Congrats

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fox, watching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the beginning

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

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

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

Read it here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let there be Easter. 

Collect for a cactus flower

 

God of houseplants, 

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

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

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

bright pink God!

No salt

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

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

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

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

Plain collect for Transfiguration

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

In collect form:

Transfigured Jesus of the mountaintop

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

You are too bright for us. 

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

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

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

Amen

Transfiguration Sunday 

February 27, 2022

Still perverse, still puzzling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(God forbid I should do the obvious.)

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

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

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