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.

A Way Into Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter
~ John Updike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

Unabashedly Proud Mom

The Lovely Daughter

Phi Beta Kappa

Willamette University '09

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

A New Poll!

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

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

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

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

For now, my own list in a nutshell:

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

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

My Very Most Favorite Facebook Greeting . . .

. . . comes from Oregon and is as follows:

Hi Momma!

God and Gender

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

Always male
10 (12%)

Always female
1 (1%)

Sometimes male, sometimes female
26 (33%)

No gender
41 (52%)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just Curious

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

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

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

I Think I've Figured It Out

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

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

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

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

Just gone.

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

I find that my own feelings are quite the opposite.

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

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



Cross-posted at Desert Year.

Perplexed and Pondering

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

Sunday Summary Ten Minutes Max

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than ten minutes due to interruptions . . .

Women in Religious Leadership

Interesting.

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

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

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

Retreat Run-Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday Thoughts 10 Minutes Max

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

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

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

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

Ten minutes -- now breakfast and into the car.

Monday Meanderings 10 Minutes Max

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

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

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

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

That's it; off to the post office.

Reading into Faith

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

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

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

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

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

Other ideas?

Settling In

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.