The Voice in the Silence

(Our CPE program requires that we plan and lead two hopsital chapel services over the course of the summer. Most of the congregation consist of chaplains, but family members of patients and nurses, doctors, and other staff also show up on occasion. Here's my first effort at hospital preaching.)

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When this passage popped up a couple of weeks ago on a website I often use as a prayer resource, I immediately thought of our experiences here at Gigantic Hospital. On the whole, GH seems to move at a measured pace -- appropriate for an institution in which so many events marked by layer upon layer of complexity take place each day. There are detailed plans and protocols for every kind of development, with numerous team members from different areas and levels of expertise involved in decision-making -- all necessary to ensure the best possible care for the variety of people and conditions that show up on our doorstep.

And yet, metaphorically speaking, we are in a place of earthquake, wind, and fire. We are in a place where crucial things happen, where God, our God who is in all things, appears in situations, in questions, in decisions, which are not routine to most people. For the patients and their families, a hospital stay, whether for a few hours or for months at a time, is a detour from the usual road, a breach in the fabric of ordinary life, an abrupt jolt out of the familiar and expected. For the people who care for them, the plans and procedures and outcomes may be anticipated and carefully monitored, but the fact that they involve individual human beings, each with his or her own needs, means that even the most perfunctory of proceedings brings with it the potential for response across the spectrum of possibility.

The text before us offers some insight into the stillness with which we can encounter God even in the wake of momentous events. I love this story from the Hebrew Scriptures in which Elijah, prophet to ancient Israel, offers a potent demonstration of God's power. Calling the prophets of Baal, viewed as the chief competitor of Elijah's God, to a challenge, Elijah initiates a contest in which both he and they will present an offering to their respective gods and await the gods' setting fire to their offerings. The Baal prophets pile up their offering on their altar and entreat their gods to ignite the fire, but nothing happens. Their noisy and completely ineffective entreaties are drowned out by Elijah, who taunts and ridicules them for relying on gods who do not exist. And then Elijah, unable to resist heightening the drama, doesn't limit himself to stacking a heap of offerings upon an altar; he sloshes water all over the whole thing, completely saturating it -- and his God still sets it ablaze, soaked wood and all. Elijah then finishes off the prophets of Baal, and for all of his trouble -- what happens? He has to flee to the wilderness to hide from the vengeful Jezebel, who has vowed to destroy him. It is while he is hiding out in a cave in the wilderness that he encounters the angel of the Lord, who tells him to head for the mountain and await the passing of God.

Elijah has already encountered God in fire; his God is, after all, responsible for the fire which has landed him in this mess. He knows something about the God who appears in mighty things, but he also seems to know that this time, God is going to speak to him differently, more intimately and, perhaps, more powerfully than God has before. And so Elijah waits, inside his his cave. A wind passes by, so strong that it rearranges the geologic features of the mountain, tossing rocks and debris this way and that, but Elijah does not venture forth. An earthquake causes the ground to tremble, and opens treacherous crevices, but Elijah remains in his cave. Flames spring from the earth and smoke saturates the sky, but Elijah does not move.

And then he hears it: the sound of silence, through which he recognizes the still and small voice of the Lord. He covers his face and steps into the opening leading from the cave into the light, and God says to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

For all that he has initiated, for all that he has withstood, Elijah knows that God, God who is surely in all things, can sometimes be heard most clearly in the quiet that follows the chaos. Here at GH, thanks to efforts to keep a lid on the external stimulii, the hum of machinery and the blinking and beeping of monitors tend fall into the background, but the internal upheavals -- the internal winds and earthquakes and fires -- are not so easily subdued. The procedures, the decisions, the tensions -- they threaten to overwhelm each of us from time to time, and we need to distinguish the still, small voice of God calling to us in the silent eye of the storm. We need to find openings in our days and nights to stand quietly and wait for the God who says, "What are you doing here?"

We can respond that we are listening for what God has to say through the words and expressions of our beloved friends and family members. We can respond that we are listening for what God has to say through our patients and colleagues. We can respond that we are listening to what God says through the things that happen and the things that don't. And most of all, we can be attentive to those openings leading into the light -- openings in which we, like Elijah, wait for the God who speaks with more stillness than we might think possible, so that when God says, "What are you doing here?" we can respond: "I am listening for you."

Catbird Days

Stratoz offered me a blessing in the last set of comments:

May a bird of much beauty brighten your day... and may it be a common one that has been a friend for many years.

That would be the catbird. They are everywhere these days. Many, many years ago, when I was a neophyte birder, I spent an afternoon at the Quiet Husband's grandparents' farm chasing after a bird in the brush. It's obvious now, but that day I was mystified by its monchromatic gray, interrupted only by its black cap and russet rear. Catbirds are mimics, which adds to the confusion for the new birder -- the signature "mew" is a giveaway, but the other calls convince you that half a dozen species perch nearby. Nope -- all one bird.

I have seen and heard catbirds on all of my walks this past month. And yes, it is awfully nice to walk in the company of friends.

Bits and pieces of my life: I am trying to keep up, in the most minimalistic sense, with the adventures of this year's PC(USA) General Assembly, mostly thanks to Quotidian Grace. So far I am happy, albeit not ecstatic, with the various decisions. I think we have some distance to go, but the conservatives among us are downcast, to put it mildly, and want to travel in the other direction, so maybe we are in about the right place for now. My hostess, I am pretty sure, disagrees with me, but she is her usual gracious self in providing an even-keeled overview of the proceedings, unencumbered by polemical diatribes. Much appreciated!

Last night one of my patients died, someone whose rather spectacular family I have spent time with over nearly two weeks. This is the first time this summer that I have carried a hospital death home with me. It felt like quite a sad and heavy load last night.

And. . . I just got off the phone with the Lovely Daughter, whose camp counseling seems to be a tremendous success. The camp website has some beautiful pictures of her with the six-year-old girls in her cabin. Today is a day off and tomorrow the next session begins. She is moving to a cabin of eleven-year-olds -- on the upside, her new co-counselor has, as she does, a long history there as camper and counselor and, in fact, the girls were SITs together several summers ago; on the downside, they are the two shortest counselors in camp, so their campers will probably all be taller than they are.

This afternoon we are off to the first of our three summer weddings. We have apparently reached a new stage in life -- the brides are all, from our vantage point, daughters!

Pointing East

The someday-Christian-pastor is the part of me getting the most of a work-out in CPE.

But the whole-world-interfaith me and the spiritual-director-who-loves-to-help-people-with-prayer me get to play, too.

This morning a woman from the Mideast wanted to know, through the family member interpreting for her, which direction from her hospital room is east. Although I am gifted with no sense of geography whatever, I was able to respond with confidence by looking out from her window down onto the hill that leads to my house - on the east side of the city.

And so today I got to provide pastoral care for a Muslim woman from far, far away by helping her with her prayer. Spiritual direction in the literal sense of the word.

How cool is that!?

Of course, that does not obviate the fact that last night I lost my pager.

There is always something lurking out there just waiting to confirm one's level of incompetence.

Ghost Ranch Sunday

Early in May, a group of twenty members and friends of our church made a pilgrimmage to Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian retreat and conference center in New Mexco. Last Sunday, they led our worship service, incorporating slides, chants, music, and reflections from and about their journey, which had them climbing through rocks to mesas; visiting Native American, Muslim, and Benedictine communities; sharing personal journies; and learning new music.

I was particularly taken with this version of the Lord's Prayer which they brought home to us, from New Zealand in the Anglican Maori tradition:

Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver, Source of all that is and shall be,
Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven:
Let the hallowing of your name echo through the universe,
The way of your justice be followed by the people of the world,
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings,
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever.
Amen.

(The image is from Christ in the Desert Monastery.)

Tiny Break

The Quiet Husband chairs the board of the local Ten Thousand Villages, which is planning a benefit for next fall. He recently learned that one of his colleagues at work, a young woman from India, participates as a dancer in a local arts organization which offers all kinds of programming, lessons, workkshps, and camps for kids, all geared toward the goal of bringng people together and combatting racism across international borders. So off we went last night to watch her group dance, since it looks like it will be performing at the fall benefit - what a fun evening in the small storefront rooms that serve as the organization's headquarters, rehearsal and presentations space, and art gallery!

Another young woman from India playing the veena, an ancient lute-like instrument. A gentle young man from Mexico, dreds down to his waist, playing folk music on a guitar and other Mexican stringed instruments. A gentleman singing Italian opera. And then ~

WOW! The drummers (from West Africa and Israel) and the dancers, performing dances from Guinea and India ~ unbelievable energy and joy pouring forth from the tiny dance space into the warm city night. Children leaping to join in. A Turkish woman from the audience, offering belly dancing (yes, definitely sensual!), followed a performance by one of her male companions on a Turkish stringed instrument, with one of the African drummers and the Israeli drummer joining in for a multicultural jam session.

This afternoon the Lovely Daughter, having once again morphed into the Lovely Camp Counselor, called from North Carolina. One of the co-counselors in her cabin is from Australia; the other is from Charlotte, but her parents live in Saudi Arabia and she's just returned from a Habitat semester in Jordan. The Lovely Daughter, as you know, has herself just returned from Prague.

The world is spinning around me. I'm looking forward to the time when I can put the books aside and get back out there!

CPE Impressions

A week of orientation and a more-or-less regular week behind us.

More or less ~ because one of our little cadre of CPE interns collapsed and died of a heart attack while on call last week-end. To say that people in our program and across the hospital are stunned and, in many cases, devastated, would be an inadequate observation.

And yet, of course, as we all know, life continues.

I am borderline ecstatic to be back in a diverse community. Last week one of the family members with whom I spoke was Buddhist, talking through a Japanese interpreter. A Jewish woman agreed that I might pray with her before her surgery ~ trying to be polite, I am sure ~ and then looked pleasantly surprised and expressed genuine gratitude when the words that came out of my mouth were, apparently, peace-inspiring rather than offensive. Christians describe every kind of belief and practice, or lack thereof, across the spectrum. I feel a profound sense of privilege to be present to so many people who are themselves in so many places of spiritual engagement.

I expressed my surprise yesterday at how quickly and completely people often open up to us, and it was pointed out to me that folks are often much more willing to speak candidly with a strangers than with say, their own pastors. Of course, I thought to myself. How else to eplain my intentional seeking of spiritual directors who differ from me in gender, religion, lifetime committments? Over time they cease being strangers, but I trust them with things I would be unlikely to share in my own community.

And on the subject of chaplaincy care and spiritual direction: I am SO glad that I was pushed into this. Yes, I tried to get out of it -- not because I was disinterested, but because time and money are in short supply and I knew that next year in my spiritual direction practicum I will be doing similar work -- meeting with a supervisor, writing verbatims, exploring my own reactions. I had no idea that hospital chaplaincy would afford me a completely different experience. (Duh.) People who seek spiritual direction are already engaged in a religious journey of some depth; they have to initiate the process, after all. In the hospital, however, I am the one taking the first step, and I am often meeting with people who may have never given much thought to the spiritual dimension of their lives, or think about it in ways other than my own, or have no interest in thinking about it at all. They each call for something different from me, and nudge me to develop skills distinct from those required for addressing the needs of people with whom I share an experience of faith.

I think this is going to be an incredible summer.

And now ~ I am going to the funeral service which is also a part of everything.

Summer Nights

I was on call the other night. Maybe two hours of sleep between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 am. Three people died. Three others came close. One had arrived by ambulance, one by helicopter. Other things happened, too. And each of the NICU babies grew a tiny bit stronger.

Tonight the Lovely Daughter and I took the dog on a walk around the block and then sat on the front porch for awhile and talked. I told her all kinds of stories about my family that she has never heard. She is a young woman now, able to hear the things that almost no one discusses. Tomorrow she heads off to North Carolina for her job as a camp counselor.

I should have thought about this a little more carefully a few months ago when I was encouraging her to spend one last summer playing in waterfalls. If my days (and some nights) are going to be filled with people who are dying or who are watching other people die, if I am going to hear over and over again It's God's will God takes people when God wants God never gives us more than we can handle God is in control, if I am going to offer prayers that result in tears breaking through, if I am going to be prowling the halls of a giant hospial at 4:00 am ~ then I am going to long endlessly for hot summer night conversations on the front porch with the young woman who was once my tiny girl.

Making the Transition

I had so looked forward to casting my ballot for Senator Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

Not to be.

The fact that she is a woman played a big role in my hopes, no question about it. (Although not so big that I would have voted for a Republican to be our first woman President.) I have a photograph of the Lovely Daughter shortly before her first birthday, taken as Gloria Steinem spoke at the Chautauqua Institution. Twenty years later, the LD, like many women of her generation, eschews the term "feminist" and probably does not find it particularly remarkable that a woman and an African-American have been vying for the Democratic nomination, which I see as wonderfully indicative of the tremendous changes that we have witnessed since I was her age. Nevertheless, it would have been something had she been able to cast her first ballot for a woman.

I'm glad Hillary has conceded the nomination with grace and dignity, and I'm glad that she will be in the arena as we seek to put an end to Republican tenure in the White House. If another Republican were elected President in my lifetime, it would be too soon for me. So, while it will take me a few days to come around to the reality that Senator Obama will be our nominee, I'll get there.

But first I plan to give a little time to some grateful reflection for Hillary Clinton, for whom I would have been so honored to have voted.

A Little Friday Five

I can't get the links to work, but this is from Sally at RevGals:

1. How important is the "big picture" to you, do you need a glimpse of the possibilities or are you a details person?

I am totally a big picture person. The details are. . . well, they're just details. Not things I can keep track of.

2. If the big picture is important to you how do you hold onto it in the nitty gritty details of life?

Memory . . . will . . . desire . . .you know the routine.

3. Name a book, poem, psalm, piece of music that transports to to another dimension ( one....what am I thinking....)

Tschaikovsky's Fifth Symphony.

4.Thinking of physical views, is there somewhere that inspires you, somewhere that you breathe more easily?

I am not overly discriminating about this. There are hundreds.

5. A picture opportunity... post one if you can ( or a link to one!)

Hmmm . . . I have a number of images of Looking Glass Rock (NC), none of which I can locate at the moment. So I've borrowed one:

Not Blogging

I'm really not blogging about CPE. Most of the would-be grist for the mill is confidential. The rest is personal growth stuff. And anything leftover would mostly be whining.

Except for now: I AM going to post, just this once, from the leftover category.

I go in tomorrow at 8:00 am per usual. Since I am on call tomorrow night I will next see my home, gutters or not, sometime the following afternoon.

Tomorrow night a resident chaplain will be there to back me up. Next time, it's me, the sole would-be chaplain on call for the whole entire gigantic maze of a hospital filled with critically ill people.

I'm really not whining. I'm really pretty excited. But also pretty terrified.

And hoping I will have recovered by the week-end. My boys are coming home, so our entire family will be together for the first time since last July!

Summer!

It has been SO nice to focus on people and matters outside my fairly self-absorbed space of the past year.

My spiritual director made his final vows as a Jesuit on Saturday, so the Lovely Daughter and I went to the mass. It takes at least twelve years to get from first day to final vows in the Society of Jesus, no matter what you've done before you get started -- in his case, an M. Div, and then many years as a parish priest. It's pretty cool to observe the solemnity (and humor) with which the Jesuit community marks a man's final and most complete commitment to membership in its ranks.

A friend of mine, a religious studies professor, had asked a small group of people to serve as first readers on a book manuscript he's working on, and so Sunday three of us got together to discuss its current manifestation. Another process of coolness -- to be a tiny part of a book in the making.

Tonight I've just returned from a lengthly planning meeting for my own church's adult ed program for next year. My days of chairing that enterprise are behind me but I still get to participate. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity, because as a group we are way up there on the imagination-ometer, if I say so myself.

And . . . I started CPE today. The hospital has 35,000 employees and covers I don't know how many city blocks. Enough that I am beyond description in terms of being geographically challenged. The chances of my actually answering a page within a day of receiving it would appear to be limited at the very best. I am more likely to find the North Pole than I am any destination on that campus.

I am WIPED OUT.

And yeah, the gutter guys are still here. I suppose I should look at it this way: the gutter-and-soffit catastrophe is absorbing pretty much all the stress I might otherwise direct toward CPE. As a lining, though, that one looks more like rust than silver.

Mothers and Daughters

She's back!

And as it happens and in spite of myself, I've been doing a lot of thinking about mothers and daughters and loss, no doubt in subconscious preparation for the start of CPE on Monday.

I've talked about this before: after the initial shock of my mother's death, I more or less went on with life. Not my old life, but the one I'd suddenly inherited. I did not dwell on loss or change; those are matters with which adults occupy themselves, and I was seven. I was aware for many years, of course, that I was the only child and then adolescent and then young woman of my acquaintance who did not have a mother, but that was what I knew and I more or less accepted it, moving forward with little curiosity about the woman who had vanished from my life so quickly and so completely.

When I became a mother myself, I was very consciously stunned by the wave of awareness that washed over me. I remember distinctly sitting in my hospital bed one morning when the boys were a couple of days old, staring down at the tiny blonde heads propped on pillows in my arms, and thinking: There was once on this planet someone who loved me like this. I had had no idea that there was such love loose in the universe, and the thought that I had once been its direct object, but for only a brief and barely-remembered period of time, was almost more than I could absorb.

I have been, as a mother, frequently and attentively alert to a sense of gratitude. Not as something to blather on about, and not in times of confusion and despair. But much more of the time than not, in a form of silent awareness. I would glance out int the back yard while three children were constructing something out of nothing, or peer into the sunroom when they were playing a game, and think to myself: You are absolutely enveloped by good fortune. As my children grew, and especially as they passed the ages my younger brother and I had been in 1960, I often thought of my mother and what she had missed. The big events, of course: the recitals and plays, the graduations, the first jobs and, someday, the weddings and babies. But more poignantly, the little moments: all that back yard construction and deconstruction, the sand castles, the late night walks, the hours and hours of reading aloud, the soccer games, the tea parties for cats.

For the past few months, I have longed for my mother as an advisor and counselor, as a source of insight and sagacity. I have depended for most of my life on the support of other girls and women, and have usually had a close circle of female friends, starting with the girls I met when I began boarding school at the age of twelve, but I realized a few weeks ago that, at the moment, the people upon whom I most rely for advice and encouragment are all male. It's an odd situation for me, and I wish my mother were here. Of course, my mother did not live long enough to become the fount of wisdom for whom I long; I have lived nearly twice as long as she did and have far more to share in the way of experience and contemplation thereon than she had the opportunity to gain. But I wish that things were otherwise.

Yesterday the Lovely Daughter and I made the six-and-one-half hour drive home from Chicago. We listened to WICKED, which I have been waiting to share with her -- I knew that as a one-time peformer in and techie for musicals, she would "get" it. And we talked nonstop for the rest of the trip. About seminary and new friends and new dreams (me). About Czech restaurants and roommate challenges and the Gaudi cathedral and senior year and the possibility of future employment related to international study (her). About churches and sermons (me). About Auchswitz (her). I gave her some advice. She gave me some advice. We talked and talked and talked. And talked.

I wish I could be the daughter of a mother.

I LOVE being the mother of a daughter.

Not the Friday Five

SLOTH

I'm up -- I'm on vacation (sort of) -- and the Friday Five is up, too -- but it's about garage sales, which are definitely not my thing. In fact, my thing this summer is the opposite (sort of) and I'd love some help. Herewith, then, my own Friday Five:

You've lived in your house for 24+ years and you suffer from Packrat Syndrome, no doubt due to deeply rooted fears of loss, dislocation, and turmoil, as well as the equally well-established deadly sin of Sloth. Your first mistake was purchasing a home with a basement and three (!) attics as well as a library (not to mention the aforedescribed rotting soffits and dangling gutters, which have now been repaired at a cost equal to all Third World Debt). Your storage space houses children's materials ranging from the artwork of three-year-olds to the college acceptances of eighteen-year-olds, books and magazines on virtually every topic under the sun, clothing in enough sizes to restock an entire boutique featuring styles of the past two decades, the debris of a lifelong addiction to photography, and numerous items of indeterminate origin and classification. And you are by nature, sadly, a piler and not a filer.

It's a good thing you hate garage sales because they would be toxic for you.

You have three months, with maybe an hour a day available to tackle the challenge of liberating your home and yourself from your unfortunate tendency to accumulate and preserve. You know that you need an underlying methodological approach, you would like to keep those things which have true meaning and/or use for you, and you would also like to be able to move into your dream house -- a 1200 square foot bungalow -- at a moment's notice.

Suggestions welcome!

High Tech High Competence

The Lovely Daughter may have navigated eight countries this past semester, and Chicago Son may have had a year of success at a high-tech job, but at the moment they are wandering around O'Hare unable to find one another and calling me, the boring and staid mom sitting at home and watching tv, apparently in the hope that my Glinda wand will reunite them.

Just an observation, that's all.

My Own Little Desert

Given the opportunity, I would almost always choose one of two activities early in the morning: a long walk through a world in which almost no one else is about, or sinking into a heap of pillows with a fleece blanket pulled around me for a good read in bed. Today I began with with the latter, starting Beldon Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes for the second time through. It's a book that calls out to the interlocking textures of my own life, as he reckons with loss through the lenses of the contemporary desert of the American southwest, the ancient desert of the church fathers and mothers of Egypt, and the inner desert we all navigate, regardless of outer terrain.

Out of one desert experience and into another, and carrying a third around inside. Out of a first year of seminary, an experience that jolted me far from my comfort zone in ways I had not known to take into account a year ago. Into the experience of clinical pastoral education (hospital chaplaincy) that awaits me next week, one that I am assured will offer another detour from comfort. And inside, a life of prayer shaped by largely by the tradition of Ignatian spirituality and the Exercises, which I recently read described as "the Jesuits’ centuries-old secret weapon, their portable desert peopled with angels and demons."

********************

Realizing that the gutter guys might show up at any moment: a quick break for a shower and to empty and vacuum the car, which yesterday I filled with the clutter from my room at seminary and tomorrow will drive to Chicago. Unbelieveable as it seems to me at the moment, the Lovely Daughter is presumably somewhere over the Atlantic and will touch down on American soil tonight. Her brother will retrieve her from O'Hare and tomorrow I will be with them both! I haven't seen him in the months since Thanskgiving, which he has spent constucting his first version of an adult life, and I haven't seen her since she got on that plane in January for a semester that would land her an apartment in Prague and visits to seven (I think!) other countries.

*********************

I had a plan for today. It involved sleep. But there is an online orientation for CPE that I have got to get to, a manuscript to read for a friend, a meeting at church this afternoon, a house in disarray, a daughter's room to prepare for a homecoming. And the gutter guys want to spend more money, so I guess I need to go out and win the lottery.

**********************

All of it in the desert, which looks suspiciously like the suburbs. I am feeling wistful at having left my behind my new community at seminary, surprised to realize that I have made a life there, surprised by how many people there were to hug yesterday. I am a bit perplexed as I think about The Quiet Husband and I, re-making a life together here after nine months of my being more absent than present. I am apprehensive about CPE: me, the girl with early memories of a hospital room permeated by the staggering loss of a mother and brother.

***********************

And I am grateful for those Jesuits, who have taught me that everything is prayer.

Geese in a Heap

Slightly older cousins of the ones I wrote about yesterday -- sixteen of them piled up alongside one of the Little Lakes.

I Did It

Two finals last Wednesday. Three papers since then.

I have some clean-up editing to take care of tomorrow, but I have written about the second half of the New Testament, post-Enlightenment philosophy and religion, first century Christianity and Judasim, that ever-present issue of suffering, and 18 pages of Greek exegesis on John 21.

I so rock.

And. . . drum roll . . . one evening last week I got a call from the guys who finally showed up after nine months to work on our gutters, telling me that if they continue with the work on the garage it will probably fall down. Because of the previous inhabitants, velociraptor-sized carpenter ants. I cannot think about velociraptor carpenter ants at the moment, I muttered, I have to think about Karl Barth. Call my husband, I said. And I wouldn't be so concerned about the insects, I added. When you get to the front of the house, you may find that every racoon in the city has moved into the crawl space under the eaves. I was sort of kidding.

I came home a day later to find the entire front of our house encased in scaffolding and the front overhang lying in the yard. It was a little bit of a shock. Oh -- and apparently the guys had been a bit upset the day before when they discovered that they had to fill a 20-gallon bag with racoon -- ok -- excrement --, discovered behind the falling down soffit. But their sense of humor had reportedly returned with the re-telling of the story -- although I notice they've taken the entire week-end off.

But you know what? I'm good with all this. Because I rock.

I cannot imagine how we are going to pay for the reconstruction of what is left of our house. I wish the guys had shown up a year ago; I might have decided that I needed to keep my job and forego seminary had I known what lay around the bend. Oh well; too late. I suppose we will figure it out. But it really is something of a disaster out there.

And you know what? It's all OK. Because I spent part of this afternoon and evening standing around the Little Lakes with a small crowd of people watching Canada goslings hatch.

How cool is THAT?

Oh, Why Not a Friday Five on Sunday?

Here's what Sally over at RevGals had for us:

1. Getting ready for summer, do you use the gradual tanning moisturisers ( yes gentlemen you too can answer this!!!), or are you happy to show your winter skin to the world?

I did not know there was such a thing as a gradual tanning moisturizer. Always contemporary and trendy, that's me. And actually, given my risk for skin cancer, I cover up as much as possible.

2.Beach, mountains or chilling by the pool, what/ where is your favourite getaway?

Why do these people always ask us to make impossible choices? I choose beach and mountains and pool. And as you can see above, I am perfectly willing to share my beach with cows, provided that the beach is on Iona.

3.Are you a summer lover or does the long break become wearing?

I've always loved long, lazy summer days. When the kids were little, a group of us used to take them all to a nearby lake for long days that ended when the park finally closed at 9:00 pm. Some of my favorite memories include those evenings as the shadows lengthened and we convinced little ones to come out of the water and got them changed from swimsuits to jammies for the hour drive home.

This summer, with CPE starting at the beginning of June and running till mid-August, and the Lovely Daughter transitioning between her summer job in North Carolina and her senior year of college in Oregon at that point, and a busy week-end retreat for my spiritual direction program followed by a niece's Labor Day wedding, the best I can do for a break is my four or five day retreat in Michigan at the very end, right before I go back to school

4.Active holidays; hiking swimming, sailing, or lazy days?

ANOTHER one? I choose all four, plus all the other travelling things I like to do.

5.Now to the important subject of food, if you are abroad do you try the local cuisine, or do you prefer to play it safe?

I'm not sure what "play it safe" entails here. We go to cafes and we eat. Although I have to admit that, when the kids were middle school age, we found a fabulous pizza and pasta place in Paris and ate there four or five nights in a row. The Lovely Daughter was having a difficult time with the local cuisine concept. I believe that this past semester in Praha she's had to learn to adapt.

No bonus this week unless you can think one up!!!

OK: If you could fly to any city in your own country for a long week-end this summer, where would you go?

ANOTHER choice? Since I made it up, I guess I have to choose. I haven't been to the Southwest in way too long, so I chose Albuquerque.

Teddy Kennedy: Such Rough News

I am so very saddened to read the increasingly grim news about Senator Edward Kennedy's diagnosis. It sounds as though his cancer is a particularly vicious one (if there is such a thing), a direct attack on intellect and humor and energy.

There aren't many politicians of his ilk remaining. And whether your views and his are in sync (as in my case) or not, his passion and his energy for his work are, to use a tired phrase that in this case is true, awe-inspiring.

Robert Kennedy was the first politician who caught my attention, providing me with a vision of what politics might mean and accomplish. On the day that he was killed, I went to the town pool to do something that terrified me. I climbed to the top of the high board, looked down at the water which seemed to be about five miles beneath me, and decided that the only way that I had to honor his life was to dive in. Over and over again. I've never felt the slightest desire to dive off a high board since then, but that afternoon it was a means by which a small-town fourteen-year-old could demonstrate just the tiniest bit of courage in response to someone who had looked as though he might challenge our country to big things.

I wish I could make a high dive on behalf of Teddy Kennedy today.

OK, Just This One

Two exams and four papers by next Tuesday at 4:30 pm. All in progress. But, OK, one meme from Law and Gospel:

Ten years ago: I was practicing family law very very very part time and homeschooling the Lovely Daughter through fifth grade. Off the top of my head, what I remember about that year is many afternoon hikes, an involved study of China, the I-don't-know-how-many novels (50?) she read, pottery, flute, horseback riding, ice skating, making our way through fractions and decimals -- and an endless custody case in which I served as the guardian ad litem for five children whose family had imploded.

Five things on tomorrow's to do list:
1. Study for church history exam the next day.
2. Study for New Testament exam the next day.
3. Steering committee meeting to plan next fall's Peace and Justice events.
4. Meet with church history professor to discuss material for exam the next day.
5. Take a L-O-N-G walk.

Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
1. Pay off the debt. Three kids in college and one mom in seminary over the course of five years? The results are not pretty.
2. Build that cottage overlooking the Matanzas River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, somewhere near St. Augustine.
3. Cameras, lenses, related stuff, and the trips all over the world to go with them.
4. Set up a fund at the small rural college with which my family is involved to provide consistent support for mothers returning to school. It serves a diverse Appalachian population for which higher education is usually a pipe dream. I have often thought that my own mother, had she lived, would have found an educational home there when we grew up and she discovered that she had aspirations beyond the two years of college she had completed before she got married.
5. And you know what I'd really love to do? Set up an interfaith center for expression and dialogue through the performing and visual arts.

Three bad habits:
1. I wash the dishes when I run out of them.
2. I don't take care of things like getting the dishwasher repaired.
3. I leave things where they fall.

Five places I've lived:
1. Vero Beach, Florida
2. Southwestern Ohio.
3. Western Massachusetts.
4. Providence, Rhode Island
5. Where I live now.

The five first jobs I ever had:

1. Mother's helper on Cape Cod. The summers of 1969 and 1970, which should give you some definitive clues as to my life then. Paul: be quiet.

2. Motel housekeeper. Most important tip for handling stultifyingly dull work: Clean the bathrooms and vacuum during the commercials so you can watch the soaps as you change beds and dust.

3. Waitress at Chautauqua Institution hotel. Great way to spend a college summer.

4. Hasbro Toy Factory assembly line worker making GI Joe flashlights. Probably the worst job of my life that I actually kept for awhile.

5. Drugstore cashier. Another tip for handling a boring job: Become an aficionado of magazines. Every single one on the rack. Use your imagination; I kid you not.

I tag: the other writers over at Women On... .