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.


:)

Ten Things

Due to the Giant Storm, I decided to skip my Tillich class today and drove home from seminary last night ~ apparently a good idea. The last 25 miles on the interstate were treacherous, an hour-long trip with cars every which way, since no one could see the lines, and judging from the looks of things, I would not have been able to come home tonight. I thought that I would spend the day holed up in the house finishing a paper, but I am still procrastinating (actually, I just got up) and have given myself a 10:00 am start time.

Therefore . . . since I see that my friend Stratoz is playing one of those list memes, I thought that I would make one up for myself. I am 55 so: ten things about myself, one for every 5th year starting with age five (and ignoring this one, which has nothing to recommend it):

1. When I was five, I went to the second half of kindergarten in a church in Vero Beach, Florida.

2. I rode a horse for the first time, on the trails of Grand Teton National Park, when I was ten.

3. I went to the Harvard-Dartmouth game in Cambridge when I was fifteen, which was followed by an unfortunate double date involving my boarding school rommate and two Dartmouth freshmen.

4. When I was twenty I used to wake up in my dorm room in Williamstown, Massachusetts listening to classical music on Morning Pro Musica with Robert J. Lertsema of WGBH-Boston.

5. When I was 25, we lived in an apartment two blocks from where we live now and one of our upstairs neighbors, now a city councilman who lives two blocks in the other direction, led our tenants' revolt when the furnace broke down during a storm like this one.

6. When I was 30, we had a large and silly black dog, named Renko for the character in Hill Street Blues.

7. I don't remember many details, but I would venture that 35, with two four-year-old boys and a year old daughter, was one of the most perfect years of my life.

8. When I was 40 my three children were in Montessori school and I opened my family law practice.

9. When I was 45, we took a family trip to Italy. Our favorite parts were ~ everything! The Duomo, the monastery out in the middle of nowhere, Pompeii, the Cinque Terre, the Vatican Museums, the Roman Forum, the gelato, St. Peter's, the full moon over Florence. Lots more.

10. And when I was 50, I had one of those completely unexpected and life-changing encounters, when I resignedly signed up for a graduate class with the Jesuit who would a couple of years later guide me through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and become the mentor, counselor, guide and spiritual father who would nurture me through the seminary process and now through this horrible past year.

I see that I did not make my 10:00 deadline. Guess I'll procrastinate a bit more and look for photos of Florence.

Or Maybe Not (Lazy, I Mean)

Grief consumes energy. Psychic energy, physical energy, spiritual energy, mental energy.

Everything I do requires a long recovery period. Everything I think or feel requires an even longer one. A lot of effort precedes infintesimal movement and then a slide backward.

I have been thinking about the story attributed to Cherokee tradition that Sharon Watkins preached at the National Prayer Service earlier this week (I picked it up at Meaning and Authenticity):

One evening a grandfather was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle that each person faces. "There are two wolves struggling inside each of us," the old man said. "One wolf is vengefulness, anger, resentment, self-pity, fear... "

The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness, hope, truth, love..."

The grandson sat, thinking, then asked: "Which wolf wins, Grandfather?"

His grandfather replied, "The one you feed."

The problem with grief, I think, is that both wolves are integral components of its reality. You cannot, at least in the first months, nourish one to the exclusion of the other and expect to emerge intact. It sounds heroic, I suppose, to say that you will choose to feed hope over fear, compassion over resentment. But the truth of loss is that it calls you to friendship with the scary and the disheartening as well as the brave and the wise.

Maybe there is a third wolf. A wolf whose compassion and faithfulness enable her to acknowledge that the fullness of experience requires her to feed self-pity and resentment at times.

Does that sound awful? Resistant and pathetic?

I don't think so.

At the end of the summer, a few days after our son died, one of our friends, a woman who lost her husband to an accident a few years ago, talked about the resentment she sometimes feels when she sees an elderly couple walking down the street together. Why couldn't that have been us, she wonders? Self-pity? In a way. But her articulation of genuine pain was an act of generosity to us. Had she starved her anger and resentment, she would have less openness and compassion for a family beginning a new journey of loss.

I don't think you should be feeding steak to the angry wolf. But I have a feeling that if you kill it off, it will find its way back, viscious and snarling and larger than life. Better, perhaps, to stroke it gently and nourish it with kindness so that, someday, the third wolf will emerge, the one who blends joy with sorrow and power with rage into a shaggy and compassionate whole.

(Image: I can hardly believe that this painting of three wolves and more by Jody Bergsma popped up when I google-imaged "wolf.")

Too Lazy ...

... to cross post. Go on over to Desert Year for today's writing.

Communiques from The Lovely Daughter

Landed safely in Chicago . . .

On the plane for Portland . . .

In the train station in Portland, where it is SUNNY AND WARM.



We so live in the wrong place.

Book-Ends

At a time in my life when I have not been much of a friend to anyone, a time when I am at best vaguely conscious of trying not to suck up all the air around me, I was startled and honored to receive the Friends Award from Kate, Diane, and Purple:

"The Friends Award isn't about being the most popular blogger or having the most read blog. It is just because you consider the author a friend. These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

This is a hard one -- eight means a lot of links to cut-and-paste. I'm focusing on some of my longterm blogging friends, and thinking that maybe I need to invent my own award for the new ones. A number of people have shown up here in the past few months and some have stuck around, and I've been very grateful for their support. So maybe in a few weeks... .

But for now: mostly old and not-quite-so-old friends:

Lisa at Coming to Terms ~ perhaps my blogging friend of longest standing; we discovered one another back in the early days of the old AOL journals and found an instant rapport.

Kat at Walk with Me ~ another AOL-er with whom I felt an immediate connection: the walks, the photos, the birds, the family.

Judi at Judith HeartSong: An Artsy Blog ~ artist exraordinaire; somehow in the move I lost track of her but I've been getting re-aquainted with her wonderful work and the story of courage and resilience behind it.

Cynthia at Sorting the Pieces ~ as I make this list, I realize that AOL brought me the friendship of women of extraordinary grit and beauty, inside and out, and Cynthia is another whose responses to the lousy hands life deals leaves me astounded and grateful to know her.

Known as Joan Calvin at PresbyOpia ~ one of my newest blogging friends, and I'm going to offer her a friendship award, since we've recently met in real life and discovered how many things we share.

Quotidian Grace, who I think just may be my oldest RevGals friend, and whose graciousness and good humor permeate Presby-land online and in real life.

PresbyGal, who does, all the time as far as I can tell, exude the warmth and kindness that a friendship award is all about, along with wit, talent, and energy.

Stratoz, who makes beautiful stained glass and sees his whole life as pieces merging into a work of art.

And Michelle of Quantum Theology ~ off on a retreat for now, but still posting some of the most elegant writing to be found online.

OK, that's nine ~ so what? ~ if any of y'all want to nominate eight MORE, go for it!

Lovely Daughter and Noble Tipper

The aging Tip is having an awfully hard time jumping onto the bed, but she is welcomed with much affection when she makes it!

Key West in No Particular Order (5)

In honor of Gene Robinson's having been asked to offer the invocation for the opening event of the Inaugural Festivities (hat tip to Mary Beth), I offer images of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Key West. It's a good day for the Episcopalians, and any winter day is a good one when 80-degree temperatures permit the church windows to be flung wide open. ( I suppose there's a metaphorical as well as a literal meaning in there.)

The Spaces We Inhabit, Part I

Mrs. M over at The Kitchen Door has posted an interesting piece on the spaces in which we live. Prompted by considerations involved in moving to a new apartment, she moves on to what she has seen and experienced in various churches and what the different frameworks for worship mean. I am always fascinated by physcial space, and so I thought that in response to her questions I'd give it some thought for a few posts. Today I'm focusing on a few churches, Protestant and Catholic.

The Presbyterian church to which I belong, which I have served as an elder, in which I have participated and been supported in so many ways:

Think austere and elegant New England. The walls are a pale shade of white with a hint of blush, the trim a bit more on the creamy side. Two sets of pews with aisles down the center and down each side. The communion table on a raised platform, a lectern for the readings to the right side as the congregation faces the front, a pulpit for preaching to the left. The cross, a contemporary rendition which I have contemplated a great deal and hope to use as the subject of a sermon someday, hangs from the ceiling over the steps leading up to the communion table. No artwork whatever in the sanctuary. The windows are clear glass panes. The choir stalls are in the front, behind the communion table, and the organ is built into the wall behind them, so the choir is always visible and the music pours directly into the sanctuary.

The Methodist church in which our entire family participated energetically for many years:

The main sanctuary is modeled on a 13th century French Gothic cathedral, huge and cavernous, with breathtaking stained glass windows and elegant piers, columns, and arches. The layout is almost identical to that of my current church, with the exception of the music-related features: the choir stalls are in the left transept, so that the choir is all but invisible to the congregation, and difficult to hear, and the organ is built into the back wall above the balcony. When the church is full and everyone is singing and the organ is playing, the effect is impressive. The pulpit, lectern, and baptismal font are all made of wood, intricately carved exponents of the theme of vine and branches running through the entire space. A Renaissance reproduction painting of Mary and Jesus hangs over the baptismal font.

The sanctuary of my Presbyterian seminary:

Again, New England and austere, but without the intimacy of my home church. High, high ceilings, and high, high, clear glass windows. Now that I think of it, the interior shape must be something of a half-hexagon; the pews do not follow the lines of the walls and the effect is somewhat confusing. (From the outside, the building appears to be a square.) One of my readers may correct me here. Both organ and choir stalls are in the balcony. And here's something Mrs. M mentions in another context: the single pulpit (no lectern) is smack in the middle of the front. I had never heard of such a layout until just before I went off to seminary and wondered what it would look like -- and there it is! To me it seems rather an astonishing illustration of the Protestant emphasis on Word at, perhaps, the expense of Sacrament. It was awhile before I was able to shake off the sense that the human preacher rather than God was at the center of the worship service. When we have communion, it is served from a small table below the towering pulpit.

The Carmelite chapel, where I have spent some time this fall:

Another austere space, this one shaped somewhat like a barn, with white plaster walls. There is a statute of Mary with the baby Jesus in a side alcove, and that's it for artwork. The windows are clear glass and the furnishings are made of wood, with simple and spare lines, and entirely mobile. When I have been there we have always sat in rows forming a semi-circle the long way across the rectangular space, with the altar front and center and the lectern/pulpit off to the right. No choir; a small organ in the back, but I think it can be moved around.

The suburban Catholic church I sometimes attend which is, not surprisingly for me, also a Jesuit church:

You might call this one a contemporary version of the Methodist church described above. It's huge, wide with high ceilings, but no arches, no columns, and boxy rather than rectangular. Most of the stained glass windows have geometric art deco designs, except for those in the front which tell some of the Ignatian and Jesuit story. The organ is in the balcony, which is usually where the choir is, too, although often the music is provided by soloist or small group vocalists and musicians from the front to the right. There are a couple of very small side chapels, and large statues of Mary and Joseph, one on each side in the front, and a large lectern/pulpit to the left. The priests sometimes preach from the pulpit, and sometimes walk down and stand in or wander the aisle There is no doubt that in this church the emphasis is on the celebration of the Eucharist: the elevated altar is huge and set back at some remove from the congregation and the majestic crucifix takes up the entire wall above it.

My current favorite, even though I have only been there once ~ a downtown Catholic church restored over the last decade or so:

Inside, a wonderful semi-Gothic space with soaring arches and white walls and huge stained glass windows that somehow still enable bright light to filter through. A little bit in the way of sculpture and statues, not at all intrusive. There is an altar but, as with the Carmelites, everything is moveable. The day I was there, we sat in two vast semicircles; the reading was from the (beautifully carved) lectern placed toward one end and the homily was preached from the center of the congregation. The communion elements were consecrated on the altar, but the entire congregation of several hundred surged forward and encirled it, as we had gathered and encircled the bapismal font in back half-an-hour earlier for the full dunking baptism of a baby girl. I can't describe this church as well as I'd like since, as I've said, I've only been there once, but its combination of elegant and historical stone, glass, and archways with contemporary and spare furnishings and artwork, its infusion of bright light, and its generous balancing of space for both Word and Sacrament, is completely appealing to me.

Expressing Condolences

Last night I received an email from a friend, writing to say that the teenage son of business acquaintances had died suddenly in the night. She added that she was astonished by some of the stupid things people have written on the funeral home's website page for condolence notes.

It is not, not for me and not for anyone else willing to think about it, difficult to imagine that first encounter with a beloved son's lifeless body.

My friend didn't ask, but I am a little crazy these days, and so I blundered right ahead and offered her two suggestions, elaborated below for anyone who fears (which should be all of us) doing or writing something stupid at such a time:

1. Make a note on the calendar for three months, four months, five, six months from now, so that you can send a note or stop by when most everyone else is gone.

There is a woman from my church who has written me a paragraph or two every ten-to-fourteeen days for the last four months. Not a pastor, not a deacon (one of the people officially in charge of such things in our church structure), not a BFF. A woman whom I know a little from vaious contexts and who has taken it upon herself to take the time to let me know that she is thinking of us. Often I can't digest the words, but someday I will be able to and, in the meantime, the very fact of her concern and intentionality about it is registering as remarkable and considerate.

2. The words of condolence, whether written or spoken? Say something specific about the gifts or adventures or life of the person who has died, and convey in some way your knowledge, whether first or eighth-hand, that he or she was a joy to the people who loved him or her. Unless you are at least 150% certain about how your words will be received, this is not the time to share whatever convictions you may have about God's plan or purpose or goodness ~ especially where a young person has died, or a person has died after much suffering, or a person has died sudddenly and unexpectedly, or in pretty much any situation at all. Even someone whose life has been an endless demonstration of certitude and conviction of faith may be rocked to the core by the loss of a loved one, and assurances that might have seemed helpful in the abstract can be heard much differently in the starkness of concrete reality.

The very best words I have received, some by email and some in person, have come from college and work friends of my son - filled with stories and conversations, expressing their own doubts and confusion and terrible, terrible sense of loss -- but always in concrete terms, always accompanied with illustrations and memories, both humorous and haunting. Those 20-somethings could teach the rest of us well.

I hope that people remind my friend's friends, again and again this week, and again and again months from now, that their son lit up this world with his life and love.

(Cross-posted at Desert Year.)

Key West in No Particular Order (4)

Bahia Honda Key. There's a rainbow in the second one.

Doubt: The Movie and the Reality

Doubt is a movie of intensity, probing and challenging and ultimately satisfying in the ambiguity of its conclusion. All of the of the major actors -- Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis -- give brilliant performances and the imagery -- the various forms of light and darkness, the gray skies and blowing leaves, the endless opening and closing of windows and doors -- while a little heavy-handed at times, creates a sense of seamlessness that both oppresses and frees.

If you haven't seen the movie, I won't spoil it except to say that its rendition of 1964 Bronx Catholicism seems to me right on target, and that its exploration of the priest sex abuse scandal weaves numerous subtleties into a storyline that might otherwise have been handled with a sledge hammer.

I went to see it last night with Gregarious Son and Lovely Daughter and, if the passionate conversations overheard in the hallway and restrooms afterward and carried right on through our late night dinner are any indication, the movie resonates with all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

After the three of us finished, at least for the evening, debating the possible angles of reality behind each of the characters, we moved on to that all-encompassing question of faith and doubt. For me, faith has always been twin sister to doubt , and I wondered what the kids thought of some of the discussions I have been part of recently. In a nutshell, I am in a pastoral care class where the professor insists that parishoners count on knowing that their priest or pastor is a woman or man of certainty, and I am in a reality in which I feel battered and insulted every time someone attempts to foist his or certainty on me.

My children, who are certain in their unbelief and sure of the role of faith, tell me that most people believe in God because they need explanations, and that my capacity for existential angst puts me in a distinct minority. I prefer to think that people veer toward mystery to whatever extent they are able on any given day, and that my inclinations are more toward integrity than angst. But then, I have been wrong about many things in my life.

I am going to go and see Doubt again as soon as possible.

Christmas Eve

Some of our friends spend some time on Christmas Eve lighting up their neighborhoods and, in our absence last week, they stopped by our place to ensure that we remained bonded to one another.

Key West in No Particular Order (3)

Gregarious Son and Lovely Daughter