Health Care 2009

Gregarious Son does not have a job with benefits, and so we help him out with catastrophic health insurance coverage. There was a time when that seemed like a precarious situation, but in the past few years I have become more jaded, with the result that I was able to say calmly in December that if the Lovely Daughter did indeed need eye surgery we had better get it done, because her college graduation will be accompanied by the termination of her health insurance.

The bill for her surgery has arrived. Now I'm not complaining, because she received excellent care at Giant Famous Hospital from a terrific doctor, and most of it is covered by the Quiet Husband's excellent insurance plan. And I am grateful that we were actually at the hospital for only three hours, and even more grateful that her vision is considerably improved and her spinal problems apparently eliminated, both by a relatively simple procedure from which no complications ensued. But, well, you know . . .

$14,000???????

Quick Write No. 1

I've started a few posts in a desultory sort of way and they've gone nowhere. But I feel like writing, so I decided to offer a question for five minutes of nonstop writing. No more, no less. If you want to play, too, leave a comment with a link.

*****

If you could get on a plane right now and fly anywhere for a five-day stay, where would you go?

Paris, for sure. I want to go back to the Chapel of the Martyrs, and I want to go back to Notre Dame for a couple of days. I don't know whether I could go to St. Chappelle for another concert, because Vivaldi sounds so off these days that I cannot listen to any of his music. All of Paris would be off, without my Chicago Son who first got me there, but it would also be a place to feel connected to him. I want to go back to the Luxembourg Gardens and remember my younger and happier family walking the deserted paths in the freezing cold, and I want to spend another warm evening on the bank of the Seine. And I want to slip away for an overnight to Chartres, and be reminded of . . . so many things.

A Way Into Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter
~ John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back,
not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

**********

I had forgotten about this poem but, in a year in which bodies and death have overtaken my thoughts and Easter has been difficult indeed, I am glad to have found it again, along with a little bit of commentary, here.

Unabashedly Proud Mom

The Lovely Daughter

Phi Beta Kappa

Willamette University '09

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A New Poll!

I seem to have gotten really into this polling thing. For those of you reading via Bloglines or whatever, there's a new one in the sidebar:

Who had or has had the most formative influence on your religious life?

It occurs to me that answers could reflect both positive and negative experiences . . .

The idea materialized out of a Lenten reflection I just listened to (the one entitled I Know A Guy), which urges us to think about the people who have played significant roles in our religious development. I hope you'll leave comments! ~ because I for one find such stories fascinating. Because I'm in seminary, I often hear people talk about growing up in religious families, which was not the case for me, and so I am interested in all the kinds of influences that bear on a life of faith (or not).

For now, my own list in a nutshell:

Minister, friends, minister, nun, friends, ministers, professor, priests, professor, friends. Later addendum: of course, I should have included authors in my personal list!

You can check more than one answer -- go for it!

My Very Most Favorite Facebook Greeting . . .

. . . comes from Oregon and is as follows:

Hi Momma!

God and Gender

The sidebar poll question was: How do you think about God?
The results, to the extent that I can cut and paste:

Always male
10 (12%)

Always female
1 (1%)

Sometimes male, sometimes female
26 (33%)

No gender
41 (52%)

The Holy Spirit is female; the other persons are male
1 (1%)

Scripture is clear on this; why are you even asking?
2 (2%)

I don't think about God
1 (1%)

I wish folks had comented more! (See the previous post.) Some apparently answered in terms of how they describe God rather than how they think about or imagine God. A couple answered that "Scripture is clear" ~ but I have no idea what their conclusions are as to what Scripture proclaims.

I think I answered both Sometimes male, sometimes female, and No gender, which would be the most accurate abbreviated response for me. I refer to God and the Spirit as God and the Spririt or, sometimes when the text is just impossibly replete with pronouns, I alternate masculine with with feminine ones, because, in contrast to what some others apparently presume, I am really really really bothered and disturbed by consistent references in readings, liturgy, hymns, prayers, sermons, and conversation, to God as "He" or "Him" ~ enough so that they affect my experience of worship in a profondly negative way.

I am, actually, surprised by the number of No gender answers, which no doubt reflects something about the readership of this blog. The questions then becomes, what does it reflect about God?

Just Curious

I was looking at my Ash Wednesday poll, upon which at one time I had intended to comment ~ but life got the best of me ~ and then I thought of a new one.

No reason in particular. Maybe it's the shadow of The Shack. Maybe it's being back in a seminary where 99% of the population refers to God by male pronouns 100% of the time. Maybe I'm just curious.

Anyway, have a go at the new poll in the sidebar. Comments welcome.

I Think I've Figured It Out

No, not death ~ I haven't figured that one out.

But I think I've realized why I have had such a visceral reaction against The Shack, which many generous people in real life and online have recommended to me.

The Shack presents a generous God who cares for all of the people of the world, who lovingly acknowledges the depth both of social sin and individual sin, who exudes forgiveness in situations we would find challenging beyond the possible, and who gently reminds us that we are the creatures and not the Creator. So far, so good.

But in The Shack, as in real life, the child is GONE. She is not coming back. She will never live the life her parents dreamed of for her, she will never marry the young man they would have loved, she will never have the children who would have brought her such joy and made her parents delirious with ecstasy. Her mother will never touch her hair again; her father will never kick a soccer ball down the beach with her again. Her many good gifts will never again be shared with the world. The doctor, the architect, the teacher she might have been ~ she will never be. All of those things which made her uniquely the child she was and the adult she would have become, all of them are gone.

Just gone.

I know that my Musical Friend finds comfort in her vision of the life to come, a vision in which she and her husband will be reunited. She relies in part on the words of her sister, who lost a teenage son and says that when they are together again, none of this will matter.

I find that my own feelings are quite the opposite.

This is the life I want back for my child. This one.

The Shack just rubs my face in the thick, dark reality that it is not to be.



Cross-posted at Desert Year.

Perplexed and Pondering

In the Catholic world, today is the Feast of the Annunciation, which offers me an excuse to post my favorite painting again.

Sunday Summary Ten Minutes Max

I loved doing the retreat . . . I am grateful to one of my someday-to-be-an-Episcopalian-priest CPE colleagues for showing me how to do annointings . . . wish it hadn't been so gray and chilly out . . . had some wonderful conversations . . . all indications are that it went well . . .

I am really tired and I have a lot of my own reading to catch up on . . .

CPE connections: one of the retreatants recognized me . . . she is a nurse at Giant Famous Hospital . . . we will be there tomorrow for the Lovely Daughter's eye surgery . . . my CPE supervisor will come by for awhile . . . the other retreat director had recently had heart surgery there and I have watched heart surgery there so we had much to discuss . . .

I am having a terrible time getting an internship organized for next year . . . The seminary would not let me start late this year and the church I was so excited about last year is not even thinking intern for next year thanks to the economy . . . I really need to address this problem this week . . .

Lots of people are blogging about writing and new perspectives and new disciplines and Lent . . . In another week I will have been blogging for five years and I think that should have something profound to say but I don't . . . I thought that I would perhaps have a deep and intense experience of Lent but I'm not . . . I have a ridiculous resevoir of self-discipline but no idea about perspective anymore . . .

Last week I spent a few minutes talking to someone who is in the middle of great turmoil, personally and professionally . . . she told me that if she could just get out for a peaceful walk for twenty minutes . . . I told her that she was thinking too small . . . I have been thinking about withdrawing from school and driving to the Coast . . . The Pacific Coast

Or getting on a plane for France and walking the Camino de Santiago . . . if I could just walk some hundreds of miles . . . I had always hoped to walk the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina with Chicago Son . . . one of many things that will never happen . . .

More than ten minutes due to interruptions . . .

Women in Religious Leadership

Interesting.

I had remarked to someone a couple of weeks ago that the Reformed faith seems so ~ masculine ~ to me ~ so male-oriented in language, liturgy, experience ~ and that it had occurred to me that the Roman Catholic church, despite its rejection of women in the roles of priests and deacons, has a strong sense of female spirituality, fostered no doubt by the attentiveness paid to Mary and by the prominence of women saints, many of whom were emphatically determined administrators, scholars, healers, and educators.

As I spend this week-end co-directing a retreat at which I am the only Protestant on the premises (one of the reasons I was asked to come was that last year about 25% of the retreatants were Protestant -- but apparently they didn't return!), the reality of the official Catholic take on women is painfully apparent. Several of the women have asked me about the ordination of women in the Presbyterian church -- they are accustomed to and expect limitations. A couple of stories have surfaced about women doing parish work equivalent to that of men on parish staffs, but being refused appropriate titles and acknowledgment. And as it was announced that there would be a mass this afternoon, I was reminded of the words of a Jesuit in a book on spiritual direction, describing women with whom he meets who are called to the priesthood but precluded due to their gender -- how, for instance, they run retreats and then have to invite a priest to drop by to say mass, a priest who has no connection to the experience or community of the reteatants.

I was reminded of reading of a new priest's excitement about saying mass for a community of nuns and thinking: they could say their own mass, couldn't they?

Retreat Run-Down

I think I've participated in four kinds of retreats:

1 ~ Working retreats. I've been on nonprofit board retreats and I've been on Session retreats (Session being, in Presbyspeak, the governing body of the local church)~ and the goals have been mixed. The former mostly involve presentations and small group work, often focused on a single set of topics or issues. Our session retreats include some of the same, but since the elders of the local church are meant to serve as its spiritual leaders, the retreats also include educational presentations on matters related to church governance and opportunites for spiritual growth -- time for Bible discussion and lectio and silent prayer and journaling. I've been on nonprofit retreats in classrooms and offices and board rooms and somewhat more bucolic settings; our Session retreats are held at a local retreat center, a beauitfully maintained former convent surrounded by acres of woods.

2 ~ Get-away-and-bond retreats? I guess that's how I'd describe the women's retreats I've been on. Presentations, art time, conversations -- lots of conversation. I'm going off to the aforementioned retreat center with the women of my church for one of these next week-end.

3 ~ Silent retreats. Time away to spend in silence with God. I was on such a retreat when my son died last September; I had gone on an 8-day retreat the summer before: no conversation at all, except for an hour a day with a spiritual director. No conversation at meals, at the pool, before or after mass ~ no conversation at all. My favorite kind of retreat. I'm signed up for eight days for next summer, albeit with some trepidation.

4 ~ Preached retreats: A combination of presentations and silence. That's what I'm doing this week-end, in the context of a women's retreat at another local retreat center. I just received the schedule; there are several presentations and a discussion group scheduled across the week-end, but the rest of the time, including during meals, silence is the expectation. I had been thinking that I had never done this before and that it was just my luck that, for my first time ever, I would be one of the presenters ~ but then I remembered that I had been on a similar week-end retreat with my church several years ago. We had invited two presenters from the Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C. to talk about their concept and practice of inward and outward journeys, and we spent the nondiscussion times in silence. So maybe I do have some sense of what it will be like.

Since the Lovely Daughter is home this week-end, I'm going back and forth each day to the retreat center. I'm glad that it's basically a silent retreat, since I won't be missing conversation time by going home.

I'm surprised, looking back at this entry, to discover how many different definitions of the word "retreat" I've experienced. My conclusion? I'd choose the week of silence over the rest anytime.

Thursday Thoughts 10 Minutes Max

Yesterday was difficult -- I thought I was going to give up on seminary -- as I was staring at the wall I was reminded (for the 15,849th time) of St. Ignatius saying, "No changes in desolation" -- and so I managed to prevent myself from walking downstairs to the registrar to withdraw. I thnk there were a lot of prayers surounding me yesterday, too. . . .

Today is a little crazy. I have to drive back to seminary for my homiletics class, make a five-minute presentation from memory (which won't actually happen), and then drive right back home after class (yeah, 2.5 hours each way -- but it's the OTHER presentations I'm interested in) because by then the Lovely Daughter will be here! She has a minor operation on Monday to re-correct an eye muscle issue that was first addressed when she was three ~ we have to get it in now, since she will lose her health insurance when she graduates from college ~ so her dad is taking the day off to pick her up at the airport and take her to all her pre-op appointments. The surgeon wanted her to be good and tired when she saw him so he could better assess her eye; hence, the all-night flight from the Oregon.

It was kind of fun to visit her eye doctor over winter break, not having seen him in 18 years. He and I recognized each other, but he said that he would never have known her, of course.

Then a busy week-end, helping to lead a women's retreat and running back and forth from the retreat house to hang out with my beautiful girl. The topic of the retreat is Women Following Jesus and my presentations are on the Woman at the Well and Phoebe, the deacon mentioned at the end of Romans.

Ten minutes -- now breakfast and into the car.

Monday Meanderings 10 Minutes Max

Encounters today: met with a friend to talk and do lectio for a hour or so -- restorative. Met with my grief counselor -- not sure how to characterize that. Pretty much on my own since then, but Gregarious Son just came home from work.

Long walk all the way around both Little Lakes (3.5 miles?). I was moving pretty slowly by the end. The merganser pair is still there, and when they zoomed across the lake they looked magnificent. Remembering a swimming break on a Canadian canoe trip with the boys as a family of common mergs fished nearby. Remembering the loons. There might be a loon or two on the Little Lakes soon. There is a wonderful article in the new Christian Century about God and silence, and I took it with me and prayed through it on my walk.

Drafted my Homiletics assignment. It is a challenge to preach without energy, without . . . . Just without.

Paid a couple of bills. I wish I had a bill for something fun. I don't. Washed dishes, did laundry, dissed The Shack, started to get organized to drive back to school at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Lots of driving this week, as I have my spiritual direction class back here in the middle of everything else. I am imagining how unhappy our professor is; this past week-end the Catholic Diocese announced the closing of some 40-plus parishes and her vibrant, inventive, energetic parish is one of them. Their recently restored church is magnificent and may soon be empty.

That's it; off to the post office.

Reading into Faith

My brother, as I've mentioned in Desert Year, is beginning to imagine a life of faith. Like me, he's in his 50s and grew up in a family whose view of religion ranges from tolerant to skepticism to ridicule; unlike me, he did not have a high school education provided by first, nuns, and later, UCCers well versed in Scripture and Paul Tillich. He's explored Eastern forms of meditation, experienced the discomfort of living in a largely conservative mega-church environment, rejected my suggestion to make the long drive out of the suburbs and into the city in the direction of the two Prebsy churches whose websites shout "progressive and inclusive," and followed my suggestion to have lunch with the pastor of a local church, whom he found to be friendly and engaging but reluctant to address his real questions.

I need some books, he said. So I took a look at my library shelves, so packed that books fall off them more often than not, and sent him a little package:

Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader: Easy, short meditations and some insight into a Christian life of simplicity and depth, turmoil and peace.

Barclay's Mark: It happened to fall off the shelf, I figure the first gospel is as good a place to start as any, and maybe the commentary will help him with a text about which he knows nothing. One of the Amazon reviews says the scholarship is outdated, so I suppose I need to find him something else soon.

Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book: I think Peterson is one of the most elegant writers around, and offers a way into Scripture that combines love and prayer with serious engagement, humor, and generosity.

Other ideas?

Settling In

I'm back at seminary. We are on a quarter system and my first class was yesterday.

Last night, my friends at home gathered after a Taize service, around an altar lit only by candles, to mark the year since Musical Friend's husband died. My husband described it as "terrible, somber, the family much less controlled than they had been at the funeral." That initial shock creates such a protective veneer, seared away a year later. And I had not really thought ahead to what it would be like for my husband, just as I had not thought ahead a couple of weeks ago to what it would be like for me to go into a funeral home. I keep forgetting that we are not who we were.

I have already written in other places that I had read that the sixth to eighth months are bad, really bad, as the shock finally wears off and the real reality sets in. Now, on the outside, we look functional. I go to class, I take notes, I laugh with friends over lunch. I have moments off and on all day when something reminds me of that real reality and I stop breathing and wonder whether I can get to the next minute, but I do. I had a meltdown during an exam a couple of weeks ago as I looked at the questions and the words swam off the page and I realized that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing -- but I was able to compose myself in a few minutes out of the room and return to fill a bluebook with -- something. Yesterday there was a moment in class when the professor said something, something meant to be encouraging and inspiring, and I wanted to flatten myself into the floor and melt away. Intention and effect so seldom merge these days.

Gal wonders whether the word trauma is too dramatic. Oh ~ no. I responded in her comments that if this were physical, we would be covered in bruises, our joints would be swollen, our bones cracked, our blood sometimes seeping through our skin. It only sounds like a melodramatic word because on the outside we look like ordinary people living ordinary lives.

**********

Last week-end, two of my friends, in two different contexts and conversations, referred to blogging as navel-gazing. I decided both times that it probably wasn't the moment to reveal that I have been blogging away for ~ I think it's five years this month.

**********

But I do hope I don't sound whiny. Grief is a self-absorbed process, but I am merely trying to record it as I experience it. I'm not under any illusion that I am the only one.

**********

Cross-posted from Desert Year, my other navel-gazing home.

Ministry Meanderings (L-O-N-G!)

Much of this post just went off by email to a blogging friend, a woman who is in a doctoral program combining theology and the practice of ministry. (I'm hoping she will clarify and permit me to be more precise). But I am developing an interest in this topic, so thought I'd share here.

Some background:

I'm smack in the middle of an M.Div, program, making a (later than) midlife vocational change. I'm a lawyer and I'm a teacher, and was most of the way through an M.A. program in Humanities before switching to a seminary degree. In others words, I have mountains of graduate school and professional work behind me. I think that I could fairly assess myself as a reasonably intelligent person ~ no genius, and certainly little enough in the way of capacity for memory. But, you know, smart enough for most everyday tasks that do not involve tax returns or electrical wiring.

As anyone who's been reading knows, I have just slogged my way through a course in Christology with great difficulty. I had expected to love it and ~ I didn't. And it has been a very long time indeed since I have submitted an academic paper without a good idea of whether or not I had achieved the hoped-for goal ~ but a few days ago, I did just that.

A few days later, Quotidian Grace wrote an entry about a discussion in her church's adult education program on ~ yeah, you guessed it ~ Christology! Although they did not, apparently, identify it as such, that was, in fact, the topic at hand. And I began to wonder, as indicated below, why we are not better versed in these theological dilemmas. I don't expect that most of us would be able to solve them or anything like that; they have, after all, been wrestled with by the greatest minds within and without the church for two and one-half millenia (I'm including the Greeks and their debates over matter and being here). But how is it that the rest of us stay in that damn cave all the time?

Of course, I should speak only for myself. I often find myself envying my Jesuit friends their THREE YEARS of philosophy studies, but then I realize that I could not posibly have survived such training. I do wish, though, that we aimed just a little higher than we do.

My email to my friend (somewhat modified for blog purposes):

"I can't say that my Christology professor has soured me on theology. I would love to ascribe my limitations to him, and I have also considered whether the problem is this experience of unending heart-rending grief, which certainly has profoundly compromised my intellectual capacity.

But the truth is that I have never "got" Rahner, whom we have studied in my spiritual direction program and in whom I have read extensively, and I did not "get" Tillich in the course I audited this past quarter. I read Shirley Guthrie for my basic systemmatics course last year and it was barely comprehendable, and I consider that to be very basic reading indeed.

I think that I just do not have a mind intended for philosophic thinking. I've never understood any of the classical philosophers, either.

Now the reality is that I have a pretty good mind. If you could take it out and look at it, you would say, Hmmm, lots of capacity and very well trained. But -- oops -- this one little section is entirely mising.

I used to think that it was the part that in other people permits access to chemistry, but apparently it is a bit more expansive of a part!

Anyway, your program now is in theology and ministry or something of that sort, right? Making theology accessible to the body of Christ?

Maybe you can find a way in for people like me who run into one brick wall after another. Now I love Moltmann, what little of him I do get -- maybe you could write a study guide for Moltmann! If you aim for about a 6th grade level, perhaps . . . .

I'm not entirely joking. I would love to be able to understand the things I've read. "

Hmmm. Apparently some of my email was cut-off due to a little server glitch this morning. But it continued in this vein:

"I was so disappointed when I returned to church in my thirties, having taken for granted a high school Biblical studies education in which we were introduced to the historical-critical method, to discover pastors preaching as if Moses had written the Torah and no one in the pews could be expected to understand otherwise. Now I find that I am responding much the same way to what little I can grasp of theology. We have a 2,000 (plus)-year-old history of philosophy and theology behind us, and the general assumption seems to be that it is not within reach of the typical churchgoer, and that she wouldn't be interested anyway."

I'm not arguing for church to be transformed into a Ph.D. program in theology.

But it really is exasperating to realize how little of our tradition we share with one another.

And now . . . oh, honestly, I feel another post brewing, this one about my envy of my rabbi friends, whose theological education encompasses endless (and I mean that literally) debate over every topic under the sun. Even I could develop a tiny bit of understanding via a participatory rather than an open-brain-insert-lecture method.

But that's for another day.

Comments most welcome and encouraged!

Screwtape for Sisters

Just got this via email from a friend:

Be the kind of woman

who when your feet

hit the floor each

morning the devil says,

"Oh Crap, She's up!

Three Things I Cannot Do

One should, from time to time, acknowledge her profound limitations.

There are three things I cannot do:

1. Cook.

2. Theology.

3. Embed a youtube video into a blog post.

I leave it to you to determine the order of importance.

Personally, I think it's clear that God had good reason to give us:

1. Restaurants

2. Philosophers and

3. College students.

Prayer in the Middle of the Night

There are a lot of wonderful things about this post and I just want to share it.

I've been looking around for Benedictine blogs for awhile. Partly because I think that prayer is the most interesting, absorbing, challenging, engaging part of life. Partly because I've been interested in the monastic experience for a long time ~ I've read the same things everyone else has, Kathleen Norris, et al.; I enjoy time with the Carmelites; and when I saw Into Great Silence I knew that I had found my calling ~ if only I were, oh, you know, male, single, Catholic, in France, not quite so taken with teaching and preaching, and more tolerant of winter. And partly because of that grace-filled afternoon last fall at Mount Angel Abbey.

Anwyay. The post is about what prayer is and how it can matter. It's terrific.

And PS: For reasons beyond me, my links don't show up in color, so I'm italicizing them and changing the font.

Inquiring Gannets Want to Know

Gannet, who is always attuned to historical and liturgical context, is curious as to why her little Ash Wednesday survey reveals a predominantly Anglican/Episcopalian presence here. Gannet herself being apparently Celtic by name, Puritan by ancestry, Methodist by childhood, Catholic by friendship, and Presbyterian by confession, wonders if all of that equals the Middle Way?

Or is it just that the survey happened to be about ashes?

Maybe if she asked about election, all the Presbies would show up.

Friday Five: Some Forks

Wonderful Friday Five today! Here it is, from Singing Owl:

I am at a life-changing juncture. I do not know which way I will go, but I have been thinking about the times, people and events that changed my life (for good or ill) in significant ways. For today's Friday Five, share with us five "fork-in-the-road" events, or persons, or choices. And how did life change after these forks in the road?

Obviously, the biggest fork in my road, ever, has been the sudden death of my son six months ago. But that horror of a life-changing event happened within a broad context of life, and it's that context that I want to focus on today. Herewith, five forks:

1. That first Brownie camera, received for my 9th birthday. I have experimented with photography off and on throughout my life, and it has played a big part in helping this cerebral, left-brained, language-oriented person become more attuned to how vast is the universe beyond words. I have noticed, in the six months since we lost our son, that despite the cascade of words that have come my way, most of the things which really speak to me are visual, either images themselves or words which create images.

2. The marriage. I have been married my entire adult life, since just before I turned 21. All of the things I have done as an adult have been within the confines and expansiveness of that relationship, meaning that, while sometimes my options have been limited, I have always been supported in decisions that are sometimes a little bizarre and more often than not seem to lead nowhere. I became a lawyer, a teacher, and now a seminary student, welcomed three children and said good-bye to one, all in the context of one marriage.

3. The venture into church, a Methodist church, in my late 20s. I simply woke up one morning and announced to the Quiet Husband that we needed to find a church. Who knew? In addition to serving as the foundation for a whole host of life choices, that church was the place in which we became part of a group of friends who have been family to one another for more than twenty years.

4. Great-horned owls. I first became interested in birding as a law student, when I read an article about a local guy studying and photographing nesting great-horned owls. Who could not fall in love with baby GHOs? That led to a decade-long volunteer relationship with the Museum of Natural History, my first experiences as a teacher, time up-close-and-personal with bald eagles and, most of all, a lifelong dedication to birds of all kinds.

5. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. After a couple of graduate courses on spirituality as expressed in literature, I signed up for a course on the Exercises and within a couple of weeks asked my professor whether he would guide me through them. With that low-key modesty characteristic of individuals of profound achievement, he simply said "Sure," never letting on, as he had not through three semesters of classes, that he is one of the giants of Ignatian interpretation. A year later, I was en route to seminary and to becoming a spiritual director myself, immersed in an experience and a tradition of prayer that have, quite simply, changed my entire being and course of life.

So that's it, five forks. All of them unexpected people, unexpected gifts.

(Image: Here.)

More Reflections on Ash Wednesday

Return to me with your whole heart. That was the line from Joel 2:12 that I heard early Wednesday morning.

Your whole heart, I thought? What can that mean, when your heart is not whole?

My heart is shattered.

It lies in tiny shards all over the ground.

Its jagged pieces spin into space, floating past Jupiter like lost little pilgrims.

Its dusty bits float on the oceans, bits of ash, sparkling grimly in the sunlight and filtering slowly downward, into the darkness where oddly luminescent sea creatures chart paths we can barely imagine.

One might want to turn to God again. The word metanoia slides off the tongue. It sounds graceful, and hopeful. But if God's desire is for a whole heart, if one can turn toward God only with an intact heart, then one is surely lost.

Late last night I turned to the passage in another version. Return to me with all your heart. Of course, I had known, in some small and isolated portion of my mind, that "whole" meant "all." I had known that in my own broken heart the response to what seemed a play on words but was really a conundrum of translation reflected my own longing for wholeness.

Your heart. In Biblical Judaism, the seat of your being. The essence of who you are.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So end the readings for the day, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:21.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon about the treasure in the field. (The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has a lot to say.) The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Why does he purchase the entire field; why doesn't he just dig up the one section? The treasure, she concludes, is scattered in plain sight, glittering all over the field.

Your heart accompanies your treasure and so there it is,

strewn across the field, scattered across the universe, mixed with the salt of the sea.

Return to me with your whole heart.

Return to me with the gift of a heart so cracked open that that in its wholeness it encounters brokenness everywhere.

Return to me with all of your heart.

You will find its pieces in places to which you would never have sought to journey on your own.

It is, indeed, an appalling thing, the strange mercy of God.

(Cross-posted at Desert Year.)

Stolen Poll - and a Little Fun on a Somber Day

I basically lifted the sidebar poll from The Anchoress.

Part of my procrastination effort with respect to my take-home exams.

So . . . what about you?

Ash Wednesday Prayer

Marked by Ashes

Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day . . .
This day — a gift from you.
This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received.
This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility.
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already
halfway home
halfway back to committees and memos,
halfway back to calls and appointments,
halfway on to next Sunday,
halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant,
half turned toward you, half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday,
but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes —
we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
of failed hope and broken promises,
of forgotten children and frightened women,
we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with
some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes
anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you —
you Easter parade of newness.
Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,
Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;
Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth.
Come here and Easter our Wednesday with
mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.

~ Walter Bruggemann

(For over thirty years now, Walter Brueggemann (b. 1933) has combined the best of critical scholarship with love for the local church in service to the kingdom of God. Now a professor emeritus of Old Testament studies at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, Brueggemann has authored over seventy books. Taken from his Prayers for a Privileged People (Nashville: Abingdon, 2008), pp. 27-28. )Found on Textweek.

(Cross-posted at RevGals Prayers.)

(I am putting my favorite over at Desert Year. Link in right hand column.)

Upcoming Lent

For the past couple of years, I've made a point of observing Lent, mostly in an interior way. It doesn't coincide with a commercial season -- no way to confuse messages and activities as we do in December. (Although this year, given the bleak economic news day after day, might present a new opportunity. Not one that the retailers would find appealing, however.) I'm not part of a church that does Lent in a big way -- my own congregation is celebrating Shrove Tuesday with a pancake supper and then Ash Wednesday with a communion service with the imposition of ashes, and offering three Taize/Iona music services on Wednesday nights -- all good, but not a particular focus on daily attentiveness to the season. And unfortunately I won't be in town for them -- but I think that I can participate in something similar at a church near my school. I don't recall Lent garnering much of a mention at the seminary itself last year. I suppose I could have missed it.

Lent is the season for which I have longed for nearly six months. It's the season I've been in for nearly six months. I'm glad it's upon us. Easter looks to be pretty rough, but Lent I can manage.

So I'm changing the blog colors (very subtly on the other blog - desert is desert) -- slowly -- and adding some links -- and . . . some other things. On the outside, I'm participating, as a presenter and as a spiritual director, in a few different Lenten retreat opportunities. On the inside, I sense a healthy and holy turning toward hope. In a small way.

I'm grateful that Lent is a L-O-N-G season.

(Image of Chartres Cathedral found here.)

Saturday Six Minutes of Stream of Consciousness

Hung out with some friends for breakfast this morning. In our tiny little group of five seated around the table: two deaths in the past year, a son's marriage in the past week, another son's job loss; we pretty much run the gamut. Spent a couple of hours in the late afternoon at an orientation for a week long retreat at which I will be a spiritual director. The Quiet Husband is mumbling to himself as he does the taxes. What with my being in seminary and the economy, we have taken a real hit in the past two years. Back to the retreat - the directors are Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist/Episcopalian. We had some great conversation. I did a lot of laundry today. I would rather have gone for a walk but I'm not sure it ever got above 20 degrees and I was NOT IN THE MOOD FOR THAT. Enough already. I finished an ethics paper this morning and sent it in and then found that after five days of nonstop work I just did not have another hour in me. I don't have much mental stamina anymore. That's it, six minutes: some good, some bad.

Skyrocketing Anxiety

I am taking three courses for credit this quarter. Two of them, ethics and pastoral care, are fairly straightforward. One of them, Christology, is not. I am reviewing material for the take-home exam in my possession, due in two weeks.

As far as I can tell, I have not understood a single aspect of this course.

I'm not sure that this has ever happened to me before ~ except in calculus. I never grasped a concept in calculus, but I memorized the textbook, and aced the exam by recognizing problems parallel to those I had memorized and filling in the relevant numbers. My capacity to memorize has evaporated with age, which was the problem in Greek last year. I understood maybe 75% of the construct of the Greek language, but I could never remember any of it from one day to the next.

This is different. This is terrible. I just looked up synonyms for "understand." Comprehend, apprehend, catch on, deduce, infer, perceve, register, take in, appreciate, fathom, get. Nope, none of that going on here.

I have been wondering if maybe grief destroys myelin. I think that perhaps it does. I'm not sure that anyone really understands the physiological consequences of grief, but I can easily believe that one of them is the complete evaporation of the myelin sheath.

I'm in seminary. Studying for the Christian ministry. Christology is, oh, you know, at the center of the whole enterprise.

This is a problem.

Status Report

I have had a few days, here and there, that have been easier. I have had parts of days that have been good.

And in spite of myself, my calendar is filling up. So I made one -- a calendar, I mean. I put all my stuff on it and color-coded everything, because I remain pretty hazy in general orientation. (Got an assignment back that said, essentially, "This would be an A paper -- for a different course.") My beautiful calendar looks incredibly efficient, and got me out the door to three appointments this morning.

And then I came home and saw that I had some messages, three of which boiled down to, "Hey, I'm waiting at the coffee shop . . . where are you?????"

Sigh.

Doing Things Differently

Last night I went to Mass and this morning I went to my own Presby church. Our pastors are both leading a group traveling in Israel, and today's guest preacher was none other than my very own CPE supervisor from Giant Famous Hospital.

After the service I asked her about one of the quotations she had mentioned, likely to appear in my other blog soon, about God holding our tears in a flask. "I think it's in Psalm 56," she said. "Let's check." And we pulled a Bible out of the first pew rack, and then a pencil so that I could make a quick note, and I chuckled and told her about going to Mass.

I've probably written this before, but the difference seems striking to me. In the Catholic churches and chapels I've frequented: no Bibles, no notepads, no pens in the pew racks. The readers identify Scripture passages by book ("A reading from Galatians"), but not by chapter and verse. You don't have a citation, and you can't look it up anyway unless you have your own Bible, and you can't make a note for later reference unless you have your own paper and pen.

I smiled at the assumption inherent in our conversation. A Baptist and a Presbyterian, we expect a Bible to be within reach anywhere in the sanctuary.

Don't get me wrong. I love both worship services, and I am able to accomodate what sometimes seems lacking in one or the other. But the Reformation emphasis on Scriptural accessibility and literacy really does jump out at me in the context of the most ordinary encounters.

A Gannet Gift

A gift from Stushie.

Now, if this gannet is off the coast of North America, it is flying into the sunrise; if off the coast of Scotland, into the sunset. It has been my joy to watch gannets from both vantage points and I have decided that in my both/and life, which these days is more intensely both/and than ever before, this particular gannet is flying both ways at once.

Stushie is, I think, a bit less both/and than I am. But this is what happens when you release a gift, whether of words or art or music or birds: others embrace meanings you had perhaps not imagined. And perhaps all manner of things shall be well. I am grateful for the hint of that possibility, as unlikely as it seems.

Thank you.

Over There

Today I am heading off for the funeral of my father's third wife's mother. She was 92 and has been ill for six months, but still. My first funeral since our son died. My husband went to an uncle's a few weeks ago. It seems that it was good for him to be with his family. My family is a good deal more complicated.

Sunday night we are planning to go to a Cotillion for the daughter of Musical Friend, whose husband died eleven months ago. It will be their wedding anniversary week-end, and their daughter will be escorted by her oldest brother. Enough said.

Hence today's post over at Desert Year. Cross-posting feels beyond me at the moment.

Key West in No Particular Order (6): COLOR!

One of the trying things about winter out here on the tundra is its monchromatic nature. Regardless of how disinclined one is to see life in general as black-and-white, the endless shades of gray in the physical world do get tedious.

Herewith, then, a break:

Wild Animal Souls

Purple quotes Parker Palmer:

The soul is like a wild animal.

If I had the energy, I would tag people. But I don't, so: tag youselves. What wild animal has your soul felt like for the past few days?

Thursday: A beaver. Lots of activity. Lots of resources and strengths to draw upon. A lttle frazzled by the end of the day.

Yesterday: An armadillo. Trundling along, glad for a shell. Like a character in a John Irving novel.

Today: Like a wolf, howling at the moon.

I think the armadillo is my favorite so far.

How about you?

Miscellaneous

The Lovely Daughter has the flu. She sounds miserable. Sometimes 2000 miles is a real distance.

I went down to Giant Famous Hospital this afternoon to have lunch with my summer CPE supervisor. I waited for her on the balcony overlooking a vast registration/waiting area and thought about the two populations of GFH. If you work there, there are always at least five things you could be doing during any minute of the day. If you are a patient or visitor, you wait. And wait and wait and wait.

Which reminds me: I am awaiting the results of medical testing done two weeks ago. I haven't taken the initiative to call because the labyrinthine phone system takes too long to navigate. It will take me less time to send a note, but I don't feel terribly motivated either way.

Tipper the Noble Dog had some medical work of her own down yesterday. Then the car had some medical work done. It was a very expensive day.

As I drove home this afternoon, I saw a bumper sticker that read: I'd rather be birding at Magee Marsh.

Yesh, so would I.

Ways to Heal

A seminary friend of mine said something wonderful to me this afternoon.

I was describing the process by which I had decided to go ahead and try to take a required homiletics (preaching, for those of you not immersed in ministry-ese) course next quarter. A demanding course that presumes something in the way of optimism. I had had lunch with the professor a couple of weeks ago so that I could explore his expectations and convey a little of the reality of my own situation. (The one in which, for instance, I can't remember anything five minutes after reading or hearing it.)

It might actually help you, said my friend.

Yeah, that's what the professor said, and that's what he said, I responded, jabbing my thumb in the direction of another classmate.

Well, she said, you'll be studying and preparing and giving expression to the Word. How could that not be healing?

If you're reading, thank you for that. It was worth our both being late to wherever we were going.

Cross-Posted at Desert Year.

It's All a Matter of Perspective

Law and Gospel posted a couple of days ago about a friend's critique of her chaplaincy work. "You're a gas station attendant offering a quick fill-up," her friend tells her, as opposed to what she might be in parish ministry with the long-term relationships it produces.

When I did my chaplaincy internship this past summer, our supervisor often reflected upon the intimate conversations with which our patients would honor us. "They will tell you things they would never tell their pastor," she said. "The elder in charge of the capital campaign is probably not going to mention to her visiting pastor that she no longer believes in God, but she will discuss her quandry at some length with the chaplain who stops by late at night before her surgery."

On the other end of the spectrum, my pastoral care professor, while holding up chaplaincy work as an important and speicalized calling, often says that when asked to complete surveys asking for "the best preachers in America, " he always writes in "the local parish pastor." "It's the pastor who knows and cares for the congregation," he says, who is their best preacher, "not the guest preacher with the resume of homiletics awards." And, he emphasizes, a pastor visiting a parishoner in the hospital walks into the room with a completely different perspective than the chaplain making his daily rounds ~ the implication being that the patient will tell the parish pastor things he would never tell the roaming chaplain.

Both are right, of course. I did have some astonishingly wide-open and candid conversations with hospital patients, family members, physicians, and nurses last summer, some of them with people I saw once or twice for less than an hour, others with folks with whom I spent time daily over the course of several weeks as they awaited a transplant or sat with a sedated amd dying loved one or cared for patients in crisis. I also had some unsatisfying conversations, and was always left with the sense of having played only a brief role in a story, the outcome to which I would never be privy.

Parish ministry does bring with it the satisfaction of long-term relationships. And it is true that the parish preacher does have the advantage of a long view from which to preach: she knows her congregation, and she has a vision for its future; she knows its individual members, and she sees immediately when she looks out from the pulpit on Sunday morning who has just joyfully welcomed a new son-in-law into the family, and who has just buried a child. Preaching in the hospital is a bit different: my brief experience indicates that the congregation is considerably smaller, and might include a family member driven to a service for the first time in decades by a crisis unfolding several floors above and a surgeon who shows up whenever her schedule permits. (The advantage, I suppose, is that the topic is always the same: life is precious and scary, suffering is pervasive, bad things happen to every kind of person, and so, sometimes, do miracles.)

I am giving a lot of thought to hospital chaplaincy as my long term call. My reasons are numerous, but two of them jumped out at me as I thought about Law and Gospel's post. For one thing, many people in the hospital, whether patients or staff, have no clergy to visit with them. They have no ties to a religious institution; perhaps they have no "official" religious beliefs. I developed a number of relationships with individuals who fell into that category. Serious illness has a way of bringing questions about the meaning of life and death and pain to the fore, and people with no connection to a religious community in "the outside world" find their way quickly into conversation with people wearing ID badges indicating that they are comfortable with the exploration of those questions.

Secondly, chaplains are in posession of time. When Musical Friend's husband died in Giant Famous Hospital last spring, her Methodist minister was with her almost 24/7 for that horrific week-end, at one point leaving to preach his three Sunday morning sermons and then coming right back. But my observations tell me that her experience was the exception to the rule, particularly in a big-city teaching hospital. Many of our patients had traveled a considerable distance for their care, making it virtually impossible for their clergy to visit them. (The exception? The Nazarenes! I could go into a pre-op unit at 6:00 a.m and be almost guaranteed of finding at least one Nazarene, often one who had just driven 100 miles, sitting with his parishioner.) Others had pastoral visits on occasion and usually for short periods -- people employed by congregations, unless specifially for pastoral care, just don't have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to hang out in the hospital. A chaplain not only has the time -- he also has the time to follow up; having ruminated over a conversation for awhile, he can go back upstairs a few hours later to pick it up again, perhaps with some new insight gleaned from another situation he's encountered in the interim.

So -- I don't think hospital chaplaincy is gas station ministry. And if it is, it comes with premium gas and a stack of coupons.

Friday Five HGTV Edition

One of my favorite kinds of Friday Five:

1) If you could, what room in the place you are currently living would you redo first?

Oh, where to begin, where to begin? In a perfect world I would begin with the outside: tear down the garage, tear off the back porch, and build something new and creative that combines outdoor living and car storage space to make better use of our cramped outdoor quarters. There are people nearby who have made garden decks (with hot tubs!) on their garage roofs. We would need a garage that isn't falling down first.

2) What is the most hideous feature/color/decor item you have ever seen in a home?

The shag carpeting and fake paneling of the 70s, I suppose.

3) What feature do you most covet? Do you have it? If not, is it within reach?

The feature I MOST covet is the ocean outside my door. Not within reach of the great midwestern tundra.

The somewhat realistic feature I covet: A gazillion built-in slotted shelves in every room to deal with all my STUFF which, as a piler and not a filer, I must have in sight. But I need a completely different kind of house in order for that solution to blend into an organic whole rather than to jump out as a jarring add-on.

4)) Your kitchen - love it or hate it? Why? It's fine. I'm not much interested in kitchens and it meets the main requirement: big enough for lots of people to congregate in.

5) Here is $10,000 and you HAVE to spend it on the place you are living now. What do you do?

I would redecorate the living room which, with its 25-year-old wallpaper and kid-and-dog safe furniture, looks like the backdrop for a garage sale rather than the inviting home for conversation that I imagine it might be. And then I would transform what was once The Lovely Daughter's childhood bedroom into a soothing guestroom, with gentle colors rather than cats on the walls, a comfortable queensize bed instead of a hand-me-down trundle daybed, and generous storage space for guests rather than for my overflow of clothes and papers.

BONUS: Why do you think there was such a surplus of ugly bathroom tile colors showcased in all homes built from the 1950's right through the early 80's?

I reject the assumption inherent in this question. I grew up in a ranch home built in 1955 and I still love the yellow tile in the bathroom of that house. All the original bathrooms in the 19-teens and 20s houses around here have black-and-white octagon tiles -- I want to know: what was with that? (Ours has been replaced with beautiful white and cobalt tiles.)

Moving Into the 21st Century...

In a completely uncharacteristic move for me ~


I joined Facebook!


I'm keeping the blog(s) anonymous, but if you want to connect on FB, email me at gannetgirlatsbcglobaldotnet.


:)