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.