there's just four people and you're not trying to serve a dozen dishes hot.

Wool for knitting, wool for weaving, and all the things you can make it do with looms and needles. 

Heat. Light. Water. Available just by flicking a switch or turning a faucet. I can't imagine what life is like for the people of Ukraine. 

Singing, with people my own age and with younger ones who keep me sharp. Not literally sharp, but sharp enough not to be flat. 

The good and interesting books I've read this year. Someday I'll keep a list so that I can trot out a list of recommendations. Good as they were, the titles mostly elude me in the moment. Maybe they weren't so good after all.

The less-good and the mundane books in my life this year. Ordinary is not a terrible place to spend time.

Lavender hand lotion. Good for rubbing on your feet before going to sleep.

Salmon fillets, which are, praise be, among my daughter's favorite foods. 

Kurt, my thirty-year-old son. How is it that my youngest child is that old and yet is wise beyond those years? (He is still a lovable goof, too.)

Eliza, my soon-to-be thirty-two-year-old daughter. Also wise beyond my expectations.

I'm thankful for living and breathing today. For bouncing along on the surface of life, for being pulled under into dim and confusing places, for all the details that I turn over endlessly in my brain and for the mind that does that work, consciously and unconsciously.

I'm thankful for poetry that turns words and phrases sideways to catch and hold unique moments in time. I'm thankful for the times I've been able to do that myself and thankful for times when I try to sit with the present moment and not much of anything shows up. 

I'm thankful for people who read this blog. 

I'm thankful for grief and all the people who illuminate it, especially in Anderson Cooper's podcast "All There Is."

I'm thankful for the exercise that got my knee back into shape after I fractured my patella. Thankful for the calm and alignment of yoga. Thankful for the nap I'm drifting towards.

It's dark. It's chilly in the house. It's time this weekend to get out the Advent candles and gird ourselves for the cold winter. Nothing else to do but head on through it, thankful for all that life brings and all the ways we avoid going splat. We bounce. We turn back flips.

All Saints 2022: After the battle

I read three sermons yesterday on All Saints Day: Nadia Bolz-Weber's post "It's All Saints, Not Some Saints," preached in a women's prison last Sunday; and two sermons from 1969, one from my Grandpa Gotsch's funeral in June of that year and the other from the All Saints Day commemoration at Concordia College in River Forest the following November. The order of service at Concordia, where my dad taught organ, included my grandfather's name, Herbert Gotsch, Sr., on the list of family members of students and faculty who had died that year.

I found these 1969 sermons in my attic this fall, in a box of papers from my grandmother who saved everything. Because of poor health she was not able to attend my grandpa's funeral. Having a copy of the sermon to read and save would have brought some consolation. Pastor Paul (that was his last name — we didn't use first names with pastors in those days) preached on Psalm 23 which had been my grandfather's confirmation verse. 

Pastor Paul noted all the ways the Good Shepherd had cared for Herbert throughout his life. But he didn't mention my grandfather's service in the infantry in France in World War I, when he was a young man of 25. Yet if Herbert Gotsch (1892-1969) indeed had a Good Shepherd, that Good Shepherd must have been there in the trenches, too. Could that young man, taught by his parents to fear and trust in God, feel God's presence in France? Did it help? Did he despair? Friends said Herb was never the same after the war. Twenty years later, when my dad was still a child, he suffered a severe depression; my aunt, his daughter, told me of how he would lash out in anger at my grandmother. He became senile in his final years, fighting a losing battle with language and cognition and restlessness. 

Martin Koehneke, president of the college, preached the All Saints sermon in 1969. He quoted the battle language in the hymn "For All the Saints":

And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long/Steals on the ear the distant triumph song;

And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia! Alleluia!

The text of the hymn is from 1864, 30 years before Stephen Crane wrote about the reality of battle and cowardice in "The Red Badge of Courage" and more than a century before PTSD was added to the American Psychiatric Association's DSM. Post-Vietnam, post-20th century, we're less inclined to use war as a metaphor for the life of faith.

 Another stanza of the hymn also speaks of warriors: 

The golden evening brightens in the west. 

Soon, soon, to faithful warriors comes their rest.

While scuffling through the woods at the Morton Arboretum this morning, I received a text telling me of an old friend, Scott, for whom that rest arrived this morning. His death had been expected for the last few days, after a long, debilitating battle with cancer. 

These days we are careful not to say "lost his battle" with cancer or with ALS or with Alzheimer's. There is no losing a battle that is known to be un-winnable from the start. The suffering is fierce and long and tearful. It changes the ones who watch and care as well as those who are sick. Yet God is present as Good Shepherd, loving Savior, Comforter. "Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blest," continues the hymn, and that sweetness appears in God's everyday grace even on this side of the grave. 

It was a warm, dry day today. As I walked in the woods this morning I spent as much time looking down at the dry leaves underfoot as I did looking up at the blue sky and the gold and rusty leaves still on the trees. We sat for a while on a bench and watched leaves float down from treetops to the ground, yielding to gravity yet dancing little minuets in the air. 

In his 1969 sermon, Martin Koehneke preached about the spiritual victory of the saints in heaven and the song of the saints and angels in Revelation 7:12:

Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom

and thanksgiving and honor

and power and might

be to our God forever and ever! Amen.

He found comfort for mourners in every word of the song and built a stirring finish for his sermon. I can imagine my father appreciating it. But to me -- what does this all mean? Maybe you had to be there. 

In the days after a death, when we're shaky and sorrowful, we often use very concrete images to describe that person's life in heaven, images that make us smile or even laugh. When my father died, there was lots of talk about him making music in heaven with J. S. Bach. My favorite variation came from a former organ student who described Daddy watching Bach play from one of his manuscripts. My dad reached into his pocket for his pen, leaned over Bach's shoulder, and wrote in some fingering. 

When I picture my son Kris in heaven, he's playing frisbee with his brother, Kurt, on the lawn at the Sunset Resort on Washington Island. It's the golden hour, about 45 minutes before the sun will set over the lake. The frisbee's in his right hand, he's a got a bottle of Island Wheat in his left, happy to be whole again, happy to be in the presence of God. 

Grief

Grief is stored in the body. I could go off on a search for references, but I don't need psychologists or neuroscientists to confirm this for me. I know it, in my gut. Or is it my left lung? It's in the vacuum that opens up right beneath my heart when I swerve too close, too suddenly to a memory. It's a space that also opens in sympathy for others' grief. 

"Son and brother." These are the words that leapt into my mind in church today as I heard of the death of a close family member of people well known to me over the years. a death that followed a brutal and discouraging battle with cancer.  "Son and brother" also describes my son, Kris. The loss is five years old, but the wound still opens easily. Tears flow. 

I hate crying in church, or at least I say I do. The self-control needed to stop it relies heavily on anger or disassociation along with an assessment of what's needed from me in the next few minutes as a choir member. Today I could look forward to the trebles of the choir singing the third stanza of "Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven." 

Tenderly he shields and spares us

Well our feeble frame he knows.

In his arms he gently bears us

Rescues us from all our foes. 

Not, but isn't it pretty to think so? 

And yet —in illness, death, sorrow and grieving we are gently borne along in God's arms. That is, of course, a metaphor, and I'm not sure that I can explain for what. A shrug here -- it's a mystery! Or it's something for the mystics. All things must die, yet God our Creator loves and cares for all and ultimately folds them into the Godhead, into wholeness, into resurrection

It was a beautiful fall day today, the kind where bright sunshine celebrates the first trees to turn gold, orange and deep scarlet. A month from now the leaves will be on the ground. I won't be able to sit in my backyard with an Oktoberfest beer from On Tour Brewing Company. It will be much colder. 

But even then there will be wholeness. Because wholeness includes grief and grieving, housed in that place in the gut that grieves as leaves fall from trees, that grieves with all who grieve today.

Silence, after and before

 It's silent in my backyard, relatively speaking. There's the sound of a plane overhead. A car turns out of the alley to the north, and another drives past my yard and turns into the alley. There's the sound of traffic a block away, and more city noise further in the distance. No dogs, no people walking past. It's gone dark in the time I've been out here with my Oktoberfest beer, finishing a crossword puzzle before looking at the empty white space in a new blog post. 

It's silent—noticeably silent after a noisy afternoon of music: Vaughan William's Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis stretched and held, pushed forward and held back, shaping silence into human need and yearning. (Listen here.) The main event that followed was a Bach cantata (BWV 119)  with many, many four-trumpet fanfares lavishing praise on the people of Leipzig and their new town council. (Program notes here.) One has to admire the great man, who kept all this pompous flatter just this side of winking humor without tipping over from sincerity into satire. There were plenty of big finishes and more high As than I can remember in the hymn settings. (It is nice when the choir director smiles at the soprano section as we hold one of these high notes for a full measure or more. I know he's smiling to be encouraging because he thinks it will help the tuning,  but I do hope some percentage of the pleased look was genuine pleasure.) 

After that smashing late-afternoon hour and a half, the evening quiet and even the chill in the air are welcome. What is God speaking now?

A book I read recently spoke of all music beginning in silence. It was historical fiction about J. S. Bach and his family ("The Great Passion" by James Runcie), told through the voice of a student soloist in the choir. The remark about silence was attributed to Bach, who in this novel has to speak in sermons rather than melody and counterpoint. It seems like I read this remark somewhere else as well. I've fallen into a habit of reading two or three books at once, and sometimes the characters and/or the philosophy melt from one into the other. 

Does all music begin in silence? What does that mean? 

I guess there has to be silence before the music begins. I guess there has to be silence waiting to be broken by a tune or a fanfare. I guess silence — absence — calls, at least to some of us, for a statement. It's asking to be filled or pushed aside. Or we are compelled to separate ourselves from the silence and be noticed, heard. We need to be making something where there was nothing before. Like God at creation. Like a third-grade boy who can't sit still. Or me, who has opened up an empty white page in the blogging browser window not sure if she has anything to say.

When the music is over, the order imposed on the sound is let go, the ears stop ringing and the trumpeters and sopranos and the rest of the musicians go home to dinner and a nice glass of beer or whisky. 

Music ends in silence, though we are, most certainly, changed. As surely as God spoke, let there be light.

St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig where BWV 119 was first performed. 

  

Coexistence

There is a black cat who lives in my neighborhood. I don't think it's a stray or someone's outdoor cat. I think it may be feral. It's not sleek and shiny. Its hair stands on end. It looks healthy enough but is definitely not overfed.

I see it sometimes early in the morning settled into one of the cushioned patio chairs when I come outside to drink my coffee. It looks at me steadily, calmly, for a few moments before slowly abandoning the comfortable spot. It doesn't startle and run off. It just cedes the territory, eyebrow arched, letting me know it will be back. While I don't see the cat often, some mornings I do see a bit of fur left behind in the chair. I assume it's there more often than I see it, early in the morning or during the night. 

One morning, recently, as I sat outside with my coffee and my notebook, I heard a sudden rustle behind me. I turned quickly enough to see the black cat dive into the weeds along the fence, through a hidden corridor under the greenery. It swooshed down the twenty-foot patio and suddenly reappeared at the other end with a little leg hanging down out of its mouth.

My jaw dropped. I held very still. The cat stood still for a moment as well, looking for a way out of the yard. The prey in its mouth posed a brief spatial puzzle. Which way to fit through? Under the gate? Around? And then it was gone. I could not see in what direction it went to tear up its prey and eat its breakfast. 

What did the cat catch? A very tiny baby bunny, perhaps, that had wandered from the nest? More likely a rat. Though I've never seen one around the exterior (or interior) of my house, the local paper tells me they're probably there in the alley. Whatever it was, I think it was too big to be a mere mouse. 

This little bit of excitement made me think some more about something that had happened the previous week in my backyard. I had come down the back stairs in the morning and found a dead mouse at the bottom. It seemed an unlikely place for a mouse to expire, but there it was, laid on its side, attracting flies.

I'm no stranger to dead mice. There are always boxes of Deacon mouse bait in the dark corners of my attic. The little critters occasionally die right out in the open, instead of just passing away in the walls and stinking for a day or two. I don't like having to pick them up and take them to the garbage. Back in the days when a husband and sons lived in this house, I was not ashamed to be squeamish and rely on them to pick up dead mice. But now that's my job. I got a trowel from the garage and a plastic grocery bag from the house and used the one to flick the mouse remains into the other. I walked quickly to the garbage can, dropped it in, and was glad to be done. 

But now I wonder. I've heard stories from cat owners of their indoor pets leaving them trophies at the bottom of the stairs in the early morning hours — the mice they've killed in service of their masters. Did that black cat leave that mouse for me, in tribute to my ownership of the backyard? Or maybe, as an acknowledgement of our shared reign? Is this cat truly feral, or is it remembering some old relationship with a human who cared about it?

Just a few days ago I again saw the cat, this time in my herb garden. It snuck around the oregano and crouched expectantly on top of the chives. I couldn't quite see it, but I heard the pounce into the sage.  Did it catch anything? I don't know. 

Treasuring summer, even in the heat

Garden ornament by Sue at FaithInClay.com 

It's gonna be a hot one.

The eggplant I brought home from the farmers' market a little while ago is warm and radiating heat on the kitchen counter. That dark purple skin absorbed plenty of energy just this morning, lying in the sun on the farmer's table in the asphalt parking lot that hosts the market. I bought corn and tomatoes, a single large beet, a bell pepper, and a quart of blueberries. The local peaches I look forward to all summer are ripening in a basket at the back of the counter, and there are glads, standing tall in a vase -- not in the living room or dining room, but right at the entrance to the kitchen where Eliza and I will see them whenever we come into the house.

This is summer. A season of family vacations, swimming in lakes, playing in the backyard, hanging laundry out to dry at Grandma's house. Summer theater, summer concerts, mosquitoes, and baseball. Memories of my dad painting the house with Grandpa helping in those weeks between summer school and the start of the fall term. We kids arranged the sliced tomatoes and bologna sandwiches for lunch and later watched as Daddy cracked open a beer at 3:30 in the afternoon, before cleaning up for the day. The cold bottle sweated and dripped in the outdoor air, just as we did. 

The heat did not seem so malevolent then. Meteorological data shows it's worse now, and we know now that heat creates deadly risk, especially for people who are old and on the margins. That was probably true in 1965, too, but like pollution and everything having to do with humankind's abuse of nature, so much worse now.

When it's very cold and when it's very hot, I often think of the people who lived on this land a century or two ago. How did they do it? How did they experience the weather's life-threatening extremes? This morning as I came outside to get the car out of the garage, I thought of Aunt Eller, my character in a production of "Oklahoma!" fifteen summers ago. Aunt Eller's appearance onstage starts the show, and it was my favorite thing to do — to walk out on stage, gaze into the lights and see a summer morning rolling in from the east, the sky growing bluer by the minute. She was anticipating the heat and the work of the day and then shared that picture with Curly singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning." I don't know what the audience saw looking back at us, but it sure was beautiful from where I sat. 

Aunt Eller had sweat rolling down her back within the hour, part of belonging to the land her family farmed. And that land, of course, originally belonged to indigenous people who had themselves belonged to it for millennia. 

I just finished reading "The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science," by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt lived from 1769-1859. He was a polymath, a man of wide-ranging knowledge, not just of science, but also of poetry, classics and politics, He wrote numerous books, some detailing botanical and zoological discoveries from his exploration of South America, others more sweeping views of Nature and the Cosmos. He was widely read and widely celebrated in the 19th century, an important influence on Darwin and later, John Muir. Unlike the cataloguers and classifiers of this and that species who preceded him, he saw the natural world as a unity, one organism, and wrote about the interdependency of plants, animals, climate and geography decades before Ernst Haeckel, a German scientist who'd read his Humboldt, coined the term Ökologie, from the Greek oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation."

What is this? I didn't plant it.

So here I sit in my backyard looking, thanks to my recent exposure to Humboldt, with the eye of an amateur scientist as well as an habitual poet. It's not ninety degrees — yet, not quite time to go inside and seek relief in the air conditioning—so I'm trying to treasure the details, the smallest plants and insects that make up my world. The plants and weeds that surround the patio are all very green because there's been plenty of rain. The decades-old grapes growing on the fence continue to flourish and fascinate preschoolers walking by with their parents. The purple flowers left on the sage plant are still attracting bees while the bowl that held my fruit and yogurt attracts flies, who also like to land on my bare legs. 

This suburban street is a long way from the second-growth state park forests that were the back-to-nature destinations of my childhood. And in 2022, I am far more aware of the threat that out-of-balance human beings pose to the organism that is planet earth. But there are pale butterflies fluttering across the patio and birds chirping as they settle in for a less-active afternoon in the heat. Even the bird poop on the chair I'm not sitting in is part of creation, part of the creator's worked-out vision of unity. 

Praise be!

(Also, praise be that Congress is actually about to pass climate change legislation!)

Attachments

I watch myself weed books from my shelves. Sehr komisch, I think. Very funny. 

It is my belief that I should hang on to no more books than I have shelves to keep them on. And by shelves to keep them on, I don't mean stacked on the washstand next to my bed or stacked on top of and under the library table in the living room. Definitely not on the ironing board. 

I do not have room for more book shelves. Yet new books are being published all the time. Local independent bookstores need my support. And yes, I do use the public library. 

So last week it was time to weed, to make some decisions about all those books on the shelves. I began with the books closest to the back door, the ones on the shelves that rest on brackets hooked into supports that I screwed into the studs 30-odd years ago during Kris's nap. Surprisingly, they've held up, despite occasional landslides.

Two of these shelves hold fiction, horizontally stacked, a mix of read-a-long-time-ago, want-to-read-someday, ought-to-read-someday, given-to-me-by-a-friend, and picked-up-for-free-or-for-cheap. When I need something to read, like when I've finished a book at 10 p.m. and need something to fall asleep with, I look here. And then go look somewhere else. Clearly some of these books can and must go. 

I stand on the kitchen step stool and pick up a book from the shelf. What is this? Where did it come from? What sort of intellectual pretension or passing fancy made me think I would read it? Is it diverting historical fiction, or the predictable kind I have no patience with? Sherwood Anderson—really? I read the first chapter of that little piece of Americana a couple years ago on vacation and could not make myself read more. Time to get rid of it. Jonathan Franzen's "Crossroads"? That big book stays on the shelf for now, if only so that I can continue to congratulate myself for getting through it. 

I notice that after a dozen or so books I'm completely confused. Why do I return some to the shelves? Why do I  drop others into the brown paper bag on the floor--the bag that will surely split when I take it out the back door? 

There is no logic here, no rational basis for holding on to some books and not to others. It's comical, quizzical, completely subjective. Are there hidden rules for keeping or discarding books? Why am I so attached to some and so finished with others? I seldom get rid of gifts from friends and family. Books that opened my mind about something tend to stay on the shelf. (I may need to pry open that crack again someday.) Books I dearly want others to read stay, too. But the ones I give up on? A crooked smile is often the only reason I've got.

Kept on the shelf: a Faulkner (seriously, I ought to read some Faulkner); "Hamlet" (recently reread, but I dumped the book of criticism I read alongside it); "Cloud Cuckoo Land" (well-woven story, bright shiny book from last Christmas); an Elena Ferrente novel (50 cent purchase, likely to be engrossing). 

What to do with fiction read long ago? There are two or three books each from Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, Alice McDermott, Louise Erdrich -- books I collected and read as they were published, some of them decades ago. Many of these went into the bag for the library book sale.

There was a pile of novels by Sue Miller, and I happened to flip open the cover of one, wondering about the copyright date. Inside, on the fly leaf, I found an inscription, because the book had been a Mother's Day gift to me in 1990. The message, written by my husband in my three-year-old son's voice. It began "To the ultimate Good Mother," a reference to Miller's previous book—the one that led me to mention this title to Lon. It went on, "Me and my baby sister/brother [I was pregnant at the time] know you really like to read lots and lots. So we got you this book because we want you to be happy on Mother's Day and all the time, not just a couple while."

"A couple while." I'd forgotten how Kris said that as a preschooler. 

The inscription. Lon gave me many books through the years. I should look for more of these. 

Both Lon and Kris are gone now — Lon died in 2006, Kris in 2017, five years ago this month. 

The book was titled "Family Pictures." 

I kept it. 

Fiber management

I now own a loom. Not one big as a pantry, like you'd see at Colonial Williamsburg. Not even a floor loom like you'd see in a college art department. Just a tabletop loom, with a weaving width of 15 inches. Bigger than a toy, it has all the working parts of larger looms — warp beam, fabric beam, beater, reed. harnesses, heddles. The central frame that holds the harnesses (four of them) is called a castle, a term which is easy to remember because of the way it stands above all the activity of the moving parts below. 

It's all very pretty; the wood is beautiful. I bought it secondhand from someone whose deceased wife was a weaver.  I kinda know what to do with it. I took a two-day class last fall and made a small sample of plain weave, rib and twill on this type of loom. There are more classes in my future. I've bought the book that teachers recommend and yesterday morning reviewed the section on warping the loom, step one in any project. 

Warping means putting on the thread or yarn that runs lengthwise in the cloth. It's a process where a beginner relies on the experience of teachers, not because the basic concept is complicated, but because you're working with maybe 240 pieces of yarn, each one 4-6 feet long. You can imagine what a sorry mess you'd have on your hands without a method for measuring and moving, anchoring and finally threading each end through the slots of the reed and the holes in the heddles. You do all of this with care and thoughtfulness, checking frequently for twists and mis-counting. Mistakes can be fixed, but it's easier not to have to.  

I am itching to put a warp on my loom, but unsure if I any of the yarns I already have will make a good first project. Unfortunately I am never averse to ordering more yarn, especially if that's what's needed to assure a successful project. I shopped online last night at three large yarn and weaving suppliers and ended up completely frustrated. I found a beautiful cherry-red yarn at my favorite vendor's site, but the warping pegs I wanted to buy were out of stock. The vendor with two kinds of warping pegs to choose from, both in stock, did not have yarn that inspired me. And when I found both yarn and pegs at the third vendor's site, I could not place the order because I already had an account that I couldn't log into. 

After a brief respite on Twitter, I picked up my knitting.

I spent a couple hours yesterday afternoon on another fiber project: reclaiming yarn from moths and mothballs. Last fall I was gifted with several tubs full of yarn left after a house sale. Some of it -- 29 balls of Koigu (nice stuff) -- smells nauseatingly of mothballs. I spent a couple hours unwinding the balls back into skeins that I could hang in the sun. Brought them in overnight, thinking the smell was gone. Stuck my nose in them this morning -- they're back out on the patio. Tomorrow, maybe, they'll get a soaking in vinegar and more sun.

Deliberate tasks, determined reclaiming of old stuff. Two days into retirement and I remind me of my grandmother. And yes, she'll laugh and approve when I finally end up tossing that yarn in the garbage. I'll feel younger and more extravagant when the new yarn -- yes, the website worked for me today -- arrives in the mail later this week. 

Good morning world

There's a heat advisory today from the National Weather Service. The weather app on my phone says 99 degrees by mid-afternoon. It's 7am and I'm sitting outside. It's not hot yet, but it's oppressively humid and the ground is wet after a big storm last night. More little bugs than usual are floating around my chair. I'll be scratching the mosquito bites later. 

But the birds are chirping almost continuously, a canopy of invisible sound woven into the bright green of the maple overhead, answered from the darker green of the maple down the street. The cardinal is calling from somewhere behind me. Things are growing: basil in the pot, dill in the ground, grass and weeds and hidden molds that will aggravate my allergies for the rest of the week. It feels like the midwest version of a tropical rain forest. 

I'm lucky to have this view on the world: substantial trees planted in the parkway, land around my house that hosts lush weedy greenery, urban birds for company. It's not the natural world. There's too much concrete. There are cars. But it's enough like it to be comforting and renewing, even as I hear the garbage truck working its way down the alley. 

Good morning world.

From the bulletin board of a perverse Lutheran

On June 30, my last day as a Grace Staff member, I will be cleaning out my office, which lies in a far corner of the building, two flights of stairs above the church library. I’ll be sorting out books and music, cleaning out files both physical and digital, deciding which personal items to take home and which ones to take to the dumpster

I will also take down the ephemera from my bulletin board. Ephemera may not be the right word for the postcards, newspaper clippings and odd bits of this and that on my bulletin board; ephemera means “transitory creations not meant to be retained or preserved.” The things on my bulletin board are there to help me remember things. Some are there for obvious reasons. Others — I am still puzzling about some of them.

There are postcards from places I’ve visited — places that have fueled both curiosity and contentment. There’s a photo I took of the four young women who sang in my Joyful Voices choir: they’re standing up tall, hands clasped in “Sound of Music” singing position and peering into the camera over their glasses, as I so often peered at them from the piano. There’s a comical drawing of J. S. Bach on a postcard from the Bach House in Eisenach, Germany. The scowl on the great man’s face is frightfully serious yet somehow reminds me of all the delight to be found in the great man’s music. There’s a page from a daily calendar with a quote from Ella Fitzgerald: “The only thing better than singing is more singing.” There’s a notecard with Romans 8:38 in calligraphy (“I am persuaded that neither life nor death…”) There are mementos of my children and of shows I’ve directed and a bracelet that came to me from a former colleague who passed away in 2014. She still reminds me to take the time to do it right.

There’s also a column of quotes typed out on plain white paper in my choice of fonts. Not surprisingly, one is about misogyny. Many are about writing:

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” Thomas Jefferson

“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” John Maynard Keynes as quoted by Paul Krugman

“Keep typing until it turns into writing.” David Carr

More pretentiously:

“Tell the truth. Don’t decorate. Remember death.”

I don’t know where this one came from some dozen or more years ago. It seemed like something to try to live into, if only in a modest way as a church communicator.

Several years later I posted another darkish quote, this one a bit of a puzzle:

“I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” Stephen Colbert

It’s from an interview published in GQ, August 15, 2015. Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on CBS, is the youngest of 11 children. His father and the two brothers closest to him in age were killed in a plane crash when he was 10. The statement comes from his attempts to explain how his mother, a devout Catholic, and he himself managed to survive this tragedy.

It is a paradoxical statement and it was stapled to my bulletin board because I wondered how it could possibly be true. It was something I tested in my own life as I watched my son Kris fight the good fight of dying from ALS. Before and after his death in July of 2017, I would stare at this statement and say, no, I’m not there, not there yet.

But maybe I am there now. This is hard to explain. It’s something about the largeness of love, and how that love originates in God and grows as we love others through good times and bad. Something about love living larger and longer than anger. Something centered in a cross.

From my office I can hear the organ played in church — musicians practicing, tuners tuning, organists playing hymns as the congregation sings. From the computer on my desk I’ve sent both death notices and festive Easter and Christmas worship schedules to the people of Grace. I’ve churned out 80 or 90 issues of Grace Notes and many more email newsletters, each one full of details about lives shared, life treasured, as we live and love one another, together in Christ.

Congrats

 

Tomorrow is a big day in our family. My younger son, Kurt, graduates from medical school, after four years of hard work and years of working hard just to get there. I am not just full of love and pride — I am in awe. 

It's Kurt's day tomorrow, but inevitably this morning, I have been thinking about what tomorrow would be like if Kris could be there. Kris, my older son, died of ALS in 2017, a year before Kurt was admitted to med school. If he were still alive, if he had never had ALS, he would be with us tomorrow, bursting with pride, grinning, five feet, four inches of social energy clearing the way for a taller, blonder but equally blue-eyed younger brother.

There were six years between them. When we found out mid-pregnancy that Kurt would be a boy, I did not think they would end up being such close companions. But in our smallish three-bedroom house they shared a room and bunk beds, close quarters with elbow-to-elbow seats in front of the TV screen, video game controllers at close hand. Kurt abandoned me from the age of three-and-a-half to tag after Kris, through a "club" under the pine trees on vacation, over the tall piles of dirt on our street when the sewers were replaced, at auto shows, in church pews, on Cub Scout field trips, in the backyard and at the park. Kurt's ambitions reached beyond imitating Kris: at baseball games, as Kris played in the outfield and stole bases, Kurt aspired to be the pitcher and brought his ball and glove to games so that he could practice on the sidelines. When Kurt became that big-kid pitcher, pitching the 5th and 6th grade team out of bases-loaded-and-no-outs jams, teenage Kris paced nervously behind the backstop, conferred with the coaches and tried to keep his cool. He had taken over for their dad, as Lon descended into dementia. 

Kurt has his own stories of time spent with Kris in the years before his death. I'm only the mom, so it's best to acknowledge that there are things I don't — and wouldn't want to know. "Worth it" is the refrain. When Kurt was admitted to med school the person he most wanted to share the news with was Kris, who had died the previous summer. 

There are new people in Kurt's life, including a girlfriend who is present in all his future plans. There is an abundance of old friends who will help him celebrate tomorrow. 

There will also be a space, not empty, that I will hold — in my heart, always in my gut. Kris. 

Fox, watching

 1. Drove to church early this morning and saw a fox., standing on the sidewalk watching the cars go by. Slowed down, looked back. Definitely a fox. 

2. Movie recommendation (or not, you decide): I watched "Drive My Car" on Friday night. A meditation on seeing and being seen, grieving and failing to grieve, telling stories, telling lies, telling truth, talking about suffering, all of it infused with Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." It's a few minutes short of three hours, in Japanese with subtitles, so it's a commitment. I had to rewind one important part because I nodded off. But I am still thinking about it.

3. Because one of the truths in "Drive My Car" was that humans are terrifyingly vulnerable, a truth echoed in a depressing quote from James Agee in a sermon given this afternoon at a Bach Cantata Vespers service. 

4. Yes, we had lots of Easter trumpets this afternoon and the confident assertion that the Shepherd of the Sheep has arisen ("Surrexit pastor bonus"). And in the cantata (BWV 67, Hold in Remembrance Jesus Christ) a graying baritone calming the anxious orchestra as the Vox Christi: "Peace be with you." 

5. I don't know. This might be all. That's it. That's the blog. It's a hard and lonely world.

6. And yet, a question in the sermon: When did you become you? One answer (maybe it was the answer) was in baptism, and maybe in every subsequent baptism you've witnessed, or subsequent trips to the communion table, opportunities to claim an identity, to be seen. I'm not sure how that works exactly -- something about being present in the presence of God. And being present affirms the presence of God.

7. Side note, Part of me was recalled to a younger me today by the opportunity to do some story-telling in the Sunday School hour, during a traveling retelling of the Passion Story. I was assigned the Garden of Gethsemane part of the script. I had words to read, but told the story rather than read it. Takes me back to 2nd grade where we acted out Bible stories all the time. Except I seldom got a chance to act.  I was invariably the narrator—through the ten plagues and the Exodus and the forty years in the wilderness, through the entire Passion story. 

8. Probably should have picked up a pen and the notebook/journal I keep and written this all out there, in wandering, questioning fashion. And then closed the cover on the questions, so I wouldn't have to come up with an ending.

9. Thankfully, today is ending. The sun has broken through the clouds in the west after a day of rain. The prayers have been said for Ukraine, for peace, for those who are sick, for those who mourn. We've given thanks with an "Alleluia" for those who've gone before us in Christ. We're getting ready for Monday. In Chekhovian fashion, we prepare to go on ... This, too, would be something about who we are, what we share. It's hard to be human, but it's a grand project. Imagine that fox, watching. 

In the beginning

Easter Eve, post-Easter Vigil. The smell of wood-smoke lingers in my hair. The chants ring in my ears. The post-Vigil Prosecco sparkles in my veins from palate to collarbone, to knees and elbows. 

Christ is risen--the full moon is bright, though it's dark outside. We await the Easter morning sunrise. (And may I still be asleep when that happens!)

For several years now, I have read the first of the Old Testament readings at the Easter Vigil service at my church: Genesis 1 and a couple verses of Genesis 2, the Creation story. I love it deeply, the way it anchors the Easter story. I love its long phrases that sing what God has made, all that vegetation and fruit with seeds in it, creeping and crawling creatures, cattle, winged birds and sea monsters. I love the short phrases that stand out — "and the stars!" — and the  repetitive, liturgical language: "And God said" "And it was so" "And the evening and the morning were the first, the second, the sixth, the seventh day." Most of all, I love the way it all stops and hovers and holds it breath at the creation of humankind in God's image. 

Read it here.

This afternoon I reread Walter Brueggemann's commentary on this section of Genesis. I own this book not because I have an extensive library of biblical commentary (I don't!) but because of an ambitious Bible study group that I participated in many years ago. Not that we read much of the commentary then, even as we took many months to work our way through Genesis. We had our own lives and faith to sort through, But the book is there on my shelf, and this world of Genesis, of ancient theologians, requires a reliable guide -- or at least, is much enriched by one. 

This Creation narrative comes from the time of the Exile, when the people of Israel were in despair and feared there were about to perish as a people. The formless void, the darkness that covered the face of the earth were everyday life to them. Not unlike waking up every morning and doom-scrolling through the headlines in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Awful stuff is happening, and more of it is revealed every single day. 

But in Genesis there's a promising wind from God, a God who creates, who allows the world to come into being, into freedom: "Let there be." It is good. God sees it, declares it good, blesses it. And then God puts God's own image into creation, in humankind. 

Brueggemann points out how different this is, that when those ancient theologians went looking for God in creation, they located God's image not in nature, not in the cosmos, not in a bunch of gods more capricious and more powerful than humans, and certainly not in statues or images "set up" by kings. 

God's image was in humankind, in individual humans and in humans in relationship with one another. In us. 

God did this already having grace for us, already in the tension that all these things God created -- Sky and Earth and Sea, creatures of water and air and land, and human beings most of all -- would never be perfect like God, but they would be good, called good by the same grace that said "let there be." The same grace that was revealed in Jesus Christ, which is to say, the same grace that gave up power, riches, kingship, domination, even though that led to a cross. Because on that cross, all that was left was love, God's gracious love, which restored the world. 

The headlines won't be great tomorrow morning. The horrors in Ukraine will continue, along with horrible stuff in parts of the world we too easily forget. The environment teeters on the edge of destruction. Fools are everywhere. 

Yet the Creation story reminds me every year (more often than that!) that God is good. And I am created for good, in God's image, restored in the waters of Baptism, restored daily to praise, to be joyful, and to join in God's gracious restorative project here on earth.  

Let there be Easter. 

Collect for a cactus flower

 

God of houseplants, 

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

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

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

bright pink God!

No salt

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

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

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

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

Plain collect for Transfiguration

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

In collect form:

Transfigured Jesus of the mountaintop

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

You are too bright for us. 

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

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

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

Amen

Transfiguration Sunday 

February 27, 2022

Still perverse, still puzzling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(God forbid I should do the obvious.)

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

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

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