The spider web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must invest in that creation.

Green, green, everywhere

Green, green, everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. This.

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I begin again.

Second Sunday of Easter: Wounds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ walks, wounded, in a wounded world.

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

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

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

"This is the night"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refraction

Things I observed today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bigger -- because

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

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

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

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

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

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