Writing about faith

It is not easy to write about the contradictions in life's spiritual dimensions. They are best held lightly. Don't explain too much: 

        Joy does not equal happiness; it's deeper and different. 

        Hope is not the same as optimism; hope is what carries you when there is no room for optimism. 

        Light shines in darkness, both inside and out. 

        Grace is at work even as we are dying, our whole life long. 

        Somewhere, in some other dimension, there is the peace of God; yet we pray for peace on earth. 

Enough said. Hold these things lightly and don't explain too much. 

Write of paradox in the third person and let readers fill in their own story. It is good exercise to puzzle these things out. 

If you must write "I" and tell your truth, plumb carefully, probe and question. Search for what you truly are and own. Write what will invoke, not what you think will impress. 

Use few words, but strong images. 

Know when to stop.

 

Plugging in the Advent candles

"Winter sunset" by Irene Grassi (sun sand & sea) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Advent is short this year, as short as it can possibly be. Notwithstanding the chocolate Advent calendars, much less all the houses decorated for Christmas during Thanksgiving week, the liturgical season is calculated by Sundays and did not begin until today. There are four Sundays in Advent and every so often that fourth one falls on December 24, as it does this year. 

"Advent: the season of open fifths" I whispered to my choir-mate during this morning's organ prelude. An open fifth is the stark, "pay attention" sound missing the middle note that would allow the harmony to relax into a minor key or brighten it into a major one. It's a fanfare with an ancient, clarion sound. 

I can't say that it broke through the morning's rain and gloom--not in any way that persisted through the day. But it is the first Sunday in Advent, the day in my household when the first box of Christmas stuff comes down from the attic — the box that holds the candles that go in all the street-side windows of the house. I hope they carry a message of hope and anticipation to the outside world. Inside the house they remind me that light can indeed shine in the darkness, that there is continuity from one season of life to the next, that Christmas is coming but it doesn't get here all at once. 

These "candles" run on electricity. Not from batteries. In my house they're plugged into the wall. That stable in Bethlehem may have been lit by a star, more metaphorical than practical, and perhaps an oil lamp. Lighting up my windows in 2023 requires long white electrical cords, a power strip, an extension cord, a "three-fer" that plugs three cords into one outlet, a half-dozen built-in light sensors in some of the candles and a smart plug that controls others. When I put these things away last January, I left the cords tangled up with one another as a roadmap to plugging them in again this year. It's kind of perverse, I thought this afternoon, while crawling around on the floor, that celebrating the True Light coming into the world requires so many cords and plugs.

The lights attached to the smart plug timer will shut off at midnight, as I've programmed them to do. One candle in the kitchen has to be switched off manually when I go to bed. (Or should I order another smart plug from Amazon?) The others, the wise bridesmaids with the light sensors, stay on through the night and blink off, one by one, when the morning light reaches them through the overgrown evergreens in front of my house. There will be a couple mornings in December when I, awake too early or sleepless for too long, will sit here in the bay window and watch that happen. Those mornings seem especially promising. 

There will also be some afternoons in December when the western sky bleeds pink and purple from the setting sun, as if angels had dipped their brushes into the paint box and washed the heavens with color. Gaudy and equally promising.

In between in these closing days of 2023? Terrible conflict in the Mideast, ongoing war in Ukraine, a warming earth with big question marks in its future, and people everywhere tangled up in selfish, senseless division. 

"O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," rang the lament in this morning's Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 64, "so that the mountains would quake at your presence, as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil." 

We would be awed by such signs, and more than a little frightened. But there will be other signs of God at work in the world. I see one such on my television, currently running a slideshow of my daughter's photos of friends and family. We'll show it at her birthday party next week -- celebrating with the people she loves and who love her. 

What else? Look for the helpers, says Mr. Rogers. Look for those who persist in seeking change, bit by bit. Those who toil, those who sing, and all those who await from the Lord great and abundant mercy. 

Keep your lamps trimmed and burning, says the spiritual.  Plug in those electric candles. Wait and watch. Christ is coming soon -- indeed, is already among us. 

Making more

How much is enough? And what do with it all?

Last Sunday's gospel reading was a parable about talents (Matthew 25:14-30). Given five or two or one talent, should a servant invest to make more or bury the talent and keep it safe? (A talent was a large unit of money in the New Testament.) Make more, says Jesus. "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away (v.29)."

When this lesson from Lectionary Cycle A came up in 2020 I wrote a blog post titled "Knit from Stash," which is where my mind went again this year. My yarn stash has grown since then, with beautiful, special skeins I've purchased and haven't knit yet, and more substantially, with five bins of yarn left over after a yard sale by the family of someone who had died. It's good yarn — wool, not synthetic, in many beautiful colors, some of it handspun.  

There was a lot of Koigu, a springy, fingering weight commercial wool in multicolors of pink, gold, coral and brown. I love to knit with this stuff. It has energy, it's interesting — and it's not cheap. There was a lot of it, some wound into balls, some in a half-knit blanket, a type of modular knitting that I had no interest in finishing.

All of it smelled of mothballs, and not just faintly — more like instant toxic headache. This was a sign of someone taking care to preserve it, but also a big problem for me. After several internet searches and a Facebook post seeking tips on getting rid of the smell, I ripped out the blanket, unwound the balls, rewound them into skeins, and soaked it all in a vinegar solution and then in laundry detergent. I rinsed the skeins and then hung them to dry in the summer sunshine, strung on a yardstick balanced on the backs of the patio chairs. Back in my dining room, I wound the skeins again into balls, after spending hours working on the tangles created in the soaking and washing. 

I was newly retired and had all the time in the world. Over the next several weeks I knit the yarn into a shawl for a dear, faraway  friend who was going through breast cancer treatment. 

I wish I could ask the original owner of this yarn about her stash, why she bought the skeins of Mountain Colors, who was the intended recipient of that Koigu blanket. Did she spin those skeins of red and pink herself, or did she purchase them? They're irregular — thin in places, lumpy in others, destined for my loom, perhaps, and not my knitting needles. 

Some day after I'm gone someone will have to reckon with my stash of yarn (and also of quilting fabric). Will they wonder about the random skeins of bright sock yarn or the thousand-yard ball of fuzzy Icelandic laceweight that I've had for fifteen years already? Will someone appreciate all the balls of Shetland wool in twenty or thirty heathered shades of the rainbow from Jamiesons and Jamieson and Smith? (Do click on the links if your eyes are craving color on this gray day in late November.) Should my designate a special executor for my stash?

For me, there's a danger point in every project, when it's almost finished and I begin to look ahead to what I will make next. With the feeling of accomplishment come wild ambitions -- many more ideas than I can realistically make happen. These weeks before Christmas are another such time. I want to knit socks, mittens, hats for everyone! I dig through a big basket of random yarn, skeins left over from other projects, skeins bought earlier this year that hold plans yet to be executed. The gift-knitting often continues well into January.

Three nights ago I took a little detour from Christmas knitting to cast on for a baby sweater, a tiny, hopeful garment for a much-anticipated, much worried-over little one. It's made from yarn in my stash, yarn given to me by someone sorting through her deceased mother's belongings. The baby arrived early this morning, a couple weeks ahead of time. I'll finish the sweater by the end of the week, though it will not fit this child until early spring, after a winter of feeding and growing, held in her parents' loving arms.

Investments mature under our fingers. Stash reaches into the future. Hope abounds.

October faith

My frequency of posting here at The Perverse Lutheran has gone down from twice a week in the early days of the blog, many long years ago, to twice a month and lately to once a month. It's nearing the end of October -- gotta put something up here, especially since the weather is warm, the sky is blue and the maple tree over my head here in my backyard is green, gold and orange everywhere all at once. It's good day for sitting outside. There won't be many more.

I've just finished writing program notes for a Bach cantata (BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr; hilf meinem Unglauben!) that's about faith and doubt -- or better said, doubt and faith, since that's the direction everything is going in the cantata text: an opening chorus, a recitative and an area about unbelief, followed by reassurance.  It's the opposite of the man in the Bible story in Mark 9, the source of the text -- "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" He confesses his faith first before acknowledging his doubts. 

Bach's text, by an unknown librettist, takes Luther's approach to doubt: the solution is to get closer to Christ and trust that God's promises are sure and certain. Luther also said that doubt and the struggles of his Anfechtung (look it up, or read this) were an important way in which God brought him to faith. The struggle strengthens.

I don't disagree with any of this exactly, but I am someone who was born in the 20th century and who lives in the 21st, a time where we doubt the existence not only of God but of absolute truth, where physics includes an Uncertainty Principle, but we as political tribes behave as if our way is the only way and denounce other ideas not just as wrong but as morally reprehensible. Working together to solve problems involves giving up some treasured beliefs here and there, or at least allowing for other ideas to come and out play too. But it's hard to do, worn down as we are by unsolvable conflicts, social media craziness, and everyday complexity. 

The red-orange leaves of the sugar maple against the blue sky remind me of a jigsaw puzzle photo: crisply delineated but made up of so many tiny irregular pieces. Birds are flying in and out of the canopy of the mature tree across the street, participating, perhaps, in some secret bird activity, perhaps a confab about migration. A robin directly overhead just now caught my attention by dropping a liquid gift, splat, on the cement next to my chair. Meanwhile a Monarch butterfly is enjoying the overgrown but miraculously still-blooming zinnias in the flower pot by the stairs. 

Two or three weeks from now the leaves will be on the ground, the flowers will be dead and headed for the  the compost bin. The Monarch might be in Mexico -- I'll never know if she makes it, and it will be time to move the patio furniture to the basement (after scrubbing off the bird poop). 

But spring will come again. I have that much faith. 

Hearts Are Breaking

Shattered. Heartbroken. These words appeared in my Twitter, er, X, feed this afternoon. 

Kelsie Snow posted that her husband Chris, who has ALS, suffered cardiac arrest yesterday with a subsequent catastrophic brain injury from lack of oxygen. He is not expected to wake up. 

Kelsie, who describes herself as a writer, podcaster and storyteller, blogs at https://kelsiesnowwrites.com/ and has a podcast called Sorry I'm Sad. She and her husband have two school-age children. He's an executive with an NHL club in Canada and was diagnosed with familial ALS three years ago (that means other people in his family, including his father, have died of the disease). But his progression was slowed significantly in a drug trial. The story of all this, with the accompanying emotional roller coaster, is told in Kelsie's blog which I have followed, as I follow other ALS stories, in the years since my son Kris died of ALS.

It is hard to watch others go through this, even over the distance of social media. I'm not just watching, I'm feeling and remembering. And imagining. There's the loss to Chris's family, Kelsie and their children now living through what they've long feared. There's the loss to others in the ALS community -- families with fathers and mothers and school-age children, people with ALS who are looking for morsels of hope and find them in accounts of a treatment that worked for someone, even in a small way, even for a short time. 

Instead today, a day when an FDA advisory committee is meeting to review the potential benefits of a new therapy, they are having to think about their own death or their loved one's death, even as they grieve for a fellow warrior. I remember Kris telling me, or maybe Michelle told me, how hard it hit him when one of his friends with ALS died. Loss. Over and over again. I'm sitting with that today. 

But I just spent time glancing through Kris's blog. I thought I remembered reading about that friend who died and I wanted to link to that post, but if it indeed was a blog post, I couldn't find it.

But I did get a lively taste of Kris's voice and spirit. A few more tears, yes, and sadness -- so much hard stuff that he and Michelle went through, and the rest of us, too. 

But also love and grace.

Blessed are those who mourn. 

Hoping the grass will grow

Over the course of the summer my backyard, most of it, has been transformed from weedy suburban wilderness to yard of hope and promise. (And still some weeds.)

Back in June I paid a local tree service to cut down the weedy mulberry and slippery elm trees and grind out the stumps that could be ground away. The ones that remain, too close to the house or garage for grinding, I'll be poisoning, salting and hacking at for the next five years, if I keep at it. 

This week, landscapers removed the old broken fence, lots of tall weeds and some very dead grass and graded, tilled and generally cleaned up the soil. There are new empty beds along the neighbor's fence and the back boundary of the yard, where someday, when I find a contractor, I will have a new back fence. In the middle there's a large area seeded with new grass. 

The last thing the landscapers did before they left for the day was to hand me a sheet of instructions for watering new grass. It's all up to me now. I am to water the new seed for five to ten minutes morning and evening until the seeds germinate, which could take 5 days, the paper says, or 30. After that there's a lot of watchfulness and judgement as the grass grows, and maybe one mowing before winter comes. 

I've been kind of worried about this part. I can remember to do something night and morning without fail for at most four or five days. Currently I am remembering to take a dose of Paxlovid every morning and evening after a recent positive covid test. This is not hard to remember to do because the stuff works great. Also, the bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, a common side-effect of the drug, is with me constantly. I'm counting the doses until I'm done. 

There are no such sensory cues for remembering to water the grass. The pots of zinnias and petunias on my patio tell me with a look that they need water, and bless them, they manage to recover even when I've let them go until they're drooping and dry. But the grass seed just lies there. And watering it requires stepping carefully through the mud as I move the sprinkler from the middle of the back yard to the position needed to water the side yard. I have designated a pair of muddy flip-flops for this operation and I have a new $40 sprinkler from Amazon with adjustable nozzles and guides, but no good overall strategy. 

But once it's going, it is nice to sit and watch the water go back and forth. I think about the green that will fill my yard next spring, and the new prairie flowers and grasses I'll plant along the fences. 

There is work to do, weeds to be dealt with in other corners of my property. My overgrown lilac bush needs some thoughtful pruning. And what about that basketball hoop? The torn net hanging from the hoop has been known to attract gold finches and hummingbirds. They hang there briefly before flying off to find real food. Should I hang a bird feeder from the hoop instead?

 It is an achingly beautiful and fragrant summer morning. The crickets creak on, not yet silent in the sun. A tiny, odd bit of something glitters in the sun shining low on the cement patio. The birds are somewhere else this morning, two or three backyards down the block. 

Yesterday on a late afternoon walk I startled a whole flock of goldfinches out of a bush next to a house on my west-east path. Or rather, it was they who startled me--so small, so yellow and so many. Their excited chirping was decidedly different from the house sparrows I'm used to in the morning. 

I read Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper, recently, and also installed the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone. You hit the button on the app and it listens and records the sounds around you. Bird names pop up. I got an unusually long list this morning (five possibilities) but the persistence crickets are creating interference. Meanwhile I hear a phone alarm going off across the street as a neighbor leaves for work or school. There's a plaintive sound coming from something that I can't see high in the maple tree, while a squirrel on a low bough has fixed his attention on the tree's trunk. He's been completely still for several minutes, stretched from tail to chin to nose. What's he watching for? A juicy insect? A small bird? Something else that's alive? Me walking around the base of the tree bothers him (her?) not at all, though now he's found a new position, alert but upside down on the tree's central trunk. I do not have his patience, this morning, maybe not ever. He watches, I search for words. 

And now he's gone where I can't see. 

Cat on the fence

The black cat is back. 

I don't know that he (she?) ever really goes away, but I haven't seen him since early in the summer. As I settled in this morning, outside with my coffee, my computer, my books and my chair cushion, I looked to my right and saw the cat draped on the fence that separates my yard from my neighbor's. I've seen him there before. What an odd resting place, I thought. 

Sometimes, when I've left the chair cushions out overnight with no concern for rain, I come out in the morning and find grayish-black cat hair on the cushion. If I'm awake very early, I may even find the cat, who looks back at me and abandons the chair slowly. I suppose it's yours, he seems to say. That hasn't happened this summer--I'm rarely out before 8. 

Today the cat is on the fence, and while I was wondering what it must be like to relax and rest and balance on that horizontal board that runs across the top of the fencing, I saw my friend stretch his neck a little bit forward and down. He's watching something. He's hunting, lying in wait for a mouse--or something else--to come out from under the leaves in the garden bed below. When he springs into action that pile of rounded fur on the fence will suddenly have swift legs and a curving tail for balance. I keep watching— I don't want to miss this.

Someone walks past on the sidewalk to my left, a full backyard away from the cat on the fence. There's a stroller and a dog and enough noise that the cat turns his head and trains his green-amber eyes on the intrusion. A car goes past and he looks this way again and then turns his head ever so slightly to stare at me. Or so it seems. He's glassy-eyed and has the advantage here; I can't be sure where he's looking, but I know that he knows that I'm watching him. And he doesn't care. I'm a large human. What am I going to do? Leap across 40 feet of backyard weeds to grab or frighten him?

But it's a long wait. The last swallow of coffee in my cup is cold. He gets up, he stretches, arched-back, full-on cat pose, tail reaching high. Is he done for the morning? Not yet. He settles back down with renewed attention to the foliage below. This time his long tail hangs down this side of the fence. Do tails fall asleep and get tingly, like human feet curled under the sitter? When will the long wait be too long?

A few minutes ago my eyes veered to the left to watch a pair of birds rise up and curl around the peak of my house's roof and then circle into the top of the maple on the corner. Large birds, hawks, I thought -- the Cooper's Hawk pair known to live in the neighborhood. (Thing you learn on Facebook!) I saw them in bare trees last spring, an adult and a juvenile. The brown and white stripes on their wedged tail feathers, stretched and rounded out for flight, are easy to see even at a distance. The arrogance of predators. 

Sparrows have been gathering on the utility wires two and three yards away. I haven't seen any in my yard. They'll stay a safe distance from this persistent, patient cat, who is still there on the fence, almost an hour later. How long must one wait for action below? Has he nothing better to do?

"I see you"

As I came outside early this morning with my coffee, a bright red male cardinal flew at me and landed on the other side of the mesh patio table, just four feet away. He looked even more startled than I was at our sudden proximity and quickly retreated to the lilac bush by the back stairs. 

But he looked back at me. I smiled. 

"I see you," I said. "I see you."

The bird again took flight, this time ducking under the broad leaves of the grapevine that drapes lushly over the ancient chain-link fence that divides our yard from the municipal sidewalk. He hopped along, going in and out, hide-and-seek, looking for something to eat. Maybe some bugs? It's July, so the grapes are still green and hard; he'll be back in September. Finally he made his exit, flying back across my field of vision, to the neighbor's fence and on down the block. 

You can't help but celebrate that bright cardinal red whenever you spot one. And they're not hard to spot. Just now another one sat on the telephone wire; it was a little paler, a little less grown-up, but still not to be missed. 

It may be trite, it may be a little silly — but I let cardinals, the bright red male ones, remind me of my son Kris and his spirit. A little visit from the beyond? If I say so, then yes, it is. 

The summer Kris died I watched a pair of cardinals build a nest in the tangled vines a few feet up from where I sit to read and drink coffee in the morning. The female pulled strips of bark from the grapevine to line the nest. The male brought her food as she sat on the eggs; he sometimes took a turn there as well. I saw little beaks pop up to be fed, and worried and watched intently one Sunday afternoon as a vulnerable fledgling, urged on by bird sounds all around, gathered strength and good sense to hop and fly to shelter in the shrubbery. 

The blog posts I wrote in July 2017 are here and here. A couple years later, re-reading those posts, I saw that I had been writing not just about parenting and raising children but also about letting them go. By the end of July we'd let Kris go -- not that we could have stopped him. After his three-year battle with ALS he found eternal shelter in God's heavenly love, peace and grace. 

So yes -- the sudden appearance of a bright red cardinal, upfront and close, on a Sunday morning is bound to remind me of Kris, to feel like a cheerful visit from him. "I see you, I do."

Image by Megan Zopf from Pixabay

Sunrise

Dandy1022, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The sun just rose over the roof of the house across the street. It hit me in the face, and I smiled back. It shines on the front side of all the things between us two -- the striped hostas at the base of the fence, the floating leaves of the grapevine, the tree trunks, the potted petunias. 

Later today it will be hot and noisy. There'll be bees in the garden and cars in the street, things to take care of, decide, do. Now, it's bird conversations, cool air, tall, silent trees. 

I woke up at 5 this morning. Keeping my mind clear enough to go back to sleep seemed futile. My phone said it was still a few minutes before sunrise. Opportunity! What does sunrise look like on a day so close to the summer solstice? I sometimes see the sun rise in December. But what about now, today?

What to do with the bonus time in the morning? Finish the novel I've been reading — "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead," by Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner — and then shake off its world in the light of day. The book is a murder mystery of sorts, set in Poland on a plateau near the border with the Czech Republic, far from Illinois -- seven hours ahead. The sun there is already at the top of the sky and soon heading back down. 

Light shining recalls last week at my church -- five mornings of Vacation Bible School for children from preschool through age 10. I was not a volunteer at the crafts or snacks or Bible story station. I was there for just the first 15 minutes each day, playing an astronaut (improbably, against type) in the opening skit. This is where friendship with the Children's Ministry Coordinator will take you. My character Mickey Wey had some issues throughout the week. And the solutions, Monday through Friday, were always a variation on "shine Jesus' light" into good news or bad. 

Our relationship with the sun's light is so elemental. Smack, it hit me in the face this morning. (I've heard it rises like that every morning.) It's the same sun that ruled over my childhood summers. Of course it figures into our efforts to grasp and understand reality beyond ourselves, along with the basic rhythms of life. Stones, sundials, carvings from ancient civilizations show the sacred power of the sun and its light. "Shine Jesus' light" is a good metaphor. It works, no matter how old you are. It tells you a lot about how to live as a follower of Jesus.

It's almost 7. My wake-up alarm will go off any minute now. The sun's been up for almost two hours. It's still shining at me through the maple tree on the corner, but the early morning magic has faded. In a half hour or so it will be above the trees and I'll need to tilt the patio umbrella to shield my eyes and my computer screen from the glare. It won't be shining golden light into the nooks and crannies of plants my world view, but it will shine down on a busy Saturday's chores, shopping, recreation. 

The narrator — the unreliable narrator — of "Drive Your Plow, etc." is an astrologer. She looks to the angles and motion of planets crossing one another's influence to find truth and direction about human fate, as well as to discover the date of her own death. Astrology, the casting of horoscopes, has elaborate rules. They're stated with authority in the novel, but the mind glazes over these as you read them -- at least mine did, with no grounding in the subject. The stories created from the rules, however -- well, they are the story, sometimes truthful, sometimes not. 

Much of the novel takes place at night. There are warm, loving human encounters and dark, drunken violent ones. That's part of what drove me out of bed this morning -- I wanted to read the resolution to that unreliable story-telling not while drifting off to sleep, but in the morning light, . 

Shine the light.

Pentecost 2023

"Birdsong. Inspirited."

I wrote this on a page in my notebook this morning, as I drank my coffee outside at the patio table.

Today was another perfect May day--clear skies, warm but not hot. And oh, so quiet at 8am. Yet in the silence, birds, one chip-chip-chipping from the tree near my chair, others whistling more melodic tunes down the block. Like a fourth dimension of being. The sun was still low in the sky, lighting up the undersides of leaves and branches and shining warmly into my face. 

"Inspirited," I wrote on the page, and then, not sure if this was really a word, I looked it up in the dictionary app on my phone. 

        Inspirit: to infuse with spirit. Syn. spirit up.

Spirit up. It's the day for it--Pentecost. Or should that be Spirit down? As in descending onto the disciples' heads in tongues of fire?

I went to church, sang the hymns -- including two big 16th-century Lutheran chorales, "Creator Spirit, Heavenly Dove" and "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord" that I'm always surprised to discover are two different hymns. Perhaps we should just sing the ancient "Veni, Creator Spiritus" and be done with it. 

Honestly, I didn't need tongues of fire, the rushing wind, Peter's sermon from Acts, or even Jesus in the upper room. But the great blue heron I saw fly overhead while stopped at a stoplight as I drove to church?

Spirit up!

"I always think ... "

It's been two months since I've published a post here at the Perverse Lutheran. A long time. I've had thoughts and ideas, but they've evaporated quickly, helped along by the glare of self-criticism. 

So I'm trying "Random on a Tuesday" this morning and making a commitment (well, about 85 percent) to hitting publish, no matter what. (Please, dear reader, accept my apologies.)

1. It's almost 10 a.m. I've been awake since 6. I had my morning coffee but it did not prevent me from dozing off while reading, around 8:30 a.m. Such a pleasant feeling, floating from sleep to wakeful and back again, on a morning in May, in a patio chair under a hazy blue sky, birds chipping and chirping in the bushes, cradled by green, lilac-y fragrance.

2. This is the problem with blogging lately. Item #1 was the one single thought I had as I started this post, and it was worth only two sentences. 

3. I've been very busy directing a junior high musical production of "The Music Man Jr." It's my third time directing this in one version or another. One of my favorite moments comes near the end of the show, when Harold Hill, confronted by a boy who needed to believe in him, must tell the truth and confess to being a liar and a crook. But he tells the kid he's a great kid and that's why he wanted him in the band. 

"What band?" says Winthrop. 

Liar? Crook? Hill reveals something more about himself: "I always think there's a band, kid." 

He can't quite make it come to pass, but still he has a dream. Every time, he believes. 

4. "I always think there's a play, kid." That's where I find myself. Conjuring kids' school plays into existence, I feel seven years old again, or ten, with a grand vision of something I'm trying to turn into reality, usually against all practicality. A child’s dream. Will they believe with me? Rehearsals look like I'm in command. I'm organized. I plan. I have a spreadsheet. I tell my cast to count off by seven and move them around in groups following the circles and arrows in my notes. And I wonder if anyone can see what I see. And why would they?  

5. In plays we play together. We agree to do this and we hope to bring the audience along. Read a novel and you enter a world constructed in one author's head, its own reality. I just finished reading a novel called "Users" whose main character is a designer of virtual reality experiences that evolve and call on users to contribute content which is then shared in other users' experiences. (Think Twitter or Facebook as VR.) The protagonist is selfish. He doesn't just interact with people. He plans how to get what he needs from his wife and daughters and co-worker. His relationships are superficial and a mess. Near the end comes a reminder that we can't ever really know what it's like to be someone else. His teenage daughter's reaction: well, duh. 

6. But I’m always interested in what it’s like to be someone else, or to be inside their experience. Or interested in what they say about it. If I breathe just the right way, can I duplicate their experience in my body and brain?

7. Which reminds me to write something more about being present on this fine May day. Morning has turned to early afternoon and now to late afternoon. There's an electrician running a grounding line in the basement for the solar panels on the roof. Electricity went out in the bathroom for a while. And I just picked up three more novels from the library. 

8. What I was reading when I dozed off earlier this morning was a new translation of the writings of Julian of Norwich. Time to pick it up again. 

It's a lament

Klagen. It's a German word, pronounced with an "ah" vowel. At the beginning the back of the tongue is up against the soft palate; you push air past it to release the k sound. The l is formed as the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge behind the front teeth and then lowers; there's a little more pressure involved in German than in English. You need a big open space for the ah, especially if you're singing, with the tongue dropping to the bottom of the mouth. The g at the beginning of the second syllable is made like the k, except it's voiced, which means the vocal chords tense and vibrate as the air is released; put your fingers gently on your throat and you can feel the vibration. The e is a schwa sound, open, neutral, represented in the phonetic alphabet by an upside down lowercase e. Close off the sound with a final n, short but pitched if you're singing.

Klagen is the word for lament that lofts through the opening chorus of Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen" -- Come, you daughters, help me to lament. The ah sound makes room for the music, but the k in kommt and again in klagen brings the intensity. Choral directors want the vowel sound on the beat and the k in front of it, sent out into the room with emphasis and clarity. There is no soft edge on this grief, no sliding gently into it. It insists and is then sustained, on a long line of pulsing sorrow. 

The music goes on to call for witnesses: Sehet! See! See what? See the Lamb of God, suffering, slaughtered, patient, bearing the pain of the cross out of love and grace. A call for lament. A majestic piece of music, complex, graceful, intense, emotional.
Up until a few days ago, I was still lost in the details of this chorus as part of the choir preparing to sing the St. Matthew Passion this weekend. I'm in Choir 2, voices that interject questions—where, who, what—when called on by Choir 1 to join the lament. I don't want to screw up and sing those interjections on the wrong pitch, or worse, the wrong beat, so I focus on singing the notes spot on. Let the meaning of the words take shape in the ears of the audience. 

But last weekend I attended a memorial service online which began with Silence and Lament. Verses from the Psalms expressed sorrow and desolation. We read a Litany of Lament in which the congregation's response was "Living God, be with us in our pain." 

Not "Living God, take away our pain." 

No, we're came together to talk about grief and sorrow. The homily spoke of pain and protest. Mourners named what was lost and shared their deep grief. At the end, there was a prayer for consolation, and the life that was lost was commended to God's care. But there was so turning away from lament. I began to think of things in my own life that were, perhaps, insufficiently lamented.

The experience changed how I'm thinking about the St. Matthew Passion, about the word klagen and this chorus that invites listeners into the contemplation of Christ's death on Good Friday. Many, many words have been written to describe, analyze and explain this monument of western choral music and theology, a great work by a great composer. In the past weeks I've searched for a few choice words to describe it in publicity materials. Lament has not been one of the words that I've used. But now it's everywhere.

Somehow I missed this earlier. And it's not because of the challenges of singing in the chorus, of being ready to spit out fast-moving German texts at the drop of a downbeat. It may have something to do with the solo arias that express lament being long. They're gorgeous, each one unique and complex, with highly emotional, personal texts. But they're a lot to sit through under bright lights and the imperatives of looking interested and staying alert for what's next. 

There's a bigger reason why I haven't responded to the heavy call of lament before in this work. Ironically (perversely) it's bound up in being raised Lutheran on a steady diet of -- yes, I'll say it -- penal substitutionary atonement theology. I don't much care about the systematic theology behind it, or even how you get around it. But I will confess that it's left a grim residue in my celebration of Lent and Holy Week. "I crucified thee," we sing in a Good Friday hymn. There's heavy guilt there, self-accusation and deep feelings of unworthiness. As a child I took this way too much to heart. Decades later I squirm and resist, rather than wallow in shame. 

When I joined the lament in the memorial service last weekend, I felt my own grief and loss rise from heart to throat, remembering. At the next day's Passion rehearsal I felt the lament rise there as well—kommt, klagen. It's a lament for Jesus, yes. But as we feel things with one another, it becomes a lament for everything—so much grief, so many losses, the sorrow of the world. The sorrow of parents who've lost a child, of people who've lost a life partner. The sorrow of earthquake survivors in Turkey, of civilian victims of the war in Ukraine, of men of color suffering under police beatings in America. 

There is much to lament -- the world should not be this way. But Jesus in his Passion carries our sorrow, is with us. Laments with us. It doesn't take away our pain, but Bach's music reminds us that love -- love from God -- transforms it.

My blue car

"I love you, blue car." 

I said those words spontaneously yesterday and again today. They came out of my mouth with no thought at all as I cleaned out my Glacier Blue 2007 Honda CRV, mailed the title to the insurance company, and signed off when the tow truck came to take it away. You don't say good-bye to an old friend without some expression of what they've meant to you over the years. 

I am not one of those people who name their cars. My late husband was. The Chevy he drove when I first met him was known as Kid Blue. The Oldsmobile he bought from his dad was very quickly dubbed Reggie the Regal. He tried to name my cars for me but I resisted. The Nissan I bought a year after we got married —I didn't even want to know what kind of name he'd come up with. It would have been clever, I'm sure, but also would have commented on how how yellow it was, or how it was little but driven by the mighty Gwen.  Several years and two children later, when that zippy little car was succeeded by a boring-beige secondhand Taurus, Lon wanted to name that car, too. No thank you, I said. So he kept quiet, as he did when I moved up to the silver Windstar, a mini-van with a front seat for the oldest child, a middle seat for the middle child, and a wayback for the youngest. 

Those cars averaged seven years apiece. I owned my pretty little CRV for almost 16 years and 165,000 miles. In December a school bus swinging wide for a tight right turn scraped and crunched the car's body from back fender to front. It was still drivable, but since the estimate for the body work exceeded the car's value it was deemed a total loss, and the insurance company offered a generous settlement. I had kinda planned to go car-shopping at some point in 2023, but there I was, buying a new car in January. 

"It's not just a car, it's your freedom." That's how the song went in GM commercials in the 1990s and it spoke truth. Driving a car you can't depend on is the opposite of freedom. You don't feel free when you have to call for a tow from the Jewel parking lot because your battery's dead, or when you spend 90 minutes of precious vacation time in the Firestone waiting room because you blew a tire just 20 miles from home. Both of these things happened to me in 2022, along with other repairs, but these things didn't diminish my affection for my blue car.

I asked myself this afternoon, getting ready for that car to be towed away, what are those feelings that come up when I say "I love you, blue car"? The answer came quickly: what I love is all the life I lived in that car. Helping sons move — to college, back home, then into apartments. Mattresses jammed into the back, basketballs, smelly shoes, bicycles, randomly packed boxes. Driving the 100 miles to Rockford, for a wedding, for dinner and conversation, for a funeral. Trips with my sisters to Michigan, with my daughter on the ferry boat, driving through the Blue Ridge on a beautiful morning in June. 

A car is not an animate object. It can't love me back. But somehow it's an extension of self. And Glacier Blue is my color. 

Or was my color. There's a shiny new red Subaru in the garage. More life ahead. 

New Year's knitting is a lot like life

Sweater knitting is the best. 

On New Year's Day I retrieved this project from the bottom of the knitting bag where it had resided for the last six months. I had plotted out the cables, the seed stitch panels, the dividing stitches in columns in an Excel spreadsheet, based on swatches of the pattern stitches I'd made weeks earlier. There was some, ahem, guesswork involved, maybe some rounding out of the math. I cast on the number of stitches I thought I needed for the back of the cardigan and knit a couple inches. But when I measured the width of the piece and multiplied times two, I discovered I was on my way to knitting a sweater that was six inches bigger than I wanted it to be. Too much cardigan. 

I looked at the spreadsheet, didn't see any obvious places where I could make the sweater smaller. I didn't know what to do. So the yarn, the needles, the swatches -- they all went to the bottom of the knitting bag and I finished out 2022 knitting hats and mittens and a lace scarf.

But it's a new year. And knitting problems are solvable problems. I took another look at the Blue Aran Cardigan spreadsheet on New Year's Day. I relented on the 36 stitches of honeycomb cable I was sure I needed in the center and cut it down to 24. I changed the panels along the side seams to a simpler version of moss stitch or seed stitch (or whatever, this is a flashpoint for arguments among knitters) and got rid of another 12 or 16 stitches. I recalculated the total number of stitches for the width of the back of the sweater, plotted the increases needed between the ribbing and the body of the sweater, cast on, knit a couple inches, discovered I'd made some math errors, ripped, cast on again, ripped and cast on AGAIN, and a week later I have completed about 14 of the 17 inches I need to reach the place where it's time to start the armhole shaping. Did some math last night to figure out exactly how that will happen and put that information in the spreadsheet as well, in clear typed sentences, not scrawled, abbreviated notes. 

It's all so satisfying. There's the actual piece of knitting (above), in a beautiful blue, squishy and firm. And then there's the spreadsheet, also a thing of beauty. When I looked up information about armhole shaping in a reference book from my shelf, I found two pieces of knitting graph paper folded together and containing notes from an earlier sweater. I think it was this one, made six years ago for my son Kurt. 

There is a detailed stitch chart in one corner of the first sheet and calculations scattered around the page, but there is no indication as to which of the many figures are the final, correct ones. I wrote down as much as I needed to while thinking out other things out in my head and one the needles. It was good enough. The sweater fit (well, the sleeves are too long). He liked it. But I can't recreate it or write a pattern from my notes for someone else to use., 

I've been knitting since I was eight years old and knit my first sweaters when I was in high school. One was an Aran Isle cabled sweater, the other a Norwegian-style ski sweater with a multi-colored yoke. They were oversized, which is to say, too big.  (I still have them. They fit better decades later, and it's not the sweaters whose size has changed.) I then knit a cardigan for my dad when I was in college, during the oil crisis of the 1970s when everyone was turning thermostats down. It was warm, praised for its cables and my talent at completing it -- but enormous. 

I've knit many sweaters in the years since, most of which have fit their recipients appropriately. Most have been knit from published patterns, with some adjustments so that they fit. This requires math — and I like math. Often it requires turning back, ripping and restarting a project, which can happen only after you recognize that it's headed in a bad way. Hoping against hope that it will turn out okay anyway, or that you can shrink it or stretch it after it's done is not a successful strategy. It's not a strategy at all. 

I belong to a couple of knitting groups on Facebook where knitters from around the world show what they're working on and offer advice and information to one another. Different kinds of people post in different ways in this sort of social media. Some are encouragers: "beautiful," "lovely work," "you're so talented." Others jump in and respond helpfully to questions. There are disagreements. It's hard to tell people who have always done things one way that in some circumstances another way might be more appropriate. (See: slipped edge stitches, English vs. continental knitting, blocking superwash, blocking at all, etc.)

My personal pet peeve is the commenters who say that in 20 or 30 or 60 years of knitting, they've never worked a gauge swatch. 

(Gauge swatch: a sample of what you're about to knit in the yarn you're about to use on the size needles that you think will be appropriate. At least four inches square. Used to determine how many stitches you're getting per inch, which should match what's specified in the published pattern, because if it doesn't whatever you making is going to come out a different size.)

A knitter might have to knit several gauge swatches on different size needles to get the right number of stitches per inch. Or one might use the information gained in a gauge swatch to adapt a pattern, using math, to get the size garment desired. Neglect to swatch and you might get lucky. Or maybe you don't care about the finished size, which is okay for a blanket or even a child's sweater, since kids grow, but not okay for the hat that droops over the wearer's eyes or the pullover you're making from expensive yarn for your sister-in-law. 

The case against swatching is that sometimes you want to just be knitting. You want to pick up the yarn and the needles and go! Why not start the project and see progress immediately! 

But doing things well requires planning, critical thinking, repentance, turning back and starting anew. I did that with my blue sweater yarn, after a six-month period of aging, and it makes me happy right now to look at the work on my needles. 

I do a lot of moralizing when I think about knitting, especially sweater knitting. Sometimes I feel compelled to reply to those never-swatchers on Facebook, though often I'll delete the comment before actually posting it. I doubt I'd change their minds. Sometimes I want to point out that continuing to knit a project that is not going well is a waste of time. The two or three (or five or six) hours it would take to rip and restart are nothing compared to the hours of work that will be wasted when the finished project is too big, too small, too long, or just ugly. 

This is the moment for the "knitting -- it's a lot like life" statement. Plan carefully, think about what you're doing as you do it, don't be afraid to admit you're wrong, take appropriate steps to fix what you've messed up. My life does not hold up to the same level of scrutiny as my knitting. 

But hey, I seem to be on my way to a blue cardigan that will fit and keep me warm in the winter for the next 20 years. Which is not nothing. 

Happy New Year. 

Time

Standing, Emma, Dora, Hattie, Lydia, Amanda; kneeling, Clara, Esther.

 

Time like an ever-rolling stream 

soon bears us all away.

We fly forgotten as a dream

dies at the opening day. 

--- stanza from "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past"

Forgotten, like a dream? Not exactly. My ancestors are currently all over my dining room. Photos, postcards, recital programs, newspaper clippings, letters -- half a dozen boxes of these came down from the attic earlier this week to be shared with my sisters and cousins at a day-after-Christmas brunch. My paternal grandmother, Esther Sieving Gotsch, in her later years, as her independence faded, saw to it that a lot of this stuff landed at my parents' house. When my mother moved out of this house in 2002, 18 years after my dad's death, it ended up in my attic because a) I'm a saver and b) I'm the one in the family whose house has an attic.

Her son, my dad, was no mean saver himself. He kept copies of every recital he ever played -- and not just one or two. After the post-performance congratulatory conversations and the standing around and talking with old friends (I'm thinking of you, today, Len Berghaus), he'd grab a handful of leftover programs and drop them in his briefcase before leaving church. Though not very tall, he had hands and fingers that could comfortably stretch from the root of a chord to the tenth above (that's ten white keys on the keyboard). A handful of programs was 25 or 30 copies. When my sisters and I emptied the rickety wooden file cabinet on the front porch of my parents' home where they were kept, we winnowed the number down to two or three copies of each program. And yes, they're in a box in my attic.

The boxes from my grandmother contain lots of old photos. Grandma Gotsch wrote names on the backs of some of them -- enough of them to be a guide to the unlabeled pictures. One photo album contains little notes on blue paper in my handwriting. I must have looked through the album with Grandma or her sister Clara before they died. If I have any memory of this, it is the vaguest of memories, recovered only because of those bits of blue paper.

Esther was the youngest of five sisters. It is not easy to tell them apart when they are clustered around their mother in tiny, hundred-year-old snapshots. It's even harder to know who is who when you have just one or two seated blurrily together on a bluff at Starved Rock or Devil's Lake, and the face you're not sure about may not even belong not to a Sieving sister. It may be one of those names you heard talked about at Christmas dinners --Donnenfeldts, Molzahns -- when the meal was over and you wanted your freedom. 

My grandmother and her sisters were the second family of Pastor Herman Sieving, who married my great-grandmother, Hattie Träbing, a few years after his first wife died. She was 24; he was 43. They moved from Ottawa, Illinois, from the church where he had confirmed her, to York Center (now Lombard) where he became pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church at the corner of Roosevelt and Meyers Road. Herman Sieving died of a heart attack on a Sunday afternoon in 1901, found dead in the orchard by the congregation's treasurer, coming to bring him his paycheck. My grandmother was two years old, her oldest sister, Dora, just 14. Hattie was 39, with hard years ahead of her.

Hattie and Herman Sieving outside the York Center parsonage

A year or two after her husband's death, Hattie moved her family from York Center to a small rented house near the railroad in Forest Park. She worked as a seamstress, as a teacher, I don't know what else. Her daughters worked as they became old enough, and in 1920, financially secure, they bought a house further south in Forest Park. In 1958, when I was 4, my parents bought the house next door. The great-aunts, Emma (my grand-mother's half-sister), Lydia and especially Clara, were a big part of my growing-up years. 

They were known as "the girls," these residents of the house at 612 Beloit. My grandmother was the only one who married and she lived with her husband less than a mile away in Oak Park, in a house that was eventually enlarged and shared with her daughter, her daughter's husband and their four children.

The stories that my generation knows of these women barely appear in their photos. Amanda died in February 1922, age 32, in a state mental institution. Fifty or sixty years later Clara told me how she had threatened her mother with a butcher knife and how the pastor came to the house and told her that her daughter had to be institutionalized. Men of the congregation took Amanda to the hospital in Joliet. Dora died in November 1925, age 38, of TB, I believe. My father told me once that Dora's illness, which must have begun years earlier, was the reason his mother did not go teachers' college like her next older sister. The family needed her to go to work right after she left high school, because Dora was sick. Grandma's high school yearbook, the commencement program, a formal high school graduation portrait -- we have these things yet. Esther's disappointment -- there's no record of that, though Daddy attributed late-in-life quarrels between the sisters to Grandma's resentment of Clara receiving educational opportunities denied to her. 

I look at all these photos and imagine other stories, just from the photos' existence, from someone's decision to dress up the subjects and get their photos taken. There are baby portraits of each daughter at about four months of age, plump, well-fed infants dressed in fussy late-19th century dresses. There's more than one copy of each of these portraits; in the 1880s and 90s it seems that parents, just like today, ended up with more copies of a photo than could be given away, more than could be put in the garbage. Names are penciled on the back of at least one copy of each photo by someone who knew who was who, probably my grandmother, who in her old age, worried about who would hang onto all this family lore. Maybe she learned about each picture from her own mother, who packed them up and kept them as she moved first from the York Center parsonage to a house that someone in the congregation allowed them to live in and then to the house in Forest Park. There are confirmation portraits of each girl as well, in white dresses with corsages pinned on their shoulders. Esther has long hair coiling down over her other shoulder to her waist. 

There's another rather romantic portrait of Esther, sitting at a piano, turning to face the camera. There's the same coil of long hair. You also see a love of music, immersion in music, and aspiration, borne out a generation later in my dad's high school piano recitals and his career as an organist.

The attic boxes also hold thick photo albums with snapshots from travels, for example, a trip down the Mississippi for Mother and the girls, with stops in St. Louis and at the Shiloh battlefield. One page holds three photos labeled "roustabouts playing craps" and opposite it, photos of black dock workers unloading a boat. Curious. It was 1920 -- a time closer to the Civil War than we are today to World War II. 

There are photos from my grandmother's wedding, multiple copies in cardboard folders suitable for display.  Esther wears a beautiful tea-length dress with a floor-length train and elaborate veiling gathered around her face and pooled at her feet. One feels the full gathered female culture of mother and sisters in these these elegant photos. Meanwhile, Grandpa Gotsch looks great in a tux. He stands very straight and and the trousers break at just the right point over his shoes.

I could go on and on, and perhaps I should. Perhaps my own descendants will be interested and will read my blog someday.

Anyway -- all this stuff is all over my dining room. We unpacked boxes rather randomly on Monday; I'm trying to pack them back up in better order and add clues for the future. (My sister Linda used the zoom on her phone's camera to locate our dad in photos from his grade school, high school and college bands. She wrote notes on the back, like "Second row from left, between the tubas.") There are many random snapshots from the 1950s, when my generation was born. Many of these are from shared Christmas celebrations. As we kids looked at them together we remembered the patterns on the carpets, the special dolls, the hand-me-down dresses that appear from Christmas to Christmas on one girl after another -- clues to which year, which house, what our parents' lives were like. I should write our names on the backs before I put them back into their boxes. 

Time, you know, bears us all away.