Cannon Beach Images

Oregon: Haystack Rock Birds

Unless the puffins are the same as those in Scotland (don't know, too lazy to look up), I saw all life birds on our last day in Oregon!

Tufted Puffins (here)

Pelagic cormorant (here)

Western gull (here)

Pigeon guillemots (here)

Black oystercatcher (mine)

Congratulations, Willamette '09!

The Lovely Daughter

Cum Laude

Honors in Sociology

Phi Beta Kappa

The Housemates!

The Campus!

More Gardens

I posted a little about The Grotto in Portland over at Desert Year; the final picture above was taken there as well.

We also visited the Chinese Garden, which fills a block in the heart of Portland. It is exquisite, with so many small, intricately designed spaces, each one different from the last. And quite inspiring, given the miniscule size of our own yard at home. One of the most interesting aspects of the garden is the way in which sunlight is incorporated onto the multitude of patterns and textures by means of window design and tree placement -- you almost feel as if the sky itself is being redesigned. The effects are somewhat apparent in the image of the courtyard tile design called "Cracked Ice"~ just what it looks like.

Unformed Thoughts on Worship

None of my thoughts are well formed these days, so why should those on worship be any different?

At least that's the excuse I'm using this morning when no, I am not in church. I have some hope, though, that there will be some contributions in the comments that will lead, eventually, to some degree or another of sorting out.

My disorganized thinking on the subject has been generated by Quotidian Grace's post challenging an earlier post written by Bruce Reyes-Chow, the Moderator of the PCUSA, in which he offers the beginnings of a rationale in favor of twittering during worship services. QG objects primarily on the grounds that we struggle enough as it is to focus during worship. Bruce, as I understand it, finds twittering to offer valuable potential for community response to God and to one another.

It's no secret that I've struggled mightily with worship over the past several months. (Perhaps not a politic admission for a seminarian, but I have concluded that there is some value to be found in addressing the real-life fallout of bereavement.) When I go to my own church (in which, as far as I know, no one twitters ~ but some of us do take notes on the bulletin, and pass occasional commentary back and forth), I am usually overwhelmed by the energy and sense of community ~ aspects of our worship that I treasured a year ago, and for many years before that. (And apparently I also have a bit of PTSD going on. It had never occurred to me before that there might be a good reason to avoid having your child's funeral in your own church sanctuary.)

And yet, I keep returning ~ to other churches when I cannot manage my own. Worship is not, after all, much about me. I try to find places where other people are praying, and singing, and engaging with God in some way, even when it seems beyond me personally. And I am very aware, and grateful to acknowledge in some some way, that what is beyond me personally is being taken up on behalf of myself and my family in synagogues and Catholic and Protestant churches all over the country.

The other day, a friend talked about having gone to church a couple of weeks earlier for the first time in over a year. Her family is in the thick of it these days, contending with her husband's devastating and tenancious cancer. "I was SO BORED," she said. "All that ritual ~ it's boring and meaningless. I'm too experientially oriented for church. A day in the wilderness ~ that's my church."

The wilderness is a church for me, too. God in all things. But the ritual, the liturgy, the sacramental community, the attentiveness to text ~ I love all those things, too. It occurs to me, however, that they all ~ like the wilderness ~ require an education before they can be fully appreciated. I can't comment on where my friend has directed her energies. But I know that I can find God in the wilderness in part because I have invested years in the study of birds, in art because I read and look and listen to what others have to teach me about painting and architecture, in church because I practice (in the literal sense of the word) my religion intently in a variety of ways.

"Twittering" asked my 24-year-old son, when I told him about the discussion. "That incredibly irritating practice?" "How would you know whether it would be a problem in church, since you don't go to church?" I asked him. "No, but I think I understand the point," he said. "And what about the people who have prepared for and work so hard on the service?" he asked. "I don't think I've ever attended a church that lacked a coffee hour ~ why can't people socialize there?"

I will admit that one of the first things I had thought about, in response to the initial posts, was the effort that goes into leading a service, and how dismayed I would be as the minister, the preacher, the music director, the liturguist, the choir member, to know that people were twittering among themselves rather than offering themselves and their attention and participation to the drama of the service. I don't doubt that God is in the twittering, as one of its proponents argues. (Although I have to say, that last one felt like a really bizarre sentence for me to write.) But worship is an opportunity to focus on God's self-disclosure, rather than upon our own, and to respond directly to God, rather than to one another.

In the end, I realize that perhaps my own orientation is just contemplative enough to make twittering during worship an outrageous proposition. I can imagine that if one is directed more completely toward the evangelical (in the sense of sharing), the prophetic, the social, or the kinesthetic in one's engagement with God, then twittering could have its place. Given my own extraordinary challenges these days, I am willing to make room for others to experiment with approaches to theirs in creative ways that might seem frustrating or damaging to me.

I will share, though, as representative of my own viewpoint (with apologies for the unabashed male gender of the language) the following quotes which appeared here, on the blog The Website of Unknowing yesterday. I found it pretty humorous that they popped up in my blog reader as I was pondering this topic.

The tragedy of modern man is that his creativity, his spirituality, and his contemplative independence are inexorably throttled by a superego that has sold itself without question or compromise to the devil of technology.
…

The contemplative seeks to liberate his soul from all external control, to purify and detach it from material, sensual, and even spiritual compulsions, and to surrender it to the truth and creative freedom of the Holy Spirit.

— Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

I personally question the liberating power of Twitter. But I'm willing to listen to the arguments.

Just for Fun

As a former attorney for Chessie Railroads (another life, eons ago), I remain fascinated by trains, and the UPAC was in evidence throughout our travels. I really wanted a picture of a train winding through the Columbia River Gorge; this one enlarges more or less OK with a click.

The Bridge of the Gods is, as Gregarious Son says, a human erector-set-like version of what was, according to Native American legend, a "natural" bridge across the Gorge formed at one time by a logjam of debris at a turn in the Columbia. A mural -- too faded, alas, to photograph -- on the bridge foundation depicts its long history in its various forms. I took some photos for Chicago Son, who was fascinated by engineering and architecture, and would have loved to have photographed the bridge himself. We used it to cross to the State of Washington, so the grandparents could say that they have been there.

Columbia River Gorge

I'm sure I posted similar pictures five years ago (can it be that long?!) after the Lovely Daughter and I made our trip out west to look at colleges. But those images have vanished into the stratosphere, so why not some new ones?

I didn't get any further than the bridge at Multnomah Falls on that venture. This time I made it to the top -- a hike of 1.5 hours up and 45 minutes down. The final photo is from about halfway.

Old Town Cafe

If you're headed for Portland, Oregon, then I suggest a meal in Scappoose!

Lisa and I "met" on AOL Journals back in the old days, four or five years ago. She's a wickedly incisive writer, whether about the pitfalls of the Republican Party or the pitfalls of small business ownership ~ and she's a fabulous cook. I've missed her writing since it's taken a back seat to the restaurant, so I was grateful for the chance to relax after the plane trip west and catch up a little.

That's the Lovely Daughter with the proprietors in the top photo, and the Lovely Daughter with her momma in the bottom -- and, oh, yeah, her dad and brother and grandparents, too.

Graduation Summary

Fabulous lunch at the Old Town Cafe with Lisa (one of my oldest blogging friends) and Matt.

Columbia River Gorge - I hiked to the TOP of Multnomah Falls!

Gardens all over the place.

Lauds at 6:30 am with the monks at Mount Angel Abbey.

Phi Beta Kappa Luncheon.

The Lovely Daughter is a cum laude college graduate!!!

Haystack Rock and birds, birds, birds ~ including harlequin ducks (here).

And then ~ Gregarious Son and I caught the Lovely Daughter's little tiny cold and got so so so sick. All we can figure is we got a ten-fold wallop from an Oregon virus we hadn't encountered before.

So . . . when I get better: pictures of my own.

Over the River and Through the Woods

Well, ok, over the Grand Canyon and through the airports . . .

to graduation we go.

The Lovely Daughter graduates on Sunday. We leave for the great state of Oregon on Thursday, where we hope to see Lisa, the Columbia River Gorge, Cannon Beach, and ~ oh yeah, a few important events at Willamette University!

It will be tough, to make this trip that for four years I had looked forward to sharing as a family of five. But it will be wonderful, too, to help our beautiful girl celebrate friendships and achievements that began with that fateful hurricane four years ago.

Back in a week or so ~

From Your Mother

One of the hardest things is trying to figure out how to be ~ just plain be ~ when two of your children are here and one is somewhere else.

I suppose that the division of my blog posts tonight reflects that hard reality.

This one is for the two who are here.

I am eternally grateful to love you, to care for you, to laugh with you, to cry with you, to be on this planet with you.

Happy Mother's Day in reverse.

Preoccupation

Yesterday ~

a meeting which left me wondering why it is so important to some people to register such disdain for views which do not comport with their own ~ and realizing that if ~ or, no doubt more accurately ~ to the extent I do the same, it's time to stop ~

a second effort to preach without notes, a task at which I realized I was going to fail as soon as I took one last glance at my sermon and realized that any recollection of same had evaporated (one of the hazards of my current general state of mind is that chunks of it frequently evaporate without warning), and which has made Imodium my best friend for the second time in two weeks ~

an impromptu conversation which should have drawn on the best I have to offer, a realization that dawned on me hours later as I realized that I had been so preoccupied with the first two incidents that I had completely missed the opportunity extended to me to listen to another suffering individual.

I need to re-think a lot of things. Maybe my whole life.

Shout Out (Well, OK, A Whisper)

Great post here on meditation and religious cross-fertilization.

A Week

Wow, I don't usually miss an entire week.

I guess I've been busy, but I don't have a lot to say.

I do seminary stuff: my Matthew paper, my Calvin research, another sermon ~ year almost over.

I dread summer Hebrew. Thank God for good friends with whom to trudge through it.

I do spiritual direction stuff ~ midyear review coming up.

I try to deal with internship possibilities and I procrastinate Presbytery stuff.

I ponder whether I should try to look forward to Guelph in August.

I talk to the Quiet Husband and Gregarious Son about daily life and to the Lovely Daughter about her graduation, two weeks from tomorrow.

I look forward to walking the beach at Haystack Rock, something the Lovely Daughter and I did together five years ago when college in Oregon was just a fantasy.

I take a lot of long walks.

I read a lot of stuff about discernment and spiritual desolation.

I miss my Chicago Son.

I want my other life back.

The Sermon

Since I whined about it so vociferously, I think I'll go ahead and post my classroom sermon from last week. I did learn some things.

As it developed over the weeks it became, at the suggestion of one of the young men in the class, a communion sermon. In my extremely limited experience, I have preached before in a few circumstances in which homily and situation needed to be completely aligned -- at my grandmother's funeral service, and during CPE last summer -- and I find that thinking in terms of specifity of context is more helpful and satisfying than not.

Memorizing? Not for this girl. I had been through the sermon some 40-50 times in the 10 days before the classroom preaching of same, and it had lost all of its vitality and freshness for me. My classmates tell me that that was not apparent in the preaching, but it certainly was in this preacher's heart. Other things for which I was fairly criticized were, I think a direct consequence of brain power being devoted to pulling words and phrases out of the air and concentrating on the ones that should be next in line. Sometimes we have to accept our (vast) limitations and, as some of my lovely commenters suggested, forego the grade in lieu of acknowledging who we are.

Text? We had three choices -- apparently all from the lectionary for the last Sunday in May. In my current life, most of the passages which speak to me are in Job but ~ probably no one would want to hear those sermons anyway.

Herewith, my little offering, unimaginatively titled at the last minute when it suddenly became apparent that a title was expected:

Come to The Table

You are with me – those are the words at the center of Psalm 23.

You are with me, God, as the gentle shepherd, the figure who perhaps most often comes to mind when Psalm 23 is read or recited or prayed. We seek it most often in times of trouble – lonely and isolated people in nursing homes mouth its words, chaplains pray through those words at the bedsides of the dying, pastors proclaim them at funeral services.

The Psalmist in those first few verses seems to be musing to himself about God – God makes me lie down, God restores my soul, God leads me. God is with us, he reflects, as a persistent, tenacious, and creative shepherd. Even in the darkest of valleys, God provides green pastures, still waters, right paths. Even as the darkness overtakes it, this valley sounds like a place of peace, a place in which one might rest.

And yet – so often, it’s not. The valley is not a place of peace. The valley is filled with conflict and anxiety. The valley is the place through which the cry of abandonment echoes out of the crater of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? “

"I shall not want” – that’s where we begin again --but we DO want. We want our lives back, we want our problems resolved, we want our loved ones restored to us, we want our foes flattened. We want to be who we were -- before we were shattered by our enemies. We want, and we want, and we want.

And in the midst of our struggles, when the restful allure of the valley seems to be nothing more than a mirage, God responds to our anguish and longing in a different way.In that desolate place in which we are surrounded by enemies, God emerges as the host of a meal. God goes to work and lays a table before us. God nourishes us and sustains our broken selves right in the heart of the chaos we are unable to escape.

The Psalm pours out of the experience of someone who had encountered his own enemy, perhaps in the form of a military enemy set upon destroying him, perhaps in the form of some other threat or danger to his well-being, but by those other predators in the dark that afflict us all: uncertainty, fear, confusion. Could he prevail in the struggles ahead? Would he survive? And in the face of his questions, he found that his God was still his sustainer – that his God would set a table and treat him like a king, anointing his head and filling his cup, despite the battle raging around and in him.

The Psalmist must have remembered how God nourished his ancestors, the ancient Israelites. Freed from the bondage to Pharaoh which had sapped their lives, the Israelites found new enemies -- hunger, thirst, exhaustion, confusion – and longed to go backward. However harsh their circumstances in Egypt had been, they had been settled in one place and certain familiar routines. Suddenly they were on the road – no longer able to grow and prepare food, no longer assured of a source of water, no longer able to relax in the evenings in the shelter of their own homes. Who were they, once they were no longer the slaves of the king? They were, as they discovered, God’s beloved people – the people for whom God provided food each day. Trudging through that lonely Sinai landscape, wondering how they would survive, they found that God remembered them every single day by setting a table and providing a meal for them.

Just as the Psalmist would have remembered the Exodus journey, so Jesus’ followers must have known Psalm 23 -- and they, too, had enemies. As Jews, they were under the thumb of the Roman Empire, and knew that their freedom to worship their God was always subject to revocation. As followers of Jesus, they could see that their recognition and security as loyal Jews was threatened. And as his intimate friends, they had heard his strange words, his recognition of the precariousness of his personal situation. The disciples must have begun to wonder what their loyalty to Jesus might be going to cost them. And there was a meal, laid before them and served to them by their Lord -- nourishing them not only with bread and wine but with mysterious words of assurance.

A table set for a beleaguered figure among his enemies. Manna in the wilderness. A Passover dinner before an execution.

We know about these tables ourselves, though we may not recognize them as such at first. Our son’s death last September was an ambush, and we felt surrounded enemies on all sides – the enemies that we would call death and bewilderment and anguish, enemies that seemed to have completely overwhelmed us.

And yet – there was a table set in the midst of those foes. Dozens and people came and went every day, and they were taken care of. Coolers piled up on the back porch, food covered every square inch of table and counter space. People arrived at the crack of dawn with breakfast, in the middle of the day with paper goods, in the evenings with casseroles. My friends commandeered my kitchen and fed us and everyone else who came by.

A table set in the presence of the enemy. Unexpected manna in the wilderness. God works through the people who care for us.

And God does it for us, here, at this table. God does not set a table for us only when times are good. God does not wait for the weather to be perfect, for the blended family to stop arguing, for the cancer to be cured, for the cease fire to be declared. God does not require the holiday china, the crystal stemware. God does not demand our victorious triumph over our foes or our certainty that we are on the right path through the wilderness.

God prepares a table in the absence of all of those things. Perhaps God’s finest table is laid out in the absence of those things. Perhaps God’s finest table looks something like the 20th pizza dinner in a row that a family shares in the lounge outside the intensive care unit. Perhaps God’s finest table is covered with the casserole dishes and paper plates that dozens of friends have quietly supplied when a a child has died. Perhaps it is served with bent utensils on broken china salvaged from the rubble of a bombed-out house in Iraq or a flooded house in New Orleans.

This bread and drink we consume – they remind us of all of those tables. They tell us that the Lord is our shepherd in turmoil as well as in tranquility, that the Lord leads us through raging waters as well as still pools, that God’s most delectable meals are prepared when we are most traumatized. They tell us that God is most with us when we are most alone.

God is not afraid of the same things we are afraid of. God is serene in the face of circumstances which threaten to engulf us, God in inventive where our imagination fails us, and when we think God is nowhere to be found, God is right there, shaking out the tablecloth, scrounging around for the silverware, placing the wineglasses on the table.

God is here with us – come and be nourished.

Too Much Going On

I have to preach in my Homiletics (preaching) class today. We are supposed to memorize our sermons. As a result of that expectation, I have spent far too much time attempting to accomplish the impossible at the expense of other work. I appreciate that reading or even glancng at one's text too frequently is an unfortunate substitute for real preaching but ~ our gifts do vary. I have tried working from an outline, but I forget a different chunk each time I try. And now, having been through the thing some 40-50 times, I have lost all sense of spontaneity and pleasure in it. As is so often the case at this stage of life, I have to accomodate the expectations of others and simultaneously translate them into something realistic and appropriate to who I am.

Which brings me to my general sigh about my seminary experience. I have had some wonderful educational opportunites here, but it is definitely a place for a younger and more conservative crowd. There are rigidities in place which work well for young people whose lives demand little else in the way of responsibility, and not much recognition that those of us with other demands in our lives also bring other gifts to the table. The theological perspective across the board? ~ I am told by many of the younger folks that it's middle-of-the-road, but from where I sit: hardly. A friend mentioned a few weeks ago that it can be necessary for (ahem) "older" students to feel that we have to shrink ourselves in a multitude of ways in order to make it through, which I found to be an apt description. It's too bad ~ I remember law school as a time of growth and expansiveness, rather than limitation and diminishment. I'm not sure how much of that is due to the different view which life experience brings with it, but I had hoped for the opposite here.

On the plus side, I am auditing Christology (yes, the subject against which I railed last quarter) with a professor new to the school, and the experience is a dramatically different one. Perhaps I am intrigued by theology, after all. (I had concluded that it was not for me.)

And . . . the fabulous intership I had planned for this year, destroyed by our son's death, is not an opportunity available to me again, so I am also having to spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with an alternative. I should be finishing my essays for the next stage in the ordination process, but I am spending the time allocated for that on phone calls and emails and interviews that go nowhere. Without the required field ed position next year (my last), there is no point in returning ~ a reality which is having a profoundly negative effect on my motivation in general.

And so am I responding to all of this in a productive and useful way? I think not! I am blogging!

I am going out for a walk and yet another run-through of the now-dreaded sermon. At least it's a beautiful morning.

Suicide is Not Painless

I've decided to write a bit more openly about our son's death, starting today, on my other blog.

It seems a bit incongruous here, what with the delightfully humorous bufflehead ducks putting in their semi-annual appearance yesterday. But that's the thing about suicide, isn't it? Incongruity. Of the most devastating and incomprehensible kind.

Spring on the Little Lakes

Not my images ~ but these were all here this morning. The pied-billed grebes and the wood ducks will nest here; the ring-necked ducks and bufflehead are headed further north. I love bufflehead; they look like little buoys bobbing in the water.

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.