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.
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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.