Something short of perfect

When my kids were younger and we went camping with the cousins, nights away from home and television and streetlights meant games. As the last streaks of sunset faded into the night sky, we'd start off perhaps with Memory, and once everyone had put on socks and sweaters and settled in, we'd choose teams for Pictionary. My family is pretty competitive--we're not sore losers, but we do prefer to win--so it's important that the teams are fair, with skilled and unskilled, young and old players equally divided between teams.

Eliza always wanted to play Pictionary, and Eliza has Down syndrome and the intellectual disability that goes with it. Whose team would she be on? Did she have to have a turn to draw, like everyone else? Would she be able to draw the random thing that came up on the card for her turn? What if she didn't know what it was?

We adapted. We made some new rules. We found ways to give her regular turns just like everyone else. She was happy and excited to be the center of attention and take her turn with pencil and paper, and we had a lot of noisy fun until campground quiet hours arrived at 11 p.m.

Did simplifying the game for Eliza give her team an advantage that was unfair to everyone else? Probably it did. We all had to give up a little bit of what we thought was "fair" in order for her to be included. We also had to be a little more gracious about bragging rights as winners and losers. But the game was better when everyone was included.

In churches we celebrate the idea of inclusion. Jesus is pretty clear about including everyone when he says "Come unto me." But we don't often acknowledge that to include everyone, individuals may have to give up some things and we might even be called on to celebrate the bumps and rough patches rather than judge them.

Our Transfiguration worship service this morning began with an awkward moment. The school handbell choir, students in grades 6–8 who I've been rehearsing with for a couple weeks while their teacher is on leave, was scheduled to play two pieces as the prelude. Neither piece is memorable music--they're short teaching pieces, with fun things in them like thumb damps and marts. As we finished the first and prepared to play the second, the pastor came to the front of church and started the pre-service announcements.

What to do? Darn it, we'd spent serious rehearsal time on "A Joyful Ring," and we were not going to be back to play it on, say, the Fourth Sunday in Lent. So before the organist had a chance to introduce the entrance hymn, we raised our bells and chimes, I beat out a measure, and we played.

So yes, the congregation was a little inconvenienced. They had to figure out what was going on and stand and wait and listen before singing "Love Divine All Love Excelling" (a much better piece of music). My back was turned so I didn't see, but I'm sure some folks didn't know if they should be watching the ringers in the balcony or turn around as directed to face the processional cross.

But they were fine. They gave up a little bit of comfort so that the kids could play. It was a small moment of grace, of God's grace appearing in us.

There have been other moments like that at my church, especially as many people, not all of them regular church-goers, came to a funeral last week for a young man who died tragically and much too soon. There were rough patches in friends' and relative's participation in the eulogies and in the liturgy. There were rough places for all of us, because--well, many tears were shed. But when we share the grief of others--and give up our own comfort--we become God's sweet tears, a sign of God weeping with us and holding us.

If we followed the Pictionary rules to the letter the game would be (might be?) perfectly fair. If everything in worship were slick and smooth and stylistically unified, it might be considered great art and certainly for many people it would be inspiring. But we'd be leaving people out.

We live on the plain, not Transfiguration's mountaintop. We live on the plain where our imperfections are where Christ's love and healing are revealed. Thanks be to God!



This month marks the tenth anniversary of The Perverse Lutheran. The first post was published on Transfiguration Sunday 2006.  There's plenty of imperfection on display in the 277 posts I've published since then, and more failings in the drafts that never were published. Thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me.

Epiphany

Epiphany. The day we get free of Christmas. 

What on earth do I mean by that? 

I'm not a Christmas-hater, someone who mumbles bah-humbug from Thanksgiving to December 25, who barks at excited children or rolls her eyes at over-the-top high-achieving household managers whose every room is bedecked with lighted garland.

I'm a hanger-on when it comes to Christmas. My tree stays up till mid-January, the lights in the backyard until a mild weekend whenever. The Fontanini nativity sometimes lingers on the bookcase till Ash Wednesday, probably because it's more fun to set it up than to put it away. Every figure belongs in its own separate, original box, and all those boxes, plus the asymmetric stable must then be puzzle-fitted into the larger box labeled "Manger Set."

It takes a long time. I've got 25 human and animal figures, a chicken coop, a couple palm trees, and a dozen pesky "Birds of Bethlehem."

There are shepherds young and old at my manger and musicians. And there are plenty of women--a tall woman shepherd, along with a pregnant midwife, a spinner with a fleece, and other women who are carrying food.

And yes, the three kings are there.

Today, of course, is their day, and  they're supposed to enter a house in Bethlehem, not a stable. After a long journey from the east, they discover that the king they seek is not to be found at the court in Jerusalem. Their visit precipitates the killing of infants in Bethlehem, and the family they visit flees to far-off Egypt, living as refugees until it's possible to return to Galilee, if not Judea.

Time to face January, free of the sentimentality of Christmas.

Again, not really sure what I mean by that--or why I look forward to it. Maybe it's as simple as my favorite chair going back to its usual spot in the bay window after the Christmas tree comes down, next to a table where I can stack the books and notebooks and knitting that are currently scattered everywhere else. There's relief in not having to be in a gracious, jolly, holiday mood or seeming to be. Not that it's a bad thing to smile and greet people, to share a cozy fire or admire other people's grandchildren. But it's wearing, it's work. And there are things to be accomplished in 2016.

Happy New Year.

Heart weight

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

These words, Luke 2:19, are favorites of mine. Somewhere in one of my notebooks, there's a first draft of a hymn text with "Mary kept these things and pondered them" as the refrain. I'd have to go dig it out to remember how I parceled out the "things" among the stanzas. The angel Gabriel was surely the first, maybe the visit to Elizabeth in stanza two, then the manger and finally the dirty, disruptive shepherds stumbling over each other at the stable door, excited and hushed as they told a wild story of angels round about them and the glory of the Lord proclaiming peace to God's people on earth.

Oh, yes, Mary kept these things.

Were I an exegete (and not just another humble ponderer) I would look up the meaning of the Greek word that is translated as "ponder." Where else is it used? What shades of meaning does it bring from other contexts? Is it used for religious meditation? For deliberation? For the humdrum thoughts heard in the mind while cooking, cleaning, walking to work?

The dictionary cites Middle English, Old French and Latin roots for the English word "ponder," including the Latin ponderare, "weigh, reflect on." Weight is what pulls me into the word and might be why I especially like the King James translation above, where these things weigh on and in Mary's heart. As if these miracles and signs had entered the place where the child had lain, replacing the weight of the pregnancy, the pangs of childbirth, with the seismic promise of the angels.

Perhaps the gospel writer puts this sentence here as attribution--to give credibility to fantastic narratives of what was surely an obscure birth. Mary, the mother, is the chronicler, not a scribe with a pen in a palace recording the birth of a son and heir to a prince or emperor. Or maybe the writer is explaining the singular faith of a mother who survived her son and found her grief subsumed in wonder and awe at the resurrection, at the life present in the new Christian community.

I rose early this morning, unable to sleep anymore. As I headed for the bathroom I noticed a light shining under the door of my daughter's room. She is not usually an early riser, but she'd already posted a five-line Facebook status about being awake and all the scenes tumbling through her brain. There was plenty running through my mind as well--checkbooks and cookies, song lyrics and errands, as well as life's hopes and heartaches.

It's no longer dark out. Morning has seeped through the sky outside my living room window, just as it crept over Bethlehem long ago, after that miraculous night that lived on in Mary's heart. What will I carry in my heart today? Will the light of the Christchild fill the spaces left by sleeplessness and worry--lighten them? I hope so.

Only what's done

It's an hour yet until the sun rises, so I lit the chunky white candle on the blue plate that I placed on the table in the east window on the day after Thanksgiving. And I lit one blue candle on the Advent wreath as well. The flame on the white candle is flickering wildly, thanks to drafty old windows in this seventy-five-year-old house.

I'll get out the electric candles soon, the ones with sensors that turn them on in the darkness of late afternoon and off shortly after sunrise each morning. They make a nice glow, and once the cords are untangled and they're secured on the windowsills, they require no effort. I'm good with that.

I opened the computer this morning and Facebook came up on the screen, with a "Welcome to Advent" post from a friend. (Thanks, Chrissy.) She quoted a "Stir up, O Lord" prayer:

Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people;
that they, richly bearing the fruit of good works,
may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Oh, dear. "Richly bearing the fruit of good works" sounds like a lot of effort, maybe more than I'm good for this December.

When I was a child, there was a wooden plaque in my great aunts' home that said:

Only one life, 'twill soon be past,
Only what's done for Christ will last.

The maiden aunts (known in the family as "the girls") lived next door to us, and my sisters and I went there often. The plaque may have hung in the front hall, or perhaps the dining room. I'm sure it was old even then. There was a similar style plaque in one of the upstairs bedrooms with a saying on it in German script that I couldn't even read, much less understand. Both plaques likely dated back to Clara, Lydia and Emma's turn-of-the-century childhoods, perhaps to the parsonage where they were born in York Center, Illinois. Their papa, Herr Pastor Herman Sieving, died when they were quite small. The house they shared as adults was purchased with their mother, twenty years or more after his death, when these girls (my grandmother was the youngest of them) had grown up, worked hard, gotten good jobs and were finally financially secure.

I read the words on that old-fashioned wooden plaque often. They got under my skin. I memorized them, with their catchy rhythm and tidy rhyme. You could jump rope to this little verse, or repeat it in your head as you skipped down the block, late to school. Or pound it out as your feet hit the pavement while jogging daily de-stress miles in graduate school. The grim reminder that life is soon over sent a dark Lutheran chill through my young religious heart. It still does.

What I heard in that verse, and still hear nagging at me, is not the promise of "will last," but the judgment in "what's done"--as in, get your work done, get the dishes done, do your practicing, do your homework, for God's sake finish things--so that rooms are neat and orderly, lives run smoothly, and you, Christian, go to your grave having accomplished something.

Is all of that inherent in that little rhyme? In my family? Or is it just me, and how I heard it?

When the last of the great aunts, Aunt Clara, could no longer live alone, we cleaned out her house, and the grand nieces and nephews chose things to take to our own homes. It wouldn't surprise me to see this plaque in some out-of-the-way corner in the home of one of my girl cousins or sisters. Or perhaps no one wanted it. I certainly didn't.

On this first Monday of Advent, I'm facing a long list of things that need to be "done" by New Year's: a birthday party for my daughter (whose middle name is Noel), concerts, decorating, planning, shopping, knitting, and lots of work at my day job at church. Can any of these things be said to "last"? Music is learned, performed and over. Birthday parties, thankfully, end. Hand knit socks wear out in the heels. Church communications may live on forever on the internet, but are quickly recycled here on planet earth. So much of the Christmas celebration is ephemeral--cosy, jolly, loving, worthwhile, but not lasting.

Meanwhile the good works the world truly needs--justice, peace, compassion--seem well beyond my power to accomplish.

The sun is up, reflected on clouds in the east. I blew out the candles a half hour ago; their little flames look insignificant in the cold daylight.

What must be done for Christ today? Stir up my will today, O Lord--not to finish things, not to be done, but just to bear whatever you can bring forth through me.

Random, on a Wednesday night

1. What do people DO while they brush their teeth? I get so bored. I leave the bathroom looking for something, anything. But I can't read--too much spit flying around. Can't watch TV--too far away from the sink. It's just such a nothing-time of the evening.

2. I learned this evening that Guinness Stout has a relatively low APV. Maybe not good news for everyone, but good news for me. Most beer gets to me too quickly.

3. I am typing these words while in bed. Every article on insomnia says that screen time keeps you from falling asleep. We'll see.

3. The quilt on my bed is ugly. I made it. It did not come out looking like I hoped it would, but it's been with me for a long time and so I love it.

4. What's true of my quilt is true of my life. Not what I hoped it would be, but with me for a long time and mine to love.

5. I knit no more than a dozen stitches today, and those were while I was on hold on a call to a software support desk.  Settled in for a long wait, and instead, right away, I'm talking with Nancy, who likes carrots cooked with brown sugar and cinnamon.

6. How do I know this about Nancy? Because I stuffed a fat baby carrot in my mouth seconds before Nancy picked up the call. So I had to explain why I was, um, mumbling. A general discussion of carrots ensued.

7. Ensued is a word that serves a very specific purpose, so it doesn't show up in many sentences. It's dismissive and uninteresting, though it can be used ironically. Irony improves many things that are otherwise uninteresting.

8. I'm reading a book in which the author, a well-published woman, humble-brags about her skills at word play and uses words in ways I'm sure she thinks are wonderful and I find kind of cloying. Sentences end up being about words instead of about stuff.

9. Which is not to say I don't like good words. I just don't like it when they're prodded to step out in front of their pals.

10. Because, besides being a Perverse Lutheran, I am a Modest Lutheran, socialized through the generations to be suspicious of anything showy.

11. Perhaps that's why I love my quilt and my modest life. Doesn't explain why I get bored brushing my teeth.

Judy

Here’s my story about my friend Judy Torgus, which I was asked to write and share with La Leche League alumni who are collecting stories and memories of Judy. 

By the fall of 1983 I had been working at the La Leche League office in Franklin Park for four years. My reference librarian desk was next door to the Publications office, and I regularly read, wrote and edited copy for newsletters and information sheets.

I was not especially good at getting to work early in those days, but I usually got there before Judy. She always made an entrance, with a story, something she was outraged about, or just new jewelry. Who could resist wanting to be in her circle?

It had become apparent that fall that my father, a college professor, was having strange troubles. He was not himself, he fell asleep often, he seemed lost. I had been married a year by then, the oldest of three daughters, and I had been the one who had begun making calls to the family doctor, to a neurologist, to the psychiatrist who was treating him for something that looked like depression.

On a Wednesday morning early in December I drove him to the hospital for a CAT scan and left him there with my cousin and former roommate, Beth, who was an instructor in the nursing school. I had gone to work. A couple hours later the phone call came to my desk. It may have been my mother who relayed the news, more likely it was Beth. Daddy had a brain tumor, frighteningly large. He was being admitted to the hospital, they were talking about surgery, I should come.

I was 29 years old. The way roles played out in my family, I knew that a lot of things were about to become my responsibility. I was crushed and scared, ready to be responsible, feeling helpless. I went into the hall and around the corner to tell the ladies in Publications what had happened and that I was leaving to go to the hospital.

And Judy said, no, wait, you need to have some lunch.

But I have to go.

No, she said, you need to eat.

I’m not hungry, I said.

You need to eat. We’ll go next door, I’m taking you. Then you can go.

She took me to lunch. I ordered a tiny cup of vegetable soup with saltines. And when I asked, she told me about losing her parents as a child, something she rarely spoke of. How it was hard, but she and her sister were okay.

It gave me what I needed.

Judy came flying into many other moments of my life. She arrived with gifts and food and enthusiasm after the births of Kris, Eliza and Kurt (who was born on her birthday). She listened as I puzzled out what was wrong with Lon, my husband, as he slipped into Alzheimer’s. When she died I had been waiting for her to get better, so that we could have dinner and I could talk with her about my son Kris having ALS. Her husband had died of ALS. She would tell me it was okay.

Judy wanted to fix things, but there are so many things in life we can’t fix. Yet we are, nevertheless, okay.

And Judy is one reason I know that, even without hearing it from her one more time. And we can celebrate life, despite all the junky parts, with travel and jangly jewelry, with blue dresses, friendships and bright smiles.

We’ll share those things and continue to be okay.

Busy-ness

Saw this on Facebook a little while ago:

Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety, which improves focus and planning. Focus and planning help with decision making. Decision making further reduces anxiety and improves enjoyment. Enjoyment gives you more to be grateful for, which keeps that loop of the upward spiral going. Enjoyment also makes it more likely you’ll exercise and be social, which, in turn, will make you happier.

And cleaning my room, hanging up all my clothes, rearranging my closet and my dresser drawers, and cooking a decent dinner--these must fit in there somewhere. Focus? Planning? Decision-making? Something in that circular path, because that pasta dish made for dinner tonight is going to be leftovers for a couple of days, reducing anxiety and improving enjoyment.

Sigh. At least the busy-ness got me through the afternoon. I'll be able to get dressed this week without having to dig through a basket of unfolded laundry. There will be clean sheets on the bed tonight--if I  remember to put them in the dryer soon.

The topic this morning in church was healing, thanks to St. Luke, Evangelist, known also as a physician, who is commemorated on Oct. 18.

I don't like crying in church. In fact I'm pretty damn tired of it, but there it was, with every hymn, every lesson. Healing is a sore spot. I would like my son Kris to be healed of his ALS right now. I would like the trajectory of that awful disease to reverse itself—bam! and have him climb back up the slope to being his whole, moving physical self again. But this is not the way the natural world works. So what I'm left with is a religious/spiritual reframe-it distinction between cure (which won't happen) and healing.

Healed is, I guess, a spiritual state, something about no bitterness, or perfect trust in God, something that happens in the metaphorical heart, not the tissues of the body.  Or it's some acceptance of the finitude of this life and the resultant sweetness. Or lasting love. Or something greater than ourselves. Or the cross of Christ and Jesus. Or depending on God and being okay with whatever happens.

Or it's something about being strong. That's the Lutheranism, the Christianity of my youth--admiration for people with strong faith, who never waiver, or who "fight the good fight" and conquer doubt and anger. And we all want to be that person, don't we? So you put on a good face. You express anger and doubt and—did I say anger?—only where it's permitted, in privacy or in deep heartfelt talks with spiritual advisors. You're told to "have faith" or lean on the little faith you do have.

Shit. It's so much harder than that. I've bumped up against randomness, wretchedness, sulkiness enough that the grey cloud of life's meaninglessness moves always alongside me.

Today, tomorrow, this week, doing healthy stuff--sleeping, reading, knitting, walking, deciding to cut my hair or clean off the table where the junk mail ends up, even working--will probably do a lot more for me than spiritual whatever. Out walking today, I saw a beautiful sky and intensely green leaves about to turn gold. Reading in my chair yesterday I finished "Moby Dick," grim story, awesome writing. Knitting feels good in the fingers and you can measure your progress.

Concrete stuff. Incarnation.