Hankering for the Holy

Not In Kansas Any More

2011-07-10T02:39:00.001-07:00

OK - here are all the things I don't know anything about: South Africa, Zulu culture, international development, political theory in international development, gardening, etc., etc., etc. But what happens when I run into something that I DO know something about?

One of the African Impact endeavors here is something called the "Ten Families" project, which (with the help of the village leaders) identifies families who are in the most need and works with them to become self-sustaining. That sustainability is the mantra of all the African Impact projects - and they make lots of effort to avoid creating dependent relationships with these families.

Friday, I was part of a team that went out to visit a woman who has been identified has one of the most desperate families. Her story is pitiful: she had four little boys with a man to whom she was not married, but who really functioned as her husband - I think we'd call it common law in the US. He died, and his family demanded that she pay all the costs associated with burying him, which involved her going into debt (this is a part that I don't fully understand). What I do know is that his family then cast her and her four boys out and took all her possessions. I mean all. She has nothing besides the clothes on their backs and a couple of old blankets and a grass mat that she carefully spreads out for guests. She was given a government house in a new village development, but as far as anyone from African Impact can tell, there is no one who can help her - no family of her own, and somehow the village infrastructure hasn't reached out to her. She spends day after day in this empty little cinderblock house with her boys.

So, I was prepared for the extreme poverty - that was terrible to see - but what I saw as the visit unfolded is that this woman is so terribly depressed that she's almost catatonic. She went through the motions of welcoming us and gave brief answers to the questions we were asking (the goal for the day was to help her write a resume - there are jobs here if people's skills can be matched up with openings, and this woman did have a work history as a cook) - but she couldn't do anything else. She was pretty checked out - very different from any of the other people we'd visited who, in spite of pain and profound poverty, were very loquacious. The program expects her to put it a garden, get a job and move toward supporting herself. I don't think this woman can even wash her face.

I did talk to the Zulu woman who is our village connection and supervisor. I asked her what she thought and she said, "One day she will decide just not to wake up."

Yes.

So, I mentioned it to a couple of the project staff at the end of the afternoon and was kind of brushed off. The staff are all international development people, or people with management experience - no one has a psychology, social work or any other kind of clinical background. Of course, all I have is 30 years experience visiting sick and sad people - which isn't really clinical knowledge either. And what can anyone do for this woman anyway? There's no therapist - no access to good antidepressants - none of the things I might try to connect someone up with at home.

But the worst part is that she's just stopped caring. And you guys know what that looks like.

I'm still figuring how names work - so I can't give you a name to pray for. But pray for the sad woman with four little boys, and pray for me - for some insight and ideas. The last thing I want to be is my bossy know it all self. But I think if the project tries to treat her like all the other families, they are going to get a very disappointing result. And that result might be tragic.

Which story?

2011-05-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

The weather in Rhode Island has been vile - rainy and cold most days. In spite of the gloom yesterday, Mary and I set out to buy the annuals I plonk into the garden to give it some color. Gerry was the gardener, and I just try to put a few things in that will give it color through the summer - I can manage impatiens and petunias, and that's about it. I did a Google search to find a plant center nearby, not in the mood for a long trek (I have become SUCH a Rhode Islander when it comes to driving more than 15 minutes) and found one down in Cranston.

The moment we entered the store (which was woefully stocked) the proprietor couldn't stop talking about how miserable the weather was and how it was ruining his business. He kept talking about what he didn't have - how even his greenhouses were full of rotting plants - it really was very sad and I appreciated how hard this must be for him, and I really wanted to help him out. I was willing to be shown some alternatives to petunias (there were flats of dahlias and pansies) and I wanted to ask him some questions, but truly - he couldn't pause long enough in his tale of woe to listen to me.

Finally, feeling really sorry for him, we picked up a couple of hanging pots (which actually looked great) and a couple of flats of impatiens. I would have bought more if he'd been able to actually sell me something instead of just moan about how his business had been ruined. But as I pulled out my wallet, he shook his head and said that he was a cash only business (and of course, I had no cash). There were no signs to that effect posted anywhere. Even at that moment, if he had said "So sorry for the inconvenience, but there's an ATM right down the street" I would have trotted off and brought back the cash.

Mary and I were laughing when we got back in the car and drove away empty handed, but really - it was terribly sad. He couldn't do anything but keep repeating his sad story and he missed multiple opportunities to make a sale - if he'd put even an ounce of effort in, he might have made a three figure sale - I was in the mood to buy flowers and he did have some stuff, and it looked pretty good - he could have persuaded me to branch out from petunias if he'd spent a fraction of the time he spent whining to actually try to do business.

I heard the term "problem saturated story" a few years ago when I did some work with Larry Peers of the Alban Institute. It started my interest in narrative theology, how the story we tell reflects what we believe, and how what we believe affects our story. Never have I heard a more problem saturated story than yesterday in that that unhappy man's plant store. And that made me think about the stories we tell in congregations and how many opportunities we may miss to connect with newer members (maybe even long time members) because we're so focused on telling our sad, problem saturated stories, over and over again.

Thoughts on Leadership

2011-05-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

It sometimes takes me awhile to read The New Yorker, which is why I've only just finished the May 16 issue (the cover - a half-erased picture of Osama Bin Laden). This issue contains a special section called "Innovators", which features articles about how borrowed ideas eventually bear fruit, about the Pepsi company's interest in developing healthier products, about the corporate culture at Pixar and about fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The whole section is worth a careful read, but I was especially taken with Malcolm Gladwell's "Creation Myth" and its exploration of the development of ideas, and with a couple of quotes from Indra Nooyi, Pepsi's CEO.

Malcolm Gladwell traces the development of the computer mouse - the original idea and prototype were born at Xerox, but Steve Jobs came along and saw the potential for what had been considered a tool for experts in the mass market. Gladwell himself makes extensive reference to another study, "The Culture of Military Innovation" by Diana Adamsky. I'm going to try and quickly summarize Gladwell's summary of Adamsky, but all of that made me think about how change happens in organizations and how that might be relevant to change and innovation in the Church.

Adamsky (via Gladwell) compares the military cultures of the former Soviet Union, the United States, and Israel as they grappled with the new technologies of the digital age in the early 1980s. The Soviet Union, with its centralized bureaucracy and analytic ability, could grasp the potential for the new technology, but its strong intellectual traditions weren't enough to connect theory and practice. The United States had a less-centralized and more entrepeneurial culture that favored innovation, but didn't have the capacity for systemic analysis. Israel, whose military culture developed quickly in the face of constant threat and limited resources, was creative and improvisational, but was limited by its short-term, urgent approach to problem solving and development.

Essentially Gladwell says that, in the development of the mouse, Xerox was the Soviet Union and the United States; engineers at Xerox had innovative ideas about computer hardware and design but lacked the vision of how those ideas might be marketed for the general public. Steve Jobs was Israel, sweeping in and buying up Xerox's ideas, which might have been fleshed out into early prototypes, and transforming them for applications that ordinary people would use (and buy).

Gladwell goes on to talk about the relationship between quantity and quality of the work produced by those individuals we label "geniuses." He quotes another source, psychologist Dean Simonton, who says that its the sheer number of ideas generated by the truly brilliant that is significant. "Quality is a probablistic function of quantity". Gladwell follows that idea to Keith Richards' new memoir about The Rolling Stones: Mick Jagger's mind was so fertile that song lyrics poured out of him at an astonishing rate; so many creative ideas were generated so quickly that it was hard to distinguish the genius songs from the mediocre. But precisely because there were so many, the probability of greatness was high.

When I was first ordained, ideas and program and materials were all generated at a nice stately pace from a couple of publishing houses: as I remember, mainly the Seabury Press and Morehouse Barlowe. We might get wild and crazy and look at what the Lutherans or the Presbyterians were doing, but it wasn't hard to keep up with what the latest ideas were because there weren't very many of them and they weren't very creative. We all knew pretty much what was out there and because there wasn't so much to deal with, we could talk to each other about what worked and what didn't.

I get frustrated now sometimes with the sheer volume of ideas that pour across my computer screen daily - blog posts, digital catalogues, etc. - it's far too much to keep with with and sometimes (especially blogs that believe they have to post SOMETHING every day whether its worth the bandwidth or not) superficial and sloppy. But after reading Gladwell's article about how good ideas get translated into good practice, I'm persuaded that we in the Church need to keep generating and sifting and borrowing and tweaking so that we can be both the most encouraging and welcoming environment possible for new ideas, and also the clinic where good ideas get tested and evaluated and adapted to maximize their effectiveness. We have to work at being strategic, entrepreneurial and practical.

Indra Nooyi is leading the Pepsi Company to think about what the food trends will be twenty years in the future, and she is taking some big risks to develop products that will be ready for those trends. She said that the temptation for most CEOs is to keep doing what they've been doing, to keep dancing to the same music. Instead, Nooyi's idea of the CEOs role is not to "dance like a dervish to the old music, but to think about difference dances you have to learn from different genres of music." As a priest I am steward of an ancient, holy dance that I love and treasure, but that doesn't mean that I can't think about new dances, or even be willing to improvise a little as I hear new music for the first time.

She also has a wonderful line about how she responds to her vocal critics: "When we become CEOs, they give us CEO pills, and that allows us to remain strong in the face of all this criticism." Nooyi has the emotional and psychological stamina to hold her course, to try an imagine a future for her company that extends far beyond the limits of what anyone can confidently predict.

As I think about leadership in these sabbatical months, I'd like to cultivate my own ability to imagine the future, to be a fertile breeding ground for new ideas and possibilities, and to increase my capacity to risk failure as I work with my congregation to take new ideas from the drawing board and clothe them with the flesh and bone of practical ministry.

Daybreak in Alabama

2011-04-29T07:58:00.001-07:00

This just showed up on Facebook via Louie Crew. A beautiful Langston Hughes poem and a way to connect with the people of Alabama.

Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

In the whirlwind

2011-04-29T04:47:00.000-07:00

I have been praying for the people of Alabama especially these last two days. These terrible storms have cut a wide path of destruction through; the southeast, and there is plenty of damage and devastation everywhere, but over the last few months, Alabama has become more than just a place on a map to me. Now I have some names and faces and personalities and context to go with Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa and Huntsville and I have a sense of how active and involved with their communities the Episcopal church is in that diocese.

I found this prayer for rescue workers while internet searching this morning - I think it comes from our friends, the Lutherans -

Merciful Father, we commend to Your keeping all who work to bring rescue and relief especially all firefighter, police, paramedics, volunteers, all who are helping out. Give them courage in danger, skill in difficulty, and compassion in service. Sustain them with bodily strength and calmness of mind that they may perform their work to the well-being of those in need so that lives may be say ed and communities restored

I'm trying to imagine the stamina and strength it takes to start to dig out a community after something like this, how overwhelming it must feel to face so much destruction.

"Thou soul of love and bravery"

2011-04-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

That's a line from "The Minstrel Boy", one of Thomas Moore's "Irish Melodies" and one of Gerry's all time favorite pieces of music. When Andy made a slide show of photographs for the funeral in Blacksburg, he used Van Morrison's cover of the song; the last slide was "Thou soul of love and bravery" with Gerry's birth and death dates, and I thought they were the most perfect valedictory he could have. He was indeed a soul filled with love and with bravery; the bravery I never guessed until the cancer journey began, but the love I always knew about.

I do use Facebook to unobtrusively stalk my kids - it's been a good way to monitor their moods in this hard year of grief without having to breathe down their necks - and I noticed that they've both posted pictures of them with Gerry when they were babies. He was a doting, adorable father who could also snort flames of wrath if they pushed him too far.

So today is a year. On the morning of April 27th, 2010, I got to the hospital at 7, and although the nurses told me he'd had a bad night, he was hungry and ate a good breakfast, and sent me down to the hospital cafeteria in search of a juice he liked. Twelve hours later, he was dead. In all my years of being around sick people and people in various stages of the dying process, I've never seen anyone change so fast. And it all happened after the "family meeting" at about 1pm, when his kind, very present oncologist said gently that there was nothing left but hospice.

It's a vestry day, a post-Easter communion visit day, a lunch with a parishioner day: life hasn't stood still this past year, and it isn't standing still today.

But oh Gerry - I miss you with every breath, and remember you as the soul of love and bravery that everyone who loved you knew.

Falling in love with God

2011-04-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

"We Anglicans are not given to writing great theology. There are notable exceptions, but they are difficult to remember; but when Anglicanism is at its best, its liturgy, its poetry, its music and its life can create a world of wonder in which it is very easy to fall in love with God." Urban (Terry) Holmes

My friend George Werner just posted this quote on Facebook - and I thought, what a wonderful way to move into the liturgy, poetry and music of Holy Week.

A member of the parish commented yesterday on how powerful the Palm Sunday service was, and I laughed and made my standard response, "The Book of Common Prayer never lets you down". Over the years, I've really learned to trust the liturgy and to minimize how much I tinker with it. I've learned that if I don't mess with the BCP too much, and don't try to impose another agenda on it, that "world of wonder" can indeed be created and people will be drawn into the mystery of Word and Sacrament.

Terry Holmes reminds me that ultimately, whatever abstract excursions we make into the realm of theology and philosophy, our faith is in a Person, and is lived out in covenant relationship. Falling in love always has its own logic; we love who we love, no matter what common sense tells us, and I think faith is the same way. This week we don't write essays about the theology of atonement, we tell a story about one man who surrenders himself to his enemies and gives himself over to suffering and death. And that story compels those with eyes to see and ears to hear, to fall in love with the One who chooses death on a cross for us.

Unexpected

2011-04-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

Last autumn, when he was in remission and feeling well, Gerry planted six little chrysanthemums in our front yard. They grew and bloomed prodigiously through the fall and well into the winter, but the lovely color and greenery gave way eventually to woody, withered brown stems. They looked well and truly dead and hopeless and I figured there was nothing to do but dig them up and get rid of them (if you didn’t realize this already, I know NOTHING about gardening).

So last Sunday after church, when the sun was warm, I decided to tackle them by cutting back as much as the dead stuff as I could before I started digging. You know where this is going. As I ruthlessly hacked away at the stems, I began to catch glimpses of tender little green leaves clustered at the base of each plant, down beneath a winter’s worth of dead leaves and other detritus. At first I thought they couldn’t possibly be mums, but some interloper instead; they looked completely different from the mature plants Gerry had put in. But once I was finished cutting all the dead stuff away, it was clear that I had six identical little clumps of fresh new growth. Gerry’s mums are coming back.

I normally steer away from sentimental associations between spring growth cycles and the miracle of the resurrection, but this year the sight of those brave little spears of green made me weep with joy. St. Paul tells the Corinthians that our resurrection bodies will be as different from our physical bodies as a full grown plant is from a naked seed. What is sown in weakness is raised in power. All that nasty dead overgrowth in my front yard was really sheltering something new and fresh and full of life where I least expected it.

The ancient and beautiful liturgies of Holy Week draw us into the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, how he lays down his life for us in order to be raised from death by the lie-giving power of God. Easter is always a lovely celebration at St. Martin’s, but it will have more power and meaning for you if you spend a little time in the week walking the way of the cross. You may find something new and fresh and full of life where you least expect it.

Remebering Oscar Romero

2011-03-24T11:54:00.001-07:00

"A gospel that doesn't unsettle, a Word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a Word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, what Gospel is that?" Archbishop Oscar Romero

Today is the 21^st anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Romero, shot to death while he celebrated the Eucharist in El Salvador. He is remembered for his relentless advocacy for the poor and marginalized in his country and for his refusal to back down from his very public positions even when his life was threatened.

My Facebook friends have posted a number of Archbishop Romero’s quotes today, but this one especially caught my eye. As we were leaving the Vestry meeting last night, a member observed (and now I’m paraphrasing) that this Christianity stuff is serious and indeed unsettling, and that there is a tension between the need people have to feel comfort and consolation from their religious practice, and the inherent un-comfortableness of the Gospel.

This Lent, we hear four tremendous stories from the Gospel of John that pull us into the unsettling nature of the Word of God and show us just how threatening it can be. Last week, Nicodemus came to see Jesus by night and was told that he had to be born from above – in other words, business as usual won’t cut it – Nicodemus has to start over. On Sunday, we spend time with an anonymous Samaritan woman that Jesus meets by a well – a woman who has a sinful, shameful past, who is from an ethnic group shunned by observant Jews and who, by every reasonable standard, Jesus should simply ignore. Then comes the Sabbath healing of a man born blind, which throws everyone in the synagogue into a tizzy and provokes a hostile reaction from the religious authorities against Jesus, the man born blind, and even the man’s parents. And finally, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead – and literally, all hell breaks loose.

If the Gospel doesn’t make us uncomfortable, it isn’t the Gospel. That’s hard for all of us to hear – no wonder the disciples keep objecting when Jesus says he is going to Jerusalem to be crucified. But somehow, when the Word of God does creep under the skin and when I allow it to unsettle and discomfit me – then somehow new possibilities, new strength, new hope emerge. We lose our lives in order to find them – we give up what we have in order to receive more than we ever imagined.

Remember That You Are Dust

2011-03-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday. I not quite as geeked out as I used to be - when I was a new rector and felt so acutely responsible for communicating the beauty and the power of the day to my congregation. Now I've learned to trust the Book of Common Prayer more and worry about things a little less; some people will come and some people will not - but the liturgy will do its work among those who are there and for those who are not. But I still love the day - love smudging ashes and reminding myself and anyone my hand rests on that we are dust and that we are not going to end up as anything else.

My very first Ash Wednesday as a priest, I was serving St. Luke's in Metuchen, New Jersey. I was the celebrant at the mid-morning service, which consisted mostly of the older women who were the regulars at the weekly Wednesday morning service. There were a few additional people sprinkled in that day, including a young woman with a baby about six months old. I can still remember how powerful it was for me to touch her smooth, petal-soft baby skin and then the dry and wrinkled skin of the much older person next to her at the altar rail. All our mortality and the aching beauty of being human seemed to be summed up in those two foreheads - one at the very beginning of life and one near the end. That was 27 years ago! Hard to believe that the baby is probably now a mother herself, and that the elderly woman has long been welcomed into paradise. I was 28 myself - and would have that day been incapable of imagining myself double that age, incapable of imagining who I am now - a widow with two adult children and a whole lifetime in between.

When we took Gerry home to Blacksburg in May, I carried his ashes onto the plane. It was both awful and beautiful. Awful because the TSA people had to take the crematory box out of my hands and swab it to make sure it wasn't explosives instead of human remains (they were kind and apologetic, but still it was a ghastly moment). And it was beautiful because I could cradle him in my arms and have him close to me for just a little while longer. It was so intimate, and it made me think about Ash Wednesday and about how all of us will end up - some of us sooner and some of us later - but we'll all be dust and ashes before we're done.

There is a beautiful post on the Episcopal Cafe web site about Ash Wednesday about taking the liturgy to the streets of San Francisco. It's written by Sarah Miles, who many know from her book, "Take This Bread." I wish I'd thought of taking our St. Martin's ashes down to Wayland Square today - thought of offering this sign of mortality and mercy to people who would never dream of coming to church. Next year - if God grants it.

Bleak Midwinter

2010-12-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

The grief hit unexpectedly the afternoon of Christmas Eve - hit so hard it left me gasping. It came via, of all things, Facebook. I'd just finished my sermon and was noodling around with Facebook before going to up shower and get reading for the 4pm service. I've just changed to the new profile format and as soon as my homepage came up, there was a picture of Gerry - the picture he used on Facebook - from our 2004 trip to Ireland, sitting on a hillside overlooking the sea in County Clare, with a dandelion tucked behind each year. He looks sweet and silly and just like I that I was overwhelmed with longing for him.

I started to cry, like I haven't wept for weeks, those tears that come out of such a deep place in the heart, that place that's torn and doesn't feel as if it will ever be healed again. Mary heard me - she must have bat ears in our big old house - and came downstairs to be with me and we cried together for awhile, and it seemed to help. I knew grief was dammed up in me somewhere, I'd felt the pressure building, but with so much to do it never had a chance to come out.

But once the dam had broken, I felt like I was drowning. The whole evening felt strange and hard and I realized how much I'd depended on Gerry, for 25 years, to take care of everything on Christmas Eve so that I didn't have to do anything but church. I had never, ever noticed how quietly he'd taken over managing everything - from when we ate dinner, to getting everybody to church, to putting everything out under the tree and in the stockings. Without him, I felt like a spinning top - out of control and helpless - it was a relief to actually get back to church for the late service, because there at least, I knew what my job was.

But tears stood just behind my eyes all through the liturgy. Another new widow embraced me afterwards and we whispered together a moment - and that helped. This kind of bereavement is really like an alternative universe, and no one knows what it's like unless they are in that universe, too. And I think the really, really hard thing to accept, the bitter thing that everyone in that universe tells me, is that you can't ever get out of the universe. You can't ever go back to not knowing what this is like, there's never a moment that it's not part of the air you breathe. This doesn't mean I don't have moments of joy, moments of happiness and pleasure - I do - and I am thankful to God that I seem to be able to have more and more of those moments as the days go by. But I can't ever get back to the old universe - that universe is gone forever.

This morning, it was much better. It felt more like Thanksgiving did - like Gerry was here, just - not here. Like he was still part of things. We had a nice morning together, with blood orange mimosas, beautiful croissants that a parishioner gives me for Christmas every year, good strong coffee and finally presents. When we were all done, Mom turned to me and said quietly that she was proud of me. It's funny how much power that praise has, even at my age.

This is how selfish I am: I would have him back, even that last terrible week when he was so sick and fighting the inevitable so hard. I would have him back, because even beaten down and in pain, Gerry was always utterly and completely himself. He was funny and quick and smart, and he wanted so much to stay with us. He fought for life like a warrior - not because he was afraid to die, but because he loved us so much. If the only thing I can do for him now is be the best daughter and mother I can be, then I'll try my hardest.

The Art of Worship

2010-12-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

We have a new member at St. Martin's, a young man who found us because we are right up the hill from his alcohol-rehabilitation halfway house. He sort of hung around in the back at the early service for a few weeks, and would shyly ask me to sign the slip that attested he had indeed been in church that morning. After a few Sundays he opened up a little, telling me that when he had gone to church as a child, it had been very different worship from what he experienced with us - pentecostal, from what he described. He said something I loved - that he found "space" in our liturgy, space for his own prayer and meditation.

This past Sunday, a very different new member, a retired UCC minister who has been indulging his fondness for liturgical worship, said the same thing. He couldn't be more different from the young man in the first paragraph, in education, background and affluence, but he had the same response to our ancient sacramental rite. And then, just because preachers always talk in threes, I had another conversation with a young woman at one of our regular small group dinners who said she loved the Episcopal church because at worship, she could trust that the liturgy would support her own prayer and that she didn't have to "pay attention". That sounds like a bad thing, but I understood it to mean that she can let herself lean into the liturgy and let her prayer percolate more deeply. And that's a good thing.

And that made me think again about how much I wanted to go lean into the liturgy the Sunday morning after my Uncle Jack's funeral a few weeks ago in Tucson. I was spiritually hungry - feeling my own grief stirred up and having sat through the Eucharist at my uncle's Roman Catholic requiem mass (now - the subject of a whole other post, wondering whether this made my stern Scotch-Irish Presbyterian granny spin in her grave). So I found a church near the hotel and made my way to the 8am service.

It was not what I had expected - and some of that was lovely. The liturgy was thoughtful and well-prepared, and they had lots of music, including sung responses to the prayers of the people that I really enjoyed. The parish identified itself as progressive and had an impressive list of outreach connections and activity in the community. The liturgy was full of alternative material, which in general I think is a very good thing, but there was so much, that I lost the sense of being able to trust the liturgy to do the heavy lifting for me. I had to always be dipping my head back into the bulletin to make sure I was offering the correct responses. This began to be pretty aggravating as it carried on into the Eucharistic prayer itself.

I would expect that the church would say that they are trying to make their worship more accessible to newcomers, but I wondered why, if a bulletin is fully printed out, nonprayerbook material would be any more accessible. It was all very earnest and well meaning, but the barrage of different images, unfamiliar responses and reference to current events began to crowd out my own prayer.

The final blow was when I went forward to receive, and of course, by now I'm sure the rector had identified me as a visitor. Like I always do, when I have the opportunity to receive at another altar, I do what I was taught eons ago in confirmation class; I kneel, lift my hands up and keep my head down. The celebrant, longing to make a connection with me, almost bent double trying to make eye contact. I wanted to tell him to get out of the way (I know it sounds really snarky), that it wasn't about any personal moment between the two of us. I just wanted to be fed. I am ashamed to say I fled immediately afterwards, because I just couldn't bear being "welcomed".

The three comments I heard from three very different people in the weeks after my Tucson excursion have helped me put this all in perspective. Our liturgy really is an art form. I often tell people prior to weddings and funerals that my motto is "The Book of Common Prayer will never let you down; just don't get in its way." I do indeed love some of the alternative texts, and the Advent preface especially that was used in Tucson, was quite beautiful. I think it's important that we always be mindful of how easy our liturgy is for strangers to use, but perhaps we aren't always making things as easy as we think.

Worship doesn't just happen in the cerebral cortex - it comes from some deeper part of us that I think sometimes can only be accessed when our brains can empty out a little. It's what spoke to me when I was a clueless 14 year old and went to my first Episcopal service at boarding school - this space for something else to happen besides just processing a lot of words. I love having a liturgy that prays for me and with me, when I don't have the heart always to pray for myself.

Loss upon loss

2010-12-02T19:09:00.001-08:00

I am writing at 30,000 feet partly because I can.

I am enroute to Tucson, where my uncle Jack Markham will be buried on Saturday. He was the middle of my mother's three younger brothers, and sort of the family black sheep - which means really, he was only a little gray, but I suspect he was my mother's favorite and when she called on Thanksgiving to tell me he had died, I could tell she was badly shaken.

Both of her remaining brothers, though younger than she is, have bad dementia, and I realized that she's kind of on her own when it comes to mourning Jack. He was married (fourth marriage, third wife - he married one twice), but even though my parents visited regularly, I don't think Mom and Mary Ann ever warmed up to each other, and I'm sure we'll be out of the inner family loop. So I decided to head out west myself, so that Mom has someone to drink and cry with. My father doesn't do emotion, and I just hated the thought of Mom being by herself in all of this.

USAir has wifi, and it's a long flight, and I figured at least I could accomplish something besides playing suduku on my Blackberry and trying to figure out lattice energy problems for chemistry. I'm going to get back to Providence late Sunday night, set the alarm for six and head right back out for another funeral.

Back in seminary, I had a great friend named James, who was erudite and witty and generous and a wonderful dancer. We would dress up and go swing dancing at clubs in Boston, and he'd have wine and cheese parties and everything would be lovely. For the first few years of our ordained life we stayed in touch. I was in New Jersey and he was on Long Island and we visited, and hosted dinner parties and went to the weddings of friends together. He had a partner for awhile, and I met Gerry and we got married fast, and then moved to New Hampshire and I lost touch with James for a long time.

James died Monday - hardly more than a month after being diagnosed with colon cancer. He was rector of a lovely place in Maine, and his funeral will be at the cathedral in Portland on Monday morning. I can hardly believe it - none of us can. Monday, phones were ringing all over the country as my tight seminary class shared the news.

You know, it's just too much loss. I'm beginning to be afraid that some part of me is simply going to shut down, or turn off. Looking for a pair of nail clippers today, I finally opened one of the drawers in Gerry's bedside table - something I've avoided doing, and the grief and loss rose up like a cloud. The drawer was full of his peculiar paraphernalia. He loved handkerchiefs, and clip on sunglasses, and those Croaker things that hold your glasses on when you exercise. A couple of pen knifes, a stack of old birthday and anniversary cards (he hated throwing anything away), and then a bag full of all the stuff he'd used to ease the symptoms of the plague that killed him. Spray for dry mouth, band aids for the peeling skin on his fingers, inhalers, ointment - it made me realize again just how uncomfortable he must have been for months and months - discomfort he never complained about because he didn't want to upset me.

Oh sweet blessed Jesus, I miss him. And I'm sad for James, and for my Uncle Jack - and for my own parents who are well into their 80s and can't possibly live forever. There's just nothing that makes this better - a colleague of mine said on her own blog earlier today, marking the anniversary of the death of her daughter, that grief doesn't get better - you just learn to live with it, to navigate with it as your constant companion. And I think that must be true.

I am hoping that Gerry, and James and Uncle Jack are in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life everlasting. I hope there IS such a place. I will stand with the living one more time as we bury the dead - I guess in the end, that's the most of any of us can do.

Holidays

2010-11-26T07:29:00.001-08:00

One down. It's Friday morning, and the challenge of getting through the first major holiday is behind us. And it was OK. Better than OK. Lovely, in fact - and that's a tremendous blessing. When we (three of Mary's friends from Harvard) and I finally sat down at 8PM, we held hands and said what we were thankful for. And Mary said, "I'm thankful that we could put all this together without Dad" and suddenly, it was all worth it.

At the beginning of the week, I was so sad and so afraid that I couldn't pull it off that I wanted to crawl under a rock. Gerry was always the heart and soul of the holidays at our house, the one who decorated, and got into all the traditions and the sentiment, and a big part of me just wanted to pretend that the holidays didn't exist this year. I was all for taking a trip to some exotic locale and putting my head in the sand and ignoring the dates on the calendar. I flirted with flying Mary and me out to California to be with Andy, but decided that was expensive and impractical. And not fair to Mary, who really needs this couple of days to unwind and catch up on sleep before heading into exams.

So, I put my big girl panties on and went to the grocery store and started thinking about food and making beds. Mary's friends are sweet and supportive and so easy to be around. They slept late Thursday morning and then plunged into baking pies. My menu was a little more elaborate than I had first intended it to be, but I discovered this year that the slow cooker is your friend - I braised red cabbage in it Wednesday night, and Thursday used it to cook potatoes.

When the pies came out of the oven, it was about 2 and we decided to drive over to Horseneck Beach and take a walk. The little 10 pound turkey came out of the fridge to come to room temperature - and we piled into the van. The beach was perfect - it was gray and cold, but not windy and George ran and sniffed other dogs and we just kind of ambled along until I decided that, if we were ever going to eat that night, we'd better head back.

And here's another blessing: I realized that if I had walked into the house at 4:30 and said, "you know, I really don't feel like cooking this turkey" - that would have been fine. And that got me over the last hump. Starting the turkey at 425 and a convection oven produced a beautiful brown bird before 7:30, I still have my gravy making juju and we broke open the champagne, the candlelight and the prayers a little before 8.

It was a lovely day - and somehow, Gerry seemed very present through it all. And that was another blessing. I was afraid that doing the things he loved would make his absence too painful, but it actually worked the other way. It actually made him seem closer, still part of the family - just, not here. I missed him, but it not in that terrible aching, empty way.

Andy will be home in three weeks for Christmas, and he's promised to do all the decorating. My parents will come up for the week and I'll be surrounded with love and support. And now I know that I can get through it, and that the holidays aren't something just to be endured. They will bring their own sweetness, and unexpected moments of grace.

Half a Year

2010-10-28T13:56:00.001-07:00

It was six months yesterday. I wondered what I ought to do. It's not quite an anniversary - it didn't seem right to take the day off, or otherwise break out of my routine. It was my week to celebrate at the 7am Eucharist, but I kept the date to myself - just murmuring Gerry's name when we prayed for the departed. But later in the day, I found myself desperate to go to a Eucharist on All Souls' - some place where I can pray in blessed anonymity.

One day in late August, Mary observed that she was no longer waiting for him to come down the stairs. That's true. I know he's gone - Joan Didion said she had a year of magical thinking, but I've had more like four months. By the beginning of September, I knew I had to pick up the pieces and move into whatever life is going to be like now. It's good not to have that terrible, howling grief that was so hard to bear through the summer - but it's also another plateau of loss. The intensity of mourning in some perverse way kept me feeling connected to him. Now I just miss him - miss his intelligence, and his wit, and his company and how handy he was around the house. I miss arguing with him and snuggling with him and picking up all the glasses he would he would leave all over the house. I miss being kissed and I miss him telling me "you look great," which could mean anything from "you look stunning," to "I'm not ashamed to be seen with you."

I knew I was feeling better one Saturday in September - when all of a sudden I wanted eggplant parmigiana. I didn't just want it, I wanted to make it. It was really the first time I've wanted to cook since Gerry died. So I did - I picked out a couple of nice, plump smooth eggplants, and made a delicious, reasonably low-fat version and even invited a friend to come eat it with me. It felt normal and I felt like I was back in my own skin after being disincarnate and lost for months. Eggplant was one of those things that I love and Gerry loathed and I never made when I was cooking for us. Now I can eat eggplant, and beets and tofu and olives and artichokes and kale.

And I'm going to call Martin Smith, my old spiritual director, and go down to meet with him to learn what discernment means at this time in my life and ministry. For twenty five years, I've done what I was supposed to do - and that's been a blessing and a privilege. I have a rewarding and challenging ministry - I had a happy, strong and committed marriage - and I have two of the smartest, kindest, most loving children anyone could hope for. I've been lucky, and I know it and I'm grateful.

But what now? What next? I don't know how to listen for God's voice if God isn't speaking to me through duty and obligation. I am learning to navigate in a different way - I no longer believe that I'm wandering lost in a wilderness, but the compass is still strange and I'll have to learn to read it. In a funny way, struggling through my chemistry class is showing me that I still have stamina and determination, and that working hard can still produce results. Some laws of the universe still work.

What will the next six months bring?

True North

2010-07-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

I lost my husband.

I've said that over and over again since April 27.

I lost my husband. Sometimes I say simply, "My husband died." You actually have to say it a lot - every time you make a phone call to anyone who has a reason to think that Gerry is still alive. I say it to lawyers and to banks, to credit card companies and doctor's offices - and every time I think that I'm not going to have to say it anymore, something else comes in the mail, requiring that I pick up the phone and say, "I lost my husband."

It's such a strange little phrase. But it's way better than "passed away," which was the euphemism of choice when I was growing up in the South. And oh, how I hate the euphemism du jour, "he passed." What the hell does that mean? It aggravates the grammarian in me. Passed what? A test? A car? A competitor? It doesn't mean anything - it just reflects yet again how uncomfortable we are with death. Gerry died. I've been at a lot of death beds, and seen a lot of dead bodies and however striking and individual we are in life, we are all exactly alike in death. He died. I have no idea what has happened to him. I know what popular sentiment says, and I know what our mostly Victorian piety says, and I have been reading a lot to find out exactly what the earliest Christian witness testimony says, but I don't know.

I don't like to think of him hovering around watching us - missing us. That gives me no comfort at all. I want to think of him, if any part of him has endured, in some reality that is so categorically different from this one, that really "there is no pain or grief, neither sighing, but life everlasting." I don't want him to have any sense of absence, or loss or pain. He endured so much and fought so hard, and tried to hang on because he just didn't want to leave us. I don't want him now to yearn for anything at all. I'd rather there be oblivion than that.

I've lost my husband. And I feel lost without him. It's as if I'm wandering in this new, strange landscape that sort of looks like the world I knew, but is completely different. The landmarks, the touchstones, the points I used for navigation are all gone. He really was my true north - the magnet that always drew me home. Of the two of us, I was always the restless one, the one who needed to be on the move, who loved junkets and jaunts and was always ready to travel. But I always knew who home was, and who would be there to welcome me back and who was steady and true and loyal and solid as granite.

I miss him terribly. And I don't know quite how to find my way forward. Everyone tells me is just takes time. I'm doing everything right - I'm eating and exercising and talking to people and keeping up with the paperwork and not drinking too much - I'm perfectly functional. But I'm lost.

I've lost him, and somehow that means I'm lost as well. It's a terrible wilderness and I'm wandering in it without a compass.

Learning To Listen

2009-11-10T09:12:00.000-08:00

I used to think I was pretty good at providing pastoral care. But as I've been taught in this hard school of mortal illness in my own family, I've discovered that I didn't know very much after all. I know that people mostly mean well, but I've learned that very few people can bear to be truly present with the deep pain and sadness that we are all living with. And now I regret all the times I thought I was being "helpful" to others, when probably I was only irritating them, and they were just too nice or too weary to tell me so. I realized how much this experience has changed me when I went to the hospital this week to be with the wife of someone who'd just had a severe stroke. My own broken heart has shown me how inadequate most of our words are, and taught me that saying nothing is actually the most powerful way of speak.

My dear friend and colleague Chris Foster from Providence Presbyterian Church, who can indeed be silent in that most holy and present way, sent this along to me this week:

DEEP LISTENING: How to connect with and take seriously people who are suffering
Bill O'Hanlon, Bill@billohanlon.com,http://www.billohanlon.com

Sit with the person's pain and suffering with compassion instead of offering positive stories or trying to fix, give advice or suggestions. Be willing to do nothing, just be with, acknowledge and honor the person, their pain and their suffering. Just having told one's story can often be powerfully therapeutic.
Attend to the person's story and experience rather than your own idea.
Be aware of the bias many of us have and our culture has toward redemptive stories. Do not try to change, rewrite, reframe or invalidate the person's non-redemptive, non-happy ending stories.
Give credit for small or large efforts, endurance or strength in facing challenges without being patronizing.
Keep one foot in acknowledgment and one in possibilities, but do not insist on always speaking the possibilities.
Avoid platitudes:
Everything will work out.
God doesn't give you more than you can handle.
You are going to be all right.

Avoid glib explanations:
Why did you create this?
I wonder what you are meant to learn from this?
What part of you needs or benefits from this pain?

Speak to the complexity of the situation by including seeming contradictions:
You can't go on suffering like this and you don't want to die.
You want to give up and you don't want to give up.

Frank, Arthur. (1998) "Just Listening: Narrative and Deep Illness," Families, Systems and Health, 16(3): 197-212.
Kleinman, A. (1988) The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and The Human Condition. NY: Basic Books.
Kushner, Harold S. (1981) When Bad Things Happen to Good People. NY: Avon.
Mobile Phone Email

Greg Carpenter LMFT
Individual & Family Therapy
546 Arcade Ave.
Seekonk, Ma. 02771
#401.265.2951
www.energizingthejourney.net
www.gcarpenter.net

Chris Foster
Co-Pastor
Providence Presbyterian Church
http://www.provpresri.org
(H) 401 454 0176
(email) cjfoster@alumni.princeton.edu

I think that cites everything that should be cited!

I was especially struck by that emphasis on our need for redemptive stories. There are so many stories without happy endings, and it takes real courage, maturity and self-discipline to resist the urge to look for something redemptive. God will knit all that up together as God can - but that is most decidedly not what a person in the middle of tragedy needs to hear. There are some things that simply cannot be fixed; sometimes I just want to lay my head down and howl my grief.

This is probably why I'm finding that I get very twitchy when people ask me "how's Gerry?" In fact, I don't want to talk about about Gerry is, especially in a grocery store aisle, at a meeting or on Sunday morning. What I do want to know is who can bear to listen when I need to acknowledge my own broken heart, or acknowledge how scared I am, or express the depth of my pain for Gerry. It's hard to be helpless, but being helpless with me may actually be the most helpful thing of all.

Writing a new story

2009-11-07T09:59:00.000-08:00

We all have stories - ways that we weave together the different parts of our lives into some kind of a coherent narrative. Sometimes these are stories that we just tell ourselves, sometimes we share those stories with others, and sometimes those stories become official "biographies" that we post on our web sites or give out as press releases. However we use them, the stories we tell about ourselves help us make sense of the circumstances and events of our lives.

I know one story that I've told about myself for years is that I have no talent for science or math. My last science class was Biology my sophomore year of high school. I remember it being an absolutely miserable experience and somehow I managed to talk my way out of having ever to take chemistry and physics. However did they let me graduate??? I decided not to take calculus in high school because I knew it would wreak havoc with my GPA. I played it safe with whatever "senior math" was instead.

This was long enough ago that no one talked about learning differences, or different ways to present material, or right brain/left brain stuff. I just made up my mind that I couldn't do science and math, and that didn't bother me much. In those days I was still destined for the stage - and didn't want to waste my time with lab reports and problem sets when I could be rehearsing a show. But over the years, I found that science never quite seemed to go away. Childhood interests in astronomy and earth science could still be piqued by a good popular book like those by John McPhee. I dragged the kids to meteor showers, loved natural history museums and every so often, wondered whether I might have gone to medical school. But mostly I kept telling myself the story that I didn't have any talent for science and math.

I have been bitterly reminded this summer of just how brief our lives are and that we must not put things off. So I went down to CCRI in August and registered for Biology 1001. It was partly an exploration, partly to see if I could prove something to myself, and partly wondering what other vocational ideas God might have for me. I didn't tell anyone about it until after I'd had a few classes because I was afraid I might flame out and have to drop the class. But I find that I love it, that I'm perfectly capable of doing the work, that whatever I ultimately do, just learning something about how life is organized is fascinating and useful.

Here's where the story changes. I've reconnected with one of my high school friends. Peggy was one of the smartest girls in the school (my parents kept telling me that I ought to be more like Peggy - she was also a hard worker which I was not so much) and she was especially good at math. I'd always assumed that she was also good at science, too. But when she found out that I was taking bio, she mentioned that our high school teacher had ruined it for her forever (best comment: "(the teacher) looked like a praying mantis only less interesting.")

And all of a sudden I realized that maybe my story needed to be rewritten. Maybe the issue wasn't that I was bad at science, but that I hadn't had a good teacher. Maybe if I'd had a science teacher as enthusiastic and gifted as my history and english teachers were, I would have tried chemistry and maybe I would have thought about medicine and not given up so quickly on myself. It's hard to tell - because I really was focused on show business in those days and nothing else could capture my attention - but it's really liberating, all these years later, to think that maybe the problem was at least partly due to poor instruction. Maybe the problem was just as much the teacher as the student.

Now I'm wondering what other stories can be written - what things I've told myself that just aren't true. I'm wondering what other possibilities are out there.

Bad Things Happen

2009-09-30T10:21:00.001-07:00

I've started reading the obituaries. I take a good look at them every morning with my second cup of coffee, after I say my prayers. It started some time this summer when I began to notice just how often someone dies young. "Young" is, of course, a relative term, but in general my eyes search for those who die before their 60th birthday. As Gerry battles his cancer our own thoughts turn, however seldom, to his life expectancy, and this summer, when I was feeling so scared and sad and isolated somehow it helped to know that we weren't very special at all.

Bad things happen all the time. And whether they happen to "good" people or not, those bad things leave a trail of grief in their wake. That's what I think about when I read the obituaries. There are all the premature deaths from cancer and sometimes heart disease. References to young children still at home, left without a parent at such a vulnerable age. And then there are the "died unexpectedly at home" obits which makes me think about a suicide, or perhaps a drug overdose. And then I wonder about all the sadness that came before, the darkness and depression and despair that goes with severe mental illness or with addiction.

Reading the obituaries doesn't depress me. In fact, it makes me feel connected by this web of mortality and human experience. It's a way to reflect prayerfully and deliberately on what it means to be a created being, and how Gerry and I are part of something that comes to all of us sooner or later. It makes me feel a little less lonely.

The new chemo regimen left Gerry feeling pretty puny. He had one drug administered at the infusion center, and then came home with another drug attached to a pump, which he wore continually for five days. The toxicity of these drugs is much higher, and the nausea and fatigue are more intense. And I just sort of came apart on Sunday, overwhelmed with stress and sadness.

So many people have expressed so much kindness and such a desire to help, that I wish I could find a way to put all that good will to work. But you know, there's just nothing to be done. Bad things happen. Being stressed and sad is simply part of this experience, and no amount of hugs, casseroles, therapy or pharmaceuticals can do much to change that. I am trying to stay balanced - doing all the right stress management things like sleeping enough, eating right, getting plenty of sleep. And Gerry and I can talk about it openly to each other, which helps, too. We know each other so well that one can tell when the other is hiding something, so we don't waste much energy trying to conceal things.

So - to everyone who wants to know what he or she can do to help - please keep praying. That's what I can feel as tangibly as any casserole or embrace. Bad things happen. God's grace abounds. I don't have much more to say than that.

Cancer Cells

2009-09-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

"Cancer cells are those that have forgotten how to die."

That quote appeared in a little sidebar in my biology textbook's chapter on cell division. It's an epigraph attributed to a hospital nurse, that precedes a poem by Harold Pinter called "Cancer Cells." You can find the whole poem here.

I didn't want to read the cancer section in the textbook. Just looking at the section heading made me feel sick and scared. And then, finally, I realized that knowledge isn't our enemy and that giving in to fear wouldn't be helpful. So I opened the book yesterday and read right before the Monday night lecture started.

Cancer cells have forgotten how to die. That is actually true. I learned that healthy cells have a kind of odometer in them that track how many times that cell divides. On average, a healthy cell will divide about 50 times and then die, which maintains a balance between young, middle aged and old cells and also ensures that a mutated cell won't have unlimited opportunity to keep spawning itself.

But in cancer cells, that odometer is turned off. They keep dividing forever, until surgery or some chemical agent or radiation kills them. And once they are in the lymph system, the way Gerry's cancer is, then they can travel anywhere in the body and start new colonies of immortal cells.

I also learned that cancer cells don't have the same boundaries healthy cells maintain between themselves. Cancer cells don't mind being piled up on top of each other; they don't shut down production when they achieve a certain density.

Gerry and I are regrouping after learning that his treatment over the last several months hasn't had the result we'd hoped for. The cancer is continuing to spread, although perhaps more slowly. He continues to look and feel remarkably well, which is a great blessing and a sign that these new colonies of cells aren't affecting him in any noticeable way. He will start a new chemo regimen tomorrow, and we are also going to head down to Sloan Kettering in Manhattan to explore the possibility of some clinical trials. We just haven't had a terribly good experience at Dana Farber - the head and neck cancer guru there spent most of Gerry's consultation making contemptuous comments about the quality of medicine practiced in Rhode Island.

And I keep thinking about these cells that won't die. It reminds me of Adam and Eve trying to be like God in the garden, or of Lucifer in rebellion in heaven. Cancer cells are not how they were intended to be; they are a perversion of creation, a rebellion against God's purpose. How strange that these cells, which violate the most basic fact of life - everything is mortal, are themselves agents of mortality. I keep thinking about healthy boundaries and balance and all the things we strive for in our own lives.

Cancer cells have forgotten how to die. And somehow, their presence is teaching Gerry and me something about how to live.

Religion Ruins Everything

2009-09-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

This is the title of a book by professional athiest Christopher Hitchens. It was cited at my first biology lecture at CCRI last week, as the professor presented the difference between religion and science. I thought, of course, that the professor was on surer ground when he was talking about what science is - especially how science progresses by finding out things are false. He obviously knows a lot more about biology than he does about theology, and seemed to assume that anyone in the classroom who'd had any religious instruction at all was going to start screaming at him about evolution.

I didn't wear my collar in the classroom.

He didn't have anything original to say about the perceived conflicts between religion and science, mentioning the expected biggies like Galileo and the Catholic church and the Scopes Trial. But he was a stimulating and very interesting lecturer in biology and the two hour lecture flew by. On the drive home though, I started thinking about the proposition that "religion ruins everything."

Of course, I'd say it's not religion's fault. I'd say instead the human sin ruins everything. My bio professor and Chris Hitchens, and Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, etc. would say that religion ruins everything by making believers sloppy thinkers, unable to evaluate or interpret data because we're blinded by religious beliefs.

I get nervous in general when people make sweeping generalizations about other people. And I wondered, as my teacher was discussing the big scientific paradigm shifts: the Copernican revolution, Darwin and Einstein , that he was awfully certain that he'd have been on the right side of scientific history. I mean, not just the church thought Copernicus was nuts. Those big paradigm shifts challenged everyone's thinking - yes, thinking conditioned by the pervasive teaching of the church, but I don't think that scientific data is always as self-evident as anti-religionists claim.

And scientists of course fall in love with their own theories, ignore or misinterpret crucial data, and are conditioned by whatever cultural and philosophical soup they swim in. Sloppy thinking isn't just the purview of believers.

And religious institutions aren't the only human organizations that can be infected by sin. Greed, pride, anger, lust for power, etc., etc., aren't just problems for the Church.

Talking about sin seems awfully regressive and old-fashioned, but I find that it is actually liberating for me to acknowledge that sin ruins everything. I wish we hadn't gotten so squeamish in using the word. I had numerous conversations last fall with someone deeply involved in politics, passionate about social justice and deeply angry at our country's abandonment of our most vulnerable citizens. Gee - sounds like sin to me - but somehow she couldn't connect the "throw them under the bus" attitude of the previous administration and the bible's admonition that we should care for widows and orphans.

Talking about sin is ultimately liberating for me because it recognizes that perfection is not part of human experience. We all screw up and we all are offered a way - through confession and reconciliation. to put the screw up behind us and start fresh. It's too bad that the word "sin" pushes so many buttons, because I think we'd be a healthier church, a healthier culture and healthier individuals if we could simply recognize and acknowledge our faults and ask for forgiveness from God and from each other.

The Work God Has Given Us To Do

2009-07-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

"And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do..." that line from the second post-communion prayer in the BCP has been echoing in my mind and heart the last few days, as I've been musing about vocation, prayer, work, obligation and joy. I have been thinking about the work God has given me to do through the 25 years I've been a priest, and how that work seems to be changing, even evolving.

For a long time, I believed that God was giving me work to do in the wider Church. In every other diocese I've been part of, I've been an active participant in the life of the diocese, working especially in areas of clergy and congregational development, enjoying collegial relationships with other clergy and with the bishop, broadening my experience, developing new skills and deepening my sense of connection with diocese, province and national church.

But after four years in Rhode Island, I have come to accept that God is no longer calling me to that work. Whether due to my own personality, the personality of the diocese or some unhappy combination of circumstances that I don't fully understand, the door to deeper participation in diocesan life remains closed to me. This has at times been both bewildering and deeply wounding. It has left me feeling isolated and lonely, cut off from connections that I cherished in my former diocese. I believe that I still have gifts to share, experience that might be of value, and an affection for the corporate life of the church, but I am resigned to the reality that none of that interests anyone but myself.

It's interesting that St. Martin's, my beloved, challenging, complex congregation, has also been shoved to the periphery of diocesan life, dismissed by its leadership as "that rich church." There's history there that I've been trying to piece together - mutual dislike and disappointment that goes back at least a dozen years. It's too bad, because the parish has so much to offer - so much energy, intellectual capital, artistic gifts and extraordinary hospitality. And they would benefit, too, from feeling less isolated and lonely.

In the crucible of this summer, as my husband battles for his life and St. Martin's once more enfolds me in support, tenderness and their wonderful humor, the work God has given me to do has been made clear - and I've decided to quit lamenting the work that has been taken from me and instead to embrace the vocation being revealed.

I used to wonder why St. Martin's had called me, what specific work God was preparing for me that needed me and no other. Well, perhaps plenty of others could do it, but I understand now that God needs me first and foremost to love this congregation. They were cruelly betrayed by past clergy sexual misconduct, and left mostly to fend for themselves. They've been told that they are complacent and corrupted by their wealth. They've been condemned for having a beautiful building and mocked for taking care of it.

It's not an easy place, and I've been plenty vexed over the last four years, but I have truly come to love this parish, not least because they love me. I'm not so easy either, but I'm loyal, tenacious, creative and hopeful - just like them. We really are a good match - and I'm looking forward to living into the challenges this coming year holds for us and to working with them at the ministires of prayer, worship and service that I know God is unfolding for us.

God is also giving me work to do in my family - as we've all walked through the valley of the shadow of death this summer. Gerry and I have absolutely no idea what the future holds, except for more treatment - no one is making any prognoses because his cancer is behaving so atypically. It's the hardest spiritual challenge I have ever had to face - excruciating for someone who likes to know what to expect -this being grateful for each day, and never looking too far into the future has become a practical reality and not just a pious platitude. Andy and Mary are both heading off to college in a few weeks, and part of my work is surely helping them make that enormous transition without being too distracted by the uncertainty at home. Well, one kind of uncertainty yes, but on another level I've never been as certain of anything in my life - God has given me a wonderful husband, and two interesting, gifted and kind-hearted children - and no matter what comes next, I'm profoundly grateful for that.

And God has given me work to do in the development of my own spiritual life. I had a powerful experience of the reality of the communion of saints, of the power of prayer and the deep sense of being enfolded in the intercessory love of others this past month - an experience that has changed me in ways I have yet to fully understand. I am being schooled again in the need to allow others to help me, of the need to be vulnerable to others, and to surrender some of my precious self-containment and autonomy. I am seeking a new discipline in prayer, trying to incorporate some of what I've seen and felt into daily life.

Whew. That's plenty of work to have been given to do. And somehow writing it all down like this makes it tangible - not something just whirling around in my head. As dfficult as this all has been, I am still joyful. And that is perhaps, the greatest vocation of all. "Send us out to the work you have give us to do, to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart."

"Remember that we are dust"

2009-06-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

To get ready for my upcoming trip to France, I've been watching a great series of instructional language videos produced by the BBC. They are exactly the right level for me, and are entertaining and interesting. Before we got the news last week that Gerry's cancer is back, more malevolent than ever, I'd watched a unit on wine-making. The vigneron being interviewed is also a doctor, and he is asked, "Does wine help you live longer?" He answers, "Nothing makes you live longer, because we all die" - which made me laugh because it was such a French response. He went on to say that anything in moderation could make the quality of one's life better, but the essence of his response was "We all die."

It is a terrible, heartbreaking, ghastly thing to sit waiting with your husband in a doctor's office, expecting to be told that he only has a few more months to live. That was not exactly the news we heard, but we understand now that we are looking only at treatment possibilities - no longer for a cure. Gerry's cancer has not behaved in any kind of typical way, and whether it's atypical enough to interest them at Dana Farber we've yet to learn. There will be more chemo and we'll pray and cross our fingers and hope for the most time we can get. We all die, but O sweet blessed Jesus, not yet.

We have, neither of us, gone to the "it's not fair" place. I've always thought that was an emotional and theological dead end that doesn't offer much consolation. The news is full of terrible things: planes fall out of the sky, a young orthodpedic surgeon, triathlete, golden boy with small children, has a fatal heart attack on a ski lift, a child is hit by a school bus crossing the street, a vital, art loving woman is struck suddenly blind. We are mortal and we all go down to the dust.

When we went through this before, I had to learn to let people help me. That's really hard right now, because I don't know what we need yet. Sometimes what I need is just space - emotional and physical space - I am emotionally incontinent - likely to start weeping at any moment, and sometimes I want to roll into a little prickly hedgehog ball so that no one can come near me.

Gerry still looks well and strong, except for his terrible cough. We hope the chemo will at least control and contain whatever's going on. We had feared two years ago he might never see Andy and Mary graduate - now our new goal is our 25th wedding anniversay in June 2010. I knew I married a smart, thoughtful, funny man - I never knew I'd married a hero. Gerry is the bravest person I know - he was ready for the worst news this week, and didn't flinch.

All we go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song: "Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia."

Ghosts of Christmas Past

2009-05-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

My family was never much into making home movies. My father isn't a big gadget guy, and my mother always preferred still photography. And she didn't really get interested in that until my sister and I had left home. But my Uncle Pete, my mother's oldest younger brother, loved his Super 8 and filmed miles of his four children, their neighborhood and occasionally - my family.

The 6 of us - my four cousins, my sister and me - spent a lot of time together when we were kids. My aunt and uncle lived about an hour away; we spent Christmas at each others' houses and often vacationed together. My cousins - especially Pam and Pat, the two oldest (who sort of bracketed me in age) - were creative and crazy, with vivid imaginations and no fear. We played vast, complex games loosely based on Walt Disney movies - "Mooncussers" and "Scarecrow" were very popular - - made gallons of peach ice cream in the summer and Pam and I scribbled historical novels that we took very seriously indeed.

We haven't retained that closeness as adults, but I've been re-establishing contact with the two youngest cousins, Jeff and Julie, because they live in the west, and Andy is heading off to the University of San Francisco in the fall. Somehow I thought it might be nice if there was some family contact around for him.

And Jeff sent me some of those old home movies that he'd copied onto a DVD. I opened it up and suddenly there was my childhood in front of me. Their old house on Sunnyside Drive, assorted dogs, multiple Christmases (presented mostly as an orgy of greed), and shots of a shockingly undeveloped Outer Banks (which we had discovered decades before it became a big time vacation destination). And a few minutes of film that must have been shot in the 1960s, when we had just moved into our new house in Clifton Forge (where my parents would live for the next 30 years).

Lots of the footage is really blurry and overexposed, but these few minutes - recording what was probably our first Christmas in that house - is sharp and clear. My father, with his buzz cut - my mother, VERY thin - in their 30s - preside at the laden Christmas table. There are our pets from that era - Coco the black poodle and Calico, the eponymous cat - my cousins and I come bounding down the stairs, so excited we bounce in and out of the frame - and then, down the stairs more slowly, comes my father's mother, Anne.

She died last year at 105, and I had completely forgotten what she had been like before her long decline into fragile health and confusion. She is slender and elegant; it is evident immediately that she looks different from everyone else - she's my German grandmother and her well-tailored, elegant wool dress is quite distinct from what everyone else is wearing. I can practically smell her signature Chanel 19. She moves quickly, gesturing as she speaks to someone before she moves out of the frame (Uncle Pete wasn't much of a cinematographer).

It's all such a quick glimpse of that now vanished life. It made me suddenly sad - our lives are so fragile and brief. I miss the closeness I had with my cousins - Uncle Pete went out to work for Aramco in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, and we all scattered. And of course, like most adolescents, I didn't appreciate what I had, and could never have imagined that decades later, I would think a little wistfully of those days.

And of course, children never imagine their parents as separate entities. As my children get ready to leave home for good - off to college and the beginning of their own adult lives - I wonder what artifacts they'll discover that will give them a glimpse, however brief, of the life we're living now. I miss the formidable women who are part of my inheritance - Granny, Nanny (the cousins' other grandmother) and Grandmother Anne - who each gave me something of value. For just a few minutes, on that old bit of film, they flicker to life again - strong and stubborn, smart and independent, opinionated and impatient. They were very different from each other, but all alike in those sometimes less than admirable qualities. There is no doubt that my mother, my sister, myself and Mary are their direct descendants.

The Tudors

2009-04-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

Showtime's series The Tudors, now in its third season, makes some historians gnash their teeth in rage. It has received barrages of criticism about its inaccuracies, perhaps most sharply focused on how little John Rhys-Myers resembles Henry VIII. Indeed, the slim, dark haired actor doesn't have anything to do visually with the Tudor king immortalized in the portrait by Hans Holbein. And critics of the costume design are correct that most of the costumes seem to belong in a different era, and that some of the women's costumes especially bear no resemblance at all to what an early 16th century princess would have worn.

But I am fascinated by what they get right. Thomas Tallis turned up early in the first century. His name might only be known by Anglican reformation music junkies, and I never did figure out what the ghost was all about - but I was amazed that someone thought him important enough to include as a character. The long drawn out process that led ultimately to Henry declaring himself head of the Church in England is rendered with (at least as much as I can tell) accuracy and attention to detail. The back and forth between Henry's representatives and the papal legate, the internal court battles in England, the constant jockeying for power feels authentic and accurate.

I'm especially intrigued by the interplay between political and religious authorities. Who is manipulating and using who? Just how passionate is Cromwell for reform? Is the Boleyn family simply trying to back the winning horse, or do they have some religious scruples? How much does Henry really believe that his marriage to Katherine is invalid, and how much does he just want out?

The scramble for power becomes a scramble for survival. In the next to the last episode of Season 2, Ann Boleyn is swept away by Cromwell's dislike of her, her repeated miscarriages, Henry's desire to make a treaty with the Emperor of Spain against France, and her own misjudgment. Her own father abandons her and his son (according to this version, the accusation of incest between brother and sister is false) to save his own skin. It's some of the most brutal, intense, powerful television I've ever seen.

And it makes me think about what it means to be part of a church that has its origins in such an unholy mess. Henry really isn't the "father" of Anglicanism; his heart was never in reform. It would be up to his daughter Elizabeth to broker the settlement that would establish relative ecclesiastical peace. She was a canny and pragmatic sovereign - perhaps it's just as well we don't have a window into her soul, either.

I actually like the fact that any origin myth we come up for ourselves has to be tempered by the historical record. I like the complexity of motives, the fact that there really aren't any heroes in the story, and the fact that all these people are driven by the same motives that drive us - the quest for power, lust, greed, fear. The axis of power tilts and retilts around Henry - his courtiers and advisors scramble to keep their footing - the pope is as worldly, manipulative and dangerous as the king - and still somehow, the Church of England is born.

Holy Puttering

2009-04-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

One of the big differences between Gerry and me is that he likes to putter and I don't. Gerry can easily and happily spend a whole Saturday slowly wandering from one small chore to another - sometimes he gets sucked into the black hole of a big project, especially down in his wood shop - but he's happy to while away the hours chipping away at the little things that need to be done.

I hate puttering. All those little things that need to be done hang around my neck like a millstone, and I never like spending time on them. I am capable of enjoying the feeling of a task accomplished, but the inertia that prevents me from getting started on those tasks is bigger than the prospective enjoyment. I get no pleasure out of household tasks - probably because I'm not a very competent housekeeper. On Fridays, my usual day off, I have to get out of the house - for a long walk with the dog, or a movie - because otherwise all those looming household tasks hover accusingly around me.

But over the last few years, especially since I came to St. Martin's, I've started to enjoy puttering around the church. Maybe that's because this beautiful building is made for puttering. It's a pleasure wandering up and down the aisles, enjoying the scrumptious stained glass and the gleaming wood, the polished tile and the gorgeous gilded reredos. I straighten hymnals, reorganize newcomer info in the back of the church, check the tract rack and otherwise get great satisfaction out of keeping things in order.

I just came back into the office from some Holy Week puttering. Everything is ready - we have had tremendous help from people planning and executing the liturgies for this week. The bulletins are done, and the Great Hall is beautifully set up for our Maundy Thursday worship tonight. So I'm doing little things - setting out some devotional material for the all night Gethsemane Vigil, clearing up the upper sacristy - which has a tendency to become a dumping ground, putting votive candles in their holders for the Easter Vigil, practicing the Exsultet and my homily for Saturday.

It all feels tremendously satisfying. It makes me grateful for my priesthood, for this parish, and for the privilege of leading a congregation in a Holy Week journey. All these little bits come together to make a well planned and well executed whole - calm and spacious enough to make moments of grace and revelation possible.

Classical Gas

2009-03-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

Classical High School in Providence - where Andy and Mary are both seniors - is unlike any school I've ever experienced. It serves as a magnet school for Providence; students have to take a test to be admitted, and it is truly a most diverse, quirky, energetic and sweet school struggling to serve its students under a crushing load of budget deficits, arcane Providence bureaucracy, social problems and (some) teacher apathy.

Blacksburg High School hits all the marks for a high-achieving school, and the kids would have gotten an excellent education there, but the curriculum was pretty rigid, and it was driven by a hierarchy of cliques that one could see forming as early as elementary school. Classical won our hearts early on by allowing Mary, after her one miserable month in 8th grade, to take the entrance test and start CHS in October. They've continued to be flexible, making it possible for her to blast through the math curriculum so that she completed Calculus BC her junior year and did a distance learning linear algebra couse this fall. They've been great (mostly) about working around both kids' desire to spend time abroad with AFS.

But it's the social environment of Classical, its "feel" that really wins my heart. Both of my kids are square peg kids - neither one is an athlete (the kiss of death at Blacksburg High School), they have deep interests in odd subjects, and they don't pay a lot of attention to popular teen culture. Classical is full of - not just square peg kids - but hexagonal, dodecahedron, trapazoidal kids - and they all rub shoulders together pretty happily. It is an incredible cultural and ethnic stew - white, latino, asian and every possible combination of those drawn from the city's various neighborhoods - the kids' friends are Irish Catholic, Cambodian, Ecuadoran, Syrian, Dominican, Jewish, Vietnamese - the list keeps going.

Last night I went to the "third annual" CHS talent show. I went for the most bizarre of reasons - Andy was dancing with the Irish Dance club. Yes, that Andy - the shy one with no interest in being a performer, who isn't much of a risk taker, who hasn't had a lot of confidence in his physical abilities.

The auditorium was packed with a noisy, enthusiastic, mostly student crowd. At intermission, one of the principals scolded them for talking through the acts, but really for the most part, they were pretty good. There was just a lot of energy in the room and it sort of spilled over into the acts themselves. They tried hard to contain themselves - quieting down for a couple of American Idol syle vocal solos, a couple of acoustic numbers, and even a sweet little freshman girl picking her way slowly through "Turkey in the Straw" on the banjo.

And they went wild for everyody - whooping and cheering the banjo, the metal band, the solos, the fashion show, the step dance routine (and that was my introduction to a whole new dance form - very cool) and yes - the Irish dancers. And Andy just blew me away.

There were five dancers - two very experienced and three beginners. After some very impressive footwork by the two experienced dancers, the three newbies came on and did a quite respectable, solid routine. Then all five danced together for the big finale. All the training and choreography came from a student - the three beginners had clearly worked hard to master a completely new skill - and they dared to put it out there in front of their peers. And Andy had a great time.

And that's what I love about Classical. It simply doesn't keep kids in boxes - either academically or socially - the boundaries stay fluid and at least my kids felt encouraged to try different things, step outside their comfort zones and take risks. I'm not sure the city values the school enough, realizes what a gem they have. Classical makes it possible for a lot of kids, who would never have thought it possible, to go to college. It works with kids from some of the toughest parts of the city, and opens up a whole new world for them. And it mixes together those kids and kids like mine from the privileged East Side and who knows what else, into a funky, rich, sparkling stew of energy and enthusiasm.

Ourselves, our souls and bodies

2009-02-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I saw the touring production of "Fiddler on the Roof" as it came through Providence. Tevye was played by Topol, the Israeli actor who is best known for performing the role in the 1971 Norman Jewison film. His association with Fiddler began all the way back in 1967, so who knows how many times he's sung "If I were a rich man" over these past four decades.

I probably wouldn't have gone to see it; I've played Golde in two productions and seen several others, and thought Fiddler was one of those shows I just didn't need to see again. But, I found out that a friend of mine was playing Yente, and that made me call up PPAC and reserve myself a seat.

Topol is 73, but he is lean and vigorous and looked like a spry, hard working middle aged man on stage. His performance was a revelation - very different from the big, Zero Mostel-sized portrayals of Tevye I usually see. Topol made Tevye very human - his performance was small (in a good way), intimate and deeply personal. For the first time, I saw Tevye as just an ordinary person - a human being living his life like anyone else's, full of joys and sorrows, challenges, celebrations and changes. There was nothing special about him at all; it was his very ordinariness that made the show so meaningful.

It made me think that anyone of us could have a musical written about our lives - if we were lucky enough to be characters in a Sholom Aleichem short story, and then set to music by Jerry Bock. All of us are the main characters in narratives very similar to Tevye's - lives defined by relationships, work and the events in the wider world. We see our children grow away from us and we wrestle with changes. We dream of better lives and we settle for what we have. Sometimes the changes that come to us are just part of the ordinary evolution of things, and sometimes those changes are catastrophic. We love our homes, and sometimes we have to leave them. Tevye lives his whole life as a offering to God - soul, body, heart and mind - and when we are at our best, that's how we live, too.

This production of Fiddler was worthwhile for many reasons - it was wonderful to hear a real orchestra in the pit, and not just a few instruments filled out with a synthesizer. It was wonderful to hear people really sing with good technique, and not just trust the mike to do the job. It was great to see a klezmer band on stage for the wedding scene. It was great to see my friend Mary Stout walk away with all her scenes.

But most of all, it was beautiful to see an actor like Topol, who wears this role like a glove, and who could get away with phoning it in, fully inhabit Tevye and make him - not a gigantic center stage behemoth who diminishes everyone else on stage, but a gentle, good humored, faithful man who fits right in with everyone else in the village of Anatevka. That's really the whole point of Fiddler - and it took me about as many decades as Topol as been performing to get it.

New Beginnings

2009-01-19T07:06:00.000-08:00

If you've had trouble finding it, here is the text of Gene's prayer at the pre-inauguration event on Sunday afternoon. Apparently, HBO - who had broadcast rights - didn't begin their coverage until 2:30 - and Gene spoke a little before that. Of course, most people were just interested in Beyonce after all...

This is really Gene's voice - he has a gift for expressing deep truth with clear and simple (not simplistic) language. And his personal faith always shines through everything he says. He never lets rhetoric get in the way of content.

By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

Dangerous Acts

2009-01-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the best part of movie reviews in the New York Times is the tag added to the rating atthe end of the review. "Bride Wars" is rated PG, for - critic Manohla Dargis tell us, "Dangerous Acts of Consumerism".

I thought that was a great line. And even though it's Friday morning, my day off, when I try really hard not to think theological thoughts and instead just catch up on Gawker, it started me musing on just how dangerous our acts of consumerism can be. Michelle Singletary, in a personal finance column earlier this week, talked about how we have come to identify ourselves primarily as consumers - not just of material goods, but of everything in our culture.

Dictionary.com gave me a definition of consumer: a person who uses a commodity or organization. That didn't sound so bad until I saw that in earlier usage, consumer meant "squanderer". I suppose that using things or organizations, or even people isn't necessarily a bad thing; I use my physician to maintain my health, I use the internet to gather information, I use the church to sustain and nourish my faith. I suppose the moral value of consuming lies in the end of our consumption, which is why I love the earlier sense of consumption as squandering.

The rampant consumerism that a movie like Bride Wars showcases is especially focused on the wedding industy, which over 25 years I've seen grow into a behemoth that dictates to brides (and I guess grooms get in on it, too) what they simply must purchase in order to have the "perfect" wedding. And what squandering it is! Every year, wedding details get more expensive, more complicated, more extravagant and well - downright silly. Every priest knows the weary haggling over modest parish charges for space and professional services while the couple is happily planning to spend ten thousand dollars on flowers and who knows how much to have a Hummer limo and a Rolls Royce cart the wedding party around. You can't tell me that 25 years from now, a couple is going to look back fondly on their wedding day and say to each other,
"I'm so glad we had the Hummer."

Squandering means, I guess, that our consuming adds no value. All these extravagant wedding details don't add any ultimate value to the marriage itself - they're just gewgaws that briefly look pretty, maybe elicit an "ooh.aah" from the guests and are thrown out the next day. We've been told throughout the Bush administration that our spending, our consuming is good for the economy - that by getting our money out in the system to buy IPods and flat screen TVs would stimulate the economy and supposedly add value. The fact that our spending was primarily financed by credit card debt didn't seem to bother government economists.

And a consumer mentality also creates in us a sense that everything is there to please us. We are free to reject anything if it doesn't meet our standards and free to keep looking for something that will. I had a conversation this week with a minister from another denomination: a family, who had left my parish several years ago (before I arrived, so I didn't know them) had gone to her church but were constantly expressing a vague dissatisfaction with their present spiritual home. "I don't know how to be their pastor," she said plaintively. I did a little research, and discovered that the family had left this congregation under exactly the same circumstances. This unhappy family seems to go from church to church seeking product satisfaction, instead of seeing themselves as active members of a body and committing to be part of that body in good times and in bad.

So I think Dargis is absolutely right to talk about Dangerous Acts of Consumerism. They can be dangerous, not just to our economic health - squandering resources that might better be used elsewhere or *gasp* even saved for the future - but dangerous to our spiritual health, as well. Expecting that we will always be pleased and satisfied doesn't have much to do with "take up your cross and follow me." If we never make a deep enough commitment to a church or a creed, we'll never have a solid foundation on which we can build a life-sustaining faith. If we squander our spiritual resources, we'll have a really hard time growing a sense of belonging, connection, meaning and purpose.

God is not a shop-keeper, and the church isn't Filene's Basement. We are not the customer, and we are not always right.

No Harder than it Has To Be

2008-12-30T08:34:00.000-08:00

There's always a lot of buzz around the parish in the days leading up to Christmas about how hard this all is. There's a certain amount of hand-wringing in the office - how will we possibly get all these bulletins folded?! And parishioners are always very concerned about how stressed we clergy must be at this time of year. That buzz spills over into comments clergy make about themselves; its was a recurring theme a couple of weeks ago on Facebook - everyone lamenting how hard it was, how much work they were doing, how demanding and difficult (although of course, richly satisfying!) their jobs were.

I don't know. I have a different take on all of this; I actually don't find Christmas very hard and even more radical, I don't find Holy Week and Easter all that hard either. I decided years ago that I didn't have to get on the Christmas stress train, and that making such a fuss about how hard it all is doesn't help the work get done any more efficiently or effectively.

Christmas (and Holy Week) is really just event planning - in show business terms, it's about being a producer. I can always keep tweaking how we do our planning and execution, how we manage the logistics, but it really isn't rocket science - it's about coordination, organization, deploying resources, and delegating roles. I have a lot of faith in the Book of Common Prayer and the Hymnal. I believe that if you get out of their way and let them (and the Holy Spirit) do their work, then people can have a transforming experience, an encounter with beauty and holiness that will nourish and shape their lives. It's really not about what I do on Christmas Eve - it's about getting everything lined up so that the glory of our liturgy can shine.

There is so much in parish ministry that is really hard. Managing volunteers. Leading an organization in stressful and challenging times. Dealing with people who want things we cannot give them. Walking with people facing death and disaster. Attending to our own spiritual, mental and physical health. I want to save up my energy and my adrenaline for the things that are really demanding, and never, ever make things harder than they have to be.

We had a wonderful Christmas at St. Martin's: Lindsay came up with a creative, fun way to incorporate the children into the 4PM liturgy, the church looked absolutely gorgeous, the music was glorious, the liturgy worked. And it just wasn't that hard to get there. I'm going to find it much harder in the coming weeks to deal with our budget crunch, with parishioners who are desperate to find work, with others facing surgery, with preparing for a vestry retreat and getting ready for annual meeting.

It may be that there are, among my colleagues, some who find that last paragraph easier work than getting ready for Christmas. I wish we could switch around and do what we do best all the time - I'll come plan your liturgical life if you'll manage my finance committee! I guess all of us find some things harder than others in parish ministry. My resolve is to at least, not to join in whatever current zeitgeist is trying to turn something that I don't find difficult into a major challenge.

Things will be hard enough without actively trying to make them harder.

Letting Leaders Lead

2008-12-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

Anyone in any kind of a leadership position is used to people questioning and challenging just about every decision. Whether you call it Monday morning quarterbacking, back seating driving, or just annoying - not only does no decision ever please everyone, but in most every organization, there will be a couple of people who seem to question the leader's basic competence, and even integrity.

Gerard Hoogeboom is back from New Orleans for Christmas week, and he was telling me about his first experience being the solo crew chief, leading a group of volunteers as they hung sheet rock. Sure enough, there was one woman in the group who challenged just about everything Gerard said, including when the group should take water breaks! It was a perfect example of what every leader experiences. I'm sure that Gerard handled it with his customary easy going good humor (which I wish I had more of), but the experience of constantly being second guessed can be an enormous distraction when leaders are trying to get an organization moving in a new direction.

That's why I'm not jumping in with everyone else to excoriate Barack Obama for choosing Rick Warren to offer the invocation at Obama's inauguration. Believe me, I'm no Rick Warren fan. I think he is a shameless self-promoter, a theological lightweight, and he has said appalling things about gay and lesbian people. I think there were better choices out there. But I don't consider the Warren invitation a betrayal of all Obama's principles, or a betrayal of all those who supported him in the election. Obama and Warren actually have a history of appearing together, bridging ideological gaps in order to address larger issues. They have found some common ground in spite of their differences; I don't think it's fair to accuse Obama of pandering to the right with this invitation.

I'm way more worried about the financial crisis, the horrifying conditions in Zimbabwe and the Congo, climate change, Iraq and Afghanistan - well, the list goes on and on - than I am about Rick Warren. Barack Obama will take office in the middle of an absolute mess of domestic and international problems, problems that will defy quick fixes and easy answers. Change is not going to come quickly or easily.

I believe that in Barack Obama, we have elected a leader who brings great intelligence, analytical ability, intellectual curiosity, respect for the other, and personal integrity and generosity to this most impossible of jobs. He is willing to listen to voices he doesn't agree with and explore other points of view. I want to trust him to do the work and make the decisions we need to restore honor, dignity and prosperity and justice to our country. I don't want to get caught up in demands for ideological purity or narrow focus that distract from keeping larger goals in view.

The Pending Apocalypse

2008-12-11T10:24:00.000-08:00

Sport Illustrated used (may still) to have a section called "This week's sign that the apocalypse is upon us..." which went on to mention a couple of outrageous stories from the sports world. It was a great tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out ridiculous behavior or mis-behavior and it was always my favorite part of the magazine.

So - over the past couple of weeks - I've heard two separate stories that I'd classify as "The latest signs that the parenting apocalypse is upon us..." Truly silly examples of just how crazed, over-wrought, anxious and silly American parenting has become.

The first was an article about doing DNA testing to establish what sports your child was best suited for - testing administered in infancy! (Or maybe toddlerhood - can't remember). The DNA test was supposed to tell you if your child was going to be better suited to sports that required strength and endurance, or sports that depend on speed, or some combination of those assets. The mom quoted in the article as wanting to sign up immediately for the test was watching her two and a half year old(!) "play" soccer. She thought it would be a really helpful way to know which sport to direct her child to play.

Wow. It never occurred to me that I could "direct" my children to play sports. Full disclaimer - in spite of Gerry playing football and wrestling in high school and college, we are not and never have been a very sports-centered family. I grew up in an era when girls weren't encouraged to be athletic, and only discovered in adulthood that I liked to be active, was actually pretty strong, and could run 13 miles if I put my mind to it. Gerry separated his shoulder wrestling and after surgery and lots of pain decided his jock years were behind him. And, bless him, he's never tried to live out his failed dreams of glory through our kids.

But I did trot them through rec league soccer, swim team and tball, thinking that it was the dutiful mother thing to do. But they hated it all - and I would no more force them to play a sport than I would make them drink castor oil. We pretty much let them explore what they wanted to do (I'm really a lazy mother after all) - Andy still is happiest when he's alone with a pencil and a pad of drawing paper, and Mary loved ballet and piano.

I know that sports teach important things like teamwork, practice, and healthy competition, but I can't imagine swabbing a kid's cheek to see whether he should be the next Michael Phelps or the next Tom Brady.

The second apocalyptic sign was a story that ran over Thanksgiving weekend about parents, stressed by the current financial crisis, demanding that toy companies quit advertising on children's television programs because the ads were creating a demand for stuff that the parents were afraid they wouldn't be able to meet on Christmas morning.

Um - whatever happened to just turning off the TV? What about teaching children that no one ever gets everything he or she wants? What about beginning to teach children how to navigate the materialism and consumerism of our culture? I'm starting to sound like a crotchety old curmudgeon - but I wonder why parents demand toy companies stop doing their job (selling toys) instead of actually - well, parenting.

Heaven at the Rock N Bowl

2008-11-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

When my friends in New Orleans told me I had to check out the Rock N Bowl, I thought they were kidding. I was unable to imagine a combination of bowling and great music - it seemed impossible to put the two of them together. It sounded like one of those things that a movie screenwriter might dream up to give "local color" to a script, but that people watching the movie would know couldn't possible exist in real life.

But last week on our mission trip, I made a Rock N Bowl pilgrimage, because I felt like I owed Gerard a night out. Poor thing - he was the youngest person in our small group, and worse than that, I was the person closest to him in age. He was a good sport all through the week, never minding the fact that the rest of us wanted to go to bed about 9PM. Thursday night was Zydeco night at the Rock N Bowl, and I figured, if nothing else, we'd bowl a couple of games and come home.

We found the place - an unprepossessing storefront in a old strip mall on S. Carrollton. Up the stairs, paying our ten dollars to the gatekeeper who stamped our hands - we were in to the rock part at least. The bowling alley itself is a beautiful, old-fashioned, gleaming hard wood affair that still uses people to set pins. Bowling and shoes are cheap, and Gerard and I had a great time alternating between gutter balls and strikes. While we were bowling, we didn't pay much attention to what else was going on, but when the music started at 8:30 the place really came alive.

Zydeco is Creole folk music from south Louisiana, but it's a real melting pot itself, incorporating everything from rhythm and blues, to hip hop to reggae. At one point that night, the band played a zydeco version of "Sunshine of your love". And it is dance music. Incredible dance music. I mean, really incredible dance music.

And that's why it began to seem like heaven to me, or at least like my vision of the communion of saints. The crowd was the most diverse I've ever seen at a musical event. There were people of all ages, all ethnic backgrounds, all colors, all languages - everything from preppy white college kids to gold-toothed black hairdressers to a guy who looked like he might once have been a jockey to girls with teased hair and cowboy boots - and everyone was dancing with each other and having a great time.

And what dancing! Two-steps and waltzes and shuffles - I think of myself as a reasonably good dancer who can usually follow - and I was absolutely left in the dust. It was fast and complex and so much fun to watch.

Katrina exposed the rotten core of racisim and injustice that infects a lot of New Orleans' civic life, but at least at the Rock N Bowl on Zydeco night, it was a vision of the Kingdom of God. No divisions, no discord, great music, fabulous dancing, a rich tapestry of people from all different walks of life joined together in celebration and enjoyment. I'm not very interested in streets paved with gold, eternal rest or harps and crowns, but I wouldn't mind a heaven that looked a lot like the Rock N Bowl.

The Mystery of Attraction

2008-10-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

I have been musing on that strange chemistry that attracts us to one another - especially the powerful chemistry that makes us want to mate, and heavens! Even enter into a life-long, monogamous, commitment. Gerry's illness has changed a lot about his appearance; he is much thinner, he has a "seasoned" look now, there's a pretty hard to miss scar running down his neck, but he's still just as attractive to me as he was when we started dating in the fall of 1984.

Until I met Gerry, I'd really been pretty consistent in type. I dated thin, intellectual, kind of weedy Anglo looking men, tending towards blonds. So it was a big surprise to me when I found myself falling in love with a brawny Irishman who had history as a jock and preferred beer to white wine. But like I said, it's a mystery. I told my friends, when Gerry and I first met, that he looked like a cross between Clark Kent and Garrison Keillor. That's still true - although, as he's gotten older, the Keillor resemblance has strengthened. That's probably because Clark Kent will always be (for me) Christopher Reeve in all his glorious 28 year-old studliness. He will never age, but Garrison still marches on.

Sometimes Gerry and I laugh that we fell in love because we just happened to meet at the right time. We were both fairly fresh from broken engagements that we knew were bound to end badly, we were both in our late 20s, independent, happy in our work, and just ready to meet someone and make a relationship work. It could all be a matter of timing, and if I'd met Gerry at a different time in my life, I might never have given him a second look.

But a few years ago, I found a picture of him in college - buried amid the detritus he'd brought from his parents' house. He is just darling. Long (not hippie-long, just sexy long) curly hair, a tweed Irish cap, sparkling dark eyes, laughing up into the camera. I would SO date him. It made me think that maybe I would have been smart enough to recognize his appeal even in my dumb and clueless college dating years.

And then there's his really spooky resemblance to my maternal grandfather, of whom I have no memory. My grandmother loved Gerry - when we visited as newlyweds she brought out the big guns - her china, silver, best recipes and fawning attention. I couldn't figure it out, because Granny was not a fawner by nature - and then I took another look at the picture of her and Granddaddy early in their marriage. Gerry was a dead ringer for him - same build, same coloring, same broad, open Irish face. No wonder Granny was so fond of him. And perhaps some piece of my own DNA from her woke up on November 16, when Gerry and I went for our second date to a Mexican restaurant near Lincoln Center, he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, I took one look at his muscular forearms and was lost forever.

Reflections from dance class

2008-10-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was an observation day at Festival Ballet, where Mary studies. I love these opportunities to sit in and watch a class - I love watching how Mary has progressed, how the teachers communicate and correct, and how dance becomes a metaphor for so many other things. This year Mary is taking a partnering class, which means she is learning how to work with a male partner, learning lifts and the whole new range of technical challenges that come with that.

Some thoughts:
On balance: Mary has a new teacher this year who works a lot on balance at the barre. He's always urging the dancers to release the barre and hold attitude, arabesques, and passe on demi pointe for what seems a VERY long time. What that reveals is that balance is a very active state. The dancers are constantly making tiny, vigorous corrections in their posture - their muscles are working as hard as they do in larger movements.

I think we make a big mistake if we think about balance as some kind of state of passive, calm equilibrium. Maintaining balance is demanding, stressful and takes full attention of mind and body. Women especially talk sometimes about "balance" as if it is the Holy Grail, the ultimate solution to the hectic pace of our daily lives. A dancer balanced in position is a beautiful thing, but she is not at rest - she is a mass of contained energy.

The monastic life seeks balance between worship, work, and private prayer -with times for rest and recreation woven into the day. But like dancers, monastics work very hard maintaining that balance. It isn't easily achieved, and it isn't easily maintained. And it's never sought for its own sake. Benedict believed that balance was essential for the health of individuals and the community - balance made it possible for the monks to fulfill their principal vocation to glorify and praise God. Balance in the Christian life is never removed into some other-worldly sphere that allows us to neglect the demands of faithful discipleship. Like dancers, we are poised, attentive, at work.

On taking risks:
In the partnering class last night, the teacher began by working on shoulder sits. They look very impressive, and at first glance, it might seem like the male partner is doing all the work, hoisting the ladies up onto his shoulder. But for the lift to work, the ballerina must jump - must spring up from demi-plie and use that momentum to work with her partner into the lift. And then, she has to hold the exact position of the sit (there's that balance again) - tilting just a little too far back or forward, or losing the balance between the positions of the arms and legs throws the whole thing off and the lift collapses. It was very interesting to see that some of the smaller and lighter girls actually had a harder time moving into the lift than the larger, stronger girls. The girls absolutely have to trust their partner, and really take off from the ground in the initial jump - being tentative means it won't work.

That become even more clear when the class began to learn a new lift. The girls did a tourjete, a turning jump into their partners' arms. The partner catches the ballerina around the turning leg, ending in a beautiful position. There were all kinds of reasons the girls were having trouble with the new lift. These are teen-age girls after all, and the male dancers had to catch them in a pretty intimate way. Again and again, they would sort of half-heartedly turn - never gaining enough altitude for their partners to catch them properly.

Mary said that she was afraid that she was going to kick her partner - and I said that they've probably all been kicked a hundred times before. It's part of the process - you have to learn how to gauge speed and distance and none of that comes automatically - and until you really commit to the turning jump, you can't really figure out how it's all going to work. Until you are really willing to risk failure, you cannot possibly succeed.

But the girls persevered, and the teacher patiently kept breaking the movement down and showing them that if they really threw up their turning leg, it would be much easier for the partner to catch them. The bigger the risk, the better the result. I hate that that's true. I like playing things safe as much as anyone, but the dance class showed me yesterday that it's only by fully committing to the act and risking disaster that beauty and success are won.

The Spirituality of risotto

2008-09-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

I love making risotto. It took me a long time to master it - the first time, I didn't keep the broth hot enough, and somehow the absorption didn't work and I ended up with little rice nuggets that were both crunchy and sodden. Sometimes I tried to add the broth too quickly and ended up with a mushy mess.

But now I've got it down - and even when I come home tired and really wanting to order pizza, the decision to make risotto instead always pays off.

I love every bit of it. Sauteeing the shallot in a little butter, then stirring in the rice and toasting it in the saucepan, and finally a generous splash of vermouth. Once that's all cooked away, I start the slow, gradual adding of simmering chicken broth - loving how the rice literally seems to melt as it absorbs the liquid. It took me awhile to figure out what temperature to keep under the pot - and I still fiddle with the knob, turning it up or down to achieve the perfect simmer-point.

Risotto is the most elegant way to use up left-overs. Last night, it was some forlorn mushrooms and half a bag of frozen peas that might have been doomed if they hadn't been reborn in risotto. Sometimes I get fancy - there's a great recipe on Epicurious for champagne risotto with scallops.
But risotto has become more of a week night recipe for me - something that helps me unwind and focus on something else besides work, bills or the family.

I wish I could say that I use the half hour of slow, steady stirring as an opportunity to meditate, thinking deep theological thoughts while the rice turns lush and creamy. Usually instead I stand with a glass of wine on the kitchen counter and The New Yorker in my non-spoon hand. Multi-tasking till the end.

Last night I made my best risotto ever - the rice exactly the right al dente consistency and the peas and mushrooms added in perfect proportion. I was also completely distracted several times during the process - leaving the rice to dry out much more between ladles of broth than I've usually allowed. So - what's the lesson in that? Maybe I overfunction sometimes? Maybe it's better to ignore the risotto for awhile and see what it will do on its own? Maybe risotto is just risotto and it's silly to look for deeper meaning?

Anyway - there are a few accomplishments in my adult life that I'm really proud of: I can parallel park, I've climbed Mt. Washington, and I can make risotto (also sauce bearnaise and a pretty good souffle). If nothing else, risotto has taught me (1) even failures can taste pretty good sometimes and (2) practice really does lead to improvement, if not to perfection.

The Antidote to Death

2008-09-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I was well into my morning today before I realized that it was the anniversary of the September 11 attack. It wasn't until I was heading down the hill toward Benefit Street that I thought about the gorgeous blue sky, and recalled another beautiful September morning suddenly interrupted by unimaginable violence. And then I couldn't help but remember all the details of that morning: the first frantic phone calls from parishioners asking if I'd heard the news, finally deciding to go home to watch things unfold on television, wondering what the kids were hearing at school - holding 9 year old Mary on my lap that afternoon while she asked, "What's going to happen?" - keeping the church open round the clock so that people could come in and pray and talk to someone. And finally, standing in the aisle of Christ Church the following Sunday, as we sang "A Mighty Fortress" as the hymn before the Gospel, feeling for the first time that I understood the words: "Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever."

Tragedy, death, and violence all break into our lives unexpectedly - shattering plans, dreams for the future, prompting fear, anxiety, and despair. In the seven years since the twin towers tumbled down, it seems to me that our country has let that fear, anxiety and despair drive us more deeply into hateful, polarized positions where ad hominem attacks replace reasoned discourse and political opponents are ridiculed and demonized. Instead of exploring solutions, solving problems and building relationships, leaders are driving deeper wedges between us and opening up deep chasms along racial, ethnic, religious, class and economic boundaries.

I am trying so hard not to get sucked those chasms, not to be affected and even controlled by the fear, anxiety and despair of others. Religious faith and practice help, family and friends help, taking the dog for a long walk helps. Several people this week sent me an email link to a New York Times op-ed piece, and all the folks that sent it to me had themselves had their own recent experience of loss and death. The essay is written by Theresa Brown, a former English professor and now an oncology nurse, who reflects on the unexpected death of one of her patients. At the end of the essay she says:

"What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life."

I'm going to keep trying to choose life. Not as a political position, but as a philosophy, a guiding principle, a way of managing my own emotions and responses. It's the best answer I can think of to the horrors we all witnessed seven years ago. I won't allow the hatred and fear of others to determine how I live my life. That is, I think, what the resurrection means for individual believers, and for the whole world.

Tradition!

2008-07-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've played Golde in "Fiddler on the Roof" a couple of times; everyone knows the big opening number "Tradition" in which every member of Anatevka sings about his or her place in the community - the Papa, the Mama, the Son, the Daughter - each person understands exactly what his or her role involves. What drives the plot forward is the conflict between the tradition of the shtetl and the modern world. The Jews of Anatevka find themselves, by the end of the show, uprooted and scattered, carrying what they can of their tradition into a new context.

Some people are framing our present conflicts in the Anglican Communion as a fight between those who honor and keep our traditions and the wild-eyed, liberal revisionists who want to rewrite and refashion the Christian faith.

I never quite know how I should classify myself using those terms, except to resent being pigeonholed by someone else. I actually consider myself very traditional, orthodox even - grounded in the liturgy and creedal affirmations that have defined and nourished Christians for centuries. Anyone who has heard me preach knows that I am pretty much in the "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so..." camp. I want to be an evangelist, a bearer of the Good News for a world desperate to hear, see and experience it.

But like the folks of Anatevka, I'm carrying those traditions into new contexts. I can't imagine anything more traditional than two people wanting to commit themselves to each other for life. I can't imagine anything more traditional than two people wanting a faith community in which they can raise their child. The new context is that those two people are both male, or both female - their affections are ordered towards members of their own sex - and what they want from the church is support, nourishment and accountability as they seek to lead holy and grace-filled lives. What could be more traditional than that?

I honestly don't know where all those wild-eyed liberals I keep hearing about are. Most of us are ordinary parish priests, trying to serve our folks as best we can, baptizing, teaching, pastoring, marrying, burying, celebrating, blessing, grieving, preaching - offering ourselves, our souls and bodies for the work of the Church, the coming of the Kingdom and the healing of creation. I will continue to resist being defined by others - being labeled and categorized by those who want to push a particular theological agenda.

Tradition is alive and well at St. Martin's - new branches are always being grafted onto the Vine and it grows in new directions and bears new fruit, but it's still rooted and grounded in God's great, loving heart.

Dialing back the anxiety

2008-07-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

When I was in my first parish as rector, a small place in New Hampshire that had a few folks in it who enjoyed torturing young clergy, I turned for help to the-then Canon to the Ordinary (Bishop's Right Hand Person), Gene Robinson. Gene had lots of helpful short term advice (mainly find a new job), but he also put a book called "Generation to Generation" by Ed Friedman into my hands and changed my life.

Ed was both a family therapist and a congregational rabbi. He was trained in a school of therapy known as Bowen theory, after noted psychiatrist Murray Bowen, who developed an understanding of how an individual interacts with a system, and how the system has an emotional life of its own. Ed began to see that the same dynamics and emotional process that he observed in the families he worked with were also present in his own congregation. Ed began to apply Bowen theory to his own rabbinical work - and a book was born. I was fortunate enough to study with Ed at his Center for Family Process before he died in 1996, and his work continues to inform and support my ministry, my family life, and my quest for deeper self-understanding.

What Friedman's work helped me understand was, that as long as I was enmeshed with the anxiety endemic in my little congregation, I was never going to be able to function effectively as a leader. The best way to lower the anxiety in any system is for the leader to get a handle on his or her own self, and begin to "differentiate", to separate one's own intellectual and emotional functioning from that of the system. Yeah - it's not as easy as it sounds.

It's really work that last through one's lifetime - just as soon as I think I'm functioning pretty well in the church, something will flare up in my family of origin (like my aunt's shenanigans after my grandmother died in April), that ratchets my anxiety right back up to unhealthy levels. But I've learned to recognize more quickly when I'm getting sucked back into the system, and learned ways to dial my anxiety back to the point when it no longer drives my reactions. Hard stuff!

But my decade of family systems work has helped me recognize anxiety in others without necessarily getting sucked into it myself. So I've been reading some of the blogs various bishops are posting from their time in Lambeth, and noticing who seems anxious and who doesn't. There are many Cassandras out there, prophesying the end of the Anglican Communion, especially if the Episcopal Church doesn't repent of the heinous sin of treating gay and lesbian persons like human beings. You can read all kinds of hand-wringing, threats, ultimatums, foot-stomping, demands, gauntlets being thrown down - all kinds of ways various people express how anxious they are.

But then you can read something like this: I'm going to post the whole thing, because I thought it was so cool: This was written by Bishop George Packard, bishop for Episcopal Church chaplaincies (think especially Armed Forces). You would never call him a liberal mouthpiece. When he refers to "indaba", that's a small group process the bishops are using to shape and guide their Lambeth conversations with each other. He met the bishop menioned below in one of the interminable food lines.
"I met Bishop Bernard Oringa Balmoi of the Diocese of Torit in Sudan. His is a small diocese which he walks by foot; he has 1000 members. He and his wife have 30 children.

"Thirty children?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied, "Two my wife and I have and 28 more we adopted from the war, they were orphans...who would care for them?"

He spoke enthusiastically about his faith with nary a care that by world--or church--standards he had next to nothing.

"Have you never had a car?" I asked.

"No, the bishop before me had one but it wore out." Said Bernard.

We sat together for dinner and complained about the food (I was really beginning to like him). Finally I gave him a souvenir coin from my office and he asked me, "Do you have a companion diocese?" I told him of our work and he said there is a need for chaplains in the Army in his area and how many residents had left and only troops remained. Besides thinking his was an area which about matched the operational size of Micronesia, I realized because his diocese was so small it was being overlooked in the sorting for companion dioceses.

Right then and there we forged a bond and I promised to visit him not really sure exactly where he lived. Later I was to see on a map that it was in the farthest and most southern portion of Sudan; so distant that he receives mail in Uganda.

Bernard was to say later that the Holy Spirit had drawn us together and in the atmosphere of indaba I quite agree."

What I love about this is that two men, who have plenty of reasons to be worried about the future of their churches, about what political manuvres or manipulations would appear next, who are surely on opposite sides of the aisle in the debate about human sexuality, are free enough from anxiety to really talk to each other, to risk making a connection and learning from another person whose context for ministry is entirely different.

Anxiety takes away our own sense of self, and makes it really hard to forge an authentic connection with someone else. There are plenty of bishops who came to Lambeth with no intentions of listening to anyone else, there only to push their own agendas. But there are hundreds more like Bishops Packard and Balmoi, who have come to Lambeth open to the prompting and the movement of the Holy Spirit, who know that the future of the Anglican Communion lies in just these kinds of connections and conversations.

Anglicanism at its best has always been non-anxious. We've existed as a fellowship of autonomous provinces who don't interfere in each other's internal business. I hope and pray that a non-anxious spirit will prevail at this Lambeth Conference, and that bishops can continue to meet and talk and eat and laugh and pray and worship together. It's what we do best as Anglican Christians.

Turn Around

2008-07-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

Andy, Gerry and I drove up to Cambridge this afternoon to take Mary out to lunch. She's busy at a high-powered summer program at MIT doing research in gravitational lensing and had primly told us before she left that "parental visits are discouraged." But we managed to wriggle ourselves into her schedule and all four of us enjoyed a late, extravagant seafood lunch at Jake's Summer Shack on Alewife. She had something scheduled at 5pm, and we dropped her off and watched her hurry away from us across the MIT campus and suddenly I thought, "She's gone - off on her own."

Do you remember the old Kodak commercials; the voice over sung by a creamy-voiced baritone: "Where are you going, my little one, little one? Where are you going, my baby, my own? Turn around and you're two - turn around and you're four - turn around and you're a young girl, going out of the door." Even when I was a kid, they made me cry.

So it's no wonder I got misty-eyed watching my baby girl head off towards friends, academic challenges and interests I'll never be able to share.

I was noticing how much Andy's grown up this summer, too. Since he's the oldest, I have very clear memories of watching the baby appear out of the infant, and the baby give way to the toddler, and the little boy come out of the toddler - and a couple of weeks ago, as Andy stood leaning against the bedroom door, talking to us - I realized that the young man was emerging out of the adolescent.

Andy lost weight in Japan, and now he has the neat, compact appearance of the men on my side of the family. He carries himself with more confidence, is responsible, funny and bright, and however much he and I spar, he never loses the innate sweetness that's been in him since birth. Although he's anxious to move on with his life, too - he's essentially more of a homebody than Mary, a trait he shares with his father.

It seems so trite and sentimental to lament how quickly they grow up - how fast they go from the complete dependence of babyhood to the independent life of emerging adults. Gerry and I have never had much of a parenting plan except to stay out of their way as much as possible and hope for the best. Sometimes I think they raised themselves, because the most we did was try to keep them from killing each other when they fought, and teach them to say "please" and "thank you". I got rid of the parenting books and magazines when Andy was three months old because they were making me crazy.

They are so different from each other, so different from both of us, and yet somehow I see bits of all their ancestors in their faces, bodies, hearts and minds.

As we drove back down I-95 early in the evening, Andy sprawled in the back seat in that loose-limbed, abandoned sleep that still shows something of the baby in him, I reached over and stroked Gerry's arm. "We're lucky," I said.

He turned his head a little and smiled at me. "We are," he replied, "In many ways."

Nineveh

2008-06-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

13 of us returned on Saturday from our week long trip mission trip down to Wise County in farthest southwestern Virginia, tired, bee-stung and covered in various cuts, bruises and blisters, but satisfied with four days of hard work repairing and building porch railings for three families in the once-thriving-now-dying little coal town of Dante. Like all mission trips, this was full of highs and lows - all of us, whether youth or adults leaders, had moments of frustration, anger and disappointment as well as moments of joy.

This is my second mission trip in a month; I had to fill in when Greg went off to Church of the Ascension, otherwise I'd never do anything so foolish as schedule back to back mission trips! Someone asked me, between New Orleans and Virginia, what I loved about mission trips and why I went so often and I sort of blurted out that really, I didn't like them at all.

That's not entirely true, but a mission trip doesn't compare with a week at the beach for enjoyment. I always find the work part really intimidating - I've gotten to be fairly confident with a paint roller, but power tools scare me to death. I was the kind of kid who couldn't build bird houses or make wallets in arts and crafts sessions at camp - everything always came out lumpy and lopsided. So I don't go on mission trips because I think I'm going to make some kind of major contribution on the work sites. My best hope is that I don't saw my foot off.

And the human part is hard, too. Whether one is traveling with adults or youth, putting a group of people together in a stressful situation for a week away from home, is always going to be challenging. Everyone has at least one bad day, everyone gets cranky or upset or sad at least once, group dynamics always fluctuate, so that what works for everyone one day won't work for anyone the next.

But I keep going, and finally, thanks to Heather Annis' insight - I realize why. I think I need to make regular trips to Nineveh.

Most everyone knows that Jonah got swallowed by a whale, and spit out after three days. But the whale incident is really only a small part of Jonah's story, and the part that interests me the least. Jonah's story begins when God calls him to go to Nineveh to preach, a call that Jonah resists mightily. He so doesn't want to go to Nineveh that he heads down to the harbor and gets on a boat to Tarshish instead. A great storm blows up, and when the terrified sailors cast lots to find out who is the cause of their misfortune, the lot falls to Jonah.

The sailors throw him into the sea, and immediately the storm ceases. That's where the whale comes in, swallowing Jonah, giving him an opportunity to rethink his response to God's call. When the whale spits Jonah out on the beach after three days, Jonah heads to Nineveh.

So I head off on these periodic mission trips because they are, in a sense, my Nineveh. I feel God calling me - but I always answer reluctantly. I would much rather not go to a place that I know will be hard, but would like to run away to Tarshish instead. Nineveh was way outside Jonah's comfort zone, and he knew it - which is one reason he flees in the opposite direction. I've decided that part of my own spiritual, personal and professional growth is to regularly make myself step outside that comfort zone. My trips to Nineveh always give me insights (often painful and unwelcome) into how I function with others, into the ways I still need to work on self-control and self-regulation. It sort of turns my psyche inside out - and I come back from Nineveh feeling like I've learned something important and at least succeeded in not running away from something hard.

Four of the young people who went on the Virginia trip preached yesterday, sharing four different perspectives on the experience. They were amazingly eloquent and positive and wonderful representatives for the whole group. I also know that each one of them had a least one hard moment, one experience of being in Nineveh - of having to do something that pushed them physically or emotionally past the point they thought they could go. I was proud of them all - they accomplished something far more significant than just the railings they build and the paint they applied. They went to Nineveh - and have returned with new learning about themselves, about the world around them, and about who God is calling them to be.

I'd love to think this work was finished - but I know sooner or later, God is going to start pricking me again and calling me to another Nineveh - and like Jonah, sooner or later, I'll say yes.

A Family Affair

2008-06-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, I attended the Blessing of a Civil Union between a controversial bishop (who is also an old and dear friend), and his partner of 20 years (also an old and dear friend). I've known the bishop for over 20 years, and he and his partner are Mary's godparents. I had been reluctant to blog about it, because it was such a personal moment in their lives, but then I realized that if I avoided names and other identifying characteristics, the blog wouldn't trigger google searches, etc.

So I'll just call them G and M.

The civil union is, of course, a matter of public record, and the local paper ran a small article about it. One of the other guests, the preacher at the blessing liturgy, has in fact already appeared in a video interview made during the reception afterwards and posted on YouTube. Well. That's not the choice I would have made. G is a very well-known, public figure and this union and its blessing in the church is an important symbolic event for many who long to be able to make that same public commitment themselves, but still - the union and blessing on Saturday were deeply personal and very intimate - both G and M have a wide circle of family and friends, and I had expected a huge crowd, but in fact, it was small and really felt like a family affair - an event for those that G and M have known the longest and love the best.

I am more than ever convinced that this is the road the church needs to take in responding to the needs of our gay and lesbian members. I have never believed that we choose our sexual orientation (do you remember "deciding"?). Given that belief, then I think the church has a responsibility to help its gay and lesbian members live together in a covenant relationship that both honors and challenges their lives together.

We are all called to be stewards of our sexuality, at all stages of our lives. So to deny gay and lesbian persons the opportunity to pledge themselves publicly to fidelity, to receive the blessing and support of the wider community, to place their relationship in the context of faith and holiness, is to fail them at the deepest pastoral level. One of the things I always tell couples preparing for marriage is that, at its best, a strong, healthy, long-lived marriage is the closest we ever get to understanding what God's love for us is like - tenacious, compassionate, ardent, and forgiving.

That's what I felt more than anything on Saturday. One of the reasons we asked G and M to be godparents is because their lives together reflect so much joy, hope, love and faith. They are a delight to be with - funny, creative, profoundly committed to everyone they love, and (St. Martin's people will appreciate this) expansive, generous hosts.

I have been blessed for decades by their friendship, and I was truly blessed to share last weekend with them. I long for the day when we'll be able to offer that same pastoral care and blessing ourselves to same sex couples who want to make a public, life-long commitment.

New Orleans encore une fois

2008-06-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Last week, five of us from St. Martin's headed down to New Orleans to do our small part in the continuing effort to rebuild the city. I can't say enough good things about the work the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana is doing - they are tenacious advocates for the poorest, most neglected citizens and have developed a very clear mission about who they are helping in their rebuilding program, why they've chosen that population and how they are going about it. They work small - about 40 houses a year - and they work with people other agencies might not identify as "good" investments. And they continue to draw young adults from around the country, who care enough to come down and work for $1000 a month (and free group housing) to supervise work crews made up of volunteers like us.

We worked for two days in Lakeview - a middle class white neighborhood that was indundated when the canal linking the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain breached the levee. People are still gutting houses and starting the work of rebuilding - it takes a long time to get federal "Road Home" money, and an even longer time to navigate the byzantine web of permits, government regulations, and contractors to get the work done. We got to know Jimmy - one of the homeowners we worked with (see photo above - Jimmy's the guy in the blue shirt) - who came over for dinner later in the week and told us about waiting out the storm in Covington - about boating! to his house six days after the storm - about how he had learned to ask for help. What always moves me when I go to New Orleans are these conversations with people who've endured more than I can imagine, who keep plugging away at picking up the pieces of their lives.

So I'm not so good with working with pictures yet, but here's a photo of Joseph. His mother, Cezanne, worked on painting the hallway of a preschool in Lakeview with us - Robin, Heather and Martha are in the background. Waylon was off laying a subfloor because he actually has skills!

On Wednesday, we headed down to the Office of Disaster Response warehouse, and were sent to a house in East New Orleans where we primed and painted a house for a widow who had seen a chunk of her Road Home money gobbled up by unscrupulous contractors. The rebuilding program is a zealous guardian of their homeowners' privacy, so we were asked not to share identifying details, and not to expect that the homeowner would come out, visit with us, and tell us how wonderful we are. The work itself is its own reward.

The last afternoon, we helped get a house in Gentilly ready for its final inspection - it was interesting to see houses in three stages of reconstruction: Jimmy's was gutted and just getting wiring, plumbing and insulation - the East New Orleans house was now painted and waiting for floors - and the Gentilly house was complete. And amazing to think that everything (mostly) after the plumbing and electrical is done by volunteers with pretty much no skills except willing hearts.

I'm not sure why the rebuilding of New Orleans has such a hold on me. Somehow I sense God calling me to learn something - so I keep just trying to be open to whatever that is. I'm learning a lot about racism, economic injustice, grinding poverty, inadequate education and the patience, fortitude and determination of the Episcopal Church in Louisiana. I'm taking another group back in November - so if you are a St. Martinite - (or even if you are not!) - start looking at the week of November 8-15 and consider coming along. God is doing great things down there - it really is a multiplication of loaves and fishes into housing, dignified treatment and loving kindness.

Why Bad Things Happen

2008-04-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

Faithful people have been grappling for millennia with the problem of why bad things happen to good people. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book about it about thirty years ago, when he came to that question through the terrible tragedy of losing a child to progeria (the disease of premature aging). Archibald MacLeish posed the question as a piece of doggerel in his play, "J.B.", a drama in verse based on the book of Job: "If God is God, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God." In other words, if God is all-knowing and all-powerful, able to intervene in human events, then human misery means that God sometimes chooses not to act benevolently, not to deliver people from terrible suffering. On the other hand, if God's purpose is always merciful and compassionate, then God doesn't have the power to always fulfill that purpose.

This week is Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when questions about the origins of evil and God's response to human suffering are especially chewed over. If God could have prevented the systematic extermination of millions, why did God choose not to? If God could not have prevented that extermination, then why do we claim that God has any saving power at all?

These are hard questions, and there is a fascinating conversation happening here
between Bart Ehrman and N.T. Wright. Ehrman is a professor at the University of North Carolina, and came into the public eye when he wrote a very popular book debuking "the DaVinci Code"; N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in England and a big voice for the conservative wing of the Anglican Communion. I NEVER agree with Wright on ANYTHING, but he is more persuasive here, I think, than Ehrman. But check out the dialogue and see what you think.

All through my 25 years of pastoral ministry, when people have asked me "why did this happen to me?", I've said that I think that question is a kind of theological dead-end. It doesn't lead anywhere. I think a better question is "Where can I find God in this?" When Gerry got sick, we really never did go down the "why him?" road - it was better for us just to go ahead and rage at God, or be scared or sad, or whatever else we were feeling, and trust that nothing we were throwing at God was any more despairing than Jesus' cry on the cross, "My God, my God - why have you forsaken me?" I mean, if Jesus feels forsaken, then why shouldn't we have periods of feeling desolated and abandoned?

We found God incredibly present for us in the prayers, support, witness and blessing of countless friends - in the way this parish poured its heart out for us - and for me, in trying to practice the spiritual discipline of gratitude. The deepest significance the cross holds for me is how Jesus chooses to completely identify with the greatest pain human life can hold. I don't know where suffering comes from, but I do know that God is present in it.

My Grandmother

2008-04-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

This past Monday, I stood - just as I had stood almost thirty years ago at my Grandfather's funeral - with my three inch heels sinking into soft, spring-warm Virginia earth. My 105 year old - 105! - beloved Grandmother had died Sunday night, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, we buried her within 24 hours. The wonder of cell phones and computers allowed me to track down her rabbi and make plane reservations all at the same time, so that we could gather around the grave of this extraordinary woman who was born in 1902.

The rabbi did a lovely job, but like the minister who officiated at my maternal grandmother's funeral in 1988, he referred to Anne Fischer a couple of times as "kind" and "sweet". Well, no. No one who knew her, and certainly no one who crossed her would ever use those terms to describe her. She was fierce, passionate, committed, focused, stubborn and tenacious. How else do you manage to live to 105? She was very, very German - they emigrated in 1934 much against her will, because my grandfather could see clearly that Very Bad Things were going to happen to Jews in Germany. She had studied physics in University, but when they settled down in Richmond, she became a social worker and a leader in the Jewish community and in progressive politics.

She was the grandmother who seemed to "get" me as a child - she had been a very good pianist, and gave me all her music - and I ended up saddled with her piano, too - a 1912 German Steinway that has far outlived its best years, but I somehow can't bear to part with it. When my artistic yearnings bewildered the rest of my family, she encouraged my aspirations and always wanted to know about what I was playing, or singing, or acting in. She loved to talk about ideas, gave me my Hebrew bible when I started seminary, and well after her 100th birthday wanted to know all about my work, my challenges, and my theology.

Anne slipped away Sunday night; in a conversation with my mother the previous week, Mom said that Grandmother was less and less responsive. I don't know whether or not there's going to be any additional celebration of her life; as often happens, a death opens up fault lines in the family, and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to agree on anything. But I'm not sure that I, personally, need anything else. I have wonderful memories of family vacations, dinners and celebrations - of her keen interest in me and my children - of her grand 100th birthday part that drew people from all over the country - of her playing German children's games with Mary and Andy - of her commitment to "tikkun olam" - which means perfecting creation, the faithful person's work of cooperation with God to see God's purposes fulfilled. I got to say the Kaddish for her, to watch as the plain pine coffin with the Star of David on it was lowered into the grave, and to throw in a shovel-full of red Virginia clay.

Rest in peace, Anne.

The King of Love

2008-03-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a Very Good Day. Very Good Days have not been frequent in our house for a long time; there's been so much stress and sadness and that constant undercurrent of fear that runs through a home being stalked by cancer. Gerry won't really feel better until he finishes the course of the trial drug that's supposed to keep the cancer from coming back, and that will be sometime in June - so fatigue and nausea and low grade depression will continue to be his companions.

But - yesterday was a Very Good Day. I went off to our Women's Retreat in Little Compton - there were ten of us, facilitated by Jeana Whittredge, and she did an absolutely wonderful job. I'm always so grateful when people are well-prepared, stick to their schedule, lead people through difficult exercises with grace, encouragement and charm and create a safe place to do some challenging spiritual work. When I got home, late on that rainy afternoon, Gerry and Andy had gone off to see the new caveman movie - a testosterone fest I figured I could skip. So I took a hot bath with a glass of wine and People magazine, which is just about the most decadent thing I can ever think of doing.

Then I cooked dinner - something simple, light and delicious and we all sat down and ate together for the first time this week (I'd been out of town a couple of days) and the kids were happy and relaxed and talkative and we sort of felt like a normal family again. The kids - without being prompted at all - cleaned up - and while they were working, I went over and sat in a Gerry's lap.

Not an unusual thing for a wife to do, but it had been a long time since I'd done that - since I hadn't had to worry about feeding tubes, and burns on his neck, skin irritations and other things that make a person not want to be touched. I sat with my head on his shoulder, and my arms around him, and we started rocking a little side to side, that same motion to you make with babies in your arms and suddenly out of nowhere, I started to croon "The King of love my shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never..."

Everything stopped in the kitchen - the kids stood still and Andy said softly, "I haven't heard that in years."

It's amazing to me that he remembered. When they were very small, I used to rock them to sleep with that hymn (plus "Tell me Why" and "Tender Shepherd" from Peter Pan. ) But I think I'd stopped doing it by the time they were 5. So it goes way back to some deep memory of their childhood. Those were some of the happiest, most blessed hours of my life - I loved my babies, I loved putting them to sleep, I loved singing to them, loved smelling their clean little necks and cradling them, loved those dark hours in the evening with just the night light on, my voice singing St. Columba and the creak of the old rocker that belonged to my great grandmother Ella.

Something of that same feeling of peace and contentment was in my kitchen last night, and I am very, very grateful for that. The King of Love, indeed.

Of Students and Singing

2008-03-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have a really cool job. Susanna Vagt, parishioner and RISD student invited me to come "speak" to the Christian student group. I was glad to say yes; I've missed being around students ever since I left Blacksburg. So I gathered with them last night, to have some conversation about "spirituality and the arts". I picked that because I told Susanna I didn't want ever again to have to talk about being an ordained women. I got really tired of that in the 1980s.

Now, I don't know anything about the visual arts, and even less about design, but I do know something about performance and practice and technique and trying to say something true through an artistic medium. So we just started talking and the conversation ranged over a variety of topics including the difference between art and design, the role of technique in artistic expression, the manga bible, how to hear and respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and well - these were very bright, very thoughtful, very faithful young men and women, and I enjoyed hanging out with them immensely.

But the best part was the singing that kicked everything off. They sing every week when they meet - and then pray together. After some fumbling around with Power Point connections, they got started, singing "Be Thou My Vision", "Come thou Fount of Every Blessing" and a third song that was new to me. They sang with real enthusiasm, led by a guitarist to established strong rhythm and musical leadership. They even burst into harmony! It was really beautiful, some of the best group singing I've experienced outside of church (well, it was church in a way, but you know what I mean). It was spontaneous and joyful and satisfying and soul-nourishing, and a real blessing to me after a long day of interviews and four hours on the train.

More on Moore

2008-03-03T09:19:00.001-08:00

Go and put your hands on last week's issue of The New Yorker and read Honor Moore's evocative essay on her relationship with her father, the late Paul Moore, former Bishop of New York. I finally got to read the essay yesterday afternoon, after hearing lots about it from colleagues. and in the Episcopal blogosphere. All the chatter comes from the revelation that Bishop Moore, who was twice married and fathered nine children, also had a series of homosexual relationships during his marriages, including at least one that lasted decades. There's been passionate conversation about Bishop Moore, about what these revelations mean, about whether he is a victim or a predator (at least one of these men came to him initially for spiritual counsel and advice).

So I came to the story expecting to be caught up in that debate, and instead, I found something else entirely. Honor Moore's piece (part of a longer memoir) is beautifully written, and is, most of all, a daughter's tender exploration of her relationship with her imposing, important and distant father. She was aware of deep problems in her parents' marriage (all nine children were born to Moore's first wife), and now understands that they were driven, at least in part, by her father's conflicted sexual identity.

But the essay raised many more questions for me than simply - was Bishop Moore a Good Guy or a Bad Guy? Honor Moore has eight siblings, but none of them are mentioned in the essay. It's as if she is an only child. Perhaps that's a literary choice she made, and perhaps they figure in the larger memoir, but their absence seems strange and disturbing to me. I wonder, too, why Bishop Moore remarried after his wife's death. If he hadn't been willing to own his sexual orientation, he could at least have avoided compromising his marriage vows a second time by choosing to remain single.

I identified most of all, finally, with Honor Moore's depiction of her father at his best when he was preaching and celebrating the Eucharist. She felt the most connected to him, found him the easiest to love when he was in his priestly role. I find that I also, in a very strange way, feel most fully myself when I am preaching and when I am at the altar. It is as if something far beyond my own power and agency speaks and acts through me; I become my very best self, the person I long to be for those brief moments. It's odd to feel so authentic at a moment when I am so fully immersed in a role. But actors experience something like that, too - when the role, instead of being a mask, reveals most completely who the actor really is.

Hats and Grandchildren

2008-03-02T04:20:00.000-08:00

At convocation yesterday, Barry Taylor - the keynote speaker who has as interesting a history as anyone I've ever met - quoted Pablo Picasso. Taylor is a former sound guy for AC/DC, now a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary AND a California design school, teaching about culture, design, marketing and how Christianity affects and is affecting by all the stuff he's interested in. He's in the ordination process in the Diocese of Los Angeles and on the staff at All Saints', Beverly Hills.

Anyway, here's the quote: Picasso said, "If you want to preserve tradition, don't wear your grandfather's hat, have grandchildren."

That struck a chord with me - because as I had been looking around the room during the gathering, an awful lot of people clearly weren't on board with what Taylor was saying about how technology has so profoundly changed how we interact with each other, in every dimension of our lives, changed how we process information and how we feel connected. His point was that if we're preparing for change, for the future, we're too late - the future is already here. And he gently remarked that churches were among the slowest institutions to embrace that reality.

And I thought about how many congregations talk so earnestly about wanting to grow, about wanting to attract new members and especially new families. And it occurred me that as we talk about growth at St. Martin's, we have to be very careful that we don't talk about just bringing in new people so we can put Grandfather's hat on them. We don't need more people to wear the old hats. We need to incorporate new people so that they can carry on our traditions the way grandchildren carry family history and traditions into the future. It won't look exactly the same, and it won't sound exactly the same - but it will be the Gospel, and it will be good news, and it will honor Christ and it will build the church.

Back to Life

2008-02-13T12:08:00.001-08:00

My last entry was August 6 - just before we learned that Gerry had cancer. For that story, you can go to www.caringbridge.org/visit/gerrydavies

But now, Gerry is cancer free, Andy is home from Japan, and our family is starting to come back to life. I have been, we have all been, tremendously supported by St. Martin's, and prayers and gestures of good will came in from all over the place. I've also been contacted - perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by some disturbance in The Force, perhaps by the hand of God - by a number of very old friends - from high school and college days. These are all people I haven't seen in decades. I've never been a very good "absent" friend, which is something I regret, and I've often thought of some of these folks with tenderness and curiosity. But I was never moved to pick up a pen, the phone, or even to google them and find out where they are now.

Somehow - they were moved to reach out to me - and all through the hard weeks of the fall and early winter, I'd pick up the phone and hear a voice I hadn't heard in years. One phone call led to an impromptu college reunion in Boston, another to a planned get together later in the spring, all to renewed friendships, more support and a renewal of my energy and sense of being connected to others. This strange array of reconnections has been one of the most precious blessings of this curiously blessed ordeal.

Yes, blessed. I always was suspicious of people who said that some terrible catastrophe was a blessing. It sounded falsely pious to my cynical ears. But now I know what they mean. I would never have chosen this for Gerry - it's been ghastly, and hard and painful and scary - but it has given us a deeper emotional intimacy with each other, it has taught me to open myself up to the care and support of others, it has given me insights into the world of the seriously ill...it's grounded me more deeply in prayer. And most of all, this experience has taught me to be thankful.

Treat yourself

2007-08-06T10:53:00.001-07:00

Treat yourself to this lovely essay by Roger Ferlo. It will go down easy and will do you good.

For better, for worse

2007-08-06T10:02:00.001-07:00

Really, I'm a terrible blogger - I haven't mastered the art of sharing every waking thought with the world - although I am certainly enjoying and often profiting from the manifold waking thoughts of others. I will try to post more frequently -

Both Greg and I are getting ready for a couple of weddings. When I served a church in a university community, weddings were frequent - the pace isn't as frenetic here, which allows an opportunity to connect more with couples, do more intentional preparation with them, and take more of an interest in their future within the faith community.

Most of the blogosphere I inhabit has been chattering about the ever-escalating conflict in the Anglican Communion. Wars and rumors of wars are afoot and there's name calling, finger pointing and anathema pronouncing aplenty on both sides. In the middle of the cacophony a couple of people have calmly pointed out that both sides of the debate are guilty of obeying the rules when it suits them, while brazenly flouting them when it doesn't. That's not so serious an issue for lay people (well, it may be a philosophical and moral issue), but for bishops, priests and deacons - it can violate the oaths we take at ordination - the vow to obey our bishops, and to uphold the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal church to name just two.

So somehow I got to thinking about both marriage and Holy Orders - about making promises when you have no idea what the future will bring, and about honoring those promises when things don't turn out the way you expect. I can vaguely remember our premarital counseling in 1985, but Gerry and I were so in love - I mean, we fell hard and fast for each other and got married six months after we met - that no words of wisdom could affect us. I think about that every time I sit with a couple preparing for marriage. After 20+ years I've tried it all - inventories, Meyers-Briggs, genograms, you name it - when really, I want to take them by the shoulders and shake them and say "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HARD THIS IS GOING TO BE!"

I mean really, I married a smart, kind, laundry and housework doing, great father, steadfast, honorable, sensitive man - and of course, I'm practically perfect in every way - and still - marriage is the hardest thing I've ever done. Way harder than being a parish priest. That "for better, for worse" part is like crossing a lake covered with the thinnest ice sheet - sooner or later, that ice will break and you'll be plunged into swirling, dark and dangerous water. The "worse" part comes to every marriage - and comes back again and again - it comes with financial difficulties, and struggles with family, and illness and fatigue and hopelessness and...well, the list could go on and on. It can be wonderful to have a caring, committed partner when all the bad stuff happens - and weathering our "worsts" together has strengthened and deepened our relationship, but...

I'm not surprised that so many marriages fail. There have been several times when the only reason I've stayed is because I was too tired, and too sad to leave. Thank God, after the bad times pass - we can be forgiving, and loving and enjoy one another again. The "best" parts come back again and again, too.

Anyway, I'm thinking the church is like a marriage, too - and especially when one is in Holy Orders. I've made promises to Christ and to the Church just like I've made promises to Gerry, and I have to keep my promises in good times and in bad just like I have to keep them in my marriage. If I only obey my bishop when I'm in agreement with what I'm called to do, then my obedience isn't obedience at all - it's just lip service to obedience. There are limits to obedience, of course - just like there are times when marriage vows just cannot be upheld, and trying to discern when conscience can't be pushed or accommodated any farther is hard and painful work, and I am grateful that I've never yet had to make that choice.

I'm committed to my marriage, and I'm committed to my ordination vows. There are lots of days when I don't like my husband very much (and PLENTY of days when I know he doesn't like me) and there are days when I don't like the church very much. There are days when I'm frustrated, vexed, quarrelsome, depressed, anxious and miserable. That goes with the "for worse" part. And thank God, there are more days when I am enriched, joyful, serene, irenic, happy, hopeful and even sweet-tempered.

Keeping promises is hard work.

More about the Good Samaritan

2007-07-24T08:01:00.001-07:00

Sorry - I hit the wrong button and posted just the title by mistake!

Anyway - Sunday before last, the parable of the Good Samaritan was the Gospel reading, and in my sermon, I made some pretty oblique references to some details in the story - that several people said they wanted to know more about. So - here is a Good Samaritan (of course - nowhere is the Samaritan ever called "good" in the text, that's just what tradition has come to call the story) primer. You don't need any of this stuff to understand and appreciate what Jesus is saying, but I like knowing more about the context in which Jesus was teaching, and think it helps deepen our reflection on this very familiar tale. Open your bible to Luke 10:25 and start reading.

So: "A lawyer stood up to test Jesus..." This isn't an attorney, but someone well versed in Jewish law, in Torah (the first five books of the bible). When Jesus ask him what is written in the law, the man quotes Deuteronomy and Leviticus (in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus links love of God and love of neighbor in what tradition calls "the Great Commandment).

"a man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho" a journey of about 17 miles descending some 3000 feet through rocky and desolate terrain. Great territory for bandits. If you like maps, click this link If the man is heading to Jericho, the implication is the the priest and the Levite are headed in the opposite direction, toward the temple and toward cultic responsibilities that demand absolute purity. One reason they don't stop to help the man is that - remember he looks dead - touching a corpse will make them ritually unclean and unfit for their temple duties. Plus they are probably scared out of their wits that the robbers are still around.

"But a Samaritan..." go back to the map link and find Samaria - between Galilee in the north and Judea in the South. Jews hated Samaritans - considered them worse than pagans - there are all kinds of historic reasons for the enmity, but the short answer is - if Jesus is telling this story to a Jewish audience, the last thing they expect is that the Samaritan is going to be the good guy.

I didn't find this quote until after I wrote my sermon for July 15, but this fleshes out what I said:
"A Jew who was excessively proud of his blood line and a chauvinist about his tradition would not permit a Samaritan to touch him, much less minister to him. In going from Galilee to Judea, he would cross and recross the Jordan to avoid going through Samaria. The parable therefore forces upon its hearers the question: who among you will permit himself or herself to be served by a Samaritan? In a general way it can be replied that that only those who have nothing to lose by so doing can afford to do so. But note that the victim in the ditch is given only a passive role in the story. Permission to be served by the Samaritan is thus inability to resist. Put differently, all who are truly victims, truly disinherited, have no choice but to give themselves up to mercy. The despised half-breed has become the instrument of grace: as listeners, the Jews choke on the irony. "(p. 33) Funk, in "Parables and Presence", quoted by Brian Stoffregen.

The Mayan Apocalypse

2007-07-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times magazine ran an article about the pending Mayan apocalypse. That is, a group of - is scholars the right word? - anyway, those who like to fool around with this stuff - a group steeped in the study of the ancient Mayan calendar believe that one of the great cycles of Mayan time is due to come to an end in the last months of 2012. There's practically an entire industry built up around the parsing and analysis of Mayan astronomical observation and time-keeping, and some predict that there will be a (1) cataclysmic cleansing of the world to prepare for a purer, more nobler, more evolved and enlightened race of beings or (2) the dawning of a new age of heightened consciousness, cosmic awareness and universal peace or (3) some combination or further permutation of the previous two.

Reading the article flashed me back to the early 1980s, when I was briefly engaged to a young man who believed all that stuff. Oh - not the Mayan calendar precisely - but a strange amalgamation of theories, prophecies, theologies and rituals drawn from a variety of world religious and cultures. It's not quite fair to say that he was a dabbler, because he took the study and practice of his belief system quite seriously - but he borrowed bits and pieces from various religious traditions without much critical analysis or concern about consistency or deeper meaning. He was convinced that he was on a spiritual path that would lead him to enlightenment, mystical union with the source of all life, and also bring him personal achievement, wealth and happiness.

It all seems a little sad now. That young man was really a gentle soul, a talented musician who was hungry for connection and meaning; he'd been raised in a strange, unhappy family and left pretty much to his own spiritual devices. He was supportive of my own religious faith (I was in seminary then), but thought I was mistaken to "settle" for Christianity when I could pursue something he believed was so much richer, when I could be initiated into the cosmic and eternal mysteries to which he had the key.

I think that he, and the Mayan apocalypticists, and lots of people who glom on to whatever the latest spiritual fad happens to be, are really seeking confirmation of their own specialness. They want to believe that they are privy to spiritual secrets that the ordinary cannot penetrate, that they have a superior consciousness able to apprehend mysteries lesser mortals cannot understand. And basic Christianity just doesn't offer that.

Jesus says, "Come to me, all of you who are carrying heavy burdens, and I'll give you rest." Jesus doesn't go looking for the smartest, the most talented, the most special - instead he reaches out for the people that have been rejected and marginalized. He eats and drinks with the folks no one else will sit with; he's not impressed by anyone's knowledge or power. At it's best, Christianity is messy, an untidy assembly of people who are there because they know they need the knowledge and love of Christ. At it's best, the church is full - not of the perfect, but of the broken, the seeking, the guilty, the hungry and the lost. We make no claims of our own righteousness; we put all our faith in the grace and salvation that pours out of God's loving heart - not just for us, but for the whole world.

That young man wanted something much more pure, something that reflected his own need to be special. He never understood that glorious messiness and incompleteness that is the Christian faith and life. He wanted the first to be first; "The first shall be last" just wasn't Good News for him. I'm really grateful not to be special - I'm grateful that I can lean into God's strength and forgiveness and love, and that I can find meaning and purpose - not in my own quest for spiritual perfection, but in the great story of God's salvation.

Of Bishops and Vestries

2007-06-27T05:30:00.001-07:00

Last night, Bishop Wolf met with the Vestry for an informal, unofficial conversation about the state of the Anglican Communion, about St. Martin's vocation to be a parish that welcomes all people, and about managing the tensions between what's happening in the Communion and our parish ministry. The Vestry had asked for the meeting as a way to encourage communication and strengthen our relationship, and surely it's the way Christians ought to meet and talk with and listen to one another.

It was a very good conversation. We talked about theology, ecclesiology, canon law, ethics, pastoral theology and church history. The Bishop was clear and forthright, and never hesitated to express her deeply held convictions about the vital importance of the unity of the church. Members of the Vestry were passionate and articulate, and never hesitated to express concern and disagreement. The 90 minutes were grounded in prayer, contained in courtesy and respect, and leavened with plenty of humor. By no means did we come to any conclusions, except to agree that these are painful times and there are no easy answers.

But I was delighted that the conversation took place, delighted that this Vestry always chooses to wrestle openly with hard things, and delighted that the Bishop gave us her time and attention. These are painful and challenging times, and maybe the only way through them is to keep talking, keep listening, keep praying and keep living faithfully into our particular ministries.

Asking for forgiveness

2007-06-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

Friday night, Gerry and I watched a pretty bad movie called "Mind the Gap". In the middle of the badness was a scene that really intrigued me - especially because it featured a clergyman who was neither venal nor comic! The movie follows five characters whose lives all become entwined in New York City - the director also starred in it, which is usually (unless you're Kenneth Branagh) NOT a good artistic choice.

The scene that interested me was between a man named John and his parish priest. John is living all alone in Tucson, having destroyed his marriage by cheating on his wife. She moved to New York, taking their young son with her, leaving John to stew in the juices of his guilt and sadness. Driven to the brink of suicide, he goes to see his priest and talks about how miserable he is, how sorry he is and how much he misses his son. He can't see a way out of that tangle of bad feelings.

The priest says; "Have you asked for her forgiveness?" John replies, "I've told her I'm sorry." The priest repeats the question, and John gives the same answer, "I've told her how sorry I am." Then the priest makes the point that asking for forgiveness isn't the same thing as expressing regret. I'm paraphrasing now, but the priest says that asking for forgiveness allows the person we've hurt the chance to be holy, to participate in the divine work of reconciliation. It restores balance to the broken relationship and can free both parties from the bondage of guilt and resentment.

In both the baptismal covenant, and in the prayers for newly married couple in the wedding liturgy, we acknowledge that the discipline of acknowledging fault, expressing repentance and seeking forgiveness is part of the rhythm of the Christian faith and life. And I think it is a profound contrast to the culture of "deniability" and spin. That memorable scene in an otherwise forgettable movie has made me reflect uncomfortably on how my apologies tend to be more of the "I'm sorry I upset you" variety than a true acknowledgement of fault and an asking for forgiveness.

John goes to New York and visits his ex-wife and their conversation begins stiffly - she has remarried and moved on, but she's clearly still angry and resentful, still holding on to the pain of his betrayal. And then John says, "May I have your forgiveness?" She is surprised, and not sure how to respond. She doesn't go all gooey and sentimental, but the actress shows us a shift, a softening, a recognition that even in her new life, the old pain still has power. She gives John the forgiveness he seeks, and the movie ends with him expressing a new sense of freedom and possibility as he breaks out of the prison of his old life.

It's as good an illustration as I've ever seen of the power of true repentance and forgiveness.

Empty Nest?

2007-06-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

This is my first day of being temporarily childless - Andy is in Japan - Mary left for New Mexico yesterday and even David, our exchange student is leaving today for a week in Los Angeles with his family. We've been talking about and anticipating this day for a long time. Now is just Gerry and me, along with the dog and the two cats.

It's said so often when your children are small "You won't believe how fast the time goes," but of course, when you are in the middle of the sheer hard work of raising young children you can't imagine the time going quickly enough. I used to yearn for the days when they would be able to dress themselves and feed themselves, not to mention take care of their own toilet functions. What no one told me is that, as the physical challenges diminish, the emotional and psychological challenges begin. No one mentioned that parenting adolescents is WAY harder than toddlers - that the feeling of terrified cluelessness, the walking-a-tight-rope-without-a-net-parenting-by-the-seat-of the-pants feeling gets much worse as they get older.

We're watching Andy grow up now 10,000 miles away. He doesn't email us much, but when he does, his posts are full of new insights and maturity. I long for him, of course, long to put my arms around him, long to see his sweet smile - which even at his teen age rottenest - never entirely went away. BUT I'm glad to be able to take a breather from always worrying about whether I'm doing it wrong - whether I'm giving him the right advice - whether I should get really involved in the problem-solving or let him figure it out himself. He's really on his own - having to figure out who he can ask for help and bless him, beginning to think that maybe his own parents aren't so annoying after all.

Growing into Priesthood

2007-06-12T07:43:00.000-07:00

"I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood." That's novelist Don DeLillo, quoted in The New Yorker a week or two ago. The quote is in a letter to another writer, who is looking for encouragement and help with managing the writing life. I read the quote while I was on the treadmill at the Y, trying to work off a few calories before coming in to work - so the rest of DeLillo's words seemed particularly apt. "...eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point, discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all."

I got older, that's all. Truly, that just about seems to sum up my approach to the spiritual life and to the priesthood. I spent a lot of time and energy in my younger years trying to unlock spiritual secrets, acquire spiritual technique, master spiritual arcana - and in the end prayer just comes down to - like the treadmill - something I do. I haul myself down to the church at 7am every morning to say Morning Prayer with a colleague because, over time, I've decided that this is simply what priests do. Tobias Haller wrote about this way more eloquently than I ever could; my spiritual director in seminary exhorted me in much the same way, but it's taken me 20+ years to be able to hear it. I just got older, that's all.