Give and Take

The power of compromise has almost atrophied in today's society. To look at the national stage, it's clear that for at least the last quarter century, those in power find it more expedient to hold to their positions than to work with the opposition, much less to compromise. What used to be considered civilized give-and-take is now viewed as unforgivable weakness.

Part of it might be the increasing isolation in which we often find ourselves. It is possible, even easy, to go through an entire day without a single human transaction. We have to make an effort to engage with others. As a result, I think we've all become accustomed not only to instant results but also to instant gratification. Anything that doesn't put my needs, and me, first, is unacceptable. We've lost the example of compromise.

Which is why it was so satisfying when, last night, I found myself on the receiving end of it.

For several years now, I've been in a knitting group that meets on Monday evenings. We started at a local chain restaurant and coffee shop, then migrated to a small local coffee shop. We floundered for a while after that shop closed, before fetching up at the cafe of a large chain bookstore.

But six weeks ago, the family moved. We are now much closer to work, and we love our new home. But it also makes the Monday-night gathering a 45-minute drive. I got to thinking about it, and that's quite a haul: an hour and a half in the car for an hour of knitting and good company. As much as I enjoyed the evening, some nights it was just too much. Which is why I had missed the last two weeks.

One of the other members lives out my way, and a third lives about two minutes from the cafe. So when I made my proposition, I knew that it would mean a challenge for the one who lives so close that she could, if she chose, walk to the cafe.

I suggested a coffee shop much closer to me. There would be downsides, but it's probably safer for my budget not to be meeting in a bookstore. To be honest, it was the one knitting buddy who was making all the compromise (is it really a compromise if one side is doing all the moving?).

I worked it out. The new location, while it would mean a 20-minute drive for her, would be 13 minutes away for our other friend and 15 minutes away for me. It couldn't be more balanced.

After a little good-natured grumbling, our knitting buddy accepted. It's going to make my Monday evenings much easier. But more than that, I've been the recipient of a little seasonal grace. Because my friend exercised compromise, we'll be able to have more time together, more time socializing, and more time practicing the lost art of give and take.

Tradition

The structure and the feel of the day have changed, but the sacredness of the gathering remains. It's been close to 11 years since our family started making a point of gathering, all fourteen of us, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We usually get together a day or two after the fact. 

It's easier logistically for us than for a lot of families who are scattered across the country. The farthest away of us is only six or seven hours from home base in central North Carolina. When we began, the children were toddlers and hugely entertaining to watch. Now they're young adults, or teenagers who have perfected the art of eye rolling. Still, we gather.

For a number of years, we got together at the home of one of our number in Charlotte. A little over a year ago, though, Mom entered an assisted-living facility. She is a survivor of polio, struck just a few years before a vaccine made the disease nearly obsolete, and after seventy years of making one leg do the work of two, her left leg went on strike, costing her her mobility. At the same time, we had to face the reality that she was in early dementia.

So now we get together for a few hours at a local restaurant, which we did this past Friday. Mom was at the head of the table. She didn't talk much or engage much with the rest of us. But she enjoyed her lunch, and the whole time she sat there with a smile on her face. She knew who we were. She could look down the table and see what she and Dad had created unto the third generation.

I'm in my fifties and incredibly fortunate to have my parents still living. Many friends my age have lost their parents long ago. I don't know how much Mom got from the day's gathering - but the smile on her face was genuine. She was surrounded by family who loved her. And that is enough.

Back in the Nest

It ended up being an all-day saga, but at the end of it, our dragonlet is (temporarily) back in the nest.

As a Christmas present last year, S's boyfriend presented a ticket for a flight to suburban St. Paul and the even more extraordinary gift of a three-month stay with him and his dad. We sent S. off with a new suitcase and casual hugs goodbye, thinking we'd be reunited in May.

After only a month, S. wanted to stay. I didn't think it was at all practical, but S. managed to find a job, make a contribution to the household, and honestly, it seemed to be working out better for everyone. S. is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, and it was surprising how much energy went into keeping the peace in our household. With his younger sibling out of the nest, our firstborn's maturity blossomed. Our family of four became a family of three.

And S. was thriving in the North. Big-city living seemed to agree with the dragonlet. 

But, well, we missed the peanut. A lot. And amazingly, when the holidays approached, we found a surprisingly affordable round-trip airline ticket to allow S. to come home for Thanksgiving. We'd get a whole week together.

We were counting down the days. The flight was scheduled to arrive at an airport in the state's capital, about 90 minutes away, at 2:30. We left home at a little before noon. But en route came a series of texts. Changing planes at O'Hare, the dragonlet had accidentally gone through a one-way door, got turned around, and missed the connecting flight.

My child was stranded in Chicago. And I was helpless. But within a half-hour came another text. My young adult had gotten onto another flight, one that would arrive at 6 p.m. With several hours to dispose off, the hubs and I went to a movie, then proceeded to the airport. After a comedy of errors, we finally figured out how to park in the deck and proceeded to the terminal. S. had landed and would meet us at baggage claim.

The next half hour dragged - until finally here was this person coming down the escalator. Our baby, whom we hadn't seen in nine months. Confident, well-traveled, and a full-blown adult. There was some question about the suitcase, because of the missed flight, but before long we were reunited with the luggage and on our way home. 

S. is now asleep in the study. But we sent away a vulnerable child and have had returned to us a fully functioning grownup with a new haircut and not one but two jobs, plans for the future, and real joy in living. 

What Makes a Home

The dust has settled, at long last. On Tuesday, we left our house of the last six years and moved across town to our new home, a single-story townhouse that will cut our commute to work in half, down to twenty minutes. Already, we're feeling the difference.

The move itself took place on the one day of the week on which it was raining, of course, but the movers were on time, cheerful, careful, and efficient. We were in the new place by 4:30 on Tuesday afternoon. By 8:15 Friday morning, the last box was unpacked and its contents dispersed. We devoted the weekend to hanging framed items on the walls. 

The dogs and the cats have settled in with no trouble, and we are eagerly looking forward to the arrival on Saturday of our second-born, who now lives in Minnesota. S. will be with us for a week, and it can't come soon enough.

I expected some longing, some nostalgia, a sense of missing the place we had called home for six years. It hasn't happened. From the first, the new place has felt like home. There's been no sense of transition, no feeling that we are perching temporarily in someone else's house. This is home. 

Of course, it helps that the furnishings are familiar, that we are sitting on the familiar sofa, cooking with the familiar pots and pans, drawing books from familiar shelves. But the real difference, of course, is the people. Those whom I love are close at hand, and that's what makes the place home. 

It's also interesting to have come full circle, in a sense. When the children were small (S. was only six months old), we moved into a house just a few miles away. We had a local movie theater and a local Harris Teeter. Twenty years later, we are once again going to see films at the same local theater and shopping at the same Harris Teeter. Only now the babies are grown. Maybe that's part of why the place feels so much like home - it's a coming back to a familiar area. 

In any event, we are very glad to be home at last. 

Sign Here

It's a roller coaster ride - with paperwork.

Six years ago, as I began a new call, we moved back to the city that had been home for the better part of thirty years. We'd devoted several weeks of trading emails and pictures back and forth with a Realtor and arranged to drive over on a Saturday and look at five or six houses.

We did, and in due course found ourselves looking at a series of homes. Afterward, we repaired to a local restaurant for lunch, both M. and I agreeing that either of two houses was fine. Laughing, the Realtor said, "Come on - you really like this one." And I did. Built in 1957, it would have been an ordinary and quite small brick ranch house, except for the addition on the back in 1989 that added a spacious den, a master bedroom and small but serviceable bathroom, a mud room and laundry room, and a screened porch. 

As a result, the house had a funky layout, with the dining room - painted barnyard red - in the center. The minute we'd stepped through the doorway, I knew I'd come home.

Six years on, and we are leaving. We have sold the house. We think.

Since we moved in, first I switched from serving as chaplain of a nursing home in one city to serving at a sister facility in another city, 45 minutes away. Then M. found a job there, as did our son. And I also serve a small congregation in a town adjoining ours. 

Despite the  45-minute commute each day (and the 30-minute drive to the church), we weren't actively looking to move. Until M. happened upon a townhouse for sale by owner. Five minutes from the church and twenty minutes from the city where our jobs are. It was an older neighborhood, quiet and with a retro charm. The house was an end unit, and they were all one story. 

So we put our house up for sale. Excited at first by the run of showings (fifteen in the first week), we thought that everything might be over in a matter of days. Even so, within a month we had a contract.

The buyer was an investor who planned to live in the house and do some renovating and updating, then resell it. We were ecstatic. For about 48 hours. Then the Realtor called with the bad news. "He just can't make the numbers work." The buyer had backed out.

Were we naive? Was it foolish to think our house would sell? Autumn was coming on, and summer is said to be the best time for home sales - had we missed our window?

That was on a Friday. On Monday morning, we prepared the house for two scheduled showings and turned the dogs out. Off we went to work. And our phones started buzzing with text messages from the Realtor. 

Someone had made an offer. Before we could digest the news, the buyer had increased her offer. Unlike the previous prospect, this buyer really wanted to live in the neighborhood. She signed the contract immediately and put in almost twice as much in due diligence. 

For some undefined reason, I've got a good feeling about this one. It's nice to think that the place we have loved for six years will be going to someone who wants to make a home here. 

If everything goes smoothly, we're now in the time of waiting and paperwork. Time to pack up the books yet again, to cushion the dinner plates and box up the yarn stash. Time to trade the familiar for the new. 

Two sets of dreams are about to begin - ours, going to a place we like; and the buyer's, settling down in a neighborhood where she really wants to be.

I Was Not Here

It's a troubling trend in newspaper journalism, if one I've seen coming for a while: a recent article spelled out that many newspapers have eliminated the copy editors as an act of financial survival. Copy editing seems so integral to journalism that  I'm hard-pressed to imagine the one without the other.

It was weird enough when I learned that a newspaper at which I had been a copy editor was farming the work out - that all the copy produced locally would be edited remotely at the larger flagship newspaper in the group, in a city some three hours north. I had left newspaper work for divinity school by then but watched former colleagues make bitter jokes about how those on the copy desk would miss local nuances. "Someone will have to tell them that [Street Name] is two words."

Inevitably, over the last decade, newspapers have moved from remote, central copy editing to none at all. That is: Reporters have to edit their own copy. And, I suppose, write their own headlines. And caption the photos. Not that they are incapable. But the cardinal rule is that you don't edit your own copy, because it's too easy to miss something. It's always good to have another pair of eyes. Another person looking at the material, someone who hasn't already crafted the story, brings a perspective that allows for what editing does.

Which is: to look appreciatively over the crafted material, fixing goofs, questioning incongruities, fact-checking (is that how you spell DiSalvo? Does crumple-horned snorcack get capitalized?). Occasionally moving a paragraph higher in a story to improve the flow. And crafting a headline so that in the few seconds a reader will take, he or she will be interested enough to read the article that follows. It's an art, a craft, a vocation. A calling, even. Not as an antagonist to the reporter, but working side by side, like a pair of headlights.

I used to joke that I had the best job in the world and also the most anonymous: If I did my work properly, no one reading the paper would have any idea of my existence. The average newspaper reader might not be aware that there is such a creature as a copy editor and is often surprised to learn that reporters don't write their own headlines. "If I've done my job, I leave no trace," I'd say.

To a degree, that's what ministry feels like sometimes, particularly the nursing-home chaplaincy that has been my calling for six years. To be sure, I'm much more consciously present in the lives of residents and their families. I leave a trace. But it's ephemeral. When their loved ones have died, and that chapter comes to an end, daughters and sons-in-law, grandsons and nieces - their memories of the last days will include a comforting presence. A quiet and calm listener. Words of comfort. Praying with them, sometimes conducting a graveside service.

Typically, there's no tangible reminder that I walked with them through this part of the family journey. And that's how it's meant to be. My role is not obtrusive. I work at not shifting the spotlight onto me. I'm here to provide an objective, yet loving and respectful perspective. To do what I can to make the moments a little better. And to invite attention to the presence of God.

Just as, with editing stories, I would bring in a response that was objective and respectful; to polish a little where needed; and to cap the story with a headline that would invite attention. And if I'd done my job properly, you'd scarcely know I'd been there. Only that things were as they ought to be.

Back on the Horse

Last week's sermon was a clunker.

Virtually the entire book of St. Paul's letter to Philemon, paired with Moses' exhortation in Deuteronomy to "choose life" and the shockingly difficult message of Luke 14 - whoever does not hate father and mother ... whoever does not take up his cross and follow me ... whoever does not give up all his possessions ... cannot be my disciple.

Somehow, I ended up with at least one and a half sermons awkwardly stuck together. After more than a week of wrestling with it, smote on the hollow of my thigh, I limped to the weekly pastors' text-study group and read it. We all worked at dissecting the thing. There was some good material in there, all agreed, and some wisdom on making one sermon out of it.

I tried again, and this time I felt that the needed truth was beginning to rise out of the text in a way that I could bring to those who would hear it.

And on Sunday, I delivered a sermon. And it was dead on arrival. When I'm with colleagues and we talk about preaching, it seems we all know the feeling of delivering what we thought was a good healthy sermon, only to be painfully aware of the air going out of the room, of the thing dying under us even as we preach.

I use the word delivery advisedly, as a sermon is a living thing. It's dynamic. Creating it is one stage of the delivery, often complexly layered, and part of the role of those who preach is -- after having discerned the wisdom in the Word -- to bring order out of chaos. In a way, it's like baking bread.

After years of practice, most of the time when I bake bread, it rises when it is supposed to, rising a final time in the baking to yield a light, springy loaf with a good crust. On occasion, though, it just doesn't happen. Usually, the dough will communicate along the way: my hands will tell me that something isn't right.

Sometimes, I have a sermon that I'm not thrilled with; it's okay, but it's not great. I think it's going to be dead on arrival. But then the Holy Spirit blows through the pulpit, and the sermon lifts off, rising in the oven, and the ones who hear it are fed and nourished.

So here it is Wednesday - I've had a couple of days to lick my wounds and reflect on why my worst expectations were met for the sermon.

What will the congregation hear on Sunday? They'll hear a new sermon. One based on the lectionary texts for the week. And I'm actually excited about what I've crafted so far and hopeful about how it's shaping up. 

That's the thing about sermons (not exactly breaking news): they keep needing to be created. And once a week is not the maximum for everyone. I don't have any funeral sermons to craft. I don't lead a church that expects new sermons on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. One a week is usually all that's expected. 

Which means that, regardless of the clunker I delivered on Sunday, I've gone back into the heat of the kitchen and am shaping another sermon, another living, dynamic creation, and praying as always that the Holy Spirit will blow through the pulpit and let it rise.

The knowledge in pain

There's nothing like that cup of coffee in the morning. Unless one jerks backward and slops the stuff because of an insect sting. Welcome to Friday!

The hubs was on the computer, showing me hurricane footage from the east coast of our state, and we were talking about longtime friends who live there, and colleagues ditto. I had just fetched myself a cup of coffee and was about to take a sip when, instead, I hollered and flailed, the usual response to being stung (at least, I think it is).

M. instinctively shushed me, since our son, who worked second shift last night, was still asleep (to be fair, it was also about 4:30 in the morning, our usual rising time). At which point I informed him (a little tartly) that I was being stung.

For the last month or so, we have been unhappy hosts to cicada killers - that's actually their name. They are large digger wasps, part of a group (I found a chart, which I would rather not have seen, showing nine or so flying, stripey, stinging things) that shows up as part of the great circle of life. We've had cicadas this summer, and therefore we have had cicada killers.

It turns out that they rarely sting unless, say, stepped on with bare feet - or caught in clothing. My go-to pajamas are a set I found at Goodwill, a long soft nightshirt and palazzo pants. I usually sleep in just the shirt, and so this morning took the pants off the chair in the bedroom and put them on before going in search of coffee. Next thing I knew, there was one of those things on my pants leg and I was, as described, hollering and flailing.

The hubs played baseball in high school and has gotten very good with the broom, as they are attracted to light, which means they hover around light fixtures once they get in. Probably they get in as we open the back door to let the dogs out and in each morning. Mostly they're relatively easy to kill, and M dispatched both the wasp that stung me and another one on my shirt. He also wiped up the spilled coffee while I went in search of the topical anesthetic. 

Most of the time, I feel vaguely guilty when I kill a bug or insect that is in the house. Sugar ants, begone; stink bugs, spiders, and crickets, allow me to escort you back to the great outdoors. But even before this morning's close encounter, I have been enthusiastic about finding and dispatching the cicada killers, even as their name indicates that they're part of the ecosystem.

How seriously do I take the injunction against killing? I don't go as far as some practicing Buddhists, who trade advice on how to keep sugar ants away without killing them, or some practicing Jainists, who will wear facial masks to avoid accidentally inhaling tiny animals like midges. Do I have any right to feel invaded (it's our home) when they were pretty clearly here first?

Despite the topical anesthetic, the sting still makes itself known. And that reminds me that, like it or not, we all really are in relationship with every living thing. So maybe there's learning in the pain. And that always brings me closer to God.

No Place Like It

We're preparing to sell our house - to move locally - and so far it's been relatively painless. We got the giggles when the Realtor, who is also our next-door neighbor, walked through the house making suggestions. He came to the living room, where three tall bookcases stand in a row. He paused, trying to think of a tactful way to word what he wanted to say. 

"If you could ... maybe ... fill up four or five boxes with books...." So that the bookshelves would look like normal people's bookshelves, with a tidy partial row of books and a framed photo or ceramic bowl filling up the rest of the space. 

The Realtor put the house on the Multiple Listing Service website about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. By 8:00 yesterday evening there were three showings lined up for the next day. 

It seems there is quite a shortage in our fair city of single-family detached houses like ours. One story, a decent-sized house on a proportionate lot, with a fenced back yard and screened back porch. The yard has been our oasis, and we'll miss it. But the whole thing has got me thinking about home, in general.  

The first couple of places I lived after college never felt like home. They were fine, as apartments go, but my energy was on staying upright and pedaling smoothly into adulthood without toppling over. My third apartment felt like home. I lived there for three years and held the same job in my field for four. When I moved, it was because I got married. Since then, home has been wherever M. is, the hubs, and even crappy places that we've moved into and out of have still been home.

I had finished a call in a city a couple of hours west of here when we were moving back to our fair city in 2013. We worked with a Realtor, and via emails and photos, he got an idea of what we thought home should look like. We drove in on a Saturday and viewed five houses. Over lunch, we discussed the possibilities. I said that either this house or that one would be about equally good. 

The Realtor smiled gently. "Now, you really love this house," he said. It was true. I loved the funky layout that was the result of a basic 1957 ranch house having an addition to the rear that almost doubled its size. That left the dining room in the center of the house, and three bedrooms in a row. I loved the spacious den that resulted, and the screened porch. I loved that someone had painted the dining room a rich barnyard red.

We walked into that house, the third or fourth on the list, and we were home.

So far, we're up to fourteen showings. Eleven or twelve buyers have said it's not for them. It's okay. Someone will walk in and decide that they are home at last. For me, if things go smoothly, home will be a new place. But the hubs will be there, and family, and pets, and security, and just-right-ness.

We each of us can choose to make our hearts, our whole selves, a welcome space where each person who encounters us feels that s/he has come home, even if they've never been there before. That's radical hospitality. That's home.

A long time ago - or not

It was a really long time ago - and it wasn't, also.

The other day, courtesy of Netflix, the hubs and I watched a documentary about the Woodstock festival, which took place 50 years ago - Aug. 15, 17, and 17 - on a dairy farm in upstate New York. The documentary is not the point, although it was beautifully done. The point is the 50 years ago.

A lot happened in 1969 and 1970. As a result, we've walked through the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing as well as the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. And during the first week of August, the triennial churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America marked the beginning of a year's worth of celebration: 50 years since the first woman was ordained (though the ELCA as a church body dates only to 1988); 40 years of ordaining women of color; 10 years of LGBTQIA+ colleagues being in the light. 

I was 2 years old in 1969. And so it seems like a long time ago. Half a century - whoa. But just this morning, courtesy of Facebook and an article from Religion News Service, I saw a photo of the Rev. Jessica Crist, bishop in Montana, standing arm in arm with the Rev. Elizabeth Platz.

The Rev. Platz was the first. She was ordained in 1970. She earned her MDiv. in 1965. And here she was in a photo with the Rev. Crist. "Alive as you and me," as go the lyrics of the old union song "Joe Hill." Which a young Joan Baez sang when she took the stage around midnight on the first day of Woodstock. The Rev. Platz is not a sepia daguerrotype, a plate in a history book, the clothing, hair and expression all smelling of mothballs.

" 'But you chose not to die.' He smiled, as if we had conversations about out-of-body experiences every day." Dr. Rana Awdish includes this, her husband's response, to her own unimaginable medical crisis in her book In Shock. 

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is experiencing growth that can be transcendent and is also incredibly painful for those so rooted in it that being yanked up feels like death. It's at a crossroads, as is virtually every mainline U.S. Protestant denomination. We can choose not to die, though. We can stand arm in arm with the first woman ordained in the ELCA, part of the great cloud of witnesses. We can choose to hear the prophetic witness of the Rev. Tiffany Chaney, a pastor, a woman, and a person of color, who preached a powerful sermon at the assembly.

We can choose. In fact, we must. With compassion and empathy and love and understanding that being yanked up to sunlight and air can feel like death, although it is life.

The Never-Ending Procession

What a procession! I watched what I thought was all of it ... and thought, TERRIFIC. Then ... they kept processing. And kept processing. And kept processing.

So many green stoles. Walking with canes and bad knees, even so dancing joyfully and clapping to the processional music. One in a wheelchair. One in a scooter. Side by side, bunching up, here and there a beautiful chasuble. Long hair and short. Of so many colors of skin.Several familiar faces; most of them not pastors I knew.

And they looked like my sisters and me. And they are my sisters and me.
+ + +

Last week, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America gathered in assembly, as it does every three years. This year, Churchwide Assembly was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; in 2022 it will be in Columbus, Ohio.

I was not in attendance, but livestreaming and phone-created videos let me in on pieces of it, including sermons, plenary sessions, and worship. This year's assembly begins a year of celebrating 50 years of ordination of women in the denomination and its predecessor bodies; 40 years since the ordination of a woman of color; and 10 years of the ordination of people along different gender and identity spectra.

On Friday afternoon, scrolling Facebook (as one does), I saw a video that the bishop of North Carolina, Tim Smith, took on his mobile phone. The video was of the procession out of Friday-afternoon worship, which celebrated the ordination of women in this Lutheran body. The first few paragraphs of this blog post ... are what I wrote when I shared the video on Facebook.

There is much to celebrate - and some issues for lament - coming out of this year's Churchwide Assembly. The ELCA has become the first denomination, it seems, to declare itself a sanctuary body. It's issued a social statement on sexism and embedded patriarchy. There is yet more.

But of the many moments that caught my excitement - it was this video that made my heart sing. After watching it, as I went about my Friday-afternoon chores, I found myself singing, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." Over and over.

The Soap in the Bathroom

One of the most enduring memories of the church of my adolescence was the soap in the basement women's bathroom. We were active members of a downtown United Methodist congregation with a ground floor, second floor and basement.

In the basement was the kitchen and fellowship hall as well as the office of the director of Christian education, so that my sisters and I spent a fair amount of time there each Sunday evening, having supper before going upstairs for Methodist Youth Fellowship. 

The bathrooms downstairs probably got less traffic than the ground-floor bathrooms, and whenever I needed to wash my hands, there would be the bar of soap in the dish, invariably with deep grooves in it. It would be a while before I worked out that soap that dries out thoroughly between uses develops those grooves. The church I now serve has a container of liquid soap in the bathroom along with a small bar of soap in a dish. I make a point of using the bar soap, mostly out of nostalgia for the church basement women's room. 

To be fair, that church helped shape the core of my faith life, my peers and all the guiding adults along the well-worn path that we were making for ourselves as we traveled it. Six years of MYF will leave an impression. But together with that core are the tactile basement memories, such as grabbing and swinging from the large pipes (only in spring and summer; not when the heat was on!); clustering awkwardly in adolescent groups; going through the line for supper; and, yes, the soap. 

In any bathroom, where bar soap is an option, I'll probably use it, each hand washing bringing me back more than 35 years to the basement and the soap, used infrequently enough to develop those grooves. "When you wash your face," Martin Luther counseled, "remember your baptism." When I wash my hands, I remember the church of my youth. Not the same thing, of course, but very real.

What would happen if each of us kept to a tactile memory as pedestrian as soap? I have talismans and trinkets and photographs, as most of us do. But I wash my hands multiple times a day, often in multiple locations. And each time, I'm back in the basement.

 

Happy Endings

The headline is potentially deceptive: this blog post is about having reread a favorite novel. No endings to report, happy or otherwise, in my life at the moment. 

Recently I picked up, for the sixth or seventh time, The Nun's Story, by Katherine Hulme, published in 1956. Stop reading here, please, if you do not want to know how the story ends.

The protagonist is a young Belgian woman, the daughter of a respected physician. Set in the 1930s, it begins as she dresses in the clothing of a postulant, about to begin life in the convent.She is educated as a nurse and serves in what is then the Belgian Congo. Ultimately, she finds that she cannot love the German soldiers and finds herself lying and deceiving to protect patients from them. She resigns her vocation, aiming to join the resistance in Belgium. 

Each time that I've read it, it makes me a little wistful that she had to choose, that she had to resign so that she could resist. This time, it didn't make me feel that way. It seemed instead a natural progression of Sister Luke's development as a woman religious. 

The bishop of the ELCA's North Carolina Synod shared this about a month ago:
Remember your vows 

Maybe it was the confluence of this powerful reminder from the bishop of the vows that I made through the church and congregation that called me - and the novel of the nun that I've read before. But this story has touched me differently this time.

When you, when I, when all of us, live with hearts open to the divine breath of the Holy Spirit - what happens in our relationships to one another? Which is always the point.

And Then What Happened?

The book went onto my list of "I want to read that" as soon as I heard about it. The title is Proof of Heaven. I have read several books that are described as true narratives about, or by, people who have been clinically dead and yet survived, including Heaven is for Real. For the most part, I wasn't in the market for another account.

For the most part, I maintain what I like to describe as a skeptical open mind: I believe that while we live, we mirror Christ imperfectly, but that after this part of our journey is over, we experience God in all of God's personae completely. I also believe that a great deal of what goes on neurologically helps us understand what happens when a person is in the act of dying. It's something I have seen more often, perhaps, than some people have.

Proof of Heaven caught my attention because the author, Eben Alexander, is a medical doctor, specifically a neurosurgeon. Now I was very interested. The book was published in 2012, longer ago than I had thought. Recently, an acquaintance lent me a copy, and I am now about halfway through.

First, Dr. Alexander is from my neck of the woods, and names places with which I am well familiar, something I hadn't known. Second, he is an academic neurosurgeon, meaning he teaches as well as practicing. He's good at describing what's going on and what he experienced during his time in a seemingly fatal coma.

I saw the earth as a pale blue dot in the immense blackness of physical space.... Small particles of evil were scattered throughout the universe, but the sum total of all that evil was as a grain of sand on a vast beach compared to the goodness, abundance, hope, and unconditional love in which the universe was literally awash.*

At the same time, I'm re-reading some Carl Sagan books, including Pale Blue Dot, the title of which came from the Pioneer space expedition in which he was involved integrally. Dr. Alexander, along with his engaging description of what was happening medically, is describing his dis-engagement and then re-engagement with spiritual belief. He is insisting on a teaching that "science and religion must agree."**

What happens with my belief in God when science and religion, Sagan and St. Paul, are swirled together? When "for small creatures such as we, the vastness[of the cosmos] is bearable only through love"?***

I neither need nor want scientific evidence of an afterlife. But what happens when I open my mind and my heart and my experiences to the possibilities? My whole world becomes infinitely more vast.

*Proof of Heaven. Eben Alexander, MD. Page 129, Thorndike Press edition.
**"Science and religion must agree" is a fundamental principle of the Baha'i faith.
***Contact. Carl Sagan. Page 385, Gallery Reprint edition.

Where love abides

At what point does the definition of "home" change for the first time? It's a good icebreaker question, if one loaded with privilege. My trajectory, like that of many other people in my generation, was that I completed high school and went to college. I still called it "going home" when I returned to the house in which I'd been brought up. 

It wasn't until after I graduated and got my first newspaper job that paid (at least in theory) that I began to call "home" the crappy little garage apartment on the wrong side of the tracks. 

So how does the definition of "home" change when the household in which you abide is fluid? When the answer to "How long will you stay here?" is "As long as we can."* That's what I mean about privilege in the question.

And how does the definition of "home" change farther along the path of our lives? How does the definition of "home" change when, as my parents do, one lives in the house of 42 years' dwelling and one lives in a nearby facility for assisted living? Where is home then?

Recently, at the request of our fair city, I took a survey about housing accessibility and affordability. It reminded me again how privileged my own household is. 

In my adult life, since graduating undergraduate school, I've had twelve places I called home. Early in our marriage, I listed so many recent residences that the woman on the phone asked if I were in the military. But they were all voluntary moves, most of them job-related. And for the last 25 1/2 years, "home" has been wherever my husband and children are.

Now one of them is living elsewhere, and the definition of "home" has changed for my parents as well. Bottom line, I believe, is that home is where love abides. I'm sure I didn't originate that descriptive, but every one of the several places that I feel at home is a place where I love and am loved. 

*Blue Willow (1976). By Doris Gates. Puffin Books.

Between the Lines

Sunday morning about 6:15. I had run to the Harris Teeter to pick something up and was returning to the car. I'd been able to park near the door but not to pull through, because in this part of the lot, on one side the parking slots are straight and their opposite-number parking slots are angled. It takes a tiny bit of finesse to pull in a straight-on slot and through to an angled slot. 

Normally, I can do that without much trouble. But it happened that this was the second or third time in recent weeks I'd found myself doing a quick Sunday-morning one-item shopping trip, and the second or third time I'd observed a large white pickup truck parked sloppily in a space. This morning, it meant that if I wanted to pull through, I'd have to park a few spaces farther from the door. 

Clucking with irritation, I just parked - without pulling through - and observed to myself (as I had on previous visits) that I wished that people who drove those big pickup trucks were more meticulous about parking. The responsibility was on these drivers to be good stewards of parking slots... wasn't it? Just the other day, maybe even yesterday, I'd been having a conversation with a dear one about the reflexive tendency toward judgment, and how Jesus advises us against it because our judgment redounds on us, yet Saint Paul admits, "The very things I wish to do, I do not do." (Doo-be-doo-be-doo ... Frank Sinatra.)

And also yesterday, because I'd signed up for it, I had read an email from someone who writes on leadership and faith, pointing out that as reflexively as any of us judges (the writer including himself), the way of Jesus points toward restorative justice rather than retributive justice - validating a homiletical position for me.

So... what happened in the parking lot? I vaguely noticed a woman in a work uniform using the self-checkout to buy and bag groceries, a couple of plastic bags' worth. I judged again - not the customer, this time, but my recurring irritation at supermarket chains for using self-checkout as an excuse for convenience that takes away jobs. 

The woman and I left the store about the same time. She was the one getting into the sloppily parked truck. She was moving tiredly ... like someone who had just finished a shift at a physical job, one of manual labor. Something in me reminded me, as I got into my car and prepared (sigh) to back out (because I didn't pull through when I parked, remember?), that here was Christ standing before me in the person of a weary and worn worker about my age.

I pulled back in to the parking space, got out, and approached. She was on her guard, as who wouldn't be, seeing someone start to leave, then park and go up to someone?

Palms out, friendly, I asked if she needed help. Her body relaxed and a tired smile appeared. Sure enough, she was just getting off work, and everything was stiff and ready to go home, but she needed to do the shopping before going to bed. The bed of the truck held work-related stuff.

I sympathized and wished her a good night. She said, automatically, "You too," before correcting it to, "Have a good day." Then we got into our cars/trucks and went our separate ways.

Maybe I was alert to seeing Christ in others because that's my vocation. Maybe I've had lots of training and practice on watching my reflexive judgments. Some of it, I can tell you, is because of an intentional discipline, which has been defined as "a long obedience in the same direction."** But I think a lot of it was because I'd just read that email and had that reflective conversation.
*See Matthew 7:1, also Romans 7:15-20.

 **In searching for the provenance of the term "a long obedience in the same direction," the title of a book by Dr. Eugene Peterson, creator of The Message paraphrase of the Bible, I found Adam Setser's blog post. Read the entry on Nietzsche and Peterson here.

Good Samaritan Laws

I've stopped to offer assistance as a clergyperson. And done so with no expectation of reward, as our state's Good Samaritan law says. The last time was at the end of May. Does that make me a good Samaritan? (Dislike of this nickname on the face of it aside.)

It's so reflexive when we hear the familiar parable to place ourselves in the role of the man who, more than the priest or the Levite, helps someone in need because the person needs help. How does the man left for dead feel about all of this stuff?

It's striking to me -- preparing a sermon on that very parable -- that the laws are colloquially referred to as Good Samaritan laws. That's how woven into our sociocultural fabric is this parable. Parable, from para-, a Greek prefix meaning "alongside," and -balo, tossing a ball, from ballein, meaning "to toss." A parable is a throwing alongside. "Is it true?" thus becomes really difficult to determine.

"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate would challenge Jesus. It is possible that Pilate did not comprehend the question he asked of Emmanuel, God-with-us.

It seems that it is less important whether this parable is something that happened, although - as Dr. Mark Allan Powell would say: "Not everything in the Bible happened, but everything in the Bible is true."* What the throwing-alongside has been showing me of late is both my dislike for the common Scriptural heading, "The Good Samaritan," and Jesus' plea to the lawyer wanting to test him. Do this and live. What does and live mean? Does it not mean to live in the kin-dom, not Kingdom (with its worldly structures and patriarchal connotations), of God right here and right now?**

That might mean that heaven is a completion of the kin-dom of God, rather than a geographic destination. Which brings us back to the unfortunate section heading. These section headings, such as, "The Parable of the Good Samaritan," are something that compilers and editors placed long after the decision-makers chose and ordered the canon of the Bible (the Protestant Bible, with or without the Apocrypha; the Roman Catholic Bible; et cetera). And they long have shaped how we understand and interpret the texts that follow.

Samaritans still worship on Mount Gerazim. They are descended from Assyrians who invaded and conquered Israel, around 586 years before the birth of Jesus. When Jesus answers a question with a question (in the encounter that begins, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" "Why do you call me good?"),*** as he does throughout his conversation with the lawyer that leads to the parable of the man left to die in a ditch, how often do we who craft sermons focus on the offense of the subheading? Maybe the man in the ditch wanted nothing to do with the Samaritan.

Tensions between Samaritans and between people who observe Judaism were high in the time of Jesus, and tensions remain. Not only, "Why do you call me good," perhaps, but also, "Why do you call me a good Samaritan?"

With gratitude to my local clergy colleagues the Revs. John Weinbach, Bernie Hess, and Chris Johnson, particularly Pastor Weinbach, for his insights about section headings.

*Dr. Mark Allan Powell, "How Lutherans Interpret the Bible," a DVD series of six episodes.
**I am unclear where I first heard the term. Most of what I have learned about its provenance is from colleagues who remember where they first heard it.
***Luke 18:18-19, also in the gospels of Mark and Matthew.

The Value of Jade

Where the first plant came from, I have no idea. I know only that I had a sturdy little jade plant in a red-painted pot. I'm reasonably good with plants. 

The plant thrived. It survived even the year that I was doing fieldwork my second year in divinity school, ten hours a week at a local church, and the plant developed some sort of weird white stuff I had to keep brushing off the leaves. It thrived so much that somewhere along the way, I divided it, twice, until I had three big sturdy jade plants on the windowsill of the screened porch of the home where we now live. 

Then I waited a little too late to bring the plants in for the winter. They were done. Even the jade. 

For several years, I've been looking for a jade plant, so I can start again. A week or so ago, a colleague was mentioning that she needed to thin or re-pot ... her jade plant. She graciously let me take home a cutting. I've rooted it in soil, which I've been keeping nicely damp. Approximately every day, I check it. Has it started putting down roots? Who knows. 

For probably three years, I've been searching for a jade plant. Every time I went to a plant nursery, a grocery store with plants for sale, even the drugstores where you can buy those little bamboo plants. Why did I see the jade plant in my colleague's office and get to bring home a cutting?

This colleague has invited me to share with her each workday one of the devotions with which I begin the day. The Moravian Church of North America publishes daily texts, both online and in a book. I live and work deep among the Moravians and thought it would add an ecumenical dimension to my readings; and I do find myself being brought deeper and closer in walking with those texts. 

It was while sharing the text for the day that I spotted the jade plant. The little cutting is in a bright pot on the screened porch because I've begun sharing the daily text with a colleague - a daily text that is easy to share because of how it's structured. Some of the other devotionals that feed my spirit are less so. They drill deep into my soul, but in a different way. 

For the church to survive, to thrive, to spread up and out like a jade plant, how much more nourishing is it when we allow ourselves to be fed by nearby growth from beliefs and ways that are rooted in the same soil?

Showers in the Dark

The reason for taking my morning shower with the light off was that our bathroom is part of an addition to the house. Our home was built in 1957, a basic brick ranch house, with an addition from 1990 that includes a living room, screened porch, and master bedroom with a small bathroom.

The roof on the addition is flat, and it does not include an expansion of the attic. That means no ceiling fan in the bedroom and also nothing drawing the steam of the bathroom up and out. As a result, I sometimes open the bathroom window, which looks over our back yard.

So this morning, stepping into the shower about 5:30, I opened the window, and in an excess of caution, made sure the light was off. You'd have to work at it to see my silhouette in our bathroom, but still. 

Our house faces east; the bathroom, in the back, thus faces west. With the light off, the bathroom was still pretty dark. The shower was uneventful. Afterward, fully covered, I slid the window shut, and in doing so cut off the birdsong that we get routinely in our back yard. 

All of which got me reflecting on functioning in the dark and in the light. Barbara Brown Taylor, writing in her new book, Holy Envy, speaks of the encounter Nicodemus has with Jesus, by night, in the Gospel of John. She suggests that Jesus wants not to enlighten Nicodemus but to "endarken him."*

I use language of darkness and light, of fumbling around compared with moving easily and freely, frequently. Preached on it and probably will again. What happened when I engaged in a routine and intimate act - bathing - in the dark, with the window open, to birdsong?

I would not recommend the act to anyone with issues of balance and mobility. Don't try this at home, everyone. But as a small spiritual discipline, what happens if, on occasion, we take some routine act, from a morning cup of coffee or tea or water to brushing teeth, from hanging clothes in the closet to bagging up garbage ... without turning on the lights? Might we approach the "endarkenment" that Jesus seeks for a fellow teacher?

*Holy Envy, by Barbara Brown Taylor. 2019. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
The encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus is found in the Gospel of John, chapter 3.

Dancing on the Green

It wasn't entirely spontaneous, as family gatherings go. 

Once every couple of months, my older sister visits the parents: Dad in the family home and Mom in nearby assisted living. My sister holds the financial power of attorney, a role for which she is eminently suited. 

My younger sister, her husband, and one of their teen daughters were up from northwest Georgia, visiting his parents and ours. 

And the dance band for which Dad is a vocalist had a gig, performing on a Friday evening at the band shell on the green in a planned-village community not far from where Mom and Dad are.

The plan was for both sisters to attend the concert on the green, together with the niece, her in-laws,  and my mother. When I learned of this plan, I wanted in, and said so. As we all began to gather on the green, we learned that Mom was just not feeling well enough to attend and sent her regrets, and so the rest of us, a bit wistful, gathered anyway.  

Over the course of the two-hour performance, with the weather beautifully cooperative, we enjoyed the band, the singing, and the crowd. Some of Dad's exercise buddies from the YMCA came, including Patty, exuberantly dancing to the music. At one point, I slipped off the green to the sidewalk and stretched my legs. Coming back in at a side gate, I passed a man with a service dog, and we had a nice little visit.  

And small children, as they do, danced, ran, cartwheeled, chased one another. With complete freedom. My sisters and I commented to each other: Reminds us of us, once upon a time.

It's a lonely and vulnerable space, sometimes, when one of a couple is in assisted living and one is still in the longtime home. As we gradually returned to our own homes the following day, after tender and vital time together, Dad reflected. 

Saturday evening, maybe 24 hours after the family gathered on the green, we received an email from Dad. He spoke of how the love "bathed" Mom, "dementia notwithstanding," All of us will keep all these things, pondering them in [our hearts], in a paraphrase of the Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 2, verse 19. 

Here, beloveds, is God. Love is a circle of energy, endlessly flowing, self-regenerating, drawing its power from the joined hands and the presence of one another. Keep all these things. Ponder them in your heart. Be present with God, whatever God looks like in the moment.

The Mango Tango

(Or, the mango salsa, if preferred.)

Peeling a mango over the sink yesterday morning, which is just about the only way to wrestle with that tropical fruit. I called on my tips and tricks for separating the skin and then getting to the fruit itself and separating it from the pit. (And don't we all pray to be separated from the Pit?)

The mango was perfectly ripe and a joy to eat. It reminded me, as mangoes always do, of my childhood. Our family lived in South Florida until the late 1970s. It is, of course, tropical. It was there that I came into the knowledge of the varieties of palm trees; to enjoy the lush extravagance of hibiscus; to count lizards and frogs as fun adventure. 

Our yard included not only hibiscus but also an olive tree (sadly, infertile), a cherry tree (yum), and a grapefruit tree. A gift from family friends, it did poorly until my parents moved it so that it was in another part of the back yard, near the green utility box, where it thrived. (Go figure.) I grew up thinking that everyone just plucked grapefruits and brought them into the kitchen for Mom to slice and section for breakfast. Our backyard neighbor had a Key lime tree. 

And family friends had a mango tree. Their daughter, who was a year or two older than I was, took an Italian ancestral name for her surname and went into ballet, her passion. I still have the leather bookmark that was a gift from the family's vacation to Italy. 

One evening, our family was visiting their home, mango tree and all. I developed a headache and nausea. Might have been coming down with something; maybe it was just really warm that evening. I was eight or so and don't remember the details. I do remember deciding that it must have been an allergy to mango. 

The association was so strong that for decades, I passed on mango, citing an allergy. One morning a couple of years ago, in a rush but still wanting to make healthy choices, I picked up a cup of mixed fruit from a coffee shop. Unidentified orange chunks were ... not pineapple ... aha. Mango. The piney fibrous flavor was a treat.

At the time, I shared an office with a woman whose husband was from Mexico. She had plenty of knowledge and advice about mangoes. They've been part of my diet ever since.

The world, dear ones, is as small as you and I choose to make it. As Carl Sagan writes at the close of his novel Contact, "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."*


Enjoy the mangoes, in season, at the peak of ripeness. Enjoy the adventure of getting to the sweet fibrous treasure within.

You Call Me Pastor Tibbs*

*With gratitude to Sidney Poitier in The Blackboard Jungle who, at the end of his metaphorical rope, roared at his students: "You call me Mister Tibbs." 

While rinsing out the yogurt containers this morning, I was reflecting on the eternal insistence on being addressed as Pastor. What prompted this reflection was a Facebook post from a clerical colleague, now in another part of the country. We were both in our first pastoral calls about the same time in the same city. (As well as discussion with a pastoral text study group in which I am often the only woman at the table, and my own memories of why I let congregants know that "Pastor" is what to call me.)

This good man is almost a generation younger than I am, maybe 15 years. He posted with sharp and vivid language expressing both sympathy for colleagues who are women and a calling to account among colleagues who are men.

He'd shared something that another person had posted about what I'll call casual misogyny.

My comment to my colleague on this post was simple. "All. The. Time."

At a recent gathering of my denomination in my state, the assembly watched a video. I'd seen it before. It showed pastors who are men reading and responding on camera to a collection of statements and questions that pastors who are women have heard. The statements are recent, not dated. Recent, as in, some within the last year. See the video here.

The NC Conference of the United Methodist Church has a similar video on Vimeo, although I am unable at the moment to find a working link.

I am diminished when my colleagues who are men tell those they serve, "Call me Firstname." I am diminished when my colleagues who are women do the same. I am not a person of color. I am not a gender other than the one with which I was born. I remain profoundly grateful for colleagues such as my friend in another part of the country who advocate, who raise their voices, from their positions as pastors who are cis-gender* white males, for pastors who are women. 

What happens when you and I ask a person how she or he would like to be addressed? What happens when you and I ask a person, "What are your pronouns?" Does it diminish me? If it diminishes you, what about it is diminutive to you? 

*cis-gender, or cisgender: The gender at birth is the gender with which you identify.

All the Lynns

It started with love, as it so often does.

On Friday evening, the hubs and I drove the hour or so east, from our fair city to the town where my parents abide. Mom is in assisted living, Dad ten minutes away in their home. The visit had been planned just after Easter, tickets purchased, an outing to enjoy AAA minor-league baseball with the Durham Bulls.

The enjoyment of baseball is nurturally genetic. I trace my lineage from my dad, who inherited it from his mom, who inherited it from her dad. On the hubs' side, M. played the game through high school, and his mom was a devoted fan. 

The local team in our fair city is single-A minor-league ball, which we have been enjoying together for more than 25 years. What a treat to see triple-A ball. It was at the old Durham Athletic Park (pre-Bull Durham) that I saw my first live baseball games, with Dad, on the rattly bleachers with the occasional nearby whiffs of cigar smoke.

I asked a couple of people to take a picture of the three of us at the ball game in the new Durham Athletic Park, very nice place, once in the lull between batting practice and the game and once in the lull during a pitching change. Posted them on Facebook and tagged M. and Dad.

Several nice comments and a number of Facebook likes and loves. Out of curiosity, I asked my dad about the names I didn't recognize of the people who liked and loved the pictures. Two of them were named Lynn.

One was my dad's cousin, now living about an hour and a half east of me. My cousin too. Let's see. If her mom was my great-aunt, that makes Lynn... carry the six... my cousin. Family, at any rate.

The other person named Lynn was in the Miami Herald newsroom with my dad before moving to a university job. Both the Lynns accepted my friend request on Facebook. Normally I don't accept friend requests from someone I scarcely know - but the photo and caption showed pretty clearly that I was my dad's daughter, so they accepted my request right away.

Lynn-of-the-Miami-Herald was kind enough to send a message remembering me as an "adorable" child running around the newsroom (on the occasional Saturday, I think). Now I have a new friend and a newly discovered cousin, because we went to the ball game, because my dad and hubs and I love the game of baseball, because we always have.

Behold the connections. To walk in the Jesus way means, for me, that love is mutually nourishing. To live as though all relationships have the potential to be mutually nourishing means that our hearts are open to the threads, the networks, that bind us all, whether that network is Facebook, baseball, women named Lynn, or all of the above.

Roll Out the Barrel, Dear

It was a game show that began on radio. The host of You Bet Your Life was Groucho Marx, an entertainer who died on August 19, 1977. Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was born in 1890 to European immigrants, Sam "Frenchie" Marx of the Alsace region of France, and Miene "Minnie" Schoenberg, whose family traveled to the New World from Dornum, northern Germany, when Minnie was 16.*

Why do I care about the game show whose heyday was in the 1950s and that went off the air before I was born? Because of the recent results of another game show that is still on the air.

James Holzhauer, a professional gambler who lives in Nevada, was selected as a contestant on Jeopardy!, a game show that is a family favorite in the household in which I grew up. His first appearance was on April 4, 2019. Holzhauer was born to a German-immigrant father. One of his grandmothers was Japanese and spoke very little English. He had promised her that he would appear on Jeopardy! before she died. She died before his appearance.**

He performed on Jeopardy! for his 33 appearances in a very different way from previous contestants. He performed, in truth, as a professional sports gambler, which is his job. He is married, and they have a daughter, who is 5. He has donated a percentage of his winnings to children's charities in Las Vegas.

So what are all the connections? Too numerous to mention here. Jeopardy! has been on the air for three years longer than I have been alive, beginning about when Groucho's program was ending. I have twice passed the auditions, both written and with the buzzers, but have not been on the show.

You Bet Your Life was mostly in the top twenty in ratings during its tenure. Meanwhile, Jeopardy! endures. The contestant who ended James Holzhauer's 33-game appearance on Jeopardy! was named Emma Boettcher. The name, a German one, is often pronounced Bet-cher. As in, You Bet Your Life. 

The certified nurse-midwife who helped guide our firstborn into the world, in Dallas, Texas, was named Cherie Boettcher. Cherie, of course, being a French term of endearment meaning "dear." French being the ancestry of Groucho Marx's father. And Boettcher, a German occupational name for a cooper, a barrel-maker. From the Middle High German, a derivation of butte, meaning "barrel."*** Cherie founded the Birth & Women's Center in 1993. That child of ours was born on August 17, 1994 - ten days late and two days shy of being born on the date that Groucho died, but born instead on his dad's birthday. Unable to negotiate purchase of the house, Cherie had to close the BWC in 2018.

Learning that a librarian named Emma Boettcher was the winner on what turned out to be James Holzhauer's final appearance on Jeopardy! has prompted not only thoughts about heritage, and the strong threads that bind family members one to another, but also vivid memories. Our lives are so enriched, and our ties with God are so strengthened, when you and I are open channels for relationships; connections; love.

* From the Wikipedia entry, "Groucho Marx."
** From the Wikipedia entry, "James Holzhauer" and a footnote that sourced an article on Heavy online. 
***Surname derivation information from Ancestry.com

Where the Gospel Is

One of the questions I sometimes ask when wrestling with a sermon is: Where is the good news? The good news, as in the gospel. The word comes to us from Old Saxon via Old Norse - the Germanic languages - beginning as "good spell," or good story or good message. It's a translation of the Latin bona adnuntiatio, which itself is a translation of the Greek eu- + -angelion, bringing the good news.


At first, in Old English, it was pronounced goad-spell. By the 13th century, it had shifted to god-spell by association with God as if the history of Jesus was the "god-story." The Oxford English Dictionary terms the mistake "very natural." 

Sometimes, I ask Where is the good news when I'm not wrestling with a sermon. At all.

I was not overly alarmed, though I was dismayed, to learn that my mom, who dwells in assisted living, had gone to the bathroom at 4 a.m. and failed to transfer back to her wheelchair successfully. She had had a fall. That was on a Sunday morning. By Monday evening, she had had two more falls, and she was borne to the emergency department of the local teaching hospital. My dad was the messenger; my older sister supplied us with updates, sharing the news of her conversations with our dad. All these messengers, all this news ... where is the good news?

It is everywhere, as it turns out, when we are able to see it.

The bladder infection, while not good news, explains why my mother had had three falls in some 40 hours. The broken fibula, a lower-leg bone, from the second fall, was in her "dead" leg, a leg that poliomyelitis withered in 1949. The broken bone is not good news - but of her two legs, this was the less bad option.

There is more good news. Where my parents live, the university medical center is the local hospital. The medical care is world class. This is the United States, where health care is costly, but my parents are retired state employees with pensions, Medicare, and the long-ago foresight to have invested in long-term-care insurance.

More good news. My mother had received physical therapy to help with her ability to stand from her wheelchair and transfer to a seat. When she returns from the hospital, she will receive another round of physical therapy - and her muscles will have retained some of the first round of therapy. It can be expected that she will be stronger and more able to transfer herself when needed.

Still more good news: Mom has been refusing to wear a necklace with a help button on it, the kind that would alert staff to the need for instant assistance. Once she is back in her room, staff and physicians and social worker will quite likely be able to insist that wearing the necklace is now required. My mother, accepting of rules and ever the good student, might begin to wear the necklace.

Of course my dad is worn out with loving concern, with the inability to carry for a loved one all the pain and fear and stress, and with the myriad small daily tasks that accompany having a spouse in the hospital, with the grueling exhaustion of eight-hour waits followed by more waiting, with the "quotidian mysteries," as Kathleen Norris terms it, of laundry and groceries. Where is the good news in that?

Our close and communicative family cannot take the burden from Dad's shoulders. We cannot completely carry out the advice of Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (NRSV). But it turns out, etymologically, that to bear is where we get the language of child-bearing. That child-bearing is, of course, ideally a communal shared experience. Only one person actually carries the child. So, in a real sense, we can help to bear the burdens. So does bearing a child become the holy work of community. So does bearing one another's burdens.

A whole community, a network of strong wise women, of girls who are being shown, of men who love and walk alongside, of the religious community (religion sharing a root with ligament). I am reminded powerfully of Anne Lamott's reflections in Traveling Mercies about how when, unmarried, she chose to carry and bear her child, it was the small scrappy church community into which she had reluctantly been drawn (by the music, she says) who took loving possession of the baby, who pressed sandwich bags of dimes into her pockets, who playfully argued over whose turn it was to hold the baby on Sunday mornings. Sometimes she went to church, with the baby, because everyone else was wanting to love them.

I draw great strength, and pray that my worn-out dad does too, from the way the family network activated, automatically, upon receiving the bad news of a fall ... then a second ... then a third.

There have been times in my life that I have felt overwhelmed and numb, as though half my head had no feeling in it. One occasion about a decade ago came when, in divinity school, I returned from a weekend of my firstborn in confirmation class at a mountain retreat, during which I stayed at the home of a friend and wrote a paper for a seminar on the Gospel of Matthew. Cell-phone an email service was scrappy and I was not doing much looking, at any rate.

I returned home with the boy on a Sunday evening, checked my email, and learned that my mom and dad had been on a weekend jaunt, during which my mom had contracted Bell's palsy, a facial hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the face). I also learned by email that my cousin serving in Afghanistan had lost both legs below the knee to an improvised explosive device.

First thing once I got on campus the next morning, I sent a group email to the divinity school class and faculty, asking for prayer. Then I went to the seminar class and turned in the paper. A couple of hours later, when I checked my email, there were almost 40 messages of prayer, love, and support. More poured in. I was held up.

Over and over again, when I am emotionally paralyzed, when I don't even have the wherewithal to fall back into the hammock, the love and support of community, of family however I define it, rises up to me where I am. When the news is horrible, I have only to croak, "Help," and it is there. This network, these ligaments, this community, is my necklace with the button on it.

I press it, and help arrives, the help that I have been barely able to summon. Even when I am too worn, too weary, too numb, too paralyzed, too everything.

This is God. This is the relationships. See, look, behold how God is relationship. Here, in the weariness, here in the dark, here in the groceries and laundry and hospital parking, and what-ifs, here is God. Behold the good news.

The Babe, Yogi, death, and life

What started with a dog has ended with a grave. So to speak.

In 1993, my betrothed and I were attending single-A minor-league baseball games in the city's aging and well-beloved stadium. My favorite player was the handsome first baseman, Nick Delvecchio, a contemporary in the farm system with a shortstop named Derek Jeter. That was when the local team was a Yankees franchise. We've been attending the city's minor-league games ever since. 

In 2006, when the Miami Marlins owned the club, the local team's owner introduced a black Labrador retriever, Miss Babe Ruth, to bring bats back to the clubhouse and take a little bucket of fresh baseballs to the umpire. Since its inception, minor-league professional baseball has been about lively entertainment beyond the match itself. Miss Babe Ruth was the first minor-league bat dog, though far from the last; it now is common among single-A minor league teams. 

The local ball club's owner and management, and the city, all thought that the team would continue to re-sign three-year contracts with the Miami Marlins for as long as they both would live. The divorce was unexpected, fast, and ugly.*

Miss Babe Ruth had received a diagnosis of cancer in early 2018 and died that May. Master Yogi Berra, Miss Ruth's relative, who had been serving alongside her, died not long afterward. Miss Babe Ruth's baseball bucket is now in Cooperstown, NY, in the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

In the team's clubhouse, as a memorial, two small clean dog cages are tucked into a corner. 

It seems that in the off season, when the local team and the Marlins (owner: Derek Jeter), were getting ready to re-sign a three-year contract, a Marlins vice president - Gary Denbo - made a snap visit. He saw the cages and criticized the clubhouse manager for having dog cages in a clubhouse. (And a couple of other issues - laundry room, soft-drink machine.)The local team is now a franchise of the Pittsburgh Pirates. It has Miss Lou Lou Gehrig, Miss Ruth's niece, and is hopeful that Little Jackie Robinson will develop. It's all about relationships. Jeter, taking the high road, is loyal to Denbo. The local team, also taking the high road, waited nearly a year to allow the story to come out, which it did when this season began.

Jeter has long and publicly claimed a soft spot for our fair city. Between 1992, when he could hit, and 1993, when he also could field, he worked extensively on fielding. Ours is the city where he became Derek Jeter, at least in utero. Miami is very nearly my childhood home, as I grew up in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Our fair city, Greensboro, NC, has been my rooted home for 28 years.

The hubs grew up in east-central North Carolina but was seven years old in 1962 (five years before my birth). He discovered Mickey Mantle and has been a fan of the Mick and the Yankees ever since. I grew up loving baseball because of my dad (who inherited it from his mother), who grew up in Baltimore, where his family was dynastic fans of the Orioles, who were in the AAA international league until Branch Rickey moved the "hapless" St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, where the Orioles are currently hapless. (Since 1986, beginning with sympathy and assisted by a claim of relatives in New England, I have allegiance to the Boston Red Sox.)

Branch Rickey invented the farm system. A Methodist and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan College, he also, with cool strategic deliberation, had the Montreal Royals (farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers) sign Jack Roosevelt Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. It would take eight seasons from when Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers themselves to when the hapless Dodgers ("Dem Bums") would win the World Series.

Baseball fans in our fair city, the single-A team management, and all - are grieved at the severance of the relationship with Jeter and the Marlins. We now claim allegiance to Pittsburgh, a storied franchise with its share of player-clowns, some of my own baseball memories, and all. The team still has black Labs retrieving bats and bringing out buckets of baseballs. Baseball, and lif, continues after even a sudden, painful, and violent death.

The death of team dogs, and the death of a professional marriage, is a different kind of painful from the death of one's own dog (we have walked through that) or the death of one's own marriage (not today, thank you). But death, life, and resurrection are still death, life, and resurrection.

We've been to a few games this season. We delight in the bat dogs. And the hot dogs have improved, at least recently. The local team has some real talent, whom we are excited to watch.

"The thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy. I came that they might have life," Jesus said, "and have it abundantly." (John 10:10, NRSV). Where is the theft, the killing, the stealing, and the destruction in my life and in yours? And where is the life, and where is it abundant?

*Credit goes to Jeff Mills, columnist for the News & Record of Greensboro, NC, for his coverage of the divorce between the local team and the MLB franchise.

Credit also goes to the hubs for his recollections of Jeter and our fair city.

Cosmos Mariner

Sam Scoville has died. Chances are excellent that you have no idea who that is. But Sam having been on this earth and having lived his vocation is fundamental to me and the living of my vocation.

In 1985, as a first-year student at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, I elected a freshman course that assigned me Sam as my adviser. In the 1980s, at Warren Wilson, 95 percent of the students and 90 percent of the faculty lived on the campus, most of the latter in homes along the rolling green hills of the many-acre property. It was a community as well as an accredited four-year school with an excellent reputation and impressive faculty and staff. (No football team, however.)

All of which is to say, I never called him Dr. Scoville in my life. Still don't. The point, though, is Sam. Sam was very ... zen-ish as an adviser. I'd be sitting in that plastic-scoop chair, and he'd have his long lean New England frame folded, sort of, into his swivel-reclining chair, or gazing out his office window while we talked. Should I take this course or that one, Sam? Sam would unleash his slow Atticus Finch grin. What do you think you should do? Sam kept me mostly on track during the four years of which my know-it-all smarty-pants self had an ongoing prickly relationship with another English-department major. It was some years before I was able to acknowledge that the prickles were mostly on my side and the unhappy episode in my final semester was also my responsibility. 

Of course, Sam was the good-natured, economical of speech, unconcerned of future adviser. He was also a direct descendant of Lyman Beecher, thus Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was a graduate of Yale; his doctoral dissertation from Duke was on an aspect of Nathaniel Hawthorne (to whom, who knows, he might also have been related). He had served for a time as the dean at Warren Wilson. 

During his office hours, our conversation would often veer into matters of religion, as I explored the paths of belief. He respected the explorations I was making, showed interest, and kept his own Presbyterian counsel. After I graduated, we kept in touch, mostly on Facebook. A couple of times, when I was in the area, we visited. 

The last occasion was two years ago. As a gift for my 50th birthday, my husband and I had booked a weekend at an Airbnb - we were looking for the Asheville area, and one we liked turned out to be in Swannanoa. Ooh! Ooh! Yes, we booked it and it was lovely. It was really the first occasion in then-24 years of marriage for us to be on indisputably my turf. 

Having got in touch with Sam, I arranged that we would see him on a mid-morning in his office. He was then Sam-zenning his way into retirement at the end of that term, being increasingly crippled by arthritis. He was, however, his usual self, slow of speech, gently pleased by our marital happiness and impressed that I was now a Lutheran pastor. Before we left, he looked to his bookshelves and gave me a large book bound in soft leather, a daily-prayer book with ribbon markers for a season of the year. (Presbyterian, of course.) He inscribed it to me. 

He had "watched my career with great interest."* As in, "I know my own, and my own know me" (John 10:14b, NRSV). As do all good teachers, those for whom teaching is a vocation. 

My dad, now retired, was one such college professor, of the craft and art of journalism. Now in his eighties, if you say the name of a former student, his face lights up. He has watched their careers with great interest. He knows his own, and his own know him. 

How did I come to know Warren Wilson College? At the time, our family were members of a Presbyterian church in our town. Another member was then the dean of the school of journalism at a time when my dad, unhappy in a job he held for a year or so, was looking for a change. This church member had a son who had graduated from Warren Wilson before going on to what would become an impressive vocation in, I think, marine biology. He mentioned the place to my dad, who mentioned it to me.

My baptism at age four months was into the Presbyterian church. We mostly attended United Methodist congregations until, while I was in college, my parents returned to the United Church of Christ (my mother had been brought up a Congregationalist in New England).

Do you see how relational this all is? Do you see how each of us is bound to the other? Go and see, go and tell, go and invite. Maybe the good Presbyterians in the house would say that it all was foreordained. (Shout-out to John Calvin!)

Conrad Aiken, poet, lived from 1889 to 1973. Born and brought up in Savannah, Ga., he also has a bench in the cemetery there that serves as his grave marker. It reads, "Conrad Aiken/Cosmos Mariner."

As a coastal Georgian, he enjoyed reading the shipping news in the newspaper. It nursed his wanderlust. He is said to have seen in the list one day, either of ships going out from the port or ships coming into port, a ship with that name. Locals say that that is when he decided to have such an identity as his marker.**

Godspeed to you, Sam, cosmos mariner.

*A line from Palpatine to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
**Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Random House, 1994. By John Berendt.