Turning it Off

 More than fourteen years ago, I faced what felt like my first real emotional test as a pastor in training. The summer after my first year of divinity school, I embarked on a summer-long course of clinical pastoral education, or CPE. While most of my classmates were assigned parts of the hospital in which patients were discharged after just a few days, I happened to draw the leukemia-oncology ward. Patients came in for prolonged stays, or they came back again and again while undergoing chemotherapy.

What was more, although I was a green as they come, I nonetheless wore a badge identifying me as a chaplain, and that's how people treated me. I felt woefully unprepared; nonetheless, people still looked to me for spiritual advice and had no hesitation in asking the hard questions about dying and heaven.

Though I confessed it to no one, I had a secret fear of becoming too attached. I was concerned that if I poured out my whole heart in caring for these patients, I would become emotionally dependent on them and would have a hard time walking away at the end of the summer. How would I deal with this challenge, I wondered: Would I hold back, remaining aloof as a hedge of self-protection?

Part of the structure of CPE included weekly meetings in our small groups. The supervisor astutely observed that I tended to subconsciously create a wall around myself, as though I feared vulnerability. What would happen, she asked, if I allowed myself to be more open - in a safe space, among friends and colleagues? Through her gentle guidance, I began to let my guard down.

On the floor, though, I had no such barriers. Whether I wanted to or not, I simply could not be who I was and remain aloof and detached. I simply poured out my whole heart to all of the patients, finding myself weeping in an elevator when one who had been making great progress unexpectedly died. 

But the summer lasted only so long. On a Friday morning, we were told to turn in our keys and name tag. We were no longer functioning as chaplains in that hospital. After the graduation ceremony, I phoned to the leukemia-oncology floor, wanting to know the fate of one patient in particular. He was young and afflicted with multiple myeloma. There was no hope. I had ministered to this young man and his family for several months. I had to know. 

He had died, just a few minutes ago, I was told. I thanked the nurse and hung up the phone - and headed out the door. The family needed pastoral care, no doubt. But someone else would be providing it. 

Over the course of that summer, I learned a fundamental lesson in the life of pastors: Love them and leave them. Whether it's a matter of months or years, pastors will invariably part from their flocks. And once that happens, it's not only proper pastoral care but a matter of ethical standards that we then refrain from staying in touch with the people who were once under our care. Someone else will be meeting their spiritual needs.

In another couple of days, I will wind up my time in my current call. For seven years, I have walked with these residents and their families. As of December 31, I will be walking with them no more. Someone else will be meeting their spiritual needs, praying for them and providing their counsel. Oddly enough, the detachment is the least of my concerns. 

Or maybe it's not so odd. In the course of their careers, pastors will depart from their flocks several times. We get good at it out of necessity. In my next call, I know that I will pour out my whole heart in serving the people I am called to serve, for however long it will be. 

Finding The Way

 Poor Tricky.

Our family includes two miniature dachshunds. The elder statesdog is Tricky, short (naturally) for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We adopted him from the Watauga Humane Society in the fall of 2011. The shelter employees told us that they estimated that he was eight years old, which means that he is now seventeen. That is pretty old in dog years.

Tricky's eyes are both clouded over, and his hearing isn't what it once was. He is functionally blind. When we moved house thirteen months ago, it took him a little while to learn his way around the new home. He was delighted to discover that, like the old house, the new house has a pathway loop, which means he could travel in circles. The center comprises a utility closet and bathroom. From the front entrance, he can go right into the living room, then left into the kitchen, and straight back into the master bedroom or left and left again to go through the hall and back into the foyer.

We naively hoped that we would not have to move house ever again. Fortunately, the hubs is of a more practical bent, and he saved the boxes. COVID ate my job. I've been serving as a chaplain for a senior-living community, a campus that includes independent living, assisted living and skilled care. But since March, safety concerns have limited me to one building. At the same time, the organization is bleeding money, spending unholy amounts on personal protective equipment and on state-mandated weekly COVID tests. My job was being cut back to two days a week, no benefits.

I was not looking forward to finding a job in the current climate, but actually secured one in approximately eight weeks.

Beginning January 11, I will be serving as a hospice chaplain - in Newport News, Virginia.

Yep. We're moving again.

Which is confusing the heck out of Tricky. As he wanders the familiar rooms, navigating by muscle memory and scent, he keeps coming up against barriers. Stacks of boxes form a wall everywhere he tries to turn. He is uncomplaining, but I have a feeling that if he could talk, he would be voicing his concerns.

In less than a week, we will be packing the U Haul. We are much too old to pull that move-ourselves stunt, but until the house sells, we will be carrying the mortgage on the house as well as rent. We've taken a six-month lease, optimistic that the house will sell and we will be able to find a new place.

Poor Tricky. It's bad enough now - but in a week he will have to accustom himself to a completely new place. New layout, new sounds, new smells. But he will adapt, because the new place will also have all his favorite humans. 

And it will mean a lot to have the dogs with us, the anchor of familiarity as we navigate a whole new city, new job, new church, new everything. 

Wouldn't it be nice if, as everything changed around us, we could hold to the anchor of those we love? Hang in there, Tricky.

Can't Please Everybody

 It was time to play the pastor card.

For the nearly three years that I have served this little church, I don't think I've played the pastor card once. I've encouraged. I've strongly suggested. I might have cajoled. But until now, I have not once rolled out an edict and said, "That's it."

Until now.

Predictably, not everyone was happy about it. 

Fair enough. I had not been at all happy about resuming in-person worship in June. True, we seldom had enough worshipers for distancing to be an issue. And no one minded that I insisted on wearing a face mask and staying on the chancel, well removed from others, the whole time. And I had been irritated with myself for giving in to emotional blackmail. 

But I wasn't giving in this time. 

For two months in a row (maybe three), I had posted in my monthly report that I intended to make mask-wearing mandatory for the Christmas Eve service. Fully half our faithful and loyal members were staying away because the other half refused to wear masks while meeting for worship. The council chairman had polled the usual attenders, and all had said that they would still attend if masks were required -- but the church administrator, who is dismissive of the virus, continued to communicate that masks were not mandatory.

And reiterated the point in an email exchange with the council president. For some reason, that was the last straw. I typed out what I thought was a restrained email.

"I cannot in good conscience," I wrote, "preach the coming of the Christ into the world, the one who taught us to love our neighbor, and deny the joy of fellowship and worship to half of our most devoted members because not everyone is willing to wear a mask for an hour." No one likes wearing a mask, I said, but it is a simple and practical way for us to show our love of neighbor.

A day or two later, the church treasurer called to sound me out on the issue. I explained my reasoning. The administrator was furious, I heard. I waited to see if she would communicate directly with me. Nothing. On Sunday morning, I waited with some trepidation for her to enter the church. She came in, and we exchanged greetings as though nothing had happened.

There would be, apparently, no real fallout from my playing of the pastor card. 

In truth, they need my pastoral care more than I need them, if it comes to that. I could have been more insistent a long time ago. But I'm usually flexible. Flexibility is a powerful tool. 

Sometimes, though, it's time to take a stand.

I wish I could say I thought it would change behaviors, soften hearts. I wish I believed that those who pooh-pooh the virus would decide that wearing a mask is a simple way to love their neighbors. It won't. And that is a grievous thing.

Under Control

 It seems as though so much of emotional health is related to control. Trying to control unwise impulses; deciding whether to let other people's words and actions live rent-free in my head; controlling my breathing, my heart rate, my blood pressure. "Let It Go" was a huge pop-music hit not only because the Disney movie Frozen was so popular but also because people of all ages could relate to the tempting advice.

The pandemic has ramped up the issue of control for many of us. We cannot control, for example, other people's mask-wearing and distancing practices. We cannot control business owners' decisions about policies in their stores. 

And for many of us, it seems, the pandemic made it challenging to control our weight. A British Weight Watchers study reported that nearly half the nation put on some pounds in the early months of the virus, when many people were stuck at home. A U.S. study from July showed the same results. [1] And for front-line workers who were not able to stay home, workplace stress, combined with gestures of appreciation that tended to take the form of doughnuts, pizza, and cookies - meant an increase of close to 15 pounds. There's no study to cite for that one, just first-hand experience.

I've battled my weight all my life. Even pictures of me from age 4 or 5 show a sturdy child. Once puberty hit, I had a grown woman's build by age 14. I admire my great-grandfather, a blacksmith from rural Maryland, but I could do without his barrel rib cage and stocky build. I've lost weight and gained it back more times than I care to remember.

The last couple of years, I've found myself in a healthy place with weight control. That is, I had until COVID came calling. The gym closed - and that's not all. Because I work in a senior-living facility, staff stress levels were through the roof. We struggled to provide best care and abundant living for the residents even when their loved ones couldn't visit and the residents had to wear masks and eat their meals in their rooms. 

The numbers on the scale climbed. And I wasn't alone. Co-workers reported similar gains. 

Thankfully, I pulled the brake on what I knew to be unhealthy habits. I began working out at home and returned to making choices that made my body happier with what I was eating. And I'm back to where I want to be. Curiously, this shift hasn't felt like being controlled; it's felt like taking control.

At a time when it feels that so much in life is beyond my control, it feels good to be in control of something. And, really, it's been a reminder that so much of emotional health has to do with similar choices. I don't have to be in charge of the world. I don't need to vent about choices that other people make. And that's healthier too.

[1] https://www.weightwatchers.com/uk/covid-19-lockdown-weight-gain; https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/coronavirus-weight-gain-76-americans-nutrisystem

Presupposition, Muscle Memory, and Chicken Salad

 The other day, as we ate lunch, a co-worker (S.) and I talked about carrying emotional burdens, and about venting. She had attended Catholic school for eight grades and had been educated by priests and nuns (she wasn't sure, but they were most likely from the Religious of the Sacred Heart, a teaching order). 

Because we work on a senior-living campus, walking with the residents and their families as we do, the residents march right in and set up their tents in our hearts. And we know that death comes for each of them in turn. Accepting and processing that is part of the job. But that morning one of the residents had died, and for a range of reasons it hit everyone hard. We were hurting.

In that context, I allowed as how a couple of times, hearing me venting a little to another staff member, S. typically said something gently reproachful about seeing the best in people. Together, we explored the emotional weight that we gladly assume - that we consider a privilege - as part of our jobs. 

One of the ways that I vent, like a pressure cooker, is to be able to put into words the occasional frustration I feel because we all are trying to provide our residents with their most abundant life possible under the circumstances.Words allow me to articulate, to corral, the free-form feelings when they bubble up and need to be released. Once I've vented, I'm over it. 

S., having been educated at a Catholic school, had been shown the ideal of the Ignatian presupposition. Ironically, I had brought this ideal up in a sermon I had preached just a couple of weeks ago. What happens, I had asked (rhetorically), when you, when I, ascribe the best possible intentions to another person's words, actions, motives?

I was mulling over this conversation this morning when M., the hubs, said that it was time to make chicken salad. We use the shortcut of canned, rinsed chicken. While he parceled out the chicken water from the cans to the small animals of the house, I assembled the other ingredients.

Ten years ago, I had been approved for ordination yet had not yet received a call. It was 2010, and the stock-market dive from a couple of years ago plus the reverberations of a social statement in my denomination meant that pastors who had considered retiring - were deciding to wait a bit, while any pastor who was in a pulpit - was likely hanging on to it. In short, there were hardly any openings. 

So for a year, I did other work. The first job I landed was in a supermarket deli, in large measure because when the application asked what hours I was willing to work, I chose 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and apparently not everyone was willing to take the day shift. I worked there for three months before leaving for a seasonal temp job doing layout and editing of invitations for a company whose main business was wedding-related. That job paid more and could be done at a desk. 

As I say, it's been ten years since I worked in the deli, and I was there only a few months. But my hands, my muscle memory, still knows how to make the deli's locally popular chicken salad. In my own kitchen, I still prep fruits, vegetables, and meat the way I learned to behind that counter. And so this morning, when it was chicken salad time, I shooed the hubs out of the way and quickly mixed up the deli chicken salad. And it was good. (At least he said it was when I had him taste a forkful.)

So what does it mean that, while my hands and a scrap of memory retain the knowledge of that deli chicken salad, it took a conversation with a co-worker to remind me of a precept on which I had just preached? Maybe, I hope, it means that in the future, when I vent, I will be sure to consider the best possible motivations for other people's actions. Maybe it will even mean that I might consider the complicated motivations for my own actions and words, and grant myself a little grace.

The Screamers

 Years ago, in a memoir by a political aide, I read of the candidate at a town-hall event. One of the people in attendance was shouting and crying, trying to tell her story. "Most candidates avoid screamers," the aide said succinctly, before adding that his candidate instead made straight for the woman, squatted by her chair, and listened to her to find out what she was upset about.

It is rare, in the senior residential facility where I work, for someone to be "a screamer." Sometimes people whose minds have them in a different, imagined situation will call out. Sometimes people will say, "Help me," over and over, fearing that they will be forgotten or ignored.

But yesterday, as I headed down the hall to lead the second worship service in the building, I heard the screaming. It was hard to miss. One of the residents was in real distress. I was supposed to begin leading worship. Instead, I waved to the assembled residents, said, "If you don't mind waiting a few minutes, I'll be right back," and headed toward the room, where I joined a couple of certified nursing assistants.

I knelt by the bed and began quietly singing hymns, a technique that usually works. It didn't help much.

After she sat up, and we sat with her, she calmed down and began telling us what was wrong. In her mind, she was not in her room but back many years earlier, and she was learning of a ghastly betrayal of trust. 

After fifteen minutes, I slipped out to begin the worship service, while the CNAs stayed with the resident. Those waiting to worship had all stayed, in spite of the delay, and all had the decency not to ask what had kept me or what was wrong.

Later, when we had a quiet moment, I talked with one of the CNAs about the servant's heart that she had, how clearly she loved her work. "Most people run the other direction," I said. "But your instinct was to go to her room because you wanted to help."

There were, for a brief time, four of us in the room with this resident, and I believe our only concern was that we did not want her in distress. We wanted to listen to her reality, assure her of our support, and comfort her as best we could. 

When I saw the resident later that afternoon, she was sitting on a chair in the common area, sipping juice and chatting with a neighbor, cheerful as ever.

All that evening, especially on the drive home, I kept thinking about what a privilege it is that I have been called to do what I do. I get to move in the direction of the people in distress. "Most people avoid screamers," the memoirist wrote. But my heart leads me toward them - not out of ghoulish curiosity but because if someone is in distress, I want to help.

It seems to me that God puts in each of us strong magnetic poles, sort of, so that we are pulled toward various situations and people. This is God tugging us along by our gifts, inviting us to live in God's world in a way that we reflect God as we live.

What are you drawn to? Could your predilection be a hint that you have a gift to share with the world?

And So Fulfill

 Without going into too much detail, I can report that our younger child, who is transgender, has been living in a suburb of Saint Paul for the last year and a half. Per mutual agreement, I am allowed to refer to this young adult, almost 22 years old, as our fabulous queer dragonlet.

So the dragonlet's cell phone died - not "I need to charge my phone" dead, but "I'm going to begin to show the loading screen and then go black again" dead. For eight heart-stopping days, we were not hearing from the dragonlet and getting no response to our attempts to call, text, and email. 

Everything, as it turns out, is fine, and the dragonlet will shortly be equipped with a new, working phone. It's one of those things. 

It was a long eight days.

Somewhere in there - maybe four days in - it occurred to me to activate the bat signal, so to speak. I am blessed with a number of clerical colleagues who live in and around the Twin Cities of Saint Paul-Minneapolis, largely because Minnesota is sort of the domestic holy land for Lutherans. I reached out to a couple of local colleagues privately. Then it finally dawned on me to look up the Lutheran congregation closest to the dragonlet and explain the situation.

Well.

There are one hundred and eight ELCA congregations within a 15-mile radius. As I said - the domestic holy land. I sent an email to the pastor at the one that was closest.

I got a text message: "May I call you?" It wasn't long before we had a wonderful phone call. She was kind enough to identify as a parent of two children about the age of ours (a little younger) - and she was also kind enough to name another connection: she served her internship year at the church where the senior pastor is North Carolina's current bishop. 

Just knowing that I had this pastor-mom carrying my cares in her heart somehow made things better even before we heard from the dragonlet. As the actual Saint Paul, the author of a number of letters in the Bible, writes: "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep" (Romans 12:15).

And even though the hubs and I knew that we were never alone in this concern, talking with this pastor reminded me forcefully of one of my very favorite instructions from Scripture: "Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

At a time when the hubs and I were praying that everything was all right, my colleagues, and one colleague in particular, bore my burdens with me. She wept with those who wept, and rejoiced with those who rejoiced.

I might never meet her in person. But she was my sister in Christ when I needed one, badly. 

What happens to me, and to you, when we bear one another's burdens? Even for those of us who help bear burdens for a living, sometimes we are the ones who need help with our own burdens, and it helps to remember that.

Beloved of God

 The late John Lewis, for many years a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Georgia, has been my hero since I was about 13, which is when I first started paying attention to civil rights (as opposed to being vaguely aware).

And Jon Meacham is a historian I like and admire, having already read American Lion, his biography of Andrew Jackson. So it was what one might call a no-brainer that I would preorder the book when His Truth is Marching On was advertised: a biography of John Lewis by Jon Meacham, with the subtitle John Lewis and the Power of Hope. Preorders being what they are, when I bought the book, six or eight months before its publication, John Lewis was still alive, still showing up at nonviolent gatherings, still telling us never to quit hoping, always to keep marching on.

The book, in due course, got published, and I selected it as an unabridged audiobook. And so I've been listening. But only in measured sections, because it's so hard to hear what is being recounted sometimes. 

And when the narrative took me to the city of Birmingham, Ala., in 1961, with the Freedom Riders on the bus, another character entered the scene and was introduced by his entire name. I've known him for years as "Bull" Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham. I might even have known that his actual name was Eugene. 

 It turns out that Eugene Connor went by his middle name, as I have for more than 30 years. His first name? Theophilus. 

Born in 1897, Connor received a first name from the New Testament, a common practice in those days. And there's no way of knowing whether it was his choice or his family's to have him go by Eugene instead. But it serves as a powerful reminder, one that made me stop the book and sit and ponder that new information.

Theophilus. It means "beloved of God." It's not even a name, exactly, when it shows up in the Bible. The author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts addresses those books to "Theophilus," who might have been a real person, but who would have had a different name, because "Theophilus" is clearly a title. 

Confirmation students, one year early in my ministry, all received T-shirts printed with a "Hello, my name is" stickers, with Theophilus printed on the line. It was a reminder that whatever other names they bore, or nicknames, Theophilus was also who they were.

Bull Connor behaved in ways that were unsurprising for his place and time and probably expected by many of the white citizens of Birmingham. His use of fire hoses, German shepherds, and other vicious techniques were unspeakably horrible - yet visual confirmation of these acts helped capture the nation's attention and force significant and long-overdue change.

And Bull Connor was beloved of God. From his birth in 1897 to his death in 1973, Theophilus Eugene Connor was beloved of God. My brother in Christ. That makes it difficult (impossible, really) for me to think of him only with dismissive contempt. I can grieve, and do, at his techniques, his words, his public life. But it does well for me to remember that he was, as are all of us, Theophilus.

We Never Met

 Every year, as death claims people who are public figures, tension seems to arise between the many people who publicly mourn their passing and those who profess to be baffled. "Y'all never even met ____________," the criticism will say. "How can you be sad about the death of someone you never knew?"

But 2020 increasingly feels like a weird rerun of 1968, complete, it seems, with the death of people whose lives have had particular significance to people who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color). In 1968, of course, we saw the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks apart.

This year, the death of John Thompson at 78 comes as just one more blow. Less than a week ago, cancer claimed Chadwick Boseman at 43. Boseman, an actor and a graduate of Howard University, brought to life Jack Roosevelt Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T'Challa of Wakanda (part of the Marvel Comics universe), among others.

Earlier this year, both Rep. Elijah Cummings and Rep. John Robert Lewis died. Often mistaken for one another, each had brought his own unholy struggle to the House of Representatives, where they advocated for the ideal of what America purports to promise all who live here.

Allen Iverson, retired professional basketball player, has said that John Thompson, then coach of Georgetown University, saved his life. A number of colleges were courting Iverson, assiduously, in both football and basketball. Then, as Iverson puts it, an incident happened, and the recruiting tap was turned off. Iverson's mother interceded, begging Thompson to give Allen another chance. "He saved my life," Iverson said.

Why do I care? Why am I sad because someone I never met has died - whether it was Thompson or Boseman, Cummings or Lewis?

Partly because, as John Donne wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." [1]

But, more eloquently, Carmen Florez, writing in 2017, said: "When we're reminded of their humanity, we’re reminded of the effect they had on so many people, and that’s why we care so much. Not because they’re more important than anyone else, but because their deaths mean something different. They remind us that there are few certainties in life, one of which being that there will come a day where we, and everyone else we know, will no longer be here." [2]

I mourn for the families and loved ones of these men. Not only because of the sharp reminders of mortality in a year filled with such reminders for many people who will die "unwept, unhonored, and unsung"[3] except by those who loved them. I mourn because the country, and the world, are a little smaller and dimmer without them. 

[1] John Donne, Meditation XVII

[2] Carmen Florez, "Why We Care So Much When Celebrities Die," at Odyssey Online.

[3] Sir Walter Scott, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

Pray for Them That Spitefully Use You

 Of late, I have found myself praying for Kellyanne Conway, who has served in the current presidential administration for several years. Her husband, George, is an attorney; they have four children, including Claudia, who is 15 and active on social media.

Mrs. Conway has been a loyal face of the administration, and the election is less than three months from now: closer to two months, actually. So why did she recently abandon ship, announcing that she was resigning to spend more time with her family? Mr. Conway similarly is stepping away from his work on The Lincoln Project.

Usually, when a political figure says that, it's code for: "I messed up so badly that I'll just show myself to the door." But I really believe Mrs. Conway, which, I think, is why I find myself praying for her and her family.

Mr. Conway has publicly criticized the administration and its actions. So has Miss Conway. Even going just by the publicly available snippets, this family of six is at sixes and sevens over the administration and the coming elections.

I believe Mrs. Conway when she says she and Mr. Conway want to heal strained family relations. And that's why I've been praying for the Conway family.

Is Mrs. Conway my enemy? Has she spitefully used me? Depends on how you define your terms. I really hesitate to say that someone is my enemy. She and I have opposing views on what promotes healing and wholeness in our society. She coined the description "alternative facts," which disturbs me. She has enabled and promoted actions that I find repugnant.

And I am saddened by some of the glee and sarcasm I've seen in response to her decision to resign. "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" (Matthew 5:43-44, KJV).

I'm not as comfortable with the idea that "prayer changes things" as I am with the goal that "prayer changes me." So as I pray for the Conway family, I pray that praying for them ... changes me.

From a Distance

 In connection with the movie Beaches, starring Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler, Miss Midler released a song that got a lot of airplay on the radio in late 1989 and took on a second life being sung at weddings, funerals, and family reunions. The song is "The Wind Beneath My Wings."[1]

"Thank you, thank you, thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings," the character sings. Mirroring the plot of the movie, a popular and famous woman tells her dying friend, who was always in the star's shadow, that it was in fact their friendship that sustained the celebrity.

Miss Midler followed that song with another hit, "From a Distance," written by Julie Gold and first recorded by Nanci Griffith. "God is watching us," Miss Midler sings, "from a distance."[2] The songwriter says that she believes in the immanence of God and that her thoughts were more about the difference between how things appear and how they are.

Because of a pandemic, the SARS-Cov2-19, also known as a novel coronavirus or simply COVID, we're doing a lot of our loving from a distance these days, most painfully with the people in our lives who have always been the wind beneath our wings. The ones who have sustained us, helped launch us (sometimes more than once), given us lift, and run along the beach as we soared.

I was reminded of this just this past weekend. My parents have been married 58 years, uniting in matrimony on August 24, 1962, my dad's 28th birthday. The hubs and I packed a cooler with freshly cut fruit; turkey, lettuce, and bread; and a package of miniature cupcakes, and we drove east for a sort of a visit. 

Our family is famous, or maybe infamous, among ourselves for the frequency and quality of our hugs. Not in the last five months. 

On Saturday, we sat - my dad at one end of the dining table, the hubs at the other end, and me perched on the kitchen step stool, so that we were six or seven feet apart, and ate the simple supper I put together and talked, about baseball and marriage and birthdays. Even so, we were taking a chance, one I pray does not have health consequences.

Before we left, I phoned my mother, who for two years has been residing in an assisted-living facility some ten minutes from the family home, and we had a good conversation.

The hubs and I waved to my dad when we arrived, and we waved when we left. 

We didn't touch, not even when I handed over the cards and a small wrapped package. 

Dad's just turned 86. I know how blessed I am that I still get to enjoy my parents' company on this planet. They've been the wind beneath my wings for a long time. Maybe now I get to be the wind beneath theirs, a little, sometimes. 

But - along with everyone else - I'm wretched at this love from a distance thing. 

Rereading Job (as one does) recently helped put things in perspective. Job, a narrative folk tale that was being passed along orally more than a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, tells of a bet between God and Satan that raises questions about the whys and wherefores of evil but does not attempt to answer them.

In the end, Carl Sagan wrote (at the conclusion to his novel Contact), such vastness as the universe is bearable to such small creatures as we only with the promise of love, and the promise of presence.[3]

From a distance, or not - we are never alone.

[1] "The Wind Beneath My Wings." (c) 1989, Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar.
[2] "From a Distance." (c) 1987, Julie Gold. Miss Gold's interpretation of the meaning (c) 2005, "Here on Earth," Radio Without Borders, Wisconsin Public Radio on February 19, 2005.
[3]Contact (c) 1985. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sacred Instrument

 "The right to vote is precious and almost sacred, and one of the most important blessings of our democracy. We must be vigilant in protecting that blessing. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy" - Rep. John Lewis (D-GA 5).

My hero died recently. It's not a word I use all that often. Hero, that is, not "recently." I think that in general, we overuse it as a descriptor. There are plenty of public and private figures whose lives, work, and character I admire, all of them flawed (like me!).

John Lewis might be the only person I consider my hero. It's been that way for 40 years, since I first heard of him at age 13 (yes, my name is Beth and I'm a precocious history nerd. Hi!). It wasn't much more than a year or two after that that I first picked up a sign and started protesting something (I believe it was the nuclear-arms race). 

I'm sad that advanced pancreatic cancer claimed him when he was just 80. But we are a better people, a better country, because John Lewis was. Because by age 6, he was preaching to the family chickens in Troy, Alabama, ducking the chores to sneak away and catch the bus to school. Because by age 25, while walking across a bridge as part of a nonviolent movement to ensure that all people in Alabama could exercise their constitutional right to vote, he survived being knocked down, clubbed with nightsticks, and attacked with tear gas - and because he never gave up hope, and never stopped encouraging nonviolent communication and community.

Since turning 18, I've never missed an election, though I was 18 in 1985, which means I still had to wait three years to vote in a presidential election. I once got to my polling place near the end of the 12-hour time to vote in a party primary runoff for County Clerk. I was the fifth vote recorded at that station.

Sometimes when I vote, I don't care a whole lot for either candidate. My response, though, is not to skip the vote. In a more prefect union, there would be a choice I liked better who might have a chance at being elected if I voted for her or him.

I recently read, in the Gospel according to Facebook, that voting is less like marriage and more like public transport. "You're not waiting for the one who is absolutely perfect. You are getting the bus. And if there isn't one getting exactly to your destination, you don't stay home and sulk - you take the one going closest to where you want to be."

The way the United States government is structured, we are a democratic republic. That means, as John Lewis said, the right to vote is "precious and almost sacred."

Sacred. Dedicated or set apart. We are governed by representatives whom we elect to represent us. The vote that each of us has, the vote that each of us gets to cast, has been dedicated to, or set apart for, the operation of our country, state, county, city. 

Holy books tend to be pretty clear about what you and I are to do with things that are sacred: protect them and use them as they are intended to be used.

Radio Silence

 First, an apology. I did not mean to go silent for seven months.

A few weeks after my last blog post, we entered the world of SARS-CoV2-19, more commonly known as COVID-19 or the coronavirus. For reasons of confidentiality, I can't say much about the specifics of what's been going on at my job as a chaplain on a senior-living campus. I can say that it wasn't long that, in accordance with the guidelines of the state synod and national denomination, the small church where I serve as pastor stopped meeting in person.(It has resumed, heavily modified, for about 10 people each week.) I continue to record YouTube videos of worship each week, which can be found by searching the YouTube site - leave a comment or contact me for the specifics.

So that's what I've been up to. But my blog, rather like a child that has left the nest, has been on my heart and on my mind, and I've always meant to continue.

Yesterday was an interesting day on a couple of fronts. At the beginning of the day, my plans for my day off got upended - which happens - and then it went south. I received some distressing news from one of the niblets (who is really too grown to be called a niblet any more, being nearly 26) as well as a note from a loved one with a trace of melancholy in the tone.

At the end of the day, though, a phone visit with the same loved one healed, restored, and reminded me of what I sometimes lose sight of. 

Despair is never the last word.

Death - and the black hole of despair - no longer have ultimate power over us, and have not because of God's gift to us in Jesus the Christ.

We are made to live in relationship. And relationship, which can feed the flames of distress and destruction, is also meant to be the force that draws us toward one another, and ultimately toward God.

The Empty Page

It will surprise no one to learn that on some weeks, the sermon flows easily, almost writing itself; on other occasions, I wrestle for some time before a message emerges, something finally clicks, and the sermon gets written. On occasion, though, the paper remains blank no matter how much effort I put into coming up with something.

Like many ministers in mainstream Protestant denominations, I follow what is called the Revised Common Lectionary. It was compiled some thirty years ago by a panel of experienced scholars, theologians, and preachers and covers a three-year cycle. Each week, the RCL presents an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a New Testament reading and a gospel reading. In years A, B and C, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, respectively, are highlighted. Because John's gospel is so very different, readings from there are sprinkled throughout, including one six-week period in (I think) Year B where the readings are on Jesus as the bread of life for six Sundays straight. There are only so many metaphors.

I'm in one of those weeks right now. The sermon for this Sunday is complete, and I feel pretty good about it - as good as I can feel, seeing that sermons are dynamic composition. They don't truly come to life until I have delivered them and the congregation has heard them. It's next Sunday that has me wishing for a freak blizzard, or some other act of nature that will cancel Sunday services. 

The reading is from John, as it happens, chapter 1, verses 29 through 42. Here, John proclaims (twice) that Jesus is the Lamb of God. Two of his followers respond by following Jesus. When he asks them what they seek, they respond with a question: Where are you staying? Come and see, he replies. The followers then invite two more to come and see. 

It ought to write itself, one would think: the fleeting moment in which invitational Christianity is born. One look, and they are hooked, and what's more, they invite others to see for themselves that they have found the Messiah. 

One would think.

Normally, when I'm stuck, I go to the Internet and read other sermons on that passage, hoping to find an idea that will serve as a springboard to give me somewhere to begin my own composition. Normally I find a few ideas after looking at a page or two of other sermons. Not this time. I went through eighteen pages. Eighteen! I went through all the pages there were. I actually reached the end of a Google search. Not one of the sermons I read spoke to me, which makes me wonder whether it's the passage or whether it's me. 

I plan to bring the vexation to my text study group this week, in the hope that someone will have an idea. Our son suggested walking away for a while, which is never a bad idea - but in the meantime, I doubt that inspiration is likely to strike. 

The good news is that I have never yet failed to come up with something. The bad news is that on occasion what I come up with is watery gruel, stuff that dribbles off the spoon and fails to provide the nourishment I have been called to provide. 

Maybe I'll be struck with laryngitis. Or maybe - just maybe - time will work its magic, something will come, and a new sermon will be born.