Birdsong

I opened the front door this morning to check for Amazon packages. I wasn't looking for anything specific, but in 2018 you never know what you may have ordered 3 or 4 days ago and forgotten about.

Anyway.

I opened the front door about 7:15 this morning, felt the cold air on my face, saw the eastern sky still streaked with bright clouds from rising sun. And heard birds singing. I thought of the carol--the Catalonian "Carol of the Birds"--my little choir sang in the Christmas concert on Sunday:

En veure despuntar El major illuminar En la nit mes joiosa;
Els ocellettes cantant a festejarlo van, Amb sa veu melindrosa. 

In midst of darkest night a lovely star shines bright And sends the darkness fleeing.
The birds awake in song and singing all night long They voice our hearts rejoicing.

It's a minor-key carol with an exotic sound (exotic, at least, in a neo-gothic Lutheran church). The language is Catalan, French-inflected Spanish. The setting by Joan Varner has a few parallel fourths in the harmony and a flute, fluttering and singing above and around the treble choir and piano.

It was the hardest of the set of three carols we sang, with a slow, sustained melody, strange words, odd vowels. So it was late in the rehearsal process before I gave much thought to the words in the English text. Even now, I don't really have the images straight in my mind. Logically, it's the star that sends the darkness fleeing, but the unarticulated image linked to the music in my brain is the birdsong breaking through the darkness, as light chasing the darkness away. In a painting the star would shine over everything, revealing the birds awake in the trees on the night of Jesus' birth. But in music, in this carol--it's the sound of the flute, the bird bouncing from branch to branch, that tells of the rejoicing.

The birds sing every morning. I have heard them at 4 a.m., when I'm awake and fretting. They're still singing outside my window now, as I'm finishing up here and turning my mind towards the day's work.

Rejoicing in the Lord. At Christmas. Always.

Wounded hearts

I’ve seen two mothers, two families lose children—daughters—this month. One daughter died after years of ALS, leaving behind a husband and her own daughter. The other, a daughter with a developmental disability, died today at the age of 15. 

“You’re in my prayers,” I say, I type on Facebook, I write in a note card. But really what it is, is —“You’re in my heart.” In my wounded and broken heart. 

Driving home from work today, listening to the news, I heard more grief: parents of the two women killed at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital yesterday, talking about their daughters and about their loss. I keep thinking it’s a dream and I’ll wake up, said the mother. She knew God, she was a praying woman, said the parents. 

Things fall apart. We share the broken pieces and fall apart together, as much as we dare, and keep going, doing what needs to be done. 

There is anger, grief, struggle, and an ache inside that we hope won’t be there in the morning, but it’s still there in the dark night, still there at dawn. Even very old wounds break open when hearts around us are breaking. It’s a kind of sympathetic vibration, like music, but in beats and pulses unique to human hearts.  

Monday of Thanksgiving week (not a meditation on gratitude)

Working backwards from Thursday:

Wednesday is for pies, apple in the late afternoon, pumpkin after choir rehearsal in the evening, as well as for putting leaves in tables, patting down the wrinkles in tablecloths, counting heads and counting chairs and chopping onions and celery for stuffing. 

Tuesday is for shopping, unless I get it done today, in which case Tuesday is for cleaning, which I really don't need to do much of since I cleaned for guests last weekend and that's good enough, thank you, especially for family. Though now that I check the weather I see that Thanksgiving Day is supposed to be bright and sunny which means dust will show on the bookshelves in the back room, as will streaks on the refrigerator in the kitchen because both rooms face west. 

Monday is for menu planning, which I seem to be avoiding by writing this post, but the turkey's thawing in the refrigerator and I've done this all before, like, for more than twenty years and beyond the turkey and the gravy (which I've got down, the secret is browning the turkey neck and the giblets before you turn them into broth, the broth being an excuse to open a bottle of Merlot) — beyond that nothing matters too much except the ten pounds of mashed potatoes, which my niece will peel (hope you're reading this, Gerianne), and of course the stuffing or the dressing, which is what Grandma Masch called it and into which you can throw just about anything -- at least it seemed like that's what she did. 

Thanksgiving Dinner is logistics as much as it is cooking. Two decades of experience hosting family members at my house on this day means that everyone knows their part and they're all increasingly capable of helping out. Nieces know where to stand at the counter. When Uncle Joe was not there to carve the turkey his daughter Lauren took over. Kurt finds chairs; this year he may have to bring some back from his house, because he took them there last summer when he moved in. 

Questions to be settled today: what vegetable dish will I make to serve beside the traditional carrots brought by my sister? Will I made something everyone likes--green beans with something or another (NOT mushroom soup)? Or something the picky eaters won't touch: butternut squash and roasted onions, Brussel sprouts (which even I am ambivalent about), cauliflower au gratin, so rich there's nothing not too like because it's all butter and cheese. And will I make sweet potatoes? Probably I will, because they're cheap and I like them a lot. 

As usual, I thought briefly that I would skip the cranberry sauce this year, because only my mother really likes it and the leftovers eventually have to be extracted from the back of my refrigerator and thrown out in January. But there they were, the cranberries, at the grocery store on Saturday, two bags for $4 and so I plopped them into my cart. The second bag will get used for cranberry bread in December and hey, I really can't imagine my personal Thanksgiving plate without that glob of red next to the mashed potatoes, turning everything on my plate just a little pink.

There will be cornbread. Actually, corn sticks, baked at the last minute in the cast iron molds that came from Aunt Clara, heated in the oven, brushed with butter, sizzling hot, with the timer set to make sure we don't forget the second batch as we settle down for dinner. There are never any leftover corn sticks. 

Sometime today I need to draw the mental picture of the oven, with the turkey in it and the picture of where everything goes in that last half hour when the turkey is out and the kitchen is one giant scramble of last-minute cooking. What can we reheat in the microwave? What garnishes what" (What bits of chopped parsley or orange zest get left behind?) When can we eat?

This, my friends, is Thanksgiving Day. Dinner is at 1:00. (Church is at 10--which makes dinner at 1:00 quite the trick.) 

I'd better get started. 

Thankfulness? My full heart moves me forward.

Monday after

I read the New York Times story on the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting this morning. There are photos of many of them—often snapshots, gathered from family or friends. Their photos are a little blurred, as cropping and enlargement focuses on what was just one face in a community of people. 

I didn’t need the photographs to picture them. I just think of their counterparts at the synagogues near my own church, on a tree-lined street near Chicago, of their counterparts at my own church—the ones who come early, the ones who greet visitors, the ones who change lightbulbs, who are known to all, the ones with the forty-year history in the congregation. The ones whose lives of good works are known and acknowledged, but are nothing all that special with this community, because they are part of lives of quiet, faithful service to God, part of a wide, inclusive understanding of God’s goodness. 

To make this comparison is not to take away the victim's identity as Jews, nor to deflect attention from the unique evil of anti-semitism. I don’t want to do that. Lutherans celebrated Reformation Sunday yesterday and even as we embrace the truth and freedom of the gospel, we dare not forget the darker, anti-semitic vitriol in Luther’s writing. We dare not forget it because of its role in centuries of hate and violence towards Jews. 

When I opened Twitter yesterday morning, there was a tweet from pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber at the top: "Twitter - help me find a prayer for the martyrs of Pittsburgh?" She was getting ready for a speaking engagement later in the day. I looked at the replies to her tweet. Kaddish was at the top. Then this:

And many more prayers, some sourced, some original. Some for comfort, many for an end to gun violence and hateful rhetoric. So I prayed. That grounding in community held me for many hours yesterday.

I am, like many people, disgusted by a president of the United States and a political party backing him that play on hate and fear to hold onto power. There are many who would argue that you can't hold these leaders responsible for the deeds of a madman, and our American creed of individualism and individual responsibility would support that. 

But there are better ways to be together, better ways to live our lives together. You see it in the community of people who gather in a synagogue on a Saturday morning, in a community of prayer and mourning on Twitter, in Christian churches on Sunday mornings.

May you see it somewhere today--on a Monday morning in fall. May it be a blessing to you! 

Saints and poets

It's been a day, a full day. Not a productive day.

I spent time in the world of Franz Schubert today, the early-19th century composer who lived, in the lecturer's words, "a short life of romantic intensity." I did some singing, too--Schubert's "An die Musik"--which is about beauty and emotion and the capacity of music and language to move us into a deeper connection with our lives, ourselves, and big things that are hard to understand.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?" says Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." 

Not really, replies the Stage Manage. "Saints and poets, maybe" 

Composers, too.

There was sad news coming in from many directions today. Nothing that affects me personally, but still--one needs to reflect and take it all in and figure out where this new grief fits in the world I will wake up to tomorrow. It's a world in which death is ever present, but we keep going.

Over at the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl McPhee, who lost her mother a year ago, described grief this way:

It’s like moving through mud (which is a big improvement from trying to move through cement, which is what it was like in the beginning.)

That's exactly what's it like. Thankfully we've got music and poetry—and knitting—to help us keep moving.

September

I just saw a monarch butterfly drift across the backyard early this morning. It rose out of the weeds and grapevine, sank for a moment, rose again and was caught by the wind. I haven't read beyond the headlines about monarch migration and fears of monarch demise. From what little I know I'm either awed that this vulnerable creature is about to make a journey of many thousands of miles or skeptical that this particular butterfly is going to make it much past southern Illinois, or even down to the south suburbs.

Last night I sat in the same backyard, scrolling through my Twitter feed. Same chair, same overcast sky. It was the sound of the wind that drew me out there in the cool almost-dark, a whispering sound that I hoped would wash away the scrapes and cares of the day. That same September wind kept trees and shrubbery in motion this morning and closer to the ground, explored the weeds and straggling gone-to-seed stems of dill in the garden.

Cue Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss's song "September." It's a German poem by Hermann Hesse.

Der Garten trauert,
kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen... 

The garden mourns,
Cool rain sinks into the flowers...

There's plenty more elegiac poetry and music in the rest of the Four Last Songs cycle. Hardly the stuff of a busy Saturday in early fall. Behind my back, out on the street, a huge piece of machinery arrived noisily at about 8:30am on a flatbed truck, I'm guessing for next week's street paving operation in the block north of my home. 

Adrift on Twitter last night, I watched as so many sad things flipped by under my scrolling thumb. A black man shot in his own apartment in Texas, the continued laments for children still separated from their families at the U.S. border, ALS patients monitoring research, justly and usefully angry at the disease, hopeful that something soon will help not just in the future, but in their future. Broken politics, abuses of power. 

Much to mourn, to pray for. Trauern.

I went inside. Ate breakfast. Started my day. Basil is flourishing in my weedy garden. There will be pesto in the freezer soon. I think there's a bulb of fennel to be dug out; I don't know what to do with it.

And that Monarch is on her way. 

White coat

Eliza and I were Kurt's guests this morning at his White Coat Ceremony, marking the beginning of four years of medical school training. He is officially a student doctor, class of 2022, with a patch on the sleeve of his jacket that identifies him as a member of the community at Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine.

The program took place in the atrium of the medical school building. Students and much of the audience sat in the open area on the first floor. Eliza and I found seats behind the rail on the second level. We stood up at the rail when it was Kurt's turn to be "coated" and even at that distance could see his warm smile, beaming under his mop of summer-bleached blonde hair. We've got photos. Eliza will have them on Facebook shortly, and we're so proud.

That second-level thing, above the main crowd--it felt like the right place to be. Not at ground level, hemmed in by rows and rows of parents and friends, but looking out instead into a great vertical space. I could see the speakers if I sat just the right way but could also follow my thoughts wherever they led (or wherever Eliza led them). I was sitting on a white chair, somewhere between earth and heaven. I looked into the future, I held the past in my heart.

With Eliza's memories and mine, we gathered our family. We remembered Lon, who died 12 years ago, and of course, thought of Kris. If he had lived to see this day, he'd have been strutting around that atrium (even if it had been in a power wheelchair), so proud, so fond of his younger brother.

Loyola's marketing motto these days is "We also treat the human spirit." It takes full-fledged humans to do that, and I hold deep admiration in my heart for Kurt as he devotes his life to caring for others. He's powered in part by Kris's example of compassion, courage, and care, but even more so by his own thoughtfulness, self-knowledge, determination and spirituality.

God is good.