Spiritual Lemons: Zest for Souls Challenged and Courageous

2012.01.29 Holy Spirit...How Does She Do It?

2012-01-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

I heard an unusual comment recently, a compliment to the rector of a neighboring parish from one of the parishioners. The woman said, “He’s great. He’s not a pulpit hog.”

I also heard from a woman priest colleague that it was nice to see girls on the altar, not dancing of course, at a notably conservative patriarchal parish that’s trying to be more open. My friend has also been invited to preach and celebrate there.

And then I heard from a colleague woman priest and friend that the bishop who had 35 years ago turned me down for ordination had told her that being against the ordination had been the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

These tiny epiphanies felt hopeful that the Church will continue to chip away at patriarchy and full inclusion of every person in the worship and politics of the institution. Am I delusional? Make no mistake this current political field in this country is NOT about the economy, it is about women—keeping them in their traditional places, or not. You could even say barefoot and pregnant.

I’m firmly committed to the idea that as many different voices as possible should grace ALL our "pulpits" and altars and podiums. It builds community, neighborliness and peace. Christians are far from uniform in their styles of worship, politics, and theology. We desperately need to talk. We need to cut through assumptions and get to know who we really are. We only live next door for heaven’s sake.

I’ve been trying to promote such connections for years including interfaith ones. The miles between us are short but the walls are thick and so parochial it’s shocking.

I tell you I do wonder how Holy Spirit, She whom I call Sophie, works things for the best even when it all looks lousy and hopeless to us.

But She is a mysterious masseuse of relational connective tissues. And you know how long it takes those muscles and joints to loosen up and let go—and then pop back tight, over and over. It’s worse than muscles to get people to let go, and even worse with religious people.

Get a massage—full body and spirit.

2012.01.25 Aging With Faith

2012-01-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

“The older I get the more I believe and the fewer beliefs I have.”

This is the wisdom of the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, retired bishop of the diocese of Newark, author and theological provocateur. He recently spoke at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and I zeroed in on these words.

Wise and true I thought. And my mother who today would have been 100 years old would have loved it, she who mostly thought religious doctrines were “for the birds.”

I admit however that, although I do have more faith and care less about beliefs as intellectual tenets, my mind is rarely clear of theological ideas, all new to me, all brilliantly alluring, and all illuminating my faith and inflaming my heart.

This morning I woke up thinking that the Holy Trinity was a trifecta of energy—Creativity, Empathy, Travelocity— a race in which all three finish first, as one. Corny/silly, but it woke me up joyful.

I could only wish such a trifecta assault on our country so bogged down in the morass of contention for its own sake.

President Obama in his State of the Nation speech last night spoke of strength hidden in the nation’s depths. He again envisioned, begged for, cooperation. Is it too late to access it? He is a visionary who has grounded and become pragmatic.

Who could argue with common sense ideas like tax equity in this time of radical and dangerous economic inequity? How ingenious was it to compare the military strategy, command, to stick together for the sake of the mission no matter what, with what politicians must do now?

We shall all have to sacrifice, god forbid, competition, pride, greed, misogyny, and war. I have faith in the people to cast their secret ballots in the direction that makes sense, no matter what their leaders urge.

I’m sure that before too long I will tone down, and dull out, and store all my smart-ass faith wisdom in my one small faithful heart, there to be reduced and contained and claimed by Godde when I die.

But for now I’m filled with re-imagined beliefs.

Happy Birthday Mom.

2012.01.18 American Dream?

2012-01-18T12:03:00.000-08:00

The American dream of liberty and justice and all good things available to all citizens has turned to pablum, spooned out to the unawares, and the ignorant, and the too-busy-scraping-basic-livelihood-together-to-notice.

The so-called dream has become a lie.

There is less available than ever before to a greater number of citizens than ever before.

Paul Krugman in his NT Times commentary on Jan 16, Martin Luther King day, wrote: “Mitt Romney says that we should discuss income inequality, if at all, only in 'quiet rooms.' There was a time when people said the same thing about racial inequality. [They said it about women, too, and still are.] Luckily, however, there were people like Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet. And we should follow their example today. For the fact is that rising inequality threatens to make America a different and worse place — and we need to reverse that trend to preserve both our values and our dreams.”

James Forbes, retired minister of the Riverside Church in NYC, said without hesitation years ago when asked what he thought the next great sin America would have to face: CLASSISM.

Years ago too I saw a cartoon image that stayed with me. It pictured a fat cat capitalist type with a top hat and dressed in a tux. In the top of his tipped hat were a small bunch of people cheering and waving money around, while numbers of others spilled down over his belly landing on the ground below. Splat! 99% of us is falling fast.

Studies indicate that the more economic inequality a society has the less mobile it becomes. People can’t move. And stasis is death.

The Occupy Movement has called attention to the problem most recently. I pray its fervor doesn’t fade away.

What will the Church say? Not a whole lot I’m embarrassed to note. This is no time for religious people to be squeamish about the word SIN. One of the better definitions of sin is disconnection from the good in God, self and neighbor.
Our country is living, no wallowing, in SIN. And the Church is seemingly allergic to its mention.

Republican Mitt Romney calls for a retrieval of the SOUL of America. What is that?

I only know one path to get back in touch with one’s lost soul and that is to pray, turn back or repent, and ask forgiveness of God, self and neighbor BEFORE we seek ways to change—sell a few homes, for example. But this can only be done in company with other citizens of church and society. And it starts with confession.

Please let’s STOP dreaming!

2012.01.22 Aunt Florence

2012-01-17T12:25:00.000-08:00

When Aunt Florence comes into a room she has a neon effect. It’s her smile. It crinkles her already well-creased 101 year old face with sheer welcoming pleasure. And you’re sure she loves you without reserve.

I’m sure she has her moods and her toughness. I’ve just never seen them because I never met her till I was approaching my sixth decade and she was in her ‘80s. She isn’t even my aunt and she isn’t even my husband’s official aunt. She was his mother’s best friend for many years and that counts for extreme aunterly love, something some biological aunts often are unable to provide.

The first time I met Aunt Florence we were on our way to Harrisburg PA. to see the real aunt and stopped in New Jersey so I could meet the surrogate. She lived in the same house where she and her late husband, Uncle John, had raised two children. We have photos of Dick’s mother, Aunt Fran to Florence’s children, playing with Florence’s daughter.

Aunt Florence welcomed me with no obvious reserve. After all I was the “other woman” after Dick’s divorce— and a woman priest. Florence had been against the ordination of women priests. I don’t know if she changed her mind on that but I knew she wasn’t against me.

The lunch was simple, tuna fish sandwiches I think, but she set her table with elegance as if for best company.

After our first meeting I wrote Florence a note to ask if it was all right to call her Aunt Florence, too. You know the answer.

In time Aunt Florence moved to MD to live with her daughter. We’ve traveled to see her a few times and this last time, December 2011, we made an unplanned trip because Aunt Florence had just been diagnosed with a malignant tumor. She didn’t want treatment only good care and hospice, and the same loving family that already surrounds her. We went to see Aunt Florence before she died.

Do you know how hard it is to say good bye for ever to someone who is alive and looks well, has no pain, is vital and vibrant?

She told us that what had kept her so alive were the children— grand children and great grandchildren. They’d flock around her like birds all chittering at once. She was gracious with each and all and even did some tutoring till she reached 100 and had to slow down a bit.

Then how surreal to have the usual Christmas phone conversation 2 weeks after the last farewell. And who knows? Given Florence's resilient spirit she might make 105.

Her prayer request was like most people’s: to die peacefully in her sleep. And that Dick would be at the graveside to say prayers when her ashes were committed in the same N.J. plot where her husband is buried.

There is ample room for such goodness in the soul of God.

2012.01.15 Advantages of Aging: Liberation and Grace

2012-01-15T04:48:00.000-08:00

I don’t think this is what Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind. He had grander ideas thank heavens.

However, I’ve discovered an advantage to aging besides retirement and wearing purple, which I do anyway. Such a regal color for a Leo!

Don’t mean to offend but....... When you’re old you can fart, belch, swear, and interrupt all you want, ask dumb questions, repeat yourself, forget, forget and forget, even if you don’t, and otherwise act like a damn fool. You can even say the F word then feign dementia.

You’re free of inhibitions, if you so choose. All this will happen anyway so why not take advantage of it ahead of time?

People will just nod and attribute your crudery to your age. They will indulge you and smile wisely, and even envy you your refusal to be embarrassed. And in a few years they too will enjoy this marvelous freedom without shame.

Once when my mother was in her 80s she lost control of her bowels. It was a new experience for her—and me. We had returned from a visit to the ER after having her checked out from a fall. It was 3 a.m. I went ahead to open the door for her and heard her calling “I’m going.” “Where?”I said never imagining the truth.

That’s how invasive this trauma was for us both. We got through the clean up and getting to bed together with as much tenderness as we each could muster and, mercifully, no words at all, either of shame or scorn.

The grace in this is that you won’t be judged any more than a child would at the other end of the lifespan trajectory. So please don’t judge yourself either.

Shit happens and so does grace.

That night I almost wanted to read her a story, tuck her in, and say prayer—but settled for a kiss and “Sleep well Mom. See you tomorrow.”

2012.01.11 Breathe! Draw! Write! Sing! Breathe!

2012-01-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

I bought great books for some of our grandkids for Christmas. I loved them myself.

They are The Invention of Hugo Cabret (already a movie!) and Wonderstruck . Great title, no? Both are written and drawn by Brian Selznick, very innovative. Beautiful "holy" stories of children in search.

Books have always been “saviors” for me, providing me an alternative world in which to flourish, stimulating my own creative literary imagination, and accompanying me on my own search for life, love and mystery.

(I even read the whole Bible when I was 14, a useless resource to help me grow boobs and find a boyfriend, but astonishingly helpful in showing me a God who actually talked to and cared about people who carped and whined and carried on dramatically as I did.)

What I especially like about Selznick’s books is that the stories are told, in part, with dynamic pictures, not static illustrations. The art is dynamic and moves the story along. Pictures, not cartoons, are interspersed with words. It's how these books got to be as fat as the Bible!— half of the story is in pictures.

Very fabulous.

I also love that there is no sorcerer, extraterrestrial, magic, witches, robots or, god forbid, vampires! Just plain real-life children figuring out life's difficulties, finding someone to care, and growing up.

These creations are so real they take your breath away. Something like being “wonderstruck.”

It has been said, “The breath makes immortal music human.”

Likewise, art and text make immortal story human.

There’s something biblical about that, no? We have to stop to breath—and create. And in the beginning the biblical creator deity stops and stoops to breathe life itself into all creation.

2012.01.08 Music is a Human Right, Also a Divine Right

2012-01-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

Last night we listened to a Los Angeles Philharmonic (La Phil) concert conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, the latest sensation on the classical music scene and a young charming spirit from Venezuela—famous for saying with a shrug and a chuckle, "If it can be done in Venezuela it can be done anywhere."

Dudamel believes and passionately embodies his creed: Music is a human right.

In the beginning Godde said, Let there be light—and music. Birds made up the first orchestras.

Dudamel, inspired by his mentor José Antonio Abreu, educates children of all ages to play classical music in orchestras and in classrooms. Even tiny nursery school children are banging out rhythms in sync with each other. They are an orchestra! Their glee is unrivaled.

The program is called El Sistema. It’s a system, a saturation. Music is central to human development not an elective easily eliminated from school budgets. El Sistema is now being implemented at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

“Put a musical instrument in a child’s hand and s/he will never pick up a gun,” said Dudamel with a grin of surety.

A 12 year old African American boy said, “When I play music I enter heaven.”

This effort is an important way to take the elitist label off classical music and I think realize that all music is classical. The results of this effort are, frankly, happier children. Everyone plans and no one is left out or singled out. Unlike sports, there’s no “bench” in orchestral music. There is no grade either. Fail-safe joy.

It is also a way to instrumentalize the biblical idea that everything on earth is sacred and beloved the same. Music knows no gender, race, religion, etc.

One parent also labeled this program “safe” because it keeps children off the streets.

Dudamel said “We have to have the notes but each time we play it is different, sounds different. We have to interpret re-interpret and re-interpret to keep it alive.”

This creativity is also what keeps the biblical word of scripture alive for every generation, group, and individual. Everyone interprets it, makes it chime in their own souls, and creates, yes, music.

2012.01.04 Epiphany Insights Two Days Ahead

2012-01-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Epiphany, officially Jan 6, began with a point of light in the sky, tiny but bright enough to follow anyway and illuminative enough to shine on the face of, what else, a tiny baby. Whose eyes would not light up?

Epiphany offers many fleeting points of light. Watch for them in all the “wrong” places.

I overheard a talented writer say something like, getting published was ALL grace. I told him he should take some of the credit for it himself.

There's no such thing as disembodied grace.

And the alarmingly paradoxical Christian insistence on the co-mingling of flesh and spirit, divinity and humanity forces us to face this odd truth: it is divine to be crucified and it is human to be resurrected.

Our either/or habit of mind is confounded and convicted.

2012.01.01 Holy Naming

2011-12-31T11:55:00.000-08:00

It’s New Year’s Day. It’s also the Christian feast of the Holy Name.

Some Christians think there is only one holy name, and that it’s the name of Jesus. They’re wrong.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I love Jesus, both the holy man of Nazareth with the ribald humor and the buoying laugh and also the one the Church elevates to messiah, one sent by Godde to liberate and bring the good news that what?.......we’re saved.

But then you look around and guess what?... we’re not saved or it doesn’t look that way with all the mess of our lives and all the messiness and corruption in the world.

Salvation isn’t rescue it’s hope. And hope that is seen isn’t hope.

Scripture makes a big deal of God’s naming us each one and all, a way to acknowledge each one’s special place in the Heart of Love.

So who named you? My dad named me LYnda because he wanted to call me Lyn which he did. He only called me Lynda when he was seriously pissed off, like when he hollered me back inside as I was scampering across our lawn while sneaking out to meet my boyfriend who waited in the darkened getaway car down the street.

The sound of my whole name caught my attention. I was saved from teenage sex, which frankly was far more threatening than my father’s wrath.

Just his calling me by my whole name was enough to make me remember he cared about me, for better or worse.

Or . . . he’d call me by my full name when he “got me.”

(Our little granddaughter Phoebe, three, recently commented about her Uncle Robbie who’d given her a large empty cardboard box to play with, “That Uncle Robbie, he really gets me!”)

Dad “got me” when I told him I wanted to be a priest and then went quickly into a long awkward and inadequate explanation of something I couldn’t explain. He said “It’s OK Lynda. I understand.”

How do you name yourself? How do you name God?

God names us, and in so doing "gets" us, than tries like hell to save us from harm, failing almost every time but still trying.

Now that’s holy naming. Listen and hope.

2011.12.28 Truth and Fact

2011-12-27T15:14:00.000-08:00

A huge ceiling to floor oil painting of a rose, painted by Mary Daly RSM, hangs in the chapel of Mercy Center in Madison, CT. It serves as a reredos.

I have often gazed at its multi-petaled beauty and thought it an icon of the sacred heart, roomy enough to enfold the cosmos into its soft velvety bosom.

On one retreat I decided to dissect a real rose I had picked from the garden. I operated on it with caution, care and respect, as an good autopsy-ist would. I wanted to know how many petals there actually were in my cosmic image of divine love.

There were a disappointing 53 petals in my big fat red rose. I laughed to think how easy it is to align truth and fact as if they were the same phenomenon.

Of course I didn’t expect the number of rose petals to be infinite but I’d hoped for more than 53. The fact was this rose had 53 petals. The truth for me was its appearance of petaled profusion suggested something much more than its parts.

Fact is material knowledge. Truth partakes of a transcendent dimension, pointing beyond its literal manifestation. Facts, however, are the necessary vehicles of truth.

When I used to read Goodnight Moon to my young children we all knew the facts: bunnies don’t talk, have bedtime stories read to them, or sleep in beds.

Beyond facts lay truth: a good story well told makes everyone feel hopeful, can fill us with love and respect for all things, from a large glowing moon to a simple soothing bedtime ritual. Truth can replace fear with peace. Truth comes through facts.

ONE baby is born in a measly manger and kings think he’s a messiah in the making. All mothers think that of every babe, but the Magi? Story is fact + truth.

TRUTH AND FACT NEED TO STAY TOGETHER THOUGH FOR THEY ARE AS LOVE-MAKING AS TWO IN A BED...OR ON AN ARK. THEY LOVE EACH OTHER INTO LIFE.

Fact gives truth a leg to stand on. Truth puts a bloom on the cheek of fact lest its concrete gray complexion fails to inspire.

2011.12.25 Every Baby is God

2011-12-22T15:27:00.000-08:00

Sharon's Christmas Prayer
by John Shea

She was five,sure of the facts,  
and recited them   with slow solemnity,  
convinced every word  was revelation.  

She said they were so poor
they only had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat
and they went a long way from home  
without getting lost.

The lady rode   a donkey,
the man walked,
and the baby  was inside the lady.  

They had to stay in a stable  
with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)  
but the Three Rich Men found them  
because a star lited the roof.  
Shepherds came and you could  
pet the sheep but not feed them.
Then the baby was borned.  

And do you know who he was?  

Her quarter eyes inflated  to silver dollars

The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air,  
whirled round, dove into the sofa,  
and buried her head under the cushion  
which is the only proper response  
to the Good News of the Incarnation.

2011.12.24 Shepherd's Carol

2011-12-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

WE stood on the hills, Lady,
Our day’s work done,
Watching the frosted meadows
That winter had won.

The evening was calm, Lady,
The air so still,
Silence more lovely than music
Folded the hill.

There was a star, Lady,
Shone in the night,
Larger than Venus it was
And bright, so bright.

Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady,
It seemed to us then,
Telling of God being born
In the world of men.

And so we have come, Lady,
Our day’s work done,
Our love, our hopes, ourselves
We give to your son.

THE SHEPHERD’S CAROL
Words, ANON.
Music, BOB CHILCOTT
Oxford University Press

This carol was written for the Choir of King’s
College for ‘Carols from King’s’ in 2000.

And then one day they discovered there was also a girl in Christ, a daughter, and that the Messiah needed no surgery or counseling to be "transgendered"-in-the-flesh. Faith invited more room and a change in excluding attitudes. Grin with me and be a blessing.

2011.12.23 Christina Rosetti on Christmas

2011-12-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Christina Rosetti on Christmas

CHRISTMAS hath a darkness
Brighter than the blazing noon,
Christmas hath a chillness
Warmer than the heat of June,
Christmas hath a beauty
Lovelier than the world can show:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answ’ring music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.

Words, CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Music, TANSY DAVIES
Faber Music

2011.12.21 Every Day Salvation

2011-12-21T06:07:00.000-08:00

Just the other day I was exiting my favorite bookstore Porter Square Books having bought my 1-millionth book, an activity tantamount to starting a fund to bring back dinosaurs, when I hear the familiar Christmas season tingle of bell.

I followed the sound and sure enough there were two old men dressed in red, looking Santa-ish and ringing little bells. They stood next to the Salvation Army kettle into which they hoped generous people would toss coins, maybe bills.

Moved by a force not quite my own I put a $20 bill into their kettle and said “The Salvation Army saved my nephew.” The old man bell ringer’s eyes filled up and so did mine.

There we stood on a crowded shopping street in the city of Cambridge MA. weeping for salvation and for my nephew Sam who had been brought back to strength and health and sobriety, not once but many times, by this gently militant crusading for Christ organization that has been “saving people in Christ’s name for over a century.

I moved on lugging my book cache and he resumed his bell ringing. Somehow it sounded different.

I told my sister of the encounter and I bet she cried too. Today is the Church’s calendar date for Thomas the apostle known by some as the one who doubted the resurrection good news. Neither my sister his mom or me his aunt have ever doubted Sam, the boy, now man, of countless life chances and countless salvations.

Tomorrow is also the Solstice, a day when the sun returns its face to give us a scintilla more daylight. Such a welcome gift as we enter the bleak of winter.

My sister told me that Sam had asked for the Bible on CD for Christmas. Too hard for him to read but not hard to listen to. At the Salvation Army shelter where Sam again is trying to chose life, he is steeped in recovery program and goes to church every day. He is Christ-soaked and Christ-doped,which is better than being alcohol-soaked or heroin-doped.

Sam had told his mom that there was some guy in the Bible, Zeph-something who told him God would give him a new heart and a new spirit.

That biblical guy was Ezekiel who, along with other prophets, delivered the divine promise: “A NEW HEART I WILL GIVE YOU, AND A NEW SPIRIT I WILL PUT WITHIN YOU; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezek. 36:26)

Sam heard words that articulated exactly what he needed, an entire full-body transplant—new heart, soul, flesh, mind body, the works. The odd irony of this connection the kind Spirit makes is that Ezekiel in his day, and to many biblical interpreters in modern day, was thought insane because of his strange images and visions.The ancients said possessed; moderns said schizophrenic or manic-depressive.

Yet Ezekiel became one of the major prophets in the Bible. You could die laughing. But that kind of thing happens often. It’s the work of the God of reversals. Sam is one of those reversals. Let it hold.

My sister and I decided to split the cost of the Bible on CD for Sam this Christmas. The rest is up to Sam, the Salvation Army, and God-in-Ezekiel.

2011.12.18 Anyone Noticed Santa/God?

2011-12-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

The wondrous Christmas figure of Santa Claus as many know was based on the generosity of an early Church Bishop Nicolas of Myra (ca. 342 CE) who gave without condition—and NOT exclusively to those in need, but to all, most especially children.

His behavior was so strange that he became Saint Nicholas aka Santa Claus. He’s all around this time of year.

My grand daughter Phoebe screeched last year at the idea of sitting in the lap of this bearded and red-suited stranger going HO HO HO. But now she’s 3 and very sophisticated. She was silenced into awe when a Santa squeezed her shoulder. Told it to anyone who would listen.

Now that’s just how the ancients felt about God and Christ through their spiritual experiences. They told it all over, spreading the good news: He touched me. He touched me.

There’s a BUT to this joy, and that is that many faithful people have projected onto God the same conditional perspective we put into our ideas about Santa: IF you’re nice you get a gift BUT IF you’re naughty you get coal, or nothing. AND of course both MEN are omniscient so they know. Spooky dooky!

Do you think kids believe that threat? Probably not or no one would ever give Santa or God a chance, because they both always comes through with something without needing to be bribed by goodness.

So why, in heaven’s name literally, do some Christians have so darn much trouble adjusting their theology to allow for the central value of their faith, which is unconditional love or grace through forgiveness? Repentance isn’t, in my unhumble opinion, required. Rather it’s a byproduct.

That’s the free grace of divine nature. We may not know it or care about it. We may not be able to be that way ourselves. And we may not be able to receive such unconditional grace. Does that make it unreal?

Hell, if God is any old benign conditional parent in the sky, then I’m an a-theist.

PS An old friend who couldn’t resist just sent us some cocktail napkins with a cartoon on them depicting a mother with a small girl in a line waiting to give Santa this year’s demands, read transactional grace. The caption reads: “You should go and talk to Santa, dear, even though you feel he screwed you last year.”

2011.12.14 Occupy and Organize

2011-12-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

Let’s get organized! I think I shouted that to my young family or if I didn’t I thought it loudly.

I wonder if Godde conjured that divine thought just the second before the firmament split-seconded out of control and Creation burst through.

It seemed to me that in our family of six we needed to find a way to go in the same direction at the same time at least once a day—other than to bed.

So I have admired the Occupiers very much, for their cause, their zeal, their endurance, their shear voicing of truth, and their non-violent ways. AND I want them to get organized so their truth-voice will not fade out and whoosh away like so much sage brush in the desert.

So I say to Occupiers: Don’t get lost. Don’t lose your vitality. OCCUPY YOUR IDEA. Get organized and take your voice to the halls of executive and legislative power. Politics is a hard go, but GO.

At Christmas Christians celebrate anew the God who OCCUPIES human flesh in Jesus, and in you & me too! This idea took hold and held on in spite of many attempts to evict and convict it.

A five year old named Sharon told the old story to her poet father John Shea who wrote a poem about his daughter’s solemn retelling of the ancient story. Sharon’s response is the only possible one to such a gloriously preposterous idea:
“Then the baby was borned.
And do you know who he was?
Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars.
The baby was God.
And she jumped in the air,
whirled round, dove into the sofa,  
and buried her head under the cushion  
which is the only proper response  
to the Good News of the Incarnation.”

This Occupy movement may hold hope for what is currently thought heinous to so many: ORGANIZED RELIGION.

The early seekers and followers of divinity realized there was more to this messy life than human effort. In time they organized themselves and drew a community together to worship a Mystery they couldn’t know except by faith.

Religion’s journey began in relationships of mutual caring among human beings who shared inklings of intuitions of the Beyond, the More. They were intimately connected by their fears— and their awe. Wonderstruck they “dove into sofas” and uttered prayers. It began with astonishments and a vision. Only later did they get organized in writing and practices and, heaven forfend, structure.

Of course the impulse to organize can go awry but not if the people keep hold of the vision: love, peace, justice for all earth— because of an OCCUPYING GOD.

2011.12.11 Fleeting Frail Memory

2011-12-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me as I write my memoir that even the facts I know I don’t remember long or well, often doubt altogether. It’s why fragile memory can’t be proven, only explored and experienced with loving care. Then gone.

Here is a quote on memory from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I love it.

"My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing but the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time. "

I do envy that prose. We'd be blackballed today probably for such a lengthy sentence but it is eloquent. We who write are all honey-voiced don't you think?

My favorite Christmas memory of my childhood is my father reading aloud "Twas the Night Before Christmas" as we small three daughters listened in awe and wonder. The story itself held all the enchantment of the Nativity story. It's the story that converts and transforms, not its veracity.

My second favorite or clear memory of Christmas is of my father singing carols in his rich bass voice in church. It was enough just to listen and watch the candles flicker for me to know Love lives no matter what else dies.

The Eucharist is like Waugh's memory pigeons, a glimpse of remembered life, sharply present, beckoning, the past possessed, then, suddenly, swallowed and gone—not forgotten just gone. The Greeks call this phenomenon anamnesis (no amnesia.)

All you can do is say thanks for the memory.

2011.12.07 Anita Hill, Still Brave

2011-12-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

It's Pearl Harbor Day, a time to remember tragedy, grieve our warlike ways, and up our efforts to prevent war!!

Also a fitting time for me to commemorate one of my heros who in her own way made a contribution to the effort to end violence and its ideologies.

In early October I heard Anita Hill speak on her new book Reimagining Equality. Stories of Gender and Race and Finding Home.

Hill as I expected her to be was eloquent speaking of how our ideas about HOME shape our experience and form our ideas of justice and equality in America.

I remember being riveted to the TV in 1991 when Hill confronted the issues of sexual harassment at the Senate hearing to confirm Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice.

I’d never heard of sexual harassment but I sure had experienced it in church and society AND never thought a thing about it. I figured it was about my being an attractive women. Imagine!

Not until I read and became a feminist did I understand inequities, power dynamics and patriarchy, aptly defined by theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza as any system of social organization that depends for its stability, its very existence, on -isms, strongly held beliefs and norms whereby one group has,and is supposed to have, more power and more access to resources than all others.

The inequity is structured right into the system,politically, economically, and theologically. It’s a short attitudinal hop from God HE the Almighty power to HE the man who has power over the woman. HE with all the power and right is sexISM.

Ism to me means that whatever precedes the -ism has all the power in the mind of a culture, an individual, or a group. I’m glad Christianity isn’t called Christian-ism.

Anita Hill told us that her grandmother’s name never appeared on the documentation or deed for a large farm her grandparents homesteaded in 1869. Her grandFATHER went from being property to owning property, the American dream. What happened to HER? The grandparents farmed the land together, both giving sweat and tears to the project of landed freedom. It wasn’t that her grandfather treated her grandmother with personal disrespect; the context ignored her very existence.

That’s old stuff you say. Maybe and maybe not. We’ve come a long way for sure and we’re not there yet. Hill cited the current housing crisis and foreclosure as no accident. The crisis is gendered. Women, singles in fact, have been unable to get loans and gain greater economic independence.

The two-parent single home solution isn’t working as the dream. It is failing to provide true HOME.

This is not the space to go deeper into this but Hill said the American dream of everyone being able to own property has ballooned. It has become distorted to mean that every American MUST HAVE bigger and bigger homes. "Trophy" mansions represent a failure of equity. They are symbols of a failed vision.

I’ve never like the idea of equality anyway. Human beings are not equal. They are equivalent, of equal value in our nations and in our churches.

Hill suggested that HOME means belonging, safety, community, not just house.

Many churches bear the name Heavenly Rest. Rest is a biblical metaphor for God. It doesn’t just mean peace after you die. You have a home in God as you are right now.

If we could begin to see each other this way we might rework the American dream and work to enlarge the concept of HOME as belonging in a community of equivalent souls where anything that devalues things black, female, disabled, poor, etc. undermines the whole.

According to Hill we need a movement from tolerance to belonging—very spiritual, very political, very economic, very American.

2011.11.30 A Family Saints Day

2011-11-29T15:29:00.000-08:00

When I was a young teen and panting with romanticism, I admired Roman Catholics, actually envied them because they had stuff— like beads and prayers and saints names and days. They also prayed, to a woman of all things. AND they had answers to any religio-spiritual questions I might ask. And I had plenty of questions. I felt we Protestants were deprived.

But what I loved the most is that these Catholics had a whole array of saints, one for every issue and ailment and prayer concern you could think of. They even each had a saints name. I thought that was elegant, so personal. There was no saint Lyn.

Of course later when I took instructions to join the Roman Catholic church I found out they didn’t think much of women, except the statuary kind.

So I found the ANGLO-Catholic Episcopal church where there were beads that were optional, or less compulsively omniscient, and a liturgy that made me swoon almost as much as the Latin Mass. But here I had to wrestle with what all these mysterious words meant. It grew me up into a priest.

I made my own beads and use them when I’m dead tired or deeply desperate and wordless.

And I picked out a few saints to personalize according to meaningful days in my life and family. One was St. Andrew whose holy day is today.

Andrew was a nice and curious guy, a disciple of John the Baptist who suggested he meet this Jesus. Eagerly Andrew went to investigate. Then, according to the biblical story in John’s gospel, Andrew rushed back to fetch his bro Simon Peter.

Andrew never made it into Jesus’ circle of intimates. He wasn’t the type to aspire to the episcopate. Maybe he was lucky. After all look what became of Peter. Who would want to be pope?

But Andrew recognized a good thing like forgiveness and the God of love Rabbi Jesus preached, as a good way of life to follow. And he didn't get possessive with his new way but shared it immediately.

Andrew is patron saint to Scotland, part of our family heritage, but that’s not why I chose him as one of our family saints. I chose Andrew because on this day, 10 years ago, my two sons nearly died in a car accident. God didn’t save them, they were plumb lucky. But God I believe worked transformation in their souls after their shared trauma.

In time and with gratitude these brothers supported and led each other into a new way of life.

Each person finds his or her way to truth and holiness, and some people do it together.

2011.12.04 25 Years of Wedded Laughter

2011-11-26T15:18:00.000-08:00

Evening conversation or its lack between a middle-aging couple, retired and gratefully vital but with occasional memory lapses, can be sparse or sparred, but most always risible.

Astonishing how SHORT the “short” is in short-term memory loss.

Example: SHE confesses to forgetting to flush. (Now that’s VERY short term memory loss :0

HE reminds her by calling attention to it, loudly of course and from two flights down.

OK this is us of course. It's how we stay married by laughing.

What did I want for our 25th wedding anniversary?

I answered boldly and with surety: I want you to stop wearing underwear and socks. It would make folding the wash so much easier.

I knew his asking was a joke because we have long since not given gifts to each other in the interest of not accumulating anything that we will have to pack and move, facing wrenching downsizing choices.

OK, he said, if you don’t ever buy another stitch of clothing for as long as you live.

I won’t, I swore, silently adding “with Godde’s help.”

How did we make it the second time for this long?

You’re too ornery and I’m too terrified, he said.

Or vice versa I said.

Obviously, we have little shame left. And today we caught ourselves defensively competing over who forgot or remembered what—when and correctly. Imagine! BUT... what one forgets the other remembers and vice versa.

We’re having hysterical fun, even when we fight which happens often and lasts shorter than short-term memory loss. Not really a fight just a skirmish to make sure we’re both clear on our points. Just so neither forgets!

This is aging love—all gratitude, all laughter, and all truth in a big fat spiritual grab bag.

Thanks be to God whose sense of humor is eternal.

2011.11.27 Advent Commandment

2011-11-26T14:25:00.000-08:00

Every pregnancy is holy and every pregnancy asks us to slow down, heed inner life growing, and wait with gentle patience for the birth—of Jesus and whoever else is en-wombed.

No flesh is illegitimate!!

A wisdom that needs to take on the tenor of a commandment for all seasons, not just Advent. Our culture is blessed with instant communication. I find it helpful and use email but not social networking—yet. I still love long lunches with friends and park bench chats — in the flesh.

I received this email from a friend recently. She was getting tied in knots by email correspondence, if it can be called that.

She wrote: i've come to hate e-mail - no voice, no nuance, too quick, too easy (and you can quote me on your blog). i get about 150-200 per day at the college. madness, sheer madness.

Noting the irony I shot back my instant reply with a quick click: Tis madness indeed! And it's deaf, dumb and blind to boot!! Jesus, however, did heal such blindness with a click of his prayer-suffused hands, no? Maybe we should pray on this, to heal the device-addicted culture. Of course we will be called old fogies but I don't care. We are older, not fogies just spiritually sane. We can remember a more connected less harried world. And Eucharist is for remembering our embodied holiness, last time I ate, right?

Paradox: The more connected our devices tell us we are the more disembodied and non-incarnational we get.

Today’s culture is anti-Christian. I don’t need everyone to espouse Christianity. Some days I don’t myself. But it sure wouldn’t hurt to pay attention to one of Christianity’s central ideas: INCARNATION.

If G-d or the Holy lives in our human flesh, honors it enough to dwell therein, then maybe we need to do likewise. Touch and the keen eyes of understanding heal souls.

The lady preacha (not ordained) Baby Suggs says in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved:

"Here, . . . in this place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it, love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. . . . Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them, touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face, ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, You! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. . . . You got to love it. This is flesh that I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance, backs that need support; shoulders that need strong arms. . . . More than eyes and feet. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear em now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”

This is the prize: ALL flesh is blessed so bless ALL flesh.

(This means you have to keep in shape AND love your muffin tops, too.)

2011.11.24 Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T09:15:00.000-08:00

Originally this day was declared a national day of thanksgiving and prayer.

Often the prayer part gets left out or hastily truncated before we dive into our feasts.

So here is my prayer along with my thanks for life itself.

Dear God, Thank you for You, for the gift of divine presence in my life. You help me stay me, no more and no less. You bless me with wonder. Bless to me this sacred gift, keep me faithful, and be a spirit of prayer and thanksgiving within me and within all the people I love and believe in. As I pray without ceasing in good times and bad may I also be grateful without ceasing in good times and bad. By this I plan to help You make a feast for the hungry and the starving to share together. Let's try. AMEN.

2011.11.20 King Sunday

2011-11-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

When Dick and I were married 25 years ago we chose to have our marriage liturgy on a Sunday morning in the parish church where Dick was rector.

Ours was a second chance marriage. I had been on the search committee of my home parish when we elected Dick as our next rector. On paper he looked quite ordinary and I remember throwing his profile aside saying Let’s chuck this Simeoneee ( I pronounced it incorrectly) guy. Boring.”

I got outvoted because Dick’s profile had advertised his interest in doing youth ministry, the speciality of the former rector. I commented that they all said that, good marketing.

In the short run youth won out. In the long run so did love and eventual marriage. Going through divorces in a small town in a smaller parish was no picnic and neither of us would have opted for that if we’d seen alternatives. Both of our ex’s took their second chances too and are happily remarried.

I remember debating our day. We chose this Sunday called Chist the King, which 25 years ago was Nov. 23. The day marks the end of the Pentecost season and is the springboard into Advent, time to expect the new baby and begin the life cycle again.

Christ the King is a glory day, an all white day just like a marriage or Easter. Time for new life, for recognizing anew who really is in charge, and it’s not you. And time to know that in Christ we see the love of God lived out in the flesh and are supposed to try to follow the good example.

I don’t like royalty much but thought the day for our marriage would be OK since if Christ were sovereign of the cosmos then no one else could be—ever. We would be mutual marriage partners, no one on top, except of course........ :)

But I drew the line at the Diademata hymn—terrific triumphant music but all about kingship and completely and exclusively masculine language.

Jesus was a man and can keep his male pronouns but Christ is alive in an eternal spiritual way and can not be He, Him or His all the time. So I ruled out the crowns and the He’s and that hymn for our wedding day.

Today in church we sang that hymn and for every He that was clearly not referring to the life of Jesus on earth I sang Christ, a more neutral word, gender-free.

You don’t have to be a man to be a christ. Neither for that matter do you have to be a Christian to be a Christ.

2011.11.23 Leaps of Faith

2011-11-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve returned to reading some literary classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Brideshead Revisited.

Contemporary work pulls me along all right but its prose is slick, speedy and often dependent on contrived plot twists. Fine-tuned prose with nuance is slow and deliberate ushering me INTO the drama rather than floating me along on top of it.

I've long believed that the arts—all of them not just the fine arts— can save the world. I’m supposed to be saying that God saves the world but salvation requires human hearts and minds and limbs—and leaps of faith.

Evelyn Waugh gives an example of the intricacy of the creative process and its spirituality from the point of view of a painter.

“I had the perspective set out in pencil and the detail carefully placed. I held back from painting, like a diver on the water’s edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate painter’ that afternoon, and all the next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were not difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the pallette; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.” (from Brideshead Revisited)

For brush stroke, substitute word, step, breath or note.The creative process when it takes over is deliberate AND random all at once. Inordinate time is spent to perfect each stroke, word, note, step, or action, but in the end one must risk the plunge toward something new. Think how risky it feels to fill in a pencil sketch with paint you know you can't erase. An act of creating is like jumping INTO your soul, INTO God.

When I was eight I paced the high diving board, coming right to the edge, looking down in terror at the waters of Long Island sound below, sure to swallow up my small earnest body forever. I’d been told I’d be OK; I could swim; the waters were deep enough. Still I paced.

I’d like to say that a lovely spiritual moment of faith helped me leap, but in truth it was spotting a teen ager climbing the ladder. I was more afraid of being thrown in with mock and toss than I was of the waters, so I grasped my nose tight and leapt. Sure enough the waters caught me and buoyed me up. I can hardly remember a more triumphant moment. Later I’d boast, maybe feel grateful, but for now I just burst with pride and I was totally myself, soaking wet and safe.

It takes the same boldness to step onto a stage, write words on a page, sing notes out loud, participate in religious liturgies and rituals when you have no idea what they mean, pray without inhibition, hurling your words at an invisible Love, preach to high heaven, even though Ms. evil eye sits in the pew grimacing with her arms crossed over her chest—the body language from hell.

Like Waugh's artist you leap IN anyway. Whether your work is worthy of critical acclaim or not you have given something of your soul and so been saved

God is like that,leaping INTO creating with abandon—like a kindergartner with finger paint—faithful, free, flambuoyant, and pleased to bursting with the effort.

God is like that, leaping into Mary's womb, letting go into a scary new process—completely faithful, free, flambouyant,flawless—and pleased to bursting with the new life her womb will labor into being.

The sturdy graces of Thanksgiving are at your back. Lean on their memory as you leap INTO Advent to create something new.

2011.11.16 Getting Spoiled?

2011-11-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I worry about my grandchildren and American children today getting spoiled by so much privilege and affluence.

Then I wonder if I spoiled my own children. Trying to please them, indulge their wants, having trouble saying no, being a career codependent when they were growing up.

But no. I absolved myself. They were all spoiled enough by this culture and they are far from selfish brats.

I decided numbers helped. I had too many children to spoil. A crowd helps. A rough and tumble crowd helps. Not much room for attention to be overly lavished when there are four needing it, often all at once. They had to take care of themselves and each other especially when I hit midlife and broke out, seeking to fulfill my own desires beyond motherhood.

This is why I love the little reference in scripture to Jesus brothers and sisters—and cousins too. It is only disputed because people want Jesus to be be unique and heaven-sent—uniquely wombed so to speak. But no, he grew up in a clan and thrived—quite unspoiled.

It’s no more holy to be the one and only than it is to be one of many.

2011.11.13 COMMON CHURCH, COMMON PRAYER, COMMON GOD, COMMON HUMANITY

2011-11-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

I’ll call you after church, I said.

Oh, you still do that? my son said with the delicious innocence of the mildly churched.

Yes, I still go to church even though it’s not my job any more, I said.

Then I wondered why DO I go to church—really?

I know I don’t HAVE to go and often I’d much rather stay home than brave the subway and whatever vicissitudes of weather have arisen overnight unexpectedly. BUT I trudge on, part duty, part habit, part spiritual need.

In church I look for two experiences both spiritual and both commonly identified as signs of the presence of God: transformation from within and a feeling of unity from without.

A transformative experience can be as simple as a mood change and as complex as a theological insight. Like just recently realizing that Jesus did not flip his miracle-making gesture so a few loaves of bread became enough to feed thousands, he just had compassion, recognized hunger, told them to sit down in small groups, invoked a blessing of God, and told the crowd to count on being filled.

Obviously symbolic and eucharistic, the story newly struck me as good advice for an anxious church hungry for growth. Have compassion, the Spirit will grow within you if you just sit down, stop gawking at a guru for miracles, and begin a conversation. That’s transformation, growth from within on COMMON ground.

I confess a chuckle noticing that the story claims to feed 4-5000 men “besides women and children.” But who knows how much the thinking-ahead women stuffed into their outsized satchels, just in case anyone got hungry along the way? :)

A unitive experience? It’s standing around the altar area with some 30 other Jesus followers to receive consecrated bread and wine from a COMMON plate and a COMMON cup, gifts of one deity COMMON to us all. I feel God calling us to participate in COMMON prayer, be more aware of our COMMON humanity and act accordingly to assure the COMMON good.

I can get such experiences elsewhere but I can count on getting them in church where the Spirit connects me with divinity-in-humanity through worship, song and sacrament— IN God and IN common.

Oh yes, I also go to church to worship Godde, the transcendent mystery who both loves me with an intimacy so acute as to be almost threatening if I let it, and who is completely other and beyond— IN whom WE live and move and have COMMON being.

2011.11.09 God Talk and the Akedah

2011-11-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

I don’t know why theology has always fascinated me. I suppose it’s a mystery I can’t grasp and can’t stop trying to, anyway.

Some Christians I imagine think that the idea of grace/free will cooperation for the good started with them, or at least the New Testament Jesus. But it’s more ancient than that.

I’ve been reading Bruce Feiler’s book Abraham, a fascinating and beautiful read. He writes about what I call the story of the gasp heard round the world, the story in Genesis 22 (called the Akedah in Hebrew) about the near-sacrifice or the binding of Isaac, as most Christians call it—and use it to condemn the God of the Old Testament as if there were two Gods.

Abraham heard God ask him to give his son Isaac as a burnt offering apparently to TEST the solidity of Abe’s faith.

There have been many interpretations of this theological horror story. Who would do such a thing? What kind of God is this? Where was the mother? This is Holy Scripture?

My own favorite is that Sarah arranged with God to provide a ram for the burnt offering so Isaac, at the last-gasp minute, would escape unharmed but with a lifelong case of serious post-traumatic stress disorder. Abraham I thought had obviously made an incorrect discernment of God’s will.(My rational was obviously me trying to save God!)It happens all the time, and to the most prayerful of u, I'd say. Poor Abe.

But Feiler points out that in the story God does NOT ask Abe to kill his son but to OFFER him. Early Jews referred to the event as the OFFERING,not sacrifice or binding.

Think of the Offering in Church. Good season to think of what you can offer to help God create peace and justice.

“A potter doesn’t test defective jars, they would break. He only tests sound ones.” Such is the basis for a Talmudic interpretation that suggests that Abraham was testing God,not the reverse, see if "His" promise of continuing and multiplying Abe's line were the real deal.

Now that’s a role reversal.

The consequence of such a flip is that God is brought down to earth rather than Abe being elevated to heaven. Abe is the actor and God the reactor.

The theological boundaries are confused— or are they?

Feiler suggests that ABRAHAM BECOMES GOD’S PARTNER. They belong to each other.

“Their mutual trials completed, their love consummated, Abraham and God have now been irreparably fused.”

This is chilling and thrilling theology, a scandal to some: through trauma, God and Abraham became partners forever—humanity and divinity conjoined and blessed to work together to mend the world.

The New Testament will take that union into the flesh of Jesus.

All of this is POWER WITH, NOT POWER OVER theology—from way back. Talk it up !

2011.11.06 God Talk and Demons

2011-11-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

The bishop was delivering a terrific sermon on healing presence and demons, until he suddenly veered off on a theological path I couldn’t follow—not that I didn’t understand what he said, but I just didn’t think it sounded like the God I’d met many many years ago who listened me into life.

The biblical story was highly symbolic and desperately real.A man gone crazy, socially ignored and relegated to the tombs where he cried and flung himself and rocks about. He was out of his mind. Jesus appeared and was not afraid as all the man’s neighbors were. Jesus listened the man into his right mind. That’s a short summation of the potential of healing listening to restore mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

The bishop spoke about research that indicated mental illness as one outcome of absolute social and economic powerlessness—no control over one’s life and choices. No dignity whatsoever. Such poverty can literally drive one crazy.

The call of course was for disciples to offer compassionate listening presence to help mend the world with individuals, but also to challenge large systems whose policies and practices create severe polarities between haves and have nots.

Think Occupy Movement. Think the one and the 99 percent in America.

Disciples of healing help with their bodies and minds, and they help by opening their wallets to build programs to narrow the chasm and assist the human rights revolution.

Instead of AMEN the bishop veered. He told the large congregation gathered in the cathedral for our annual convention that no one was there because they chose to be there. They were there, each one, because God had chosen them to be there—to worship God, to catch inspiration, and to join the mission for the mending of our broken system.

Suddenly I veered too. I wondered if God chose the people who sat outside on the cathedral to catch the patches of sunlight and warmth to be there? I wondered who God chose to do the work of justice, peace and love, and why God didn’t choose more people to be here in church with their compassionate hearts—and their wallets.

Why didn’t God choose all the other people roaming the fair city on this lovely Saturday especially if there were a shortage of disciples? And what if the crazy man had rejected Jesus’ approach, had not chosen Jesus?

In short I felt a little manipulated by this dangerous theology of forced choice that set God up as the decider and the chooser as if human freedom were not part of the process. It made God sound manipulative. It seemed to compromise the partnership between grace and freedom.

I met God when I was three and I didn’t feel chosen at all, just loved, accompanied, heartened, and listened to, like Jesus listened to the demoniac. I didn’t feel unique or special.

As I grew up I thought my meeting God was intimately connected to my choice to seek refuge from the parental cocktail hour.

I love my husband and I can’t, for the love of us, tell you who chose whom first or when. Or who initiated the movement. As I grew into my first love affair with God, the issue of who chose whom first was moot.

It seems to me that the demoniac and Jesus chose each other, or were magnetically drawn together almost simultaneously. Lo! Dispelling demons became a joint venture.

This is why I prefer the theological vocabulary of love and connection over the vocabulary of choice/chosen because love is about mutuality and choice is about power.

To be honest, I trust, with humans and with God, the mutuality of love over the power of choice.

2011.11.02 Keeping Madeleine's Commandment

2011-11-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

After Madeleine L’Engle adjured me NOT to become a little man after I got ordained, I faced a few hurdles in carrying out her word of wisdom.

The adornment hurdle surmounted, the next hurdle I faced in my obedience efforts was what I call how we do business together?

As a parish priest I thought the way to lead was to meet with parish leaders for conversation, encourage prayer, and come to consensus about action.

Whatever policy and decision we made we all would support and help implement, including fielding the growls and ongoing recalcitrance-for-its-own-sake.

This is a process way of getting things done, and in fact a women’s way. Women tend to talk things over together, sometimes too much. Through the experience of being connected, listening and sharing, a path to successful action is created. One talks, another listens, the first speaks more, a third comments until all of us are on board and everyone knows the experience of the others and of the group.

Sometimes I confess it seems as if we all talk at once, we all listen at once, we all understand at once, and we all come away knowing self, other, Other, task at hand, what to do and what was said. Men think it’s insane, but it’s only different.

This way sounded good to folks but the parish culture was not used to it—a secret I didn’t know. They were used to talking a lot, then having the priest make the decision, reinforce it, take responsibility for it—all alone.

Here’s an example:
1)Complaints about noisy kids in church.
2)I brought it to the vestry and staff leaders
3)WE deliberated and prayed over a couple of months and made a fair policy then wrote it down to be communicated with everyone and appear in the weekly worship bulletin.
4)WE agreed to support the policy as a parish policy for the sake of the whole
5)I fielded a confrontation from an angry parent.
6)THEY, or most of them, expressed sympathy and compassion for the mother/complainant.
7)OUR policy became MY policy.
8)I took the issue back to the leadership group and met reluctance in the name of Christian charity for the parents, not something we had not discussed. I got a partial buy-in only.

So it went. I felt lonely, angry, betrayed, hurt and foolish. My style of leadership had been sabotaged because I DIDN’T TURN INTO A LITTLE MAN, making most decisions autonomously from his own authority, not as dictator but as a buck-stops-here leader.

I should have let them call me MOTHER. I debated preaching naked—pin-up style!

2011.10.30 Keeping Madeleine's Commandment...Continued

2011-10-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

The next hurdle I faced in my obedience efforts not to become a little man after I got ordained was what I call the earring crisis.

I started out eager, panicky, and utterly cloying in the first parish I served after I was ordained a deacon transitioning to priesthood. I was all prepped to serve God and the rector obediently—also Madeleine’s commandment.

It didn’t start off well. The rector had NOT told the parish I was coming on board. Or rather he told them by addressing the congregation and asking them if they knew what an ordained deacon was and what role a deacon played in the ministry of the Church. Everyone looked blank.

So he introduced me by name, invited me to stand, and held me up like a poster child for the diaconate. Then he started a round of welcoming applause. The congregation joined in, because how could they not?

I stood there in my shiny new white alb, my face as red as my new Christmas-tree-bulb red deacon stole draped over my left shoulder and down over my left hip (just the opposite of Miss America’s sash!) And me with no ramp to parade!

I don’t know if his passive aggressive way of communicating was about being a man or not but I decided he modeled a way NOT to communicate.

At the coffee hour a statuesque woman came up to me, put her hand on my arm and asked “Did you know we didn’t know you were coming?” I told her no I didn’t know, and she patted my arm in a deliciously matronizing way, smiled and said, “It’s OK we’re all here.” I felt tears puddling up but didn’t let them escape. She became my deacon, my woman minister, and my “mommy” in that parish from then on, a model of how to be gracious and also direct—a woman perhaps.

The next week an epiphany happened. In the parish’s cobwebbed suggestion box there appeared for the first time since forever a handwritten suggestion: THE PRIEST SHALL NOT WEAR DANGLY EARRINGS.

I gave it to the male rector. “This is for you,” I said. We laughed. I was too scared and servant-ish to be more confrontive and direct with him about his wiles, as was my goal. That would take time. After all I was a woman!

I wore dangling earring most Sundays at the altar—a little flaunting and a little pride in proclaiming my femininity.

Or you could say it was a way to keep Madeleine’s commandment.

2011.10.26 Being IN Your Writing

2011-10-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

A friend wrote to say she was thinking of starting over with her reams of pages toward a novel she has wanted to write, and will some day get write—or right.(My humor)

Writing is easier than organizing I find, mostly because it’s more fun. It gets your juices up. The drone and drudge is getting it organized and into a structure that makes it shine and make sense—like a trellis for beautiful roses—for its beholders.

I recommended starting afresh and just giving it 2-3 hours a day. This is advice I’d never be able to follow. I hate the idea of scrapping it all and starting again. Admit I have done it with some chapters and do it daily as I cut and paste.

As to time, there is an isolation that comes with being an artist of any kind. It’s wise only to devote a certain amount of time each day...then go out and play.

I'm fresher in the a.m. but I find I don't get to it till after 1 or so by the time I do my prayer time, yoga stretches, walk, emails, breakfast and morning paper, maybe a phone call, and try to be nice to my beloved.

I call this pre-crastination: doing NOW what might wait till LATER, or tomorrow. As opposed to pro-crastination: doing LATER what might or should be done NOW.

Take your pick about where manyana (couldn’t figure out the tilde) fits in for you.

Everyone says I do it backwards, that writing should be priority and come first. But pre-crastination works best for me. I hate having undone “essentials” related to my mental, emotional and physical needs/wants hanging over my head.

When I write I like to feel free, to be totally devoted to it. I find when I get INTO it and it sparks I‘m not alone at all but full of life energy coming through my words. I am IN my words rather than my words being IN me.

I find it essential to have a writers group, or take a class or two. You need company for the journey and help for the task. Hook up, as they say. The encouragement is so important, as is the critique and accountability.

Start slow, small and beautiful, close to the hem of earth where Spirit roams and broods.

2011.10.23 Message and Vision

2011-10-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

I recently received one of those love-engendering emails that circulate around. A story of a woman who had rescued then nursed back to health a fallen squirrel.

In the squirrel’s recuperation period, before it would be set free to be a full wild squirrel, the woman’s dog had pups.

The photos series showed various shots of the newly healed squirrel joining into the mothering, nursing, bonding process, curled up cozy with the puppies. Adorable and of course it made me smile and sigh and yearn.

But then an intruding thought said, What about photo shopping? This all could have been done easily by inserting squirrel shots into the puppy mélange. The endearing and meaningful photos could be virtual, not real. Ah, technology.

Suddenly I had a quick flurry of something like a million butterflies let loose in my gut and I wondered what I could trust. What is really real?

I decided to go with the message of love among vastly different species and the vision it bespoke for us humans—if only we could dare to snuggle up next to neighbors instead of building walls and fences.

Photo shopping MAY be a medium by which Spirit reminds us that it is the centrality of the divine message and vision that is important to notice, photo-shopped or not.

2011.10.19 Bodies Beautiful

2011-10-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

All this flap about Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown exchanging gender-ish pleasantries with political agenda.

Whose body to vote for?

I believe that one should always write and speak from one’s own lived experience. I also believe that everyone who reads or hears you will place her or his interpretation onto your words.

That’s happening in droves over the trivial politics-as-usual ribaldry in the body politic.

Hence my interpretation is this: It’s possible that Scott Brown meant that it was a good thing that Elizabeth Warren didn’t have to take off her clothes to meet her expenses—not because her body wasn’t much to behold or wouldn’t make much, but because she was spared the humiliation of having to go naked for money.

What he did with his body wasn’t shameful. It was just a symptom of a society possessed with sexual uncertainty and puritan angst. I’m glad his physique could help him out. That’s not sarcastic.

In an unjust society you do what you have to do to survive without destroying someone else or yourself.

When I go to a store, as little as I possibly can, to buy a clothing item I hate to stand in front of the mirror and take in a close-up of my body in the full length mirror. It’s not ugly or gross but my shame sees me as ugly.

(I hate even worse when a salesgirl pokes her nosy nose into the dressing room to chirp, "How are you doing Ma'am?") Shame again.

In Eden the first recorded post-apple feeling was shame—of their nakedness!

Our shape-obsessed American culture of advertising has not yet figured out a way to love our bodies with grace.

We Christians have not yet found a way to belove our flesh and know God incarnate— Divinity that actually deigns to indwell ALL flesh in ALL shapes and sizes.

Toni Morrison's preacher-woman adjures her listeners: WE FLESH!—and it is good.

Until we figure this out we will NOT love our differently-sized neighbors, our Godde, or ourselves.

NO body shames God.

2011.10.16 WWJS?

2011-10-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

It was past my bedtime when the text bleep came in, bedtime being a relative thing and wholly retrogressive—earlier and earlier the older you get. But you turn on the light for a precious granddaughter named Izz.

“Hi Grammy,” the text message read, “What language did Jesus speak? Mom doesn’t know either. xxoo Izzy.”

I’m not too old to text but my device has teensy letters on its phone-like, not typewriter-like, key board. So I got under the light and texted back: “aramaic but the new testament is written in greek. how was your dance?” (Didn’t bother with caps but found the ?)

Text back: “It was goo.” Followed immediately by, “I mean good.”

End of soundless conversation with a beautifully curious 11 year old granddaughter.

Why in the world was she thinking of Jesus? The family doesn’t go to Church although they did for a while and they come willingly when they visit. Their northeast US secular world isn’t geared to religion, Jesus, church.

The next day, Sunday, I called to inquire, being as curious as the girl who asked, and the cat I just looked up and spotted paroling my back fence, on a squirrel prowl.

“I don’t know,” was the answer I got. Of course I pushed her a bit. “I was just thinking, wondering about it and Mom didn’t know so I called you, ” she said. “OK I was just curious,” I said.

Exchange of love you and byes.

I was curious, also wondering if Jesus might have planted a calling card in her heart. It gets lonely being a religious Christian these days in liberal land. But Jesus, or Christ, speaks to the ears of our hearts sometimes and if he were here now he might even be a secular humanist who believed in God.

WWJS, What would Jesus speak?

I don’t know, but Socrates said, WISDOM BEGINS IN WONDER.

Stay wondering. Be curious Izz. It won’t kill you, or the cat, but it might make you wonder odd but good things. Might even make you wise, or wiser than you already are.

2011.10.12 Spiritual Writing. One Thought.

2011-10-12T07:43:00.000-07:00

Spirituality is loosey goosey to define but here is something that came to me as I read and responded on a friend’s essay on being all F’ed up.

Your writing is spiritual because it dwells in the depth dimension where all hell breaks loose and all heaven breaks through.

2011.10.09 Strongest and Greatest?

2011-10-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

My dad used to say to me when I was growing up, “You’re riding for a fall.” The implicit extension of pride goeth before the fall.

I rarely heeded the warning and he was almost always right, like the time I was 13 and in the finals of a tennis championship. I told him I knew I was a better player than my opponent and I’d win for sure. I saw the gentle warning in his eyes. I lost the match and the championship. And I cried. Pride, fall regardless, he loved me anyway.

What I didn’t tell him was that I cheated on one shot saying my racket didn’t nick the net when it did. Cheating didn’t help. I have never told anyone that till now.

If dad were alive he would say that about this country right now: You're riding for a fall.

“I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on earth, I’m not your president.” 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney recently said this while vowing vast military growth.

No, I do NOT want America to be the strongest nation on earth. And NO, I do not want Romney as my president.

I don’t want America to be the strongest, the greatest, the wealthiest, the most advanced nation. I’m sick of American grandiosity and swollen ego and I’m sick of the rhetoric of success when it is obvious we are failing on many fronts: to prevent violence against women and children, to feed our hungry, to eliminate racism and sexism, to distribute our resources justly, to wage peace, to get along with our neighbors near and far.

When do we surrender, holler uncle, say please God save us from greatness, it’s killing us?

The worst problem is spiritual because underneath all this lust for greatness lurks a greed so toxic, so sinister, so demonic that it stifles compassion and inspired a corporate giant like Lehman Brothers to plaster its Wall St. skyscraper windows with huge signs that read:

WE ARE THE ONE PERCENT!!!

The implication is that they are proud to hold 1% of the nation’s wealth. This is their arrogant response to the young people’s amazing fast-expanding Occupy Wall Street movement. It is a positive statement for community, justice and peace not just a protest against the pride and corruption that deprives the 99% of jobs, opportunities, dignity—and food.

Cry, beloved country you’re riding for a fall.

In other news......I do NOT want my chosen religion, Christianity, to be the strongest, greatest, best or only religion either. It’s riding for a fall.

I want my religion to surrender its own spiritual arrogance and take its place proudly among the world’s religions. I want it to be beautiful, gracious, and wisely humble.

2011.10.05 Bounty By Divine Design?

2011-10-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

BOUNTY BY DIVINE DESIGN?

I recently heard a pastor say with clear firmness something like: “We believe passionately that God has sent all this bounty (good results of a capitol fund drive) by design so that we may fulfill His purposes in mission for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Well now............

I stopped listening after the words “bounty by design” because all I could think of was my good neighbor who had little bounty by God’s or anyone’s design at all.

I also did not want to be included in the pastor’s use of “we.”

I do not think that such ideas about what Godde does are particularly pastoral. Nor do I believe that God distributes bounty even for the good. Sorry. I think this presumes on Godde and makes those who don’t enjoy bounty of any kind either beholden to the ones with the bounty or feeling excluded from the divine economy of distributive grace.

Some will say it’s Providence. OK. But I don’t think divine providence is arbitrary and this sounds as if God plays favorite for those chosen to do God’s work on earth.

We all are chosen and we all try to live it out in the best ways we can with the resources we have.

What do I believe?

First, I don’t know what God does. I just know that I pray and hope and love and trust, not nearly as “passionately” as I could.

Second I do believe that the wee lassy Christians call Holy Spirit, Sophie for short to me, acts as a massage therapist kneading the soul of humanity and all creation to bring forth (ha motzi) good from whatever disaster or error we get ourselves into by human fault or ignorance, individual or collective.

I experience this in my own life and as a Christian I spends my life at the foot of the cross of Christ and other “crosses” just as horrific—in hope and helplessness waiting on God.

That sounds quite different to me from the suggestion that Godde has a plan and provides certain ones of us the proper resources to carry it out.

The only response to bounty if you have it is gratitude and more gratitude, and after that sharing your bounty with those less fortunate.

Probably the intent of the pastor, but she lost me.

2011.10.02 Madeleine's Commandment

2011-10-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

In the late 70s and early 80’s when I was struggling to get ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, which was not yet ready for breasts and ample bellies in their pulpits and at their altars, I was fortunate enough to have as my spiritual director the author and theologian Madeleine L’Engle.

Madeleine, now dead and missed, was a commanding presence in voice and height and sheer bulk of wisdom. She towered over me in all ways. I was bordering on meek then, having been rejected a couple of times for ordination and being sure there was something wrong, if not toxic, about me and my gender.

Madeleine was reassuring and kind. She bolstered my soul and gave me hope. But she was no softy. She gave me regular opinionated lectures on things like divorce, a church “sin” I was contemplating. Never, she told me, unless for unremitting homicidal behavior or unremitting suicidal behavior. Well, that left me a broad interpretive swatch.

I remember feeling awed in her presence—also buoyed, but not spoiled.

One day, probably sick of my laments, she said, “Now my dear, when you get ordained, and you will, do NOT become a little man.”

I got it and I didn’t, become a little man that is. I laughed and forgot about it until I got ordained. To follow Madeleine’s commandment has not been easy though I’ve been ordained now for almost 25 years.

The first decision I made not to become a little man was to decide not to be called Mother Lyn. I had enough kids already. Many men still call themselves and/or invite or let people call them Father.

To be called Mother I thought would be like becoming a little man following the tradition of paternalism in the Church making congregants, whether consciously or not, think of themselves and even behave like children, dependent and beholden to Father or Mother knows best. (Petri dish for passive aggressive adolescent subertfuge, if nothing else. )

I told people to call me Lyn. Even “Pastor” suggested a shepherd and her flock of bleating stupid sheep. Not a good model. Besides, images of shepherdesses frolicking on the green or Little Bo Peep just weren’t my style. (God/Jesus as shepherd isn’t an image that much appeals to me either. Baaa)

When parents wanted their children to use a title I’d discuss my perspective of mutuality (my needs are as important as your needs even if I have more authority). If they insisted I conceded to Rev. Lyn. But the kids who wanted to do what everyone else did and who liked the respect usually won the day.

Stay tuned for more on how I tried not to become a little man, in remembrance and loving thanks to a grand mentor, Madeleine L’Engle.

2011.09.28 Secrecy and Transparency

2011-09-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

I think that too much secrecy and too much transparency are both unhealthy extremes in human systems, individual, family, organizational.

Both secrecy and transparency as strict policies preclude the obvious middle way—MODESTY.

SECRECY is not the same as confidentiality because it is often fueled by fear more than it is by respect.

TRANSPARENCY is not the same as freedom of speech or right to know because it too is often fueled by fear rather than respect.

I know systems get trapped in extremes of behavior and then try to change but too often change happens quickly and reactively not allowing proper time to discern and discriminate about right choices in different situations. So we set policies!

Parish search committees in the Episcopal Church, for example, are rife with secrecy mandates. Such policies when rigid become paranoid.

I remember visiting a parish for an interview, asking about bathroom privileges (my sarcasm) and being whisked in and out quickly with the comment. “Someone might see you.” I’ve never relieved myself so fast in my life.

Rigorous secrecy is injurious to clergy interviewees who are sequestered and only meet a committee and perhaps a vestry before they appear on their first Sunday. Behold! Clergy never get a chance to experience a community at worship and the community never gets a chance to hear a sermon or see a priest celebrate.

It is also unfair to congregations who have no opportunity to ask questions or shake a hand or listen to a voice. They have a vote but no voice.

Transparency in the extreme however is also not a good idea because political gossip and lobbying easily hobble the discernment of the search committee and may prejudice a candidate.

The process is really quite sinful when it’s too blind. It disallows participation even at a modest level of both parties in what in the Church is still called, for better or worse, a “marriage” between a priest and her/his congregation.

A modest appreciation of the needs of both parties in filling such a key position as rector is possible. Other traditions hold open meetings, including mutual opportunity for respectful questioning between parishioners and each finalist. And some invite each finalist to preach and, yes, go to coffee hour for schmooze time. Imagine!

The modesty approach is worth looking at in the Episcopal Church because there is much boo-hoo talk about what we call “failed searches.” WHAT ARE WE AFRAID OF?

2011.09.25 Diss-Invitation

2011-09-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Recently the University of St. Francis in Philadelphia disinvited retired Globe columnist Ellen Goodman to deliver a lecture on civility.

Grin.

Why the diss? Oh yes, a national Roman Catholic group pressured the university because Goodman supports abortion rights.

Why really? Because there was money involved. It appears to me to be a case of blackmail by a conservative group with power, influence, and big bucks the university needs to survive.

I don’t know if my suspicions are correct but I might bet on it, though I’m not a gambler—yet.

All this is done of course in the name of God. Again, using God’s name to create homogeneity and conformity or exclusionary politics is not the gospel of Jesus Christ or the God of Genesis.

Anything goes? Well, yes.

We are given the capacity to love and forbear to assure civility.

I mean look at the diversity in the Creation myth in Genesis One. It’s a colorful mélange of all sorts and conditions of life on earth—all of it declared GOOD in the mouth of God. Including both female and male creatures.

The best marriages are between two people who are complimentary and different. Too much sameness is quite cozy and comfortable— happy as a warm moist diaper pail.

We grow and thrive best in diversity where we learn to manage differences and come to love ourselves and the other without constraint and condition. That’s good science. That’s also good theology and spirituality. Homogeneity is only good for milk.

We have failed at heterogeneity-with-love......... but God still longs for it.

2011.09.21 No Peaceful Religion

2011-09-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

Watching the old movie called The Message about the history and development of Islam I saw how similar the themes and patterns of development are in all religions.

All of them start in violence and often resort to it, to defend the God they love who counsels otherwise. Is this a guy thing?

Why do we fight over that which we most value? Sad and crazy.

There are no peaceful religions although all of them preach peace till they’re blue or die trying.

There are no peaceful religions only passionate religions, petri dishes for zealotry for a God who wants love and faithfulness, not death and war. Often in the Bible violence is put into God’s own mouth and onto God’s will. There are two strands of tradition at work as theology evolves: the warlike vengeful God and the One whose steadfast love and mercy abounds.

Christianity, and other religions too, tried to choose the latter but then human “ingenuity” crucified it. And we still do.

How ironic that God’s name is taken in vain to defend God. But God through new voices calls us back to the way of compassion for all.

We have a choice about our own interpretations and theologies. That’s why I love midrash, the Jewish ongoing process of interpreting and re-interpreting the Word of God for each generation.

I do not take scripture literally. Sometimes it re-creates God in our own image. But it is part of our ongoing struggle to understand the mystery we can not.

My favorite midrashic reframe is on the story of the Exodus. The Israelites have crossed the miraculously parted Red Sea and are ecstatically safe on the other side as the sea waters close over the enemy Egyptian army. They all drown. As the Israelites thank God and cheer about their own freedom they spot an angel weeping by the shore. Revealing the enormity of their spiritual naiveté, they ask the angel, “Your people are free, so why do you weep? The angel of God answers: “Because some of my people are dead at the bottom of the sea.”

You see how mixed it all is. But I choose to believe the God whose Word keeps speaking to correct our errant thinking and reinstate Divine Love.

2011.09.18 God Made What?

2011-09-18T11:59:00.001-07:00

A four year old, aware of the 9/11 10th anniversary news clips, which his parents chose to handle with discretion rather than denial, asked the inevitable (no, it’s not about sex!):
DAD, DID GOD MAKE THE BAD PEOPLE?

Daddy was momentarily thrown for a loop about how to respond.

He said it was funny that his next thought was one of happiness realizing that this young little mind was processing and thinking and communicating and doing so independently.

Still, because this dad is wise and loves God himself, he tried to cut God a break without neglecting his son’s curiosity: “God may not have anything to do with it [terrorism]. God probably doesn’t control everything.”

That was enough for the child who could then go on loving not blaming God—and maybe think twice about his own responsibility in the workings of God’s creation.

Tragedies are not God-driven but humanly inevitable.

The ancient faithful had a theory of “double causation.” It goes like this...................

YOUR PART:
You can fall off a roof and hurt yourself because you shouldn’t have risked it in the first place, you lost your ordinarily good balance, you took a dare, someone pushed you, or it was the roof’s fault.

The ancients didn’t want to exclude divine activity from any sphere of life at all but were wise to realize that a loving God wouldn’t push you off a roof or will your fall. Hence................................

GOD’S PART:
God stays involved to inspire love and healing in whatever form it may take: a loving stranger who passes by and happens to see you fallen; a medic who treats your body; a loved one who takes time off work to babysit you because you can’t move around much for a while; a church community that prays for you sending healing energy your way, and you know it; and a faith in God who strengthens you from within to forgive yourself, the other, or the roof—and go on.

20111.09.14 Holy Cross Day

2011-09-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

For Christians today is a day we remember the painful and ugly cross of Christ crucified. We call it holy because it is an image of tragic and innocent suffering, the kind we all endure in our life time here on earth. Such an image evokes our tears and our resolve not to crucify, not to do what we hate to our neighbor or to ourselves, in any way.

To say that Jesus had it worse only cheapens your own suffering, whatever it is, so give yourself a gift today and know that whatever your troubles are they matter to God and to those who love you as God does.

There’s no way to prevent suffering I’m sure but a good way to be with it is to pray and form communities of care and love, communities that stand at the foot of the cross, helpless save for compassionate empathy, tears and prayers.

Sometimes there is something you can do though to prevent injustice and inequity and create nets of support. Money helps. Sharing riches helps even more.

I read a letter to the editor in the Globe this morning suggesting that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is right by definition to call Social Security a ponzi scheme: a monetary investment vehicle in which gains are made to initial investors with money collected from new investors. The letter writer concludes with...............

“That sure sounds like 20-year-olds paying for the Social Security benefits of 60 year-olds.”

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT?

Thank you, all you young people. I am as grateful for the benefits as my parents were for theirs and never resented paying into a system in which the able help the less able.

2011.09.11 9/11

2011-09-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

Do what you are able and for God’s sake be kind to yourself and all creation. But above all pray, for that is how you will be in touch with your internal arbiter, the soul voice that, at its most naked, conjoins with the transcendent to bring forth goodness and peace.

There is no accounting for tragedy—no need to quantify it, no need to compare it as if every tragedy weren't exactly the same to the human hearts involved, and no need to get even for we can't. There is just a need to name our heart's truth and grieve together.

To share on this day of remembrance I quote from Leo Tolstoi who in 1854 was at the front in the Crimean war. On leave he witnessed a public beheading in Paris that changed his spiritual life forever and brought forth his lasting work War and Peace.

Tolstoi wrote: "During my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I."

Judith Shulevitz writing about the sabbath remembrance in her book Sabbath World ends her fine book with wise and simple words: “We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.”

To pray is to stop, remember, and allow Other to transform your heart’s soul. A sabbath community reminds us to stop, pray and remember to strengthen our collective hearts.

2011.09.05 Labor Day and Memorial Day

2011-09-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

Today, a week before the 10th anniversary of the disaster in NYC we call 9/11, is a day on which a LABOR of love was revealed in New York. It is a MEMORIAL to help us remember what we can not restore.

I just saw a video of the memorial, “Reflecting Absence” —for me a spiritual experience, meaning awe, hand to my mouth, a gasp, and tears that flowed with the two enormous human-made waterfalls.

The two pools, a colossus to mark the foot prints of what were the twin towers plunge down, earthward, rather than up, heavenward.

Who decided Divinity was always up anyway?

Like the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. the names are engraved along the granite edges of the pools, in no special rank or order. If only life could be as great an equalizer as death.

I didn’t know anyone personally who lost life but I had a client whose new husband was on one of the planes. So I felt along with her.

I got to wondering about absence and presence. We assume that the presence of God is the only good thing, however in the tradition of the Psalms the felt absence of God elicits some of the most beautiful poetry and heart-rending spiritual aching ever created—a memorial to the biblical God who gave humanity freedom and made it sacrosanct, a gift never to be violated by power, even divine power, a Love willing to be powerless, to be experienced as absent.

The presence of God is not unimportant of course. I see it not in intervention but rather in the tears of a nation, in the labors of those who dropped their own lives for a time just to help in heroic ways offering whatever they had to give including prayers, and in the creation of great beauty in this memorial.

Reminds me of the biblical women who stood by Jesus to the end and so many others who sit in prayer or at bedsides keeping God company.

2011.08.31 Prodigal Lover

2011-08-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

It’s my son’s 44th birthday today. Happy birthday, son.

I dedicate this little poem to him and to the biblical figures, Peter and John, who ran to the tomb to see if what the women reported could be true, that God always brings new life out of the stuff of our worries and fears.

A wise woman writer Judith Shulevitz wrote: “We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.”

He is running for love
against the wind
Pushing aside
forces, furies, old wounds
in the path
as he runs for love
for love

Earth has no fire
like this man’s love.

2011.08.30 Goodnight Irene or Perfect Sunday, not Perfect Storm

2011-08-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

I still think of going to church as an important part of my spiritual health. It’s part devotional duty and part inhaling the Holy in community through song, word and sacrament. So even though I’m retired and church-going is not a “job” I go.

That said, I don’t mind missing church for a good reason. Tropical storm Irene today was a good reason. Winds threatened, our porch door sailed open though locked, and our governor declared a state of emergency pleading with people to stay off the roads. It turned out to be not as bad as meteorology predicted. But who can really predict weather?

Yet, in New England at least, we love to talk about the weather. It’s as mysterious as Godde whose grace is even more unpredictable. The religiously sane among us don’t even try to predict Godde. Most clergy try anyway because we think it’s our job. It is, but who does any job perfectly?

So I wasn’t disappointed at all when, after careful discernment and checking news of parish cancellations, my husband decided to call the parish where he’d been contracted to fill in and crawled back into bed next to me this morning.

We slept till 10 a.m., made love, cooked a sumptuous brunch, read the Sunday papers with ease, had hunks of dark chocolate for brunch dessert, and remembered to thank Godde for this unpredicted Sabbath grace.

It was made even more beautiful to me when I read in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine an article by Linda Wertheimer about a middle school in Wellesley Massachusetts where they have an education unit on religion that includes trips to worship sites and services.

It’s controversial of course but students have benefited from knowing something about religion. Religion, like it or not, has been and will continue to be a major player in history, world politics, and many personal lives. But it’s a “spiritual lemon.” People fear its bitter power and want to make lemonade out of it instead of getting to know its zest.

My favorite quotes from young students: “They are not teaching you the religion, they’re teaching you about the religion . . . they’re trying to get you to learn.” And: Before the comparative religion class I didn’t realize that Christianity came out of Judaism.”

That’s good education. That’s good spirituality. That;’s good religion.

Maybe the best part of this “perfect” Sunday was seeing that religion can be a respectable curriculum item in public education. When religion is too isolated it is dangerously subject to fanaticism, exclusionary politics, idolatry, and yes, war.

Paradox: the more you know about other religions and their participants, the more you are able to appreciate and value your own even if you are an atheist.

Good night Irene, and thank you in the name of Peace and Love.

2011.08.25 POLITICAL RANT

2011-08-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

Today would be my father's 100th birthday. He died 30 years ago, too soon for the length of my love. This rant is for him. He loved to rant mostly against Democrats. But now I'm sure he, a sensible and respectful man, would wonder about his own party.

MICHELE BACHMANN ADVERTISES HERSELF AS A MODEL CHRISTIAN AND AN EXEMPLARY WOMAN WORTHY OF BEING THE PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES.

I AM A CHRISTIAN PRIEST IN THE CHURCH OF GOD, EPISCOPAL BRAND. I SPEAK FOR MYSELF NOT FOR MY CHURCH.

AND WHAT I AM ABOUT TO SAY IS AS AGAINST MY “CORE BELIEFS” AS BACHMANN SAYS UNCONDITIONALACCEPTANCE OF HOMOSEXUAL PEOPLE IS AGAINT HERS. .

I FIND MICHELE BACHMANN’S POLITICAL POSITIONING NAUSEATING, FULL OF GLITZ AND SHOWING OFF, TRYING TO MAKE A MEGA CHURCH OUT OF HER CAMPAIGN AND ARRIVING TELLINGLY LATE FOR EVERY SCHEDULED APPEARANCE. CATCH HER IF YOU CAN! CUTE GAME.

SHE MUST HAVE BEEN BULLIED BECAUSE SHE IS A BULLY, AND WORSE, A BULLY IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST WHO, LAST I LOOKED AT THE GOSPELS, WAS ONE GIVEN TO EMBRACING OUTCASTS, FINDING OUT WHAT THEY WANTED AND HEALING THEM ON THEIR TERMS.

JESUS DIDN’T DO WITH HIS BODY WHAT BACHMANN IS DOING WITH HERS; SHOWMANSHIP TO AVOID TRUTH. HE MOVED AMONG THE PEOPLE TALKING AND LISTENING AND RISKING HIS LIFE.

AS A CHRISTIAN I TRY TO EMULATE & TEACH THAT KIND OF MOVEMENT—WITH GOD’S HELP. I FAIL REGULARLY AND KEEP TRYING ANYWAY.

BACHMANN IGNORED THE COURAGEOUS GAY IOWAN TEEN WHO (see Boston Globe august 19,A1) SHOUTED OUT HIS FEELINGS ABOUT BEING A SECOND CLASS CITIZEN BECAUSE OF THE PREACHMENTS OF SOME CHRISTIANS LIKE BACHMANN. BACHMANN WENT “DEAF.”

I DON’T GIVE A DAMN IF SHE THINKS THIS KID IS LIVING IN SIN BECAUSE OF HIS SEXUAL ORIENTATION. HER ARROGANT AND, YES, FRIGHTENED AVOIDANCE SPEAKS VOLUMES ABOUT HER POLITICAL INCOMPETENCE AND HER CHRISTIAN DISGRACE.

IF BACHMANN’S POSTURING IS A COVER UP FOR SOME UNACKNOWLEDGED PAIN, I FEEL SAD—BUT NOT ENOUGH TO WANT HER ANYWHERE NEAR THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN OUR LAND OR STRIKING A POSE SHE CALLS CHRISTIAN.

2011.08.20 Bernard de Clairvaux:Love in Process

2011-08-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

August 20 is the calendar day set aside to remember one of my favorite Church heroes. Yes, a Father, a man and a Saint Bernard, not canine with saving stimulants but human with saving spirituality.

“Who among you my brothers, was not born amid feces and urine?” he reminded those in his charge. Kinda keeps you humble, no?

But to be serious this 11th century Cistercian monk abbot gave us a summation of the spiritual process of Love
-Love of self for self’s sake.
-Love of God for self’s sake
-Love of God for God’s sake
-Love of self for God’s sake

2011.08.17 Habit & HIgher Level Spirituality

2011-08-17T09:44:00.000-07:00

Vacation time is so gloriously sluicy it skitters by almost unnoticed or marked, a bit like retreat time. (That’s why this post is longer than my usual posts.)

Vacation is un-timed time. I love it in limited hunks. At the end of two weeks of vacation I feel both sad to leave and also glad to be getting back home to my routines.

I find comfort in my habits and quickly wonder if I’m therefore deficient spiritually. It’s like judging rosaries as rote and therefore spiritually immature. Still, I’m routinized more than I like to admit, and I need it.

In a wonderful book I’m reading by Judith Shulevitz called Sabbath World she researched human habits and discovered that we humans are wired for habits. Habituated behavior can change the shape of the brain enabling automatic responses to stimuli. That sound like instinct, like animals not of the human kind. Shouldn’t the human brain be beyond that?

The power of habit according to William James is the “flywheel of society, a conservative agent.” Oh yuk. Now I feel defensive and repelled. Conservative?

Shulevitz writes about the value of keeping the Sabbath. A a Christian priest I ascribe the same value to participating in the Eucharist. You gotta do something holy with your body, not just talk about it. And you gotta do it over and over again.

Shulevitz points out that we would rather be masters of our fate than creatures of habit but that, according to James, habit is necessary and efficient because it “reduces unnecessary expenditures of physical and intellectual energy AND FACILITATES HIGHER LEVEL THINKING.”

Imagine!

Thinking leads to doing and back to more thinking. So I see what it is that habits conserves, more energy to stretch yourself, and life itself. One value in keeping “sabbath” is that it becomes a habituated sanctuary of time and place to cultivate leisure, silence, love found in relationships with loved ones. Such habits are not dependent on the force of will but create AUTOMATIC core values on which to build a civil society—PEACE.

Once a toddler grandchild had mastered walking to proficiency, made it a habit ie. few falls and faster paces, he then developed higher level thinking which consisted in his case of a new activity: piling up a box, a hassock and a couple of blocks to get up to the counter to reach his heart’s desire: the missing box car to the train he was assembling.

I remember hearing a nine year old concert pianist execute prodigious musical wonders. The conductor asked him how he got his small hands to extend over the octaves required for the compositions he so skillfully played. The child thought for a minute and said simply, “Practice.”

I’ve practiced prayer, just talking to Godde and sometimes shutting up to listen in the silence, since I was a small child. Originally I did it to assuage loneliness and exercise my curiously religious imagination. Now it’s a habit. I just do it, like walking.

Prayer as habituated spiritual practice gave me the context in which self, Godde, church, Jesus, eucharist, priesthood, soul, and the occasional mystical experience thrive.

Ritual/habitual prayer and sacrament facilitate HIGHER LEVEL SPIRITUALITY—closer to Godde or the missing toy box car.

On vacation I take time off from good habits even organized prayer. Wherever I am is sabbath, is church, is prayer. I let myself float about in un-timed time, maybe eating lunch at five and dinner at 9, taking 3-4 walks a day, gazing at the sea or kids in the sand, indulging in random reading and writing like this. I pray with no pattern and make gratuitous assumptions about Godde’s presence.

But after a couple of weeks I need my habits back, those practices that make me both pharisee and monastic—until the next spate of un-timed time.

* * *
It just occurred to me that memoir and its current popularity may relate to the human need for habituated spirituality because it provides, for reader and writer alike, an anchor in time and space, some stability amidst time that is more fluid than fixed. Zazen, eucharist, sabbath serve similar purposes.

2011.08.14 Is Godde Softening or Is It Father Time?

2011-08-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

I’ve noticed in myself that I am not less but more anxious about time, not being on time or being late but about how much time seems to fly by as I age and how much I want it to stop and let me have more of this life I love so much.

On the other hand time is so fluid, so mobile now that it hardly seems a day to day factor. I go by a schedule more or less but the schedule is softer to manage. I mean I can call to let someone know I may be late because of traffic or a sick cat. Or I can forget my watch and know my omnipresent cellphone will orient me. When I get lost I know I can call or even google map my way out of it. (The truth is I call my husband but I have the phone to do that.)

My daughter rarely listens to my messages because she knows she can press a button and call me back to find out. I’m thinking that leaving a message saves her time because it needs no call back. A whole different relationship with time and time values.

What about spiritual time? I mean time that partakes of the eternal, seems to at once stand still and expand endlessly. Time that some would argue is meaningless or wasted.

Today no time is seen as wasted because our omnipresent omniscient devices keep us connected and feeling useful and with something to do while we wait that is to say at all times.

Has far niente, the fine art of doing nothing lost meaning because time itself now is mobile, or not mechanized, that is dependent on a watch or a standard mean time?

One day when I was on retreat I had planned to have a TIME of quiet communion with Godde before I went for my afternoon walk, had my nap, read my book, and then went back to the dining room for supper. This was my planned schedule in my mind, none of it compulsory.

As I worried that I would be late for my self-allotted chapel quiet time and therefore for the whole rest of my planned time, this thought flew into my mind “You’re already IN chapel.”

I thought that meant “You’re already IN Godde.” I guess that’s what they mean by eternal time, not mobile not mechanical not needing to be scheduled—just being in doing.

I value time spent on this kind of softened timeline. The more I get of it the more I will recognize it when it interrupts my busyness.

And the better prepared I imagine I will be when I enter it for ever.

2011.08.10 Something Always Good

2011-08-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Today I said to my favorite nonagenarian, “Well the world if falling apart but damn the weather is superlative!”

She replied. “Something always has to be good.”

This caused me to remember Danny. Danny, a child with Down syndrome, was the “always good thing” in a former CT. parish where I worked.

Danny would come running up the aisle his arms akimbo, spread wide, and with a grin to match the sun’s warmth on his face, screaming, DaddyDaddyHeyDaddy—all run together.

Danny might happen in the middle of a sermon or solemn moment or if his mother held him hostage he’d get his run at the time of the announcement, which is where he belonged announcing his presence and his love.

Research today on finding ways to improve Downs is progressing slowly. There’s not much funding. I read in the NY Times July 31 magazine about a physician with a Downs daughter named Tyche (pron. tishy) He has changed his medical focus and devotes his life to research to help his daughter who in fact can solve algebraic problems. (I tried one myself and had to think a lot.) He wants to use his skills to add to Tyche’s repertoire because he loves her, nothing else.

No one denies the difficulties these children and adults present: shorter life span, adept at disruption, tempers, flinging things about to make messes.

BUT... no one denies their loving natures either, or that they can make you love in ways you never thought you could.

Many people who love a Downs child or adult feel hesitant about changing this syndrome much. Why? Well, I suppose it’s because despite its intellectual limitations Down adorns its bearers with capacious souls that can shine with love and bring the “something always good” into a day, or a room, or up the aisle.

Spiritually, I’d say they are endowed with gifts of personality that help Godde remind us that love can be more valuable in life than success, broad horizons, or intelligence.

2011.08.07 Our Birthdays

2011-08-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

It’s startling in some ways to think that a man I fell into love with, almost without will like you fall into sin, was born on the same day I was. It gives pause.

At least it wasn’t the same year, too. I’m 73 and he is 70.

I don’t know if stars aligned as some say or even planets. Or maybe the gods, whoever these heavenly ciphers are, arranged this bashert, this marriage made in heaven, meant to be.

I don’t believe any of those clichés but I don’t disbelieve them either.

All I believe is that we have stayed dwelling in love through stress and strains and spats. So far in the angst of aging our biggest fear is that one of us will die and leave the other alone—ahead of time.

Secretly each of us hopes she or he won’t be the one left behind. How hopelessly harmlessly human.

Happy Birthday to us!

2011.08.03 Writing for Pac Man

2011-08-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

Once at a writers conference an agent on a panel commented about the first page of an author’s manuscript:“Don’t make me wait too long to get under the table.”

The first page reading was mine and I was thrilled that agents liked it. “Under the Table” is the title of my second chapter. I reference the experience on my first page where I am in the scene of my ordination recalling what happened under the table 47 years ago. The hint lets a reader anticipate the under the table scene but wait till the next chapter.

Under the table in Chapter 2 I detail the childhood spiritual experience that drew me to follow a path to the priesthood happened.

I wondered if I should put my under the table scene first. Was it too long to wait? Should I follow the comment of the agent? I have actually found a snapshot way to do that. I got the idea from Patti Smith’s, Just Kids.

Still, the dismal thought occurred to me that in this consumerist culture perhaps publishing is in danger of co-opting to a pac man market. Pac man dates me. It was an early video game, probably now judged as too slow, in which a bunch of racing little faces with open gobbling mouths pursued an escapee—you!

Do we presume a bunch of readers so driven by instant gratification that they can’t tolerate waiting? Ravenous like pac people?

It sounds so infantile. Is this a disservice to serious readers? A handicap to serious writers?

Take Tinkers the novel by Paul Harding. I loved the book. I had to wait a lot, to read through a lot of context-building detail near the beginning and throughout before I got to an action scene.

And you could expire waiting for Pulitzer prize novelist Marilynne Robinson to tell you what happens—unless you let the mastery of the prose itself fascinate you. And it will.

I did feel some impatience at first, until I re-learned the first lesson of spirituality: stay steadfast, trust, be alert and notice whatever the Spirit is unfolding on every page. There’s a lot of Religion there as well—and Feminism.

Writers today are encouraged to write to the chase; that is, to get a reader to some dramatic scene as quickly as possible in order to keep her or him turning the pages. Gobble, gobble.

Do you need Pepto-Bismol yet?

2011.07.31 Ha-Motzi. "Who Brings Forth"

2011-07-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

Today’s gospel reading was the story about the loaves and the fish, a strange miracle-like story in which Jesus, surrounded by a large crowd—5000 men “besides women and children” (Imagine!)—blesses God, who brings forth enough from what looks like not enough.

The blessing over grain products in Hebrew is:
BARUCH ATAH ADONAI, ELUHEINU MELECH HA-OLAM
HA-MOTZI LECHEM MIN HA-ARETZ

BLESSED ARE YOU LORD GOD CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE
YOU BRING FORTH BREAD FROM THE EARTH.

Ha-motzi means “who brings forth”— as good a definition of what God does as any.

Jesus, like all great holy men, besides many women, blesses God first BEFORE asking God to bless. Before you deliver your bill or particulars in prayer, bless God FIRST. To do so is neither an asking nor a presumption of result but a simple acknowledgment of the nature and possibility of the God HA-MOTZI. Then do your own part to assist the bringing forth.

The motzi is used in formal Temple liturgies. It is also used in homes. It’s a bridge blessing, It connects church and home. Anyone can use it. Once I went to a Jewish friend’s home for lunch. We made tuna fish sandwiches. She made ha-motzi over them and I swear that was the best tuna fish sandwich I’ve ever had.

Christians do not bring home the words of our eucharistic liturgy, the words Jesus would have said, the words he did say on the hillside, words addressed to God first.

What would happen if at our home meals, big gatherings or small, we first made our own ha-motzi?
BLESSED ARE YOU LORD GOD SOVEREIGN OF THE UNIVERSE.
YOU BRING FORTH BREAD FROM THE EARTH

And if we then added some words from our Christian Eucharist?
TAKE AND EAT THIS FOOD. IT IS GIVEN FOR YOU.
EAT THIS FOR THE REMEMBRANCE OF JESUS CHRIST.

Might this spiritual practice in time BRING FORTH humility, gratitude, re-enlivenment, hope, courage, a new chance— just as it does in church on Sunday?

2011.07.27 Blessings on the T

2011-07-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I boarded the famous or infamous red line to go into Boston to attend church. The T was empty at its last stop before it headed back inbound.

Empty save for one large gentleman with a Red Sox cap a backpack, also large. It was the last stop. I waited for him to get off but he stayed on, likely riding back and forth like “Charlie.” His head nodded and bobbed and I prayed he would find solace or a home or sobriety a job, or whatever he needed for love.

As the train moved along it filled up. At Porter Square two young women who had just left girlhood got on. They were all primped up, cute and perky in their shorts and tees and sandals.

As the train took off a young-ish man, disheveled, seemingly disoriented but not drunk, began his speech. I’ve heard many such painful stories and I believe them all even if all the facts aren’t quite correct. “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen. I’m so sorry to take your time like this. God bless you. I’m so grateful you’re listening to me. God bless you.I just want a little change, couple bucks to get something to eat. Haven’t eaten in ___ hours..........” No one responded. The young women listened and looked at each other a little embarrassed giggles.

At the next stop the man got off leaving us all God blessed and thanking us all for nothing. Another occasion for prayer.

The girl/women commented. “Wasn’t that weird?” Yeah, really, like...weird.” “Yeah you never hear anyone say that anymore.” “God bless you. You don’t hear it ever.” They shook their heads in amazement—not at the man’s plight or his strategy but at his blessing. So weird!

God bless you, every one!

2011.07.22 Another Amazing Holy Woman

2011-07-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

Today is our Episcopal calendar day to wear Easter white, feast, and hallow St. Mary Magdalene.

Mary of Magdala, a town near Capernaum, was very close to Jesus.

In her day it would have been unusual for a single woman to hit the road like that. But that’s the kind of trust Jesus inspired and the kind of risks people took to catch a portion of his spirit.

In Mary’s case there was also gratitude. Luke reports (8:1-2) that Mary and some other women had been healed of infirmities and evil spirits, “Mary, called Magdalene from whom seven demons had gone out...”

Seven was/is considered a mystical number, whole in itself and indivisible except by itself, like Godde. Seven means Scripture is saying something important about this woman. People have speculated about her “demons.” I wrote about multiple personality disorder; others have conjured addictions and incurable seizures. On and on.

We interpret things according to our context. Today's context is nothing if it's not psychopathologistic. (What a word!) Mary's culture was about exorcism and demons.

But the favored conjure has been that she was a wanton woman, bound by her shameless sexual behavior— a prostitute, seductress, temptress and, god forbid, the undoer of men.

Luke wrote none of that, though we are to know that her life was radically transformed in many ways by Jesus and she stayed steadfast to his end, was a witness at the crucifixion, and wept at his mysteriously empty tomb. She mourned so deeply she almost missed meeting the image of Christ resurrected who spoke her name and commissioned her to tell the good news to the others.

If you identify with Mary and make her your biblical prayer partner try this spiritual practice: list seven “demons” of your own and ask Jesus to heal you. Be sure to say exactly what YOU want........ then leave the results up to Christ.

Also . . . suggest to your parish church that they transfer Mary Magdalene’s feast day, July 22, to a Sunday so the whole congregation can remember her, hallow her closeness to Jesus, and bless her role as the first apostle of resurrection.

2011.07.21 Amazing Holy Women—More

2011-07-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

SOJOURNER TRUTH

She was born into slavery and passed from household to household until at 28 she fled. With the help of some Quakers she landed in New York and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

But she never forgot her family and all the slaves still in bondage back home. And she never forgot her Bible.

The name story fascinates me. Sojourner Truth was named Isabella and called Belle. When she was 46 she heard God tell her “Go east.” A nice switch—men west, women east. She headed for L.I. and CT. and stopped at a Quaker farm on the way.

“What is your name?” they asked.

“My name is Sojourner,” Belle relied identifying quickly with the biblical injunctions to welcome traveling wanderers who only stay a little time, a sojourn.

“What is your last name?” they asked.

Belle thought of all the names her many masters had called her,. Then an idea sprang from nowhere into her mind, “the only master I have now is God, and His name is Truth.”(An example of the bath qol, Hebrew for the voice of God whispering truth into souls, quiet, the daughter of a voice.

A traveling preacher with wit and wisdom, Sojourner Truth became an abolitionist. Her charisma and six foot height drew many to listen to her truth.

She once said “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again.”

Best remembered for her speech “Ain’t I a Woman” at a Women’s Rights convention in Ohio, Sojourner spoke out against male clergy misusing the Holy Word to oppress women saying women were weak and blacks were weaker still.

She died in 1883. She had told her people she wasn’t going to die, just shoot straight up home like a shooting star.

Now there’s a star in the east I would follow!

HARRIET ROSS TUBMAN

Harriet Ross grew up in a pretty stable but always anxious family of slaves in Maryland. She suffered serious injuries from beatings but grew strong in the hurt places. At 24 she escaped to Canada but never forgot her family and brother/sister slaves back home.

Known as “Moses of her people” Tubman followed her favorite biblical hero and story of liberation. She made trips home, worked with Quakers and freed 300 people leading them into Canada.

$40,000 was offered for her capture. On the head of a small black woman? No one ever collected the reward. Grin.

Tubman moved to upstate New York where she joined up with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to promote women’s rights and always encouraged black women to stare their own organizations. She provided hospitality to orphans and the helpless old and founded schools for African American children.

Moses would have signed Harriet on. She championed justice for women and for own black women in particularity, taking on both sexism and racism in one 93 year long life.

You know the Bible may not exaggerate so much about age and Godde’s grace. Wasn’t Abraham 75 when he headed off to start a nation?!

When this Holy Spirit of reversals touches down, age, race, gender, ability know no limits.

2011.07.20 Amazing Holy Women

2011-07-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

July 20 is the day set aside on our Episcopal Church calendar of holy men and women to remember Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman—Liberators and Prophets.

And yesterday marked the 163rd anniversary of the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. The first day was women only. Today 7/20 the men joined in. We need both!

Godde, I’m proud these women are on our Episcopal calendar and that their day is WHITE that is considered to be a feast day, an Eastering day.

STANTON felt oppressed by the prevailing (and still does prevail) Augustinian doctrine of human depravity and Calvinist predestination. What was the point if doomed? She refused depression and worked instead to right wrongs perpetuated upon women by Church and society.

Stanton attended Trinity Episcopal Church in Seneca Falls, N.Y., site of the 1848 first Women’s Rights Convention, July 19-20.

Stanton was rightly hard on the Church accusing it of using (I’d say abusing) Scripture to enforce subordination of women and to prohibit them from ordained ministry. She wrote a Women’s Bible, a commentary on offensive, sexist we might say today, passages. Her effort was inspired by the fact that there were no women on the committee of scholars that in 1881 published the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Stanton dissented boldly and ceaslessly and didn’t lose hope because “what is good is immortal.”

“My only regret,” she said before she died in 1902, “is that I have not been braver and bolder and truer in the honest conviction of my soul.”

I can’t imagine what bolder, braver and truer would look like.

BLOOMER attended Trinity with Stanton and made powerful and popular statements about biblical abuses, being sure that if St. Paul could have foreseen the strife and misery some of his words caused he’d “never have written them.”

Bloomer established schools, libraries and churches.

She published a newspaper called The Lily and plunged without intent into faith and women’s fashion. Waist-cinching corsets created serious health problems for women. Bloomer printed a picture of herself in loose-fitting Turkish trousers and began to wear them in public. She argued with male clergy who cited Moses’ statement about women not dressing in men’s clothing. Bloomer said if they followed Moses they’d all “put fringes and blue ribbons on their garments.” Grin.

So much for biblical literalism arguments. What chutzpah.

I remember in the ‘70s when women started to wear pants to Church and it was considered scandalous.

Nevertheless..............

Who does wear the pants, again?

(Sojourner and Harriet tomorrow.)

2011.07.17 The Nose Knows

2011-07-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

My earliest olfactory memory is the pungent odor of ammonia. My mother who overvalued her first adorable child, me, used to clean my bassinette with it—probably more than she needed.

(After all, don’t some say that Americans have created such a clean germ-free environment that we don’t build up antibodies to strengthen our immune systems? But ammonia is stringent.

At 35 or so I entered my first therapy experience with a bioenergetic (a therapy developed by Alexander Louwen to access emotions that were forgotten by the mind but stored in body muscle) therapist.

Imagine body work for my first ever encounter with psychotherapy!

Imagine my having no mental control over what emotions arose. Terrifying. Through body postures, stances far less graceful than yoga, and encouragement to make totally un-pc sounds like a lion’s roar or a baby’s waaah, I discovered my body’s voice.

Then my therapist and I would process whatever came up and out by which I discovered lost feelings like anger and sorrow, feelings I needed to be whole.

One of my earliest feelings came through my nose. I lay with my back stretched over a stool my feet on the ground, hands at my side and head hanging over the edge. The rack—sort of. Comfy? Not.

Suddenly I got a strong whiff of ammonia. Of course there was no ammonia around. Alarmed I tried to sit up. In the process I experienced a sorrow seizure so strong it took a few minutes to subside.

I think the therapist was as surprised as I was. As we talked I made the connections between what my nose knew and the emotional pain I’d stored in my heart-lung area from not being able to connect securely with my mother.

Science tells us that olfactory memories connect to the hippocampus and amygdala regions of the brain, those in charge of memory and emotions.

I consider my bioenergetic experiences spiritual because of my Christian faith. The body stores healing memories. It is holy, a sanctuary for the wisdom and healing of the Divine within, the Word made flesh.

2011.07.13 My Ways are Not Your Ways

2011-07-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

The biblical wisdom on Godde's lovely lips written by Isaiah lets us know that Godde's ways are not our ways. BUT there is no judgment in this so don't put it in there.

The degree to which I critique, compare, condemn,judge, interpret negatively the ways of another is the degree to which I lack appreciation for my own ways.

Damn. Hard to give up that old sin.

I'm abstinent from sin on occasion only and with Godde's grace.

I have learned this truth from years of creating, participating in, observing sibling warfare.

My sister and I still react. Her ways are airy, light and lovely when she's not on a rampage. My ways are dark, dense and lovely when I'm not in my cave assessing my ways.

Life is not a battle to be won or a success to make me better. It is a spiritual gift to embrace and pluck from, yes, the forbidden Tree of Life

2011.07.10 Out of Eden?

2011-07-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve noted this before I think but I feel the need to note it again, mostly because I find myself back in Eden passing blame around like a hot potato.

Much of what I read and hear on the news or on internet chitter chatter and in conversations is addressing important issues, which is a good idea, and then coming up with a culprit, not as good an idea.

Adam and Eve blamed each other, God and the snake and God is portrayed as quite fed up with the blame/shame process, enough in fact to institutionalize the breakdown, to make it so humanity will have to take responsibility for their life on earth, with God’s help of course.

Nobody blamed the tree or the infamous apple whose fault it was that the couple got into trouble in the first place.

Finding a culprit makes everyone feel safe—temporarily. Wasn’t it the old priest Caiaphas who suggested that if one man were eliminated peace would be restored. Thus began the plan to execute Jesus who hadn’t preached rebellion but had told people of their worth and value in God’s eyes. It was easy to conclude that they were not being valued at all by those with earthly authority who likely blamed themselves for their destiny.

This can happen in families too of course. We’d all be fine if it weren’t for XX. It’s a habit. I don’t know why it happens.

The current blamee for all of society’s ills is the media. Oh dear the trash they present! But who do we imagine creates the market that buys and tunes into these media reports?

Who is responsible for healthcare or the schools, or church attendance? Doctors, educators, clergy, yes, but ALL OF US are responsible for our institutions and their well being.

What do you complain about most often? It’s a very good spiritual question. Follow it.

2011.07.06 Private Property?

2011-07-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently that there is no such thing as private property. Everyone squawks about abutters and their infringements and how dare they.

Everything abuts. Everything exists next to something else. All is connected. Remember the butterfly wings that affect the weather thousands of miles away?

Suddenly your property is contiguous, not yours at all. It belongs to you AND everyone around you—even globally.

If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves and abut them and they us, then property is contingent and collective. What happens to your property happens to mine so best it be ours. We all are responsible for its well being. It is not about moneyed ownership and property lines, but a spiritual issue.

If only we could believe the basics of creation theology: that it all belongs to God, even our children whom we also think we own. It's all on loan, none of it is private, all of it is sacred, divinized, as is every human being, every plant, every animal and every sunset.

How do you view and treat something you consider sacred?

2011.07.04 Independence?

2011-07-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

Today I wonder......

I have often imagined my life metaphorically as a jigsaw puzzle, myself a piece in the puzzle that had fallen out and was trying to figure out how to FIT back into the picture.

This is personal and political. Much that I read about women tells me they are still trying to fit into a system that grew up around us and seemed as right to us as rain or sunrise. But it’s not.

The workplace is an example. Women are returning to the job market after a break from career for birthing and parenting. I wanted children very much and love them today but I also wanted something beyond motherhood.

Women who get the choice jobs are the ones who return rarin’ to go. They are ready, fit to FIT into the breakneck pace of commerce, great workers. If there are adjustment problems some companies set up internships to facilitate the fit.

Some woman opt out of the insanity of the culture’s rhythm and they will likely be judged inadequate as has happened in the Church.

I remember when a woman bishop retired earlier than expected. She said she wanted to spend time with her grandchildren.Some colleagues said she shirked her responsibilities. Might that be a sexist perception?

WONDERINGS:
Who is looking at a bigger picture? Who sees the forest?

Who is daring to imagine that instead of expecting women in particular to FIT that we reform the system, change the way we do business? Who asks what motivates, fuels this “rat race?”

Has anyone thought that these same dynamo worker women may in just a few years be drawn toward caring for aging parents?— “children” at the other end of life.

Who thinks about initiating WORK-LIFE POLICIES that make it easier for women, really for ALL parents and the children they raise who represent our future, should there be one?

It took me years to realize that I didn’t have to lop off pieces of myself to FIT into the jigsaw. Every single piece as it is shaped has its own place and without each piece, exactly as it is, there can not be a whole picture.

A spiritual vision to ponder and pray. Happy 4th!

2011.06.23 A Condition Exists...

2011-06-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

Life is so serious it’s lovely when a quirk of unexpected humor seizes both me and Dick at the same time. It’s so funny we forget to blame or justify.

Background: he tends to leave early and I tend to leave late. We both make it more or less on time but it’s a constant difference over which we tangle.

Hence: when we are readying to head off somewhere he can be seen striking a casual pose leaning against the door post, one leg draped over the other tapping his fingers together. Oh ye of the ample sigh! Very rakish.

I am bustling around always almost ready, “Be right there.” The time is usually exactly when we decided to leave or maybe just a mere 2-3 minutes past that time. Or, our departure time is lost somewhere in my short-term memory fog.

OK I’m ready.

He turns to push buttons to set the house alarm. He punches in the correct code and a voice (don't you just love the almost liturgical solemnity of computer voices?) informs: “A CONDITION EXISTS.....” Then info flashes on screen informing: “movement in guest room.” The alarm won't set if there is movement in the house It's triggered unless it is set for "stay" ie. we're in for the night. Good thing...we wouldn't want to lock up and secure any unattended burglars.

The alarm also blasts if there is movement in the house after it is set and we're out. Once we forgot this sensitive information and our son's Jack Russell terrier Victor ran upstairs to jump on the bed after we left. The computer voice went into apocalypse now mode. We could hear Victor's panicked barking from 2 blocks away before we got the police call that our house had a "condition."

"Conditions" have names, Victor and Lyn. Victor was innocent. I, however, am taking a last look in the mirror or grabbing a cough drop or my T pass, etc. etc.

Now, Dick waits for me to stop being a condition, pushes the alarm buttons, gets the all clear, and we both exit with a grin and a wave saying, “A condition exists!”

Spontaneous laughter is a sign that Spirit is playfully about. Her job is often to lift us beyond idiosyncrasies or little “wars.”

A conditions exists indeed!

2011.06.27 MIRAMAR of Beauty

2011-06-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned from a week’s silent retreat at MIRAMAR in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

MIRAMAR is a five star retreat center, my review.

Entering into the silence is always daunting no matter how may times I tell myself I’ve done this before. I’m afraid of myself.

So I came with armor: a satchel full of books few of which I read, and comfort food, though the meals were ample and I ate everything in sight. Praying and strolling, breathing and gazing into beauty makes me sooooo hungry.

I brought M&Ms. I ate 25 the first night and never touched them again.

MIRAMAR as its name suggests provides a view of the sea, a long distance view, a streak of blue across the horizon. Beaches and a full view are in easy distance but the streak is all I needed because I felt part of a painting, a great work of art.

I came feeling sad and left rejoicing. No, I didn’t forget or cease to love my usual retreat place Mercy Center, closed for renovations. I simply learned to appreciate Godde’s many and varied outfit changes. What a closet!— and we think women are wardrobe addicts.

The grounds of MIRAMAR deserve special mention. They are tended lovingly by a gardener named Yvonne.

Her predecessor was the late “Spike” Dudink of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD), the order that owns and manages MIRAMAR. Dudink, an artist, created a Zen garden, exquisite in every blossom, tree and fountain. Retreatants, I was told, used to weep watching Dudink tend each small plant with a tenderness of the quality that assures thriving. This man prayed the gardens into being, an artist like his Creator.

He also created a tabernacle the like of which I’ve never seen. Most are ugly brass vessels, dumpy and unlovely, not fit for any food let alone spiritual food, my opinion. But this one is made of 6 concentric circles, the outermost one about 4 feet in diameter. The outer 3 circles, made it would seem of sturdy wallboard painted in blues from pale to vibrant; the center three of hammered silver, the centermost a raised metal sculpture of Jesus with his two friends, a woman and a man, breaking bread together and recognizing each other in meal and gaze.

The image is from the biblical story of the road to Emmaus in Luke and of course the Christian eucharist, but the blessing of being daily in sweet communion over good food is like a dream to me and perhaps to others. (How many happy-family meals end in tears I wonder?)

Gardener Yvonne is not a monastic and I don’t know her spirituality but you only have to look around to discern divinity in her designs, her prunings and plantings. If a tree is sick it gets immediate attention. This gardener is a birther and healer of plants. I understand why Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus after his resurrection for a gardener. Not a mistake.

And the two trees with their two trunks I mentioned in my last post, the two that grew into one and brought forth a third and altogether different tree? Is that resurrection or what?

(OK I know I project the beauty of some basic Christian ideas onto everything in sight but who could argue with new life ever-renewed & transformed, abundance, and the divinity of all things?)

There is also much human beauty at MIRAMAR. The staff smiled. They greeted you with a nod. They were silent and they spoke. The inside is as well cared for as the outside. The hierarchy or role and rank was obvious but not intrusive, just part of the fabric of life. Some cooked and some cooked eucharist. Some preached using words and some proclaimed truth with breath.

I have to mention the geese, notorious pests. They reminded me a bit of sheep, all day grazing and fouling the grasses and the small pond, their camp ground for now. They are waddly critters unsteady of gate. They followed the leader well. I never saw them fly except to catch up with the line-up doing a quick hop-flutter.

The flock of nine were military, patrolling the grassy slopes in a wobbly line around the pond. The poor things could hardly thread their way through the pond waters because it was so full of their poop. Clockwork regular, they bedded down at the foot of a line of shrubs every night at 8:15 p.m. in a huddle. (The birds, au contraire, stayed up to party and rose before dawn rose.)

At night I heard the geese make muffled grunty sounds too subtle to be croaky pond frogs. Do geese snore? I listened for the odd sound as a child might for a lullaby.

Geese!? I’ve romanticized. But ah, when they fly off in perfect formation, they touch heaven.

Jessica Powers, OCD, a Carmelite sister and fine poet—published!—sums up the spirituality of MIRAMAR and my retreat experience best.

“The desirable thing about beauty is that we can find great rapture in it, without any consideration of our inadequacies. In this vein I have often thought that the beauty of God is more than the love of God. When I think of the love of God, I become aware of my own emptiness of heart; when I think of the goodness of God, I remember my own failure; when I think of the beauty of God, I cease to exist at all. I become a living adoration.”

2011.06.23 Bursting With Style

2011-06-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

I am on a silent retreat this week and there is noise and clattering joy all around me. It is the liturgy of the natural world doing a shout-out for Creator Godde.

Goldfinches dart and swoop in and out of the Lupine.

A tiny redbreast catches my eye as I gaze into a shrub. He is the first baby out of the nest peering peeping to the world in which he will soon fly up.

A topiaried tree leans toward its neighbor. Wait. Look. The two have two trunks but one has leaned into the other's branched topping so they are one. They have merged and as my eye travels up I see an explosion of new growth. A completely other tree, one we would call a Christmas tree, soars upward.

I am not making this up. (I understand why St.Paul wrote this as he struggled to define grace—the indescribable look and feel of divine creativity.)

It smells like lilacs, is the color of new grass, and tastes like the finest red wine accompanied by deep dark real chocolate.

And Godde said to Abram and Sarai. Go forth! Choose life!

And they went.

And from them grew nations and scriptures and a people of covenant blessing.

And God said to Jesus. Go forth! And he went.

And from his healing and teaching grew gratitude and new life for all. And when Jesus hung dying, then dead, and could no longer go forth or sing or pray, could not choose life Godde did it for him.

The beauty of Holiness is the same for humanity as it is for nature. A shout-out!

And Godde says to me, Go forth and Choose life. And I open all my senses and my pores and taste goodness and touch the sky.

It's raining so I grab my umbrella, grouse, then I go forth.

As I go I shout to Godde, Go forth and strut your stuff. Be Aslan. Rush. Hurl wisdom into all souls. Fling your word far, far, far. This is no time for anonymity or letting be. Make lots of noise. Burst with style. Shout out with all your might. Go!

Todo en el aire is pájaro.

2011.06.19 Trinity, Seamless Garment

2011-06-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

It’s Trinity Sunday, time set aside to remember Godde: Holy Divine Three AND One.

I can not imagine a truly seamless garment.

As someone who used to do lots of sewing I know how important seams are and how hard they are to place, straighten and smooth. Seams make boundaries between different kinds of fabric, parts of a pattern designed to fit different parts of a human body, itself full of seams called alternately joints, ligaments or muscles. (If you’re my age, think wrinkles too.)

Body seams delineate functions and demarcate body parts to make sure one part doesn’t intervene or intrude on another. Seams also connect one part to another—loosely.

Seams are orderly, discrete and, depending on the fabric, hard to execute. When I made the bridesmaids’ dresses for my sister’s wedding out of ecru velvet, the cut and pattern were easy but the seams were difficult—long running lines in the lush thick of velvet that stuck and bunched and didn’t cooperate. If a seam isn’t flat the line of the dress looks uneven, bumpy, ugly like a sudden pimple on your nose when you’re fifteen.

There are seams on books too. If you break one you do worse than breaking your mother’s back.

When I would sit in Mercy Center’s chapel on retreat kneeling on a pillow below the tabernacle and the ceiling-to-floor rose portrait it often felt like a seamless continuity a flow with no hardline stitches.

Tabernacle, rose and I, we three totally dissimilar AND one seamless line of being.

In Godde there is no need for categories, territories, borders, no trespassing signs because though different we are all one.

How lovely would be a seamless religion with no need for fear or aggression or proofs or denominational strictures. We would look different in our clothing, trappings, tenets, structures and song according to our churchly and worldly cultures, but we would have the same soul—and know it.

Seam rippers are sharp, small painstaking tools used to remove seams. To rip a seam takes patience, care, courage, commitment, risk, grief and more love than one alone can muster.

Still, Godde is a Seamstress. It is Her design and Her way.

So to honor the seamless Trinity, the long green pentecostal season and Godde the Seamstress, I pray..............

SEW ME A SEAM OF FINEST SILK
DON’T LET YOUR SEAM END LEST THE THREADS
THAT MARK ITS END ARE PULLED
AND THE ELEGANT FLOW OF FABRIC BECOMES
COCOON, OR WORSE, COSMIC CORSET.
UNSEAM ME, DEAR GODDE,
ONE TINY STITCH AT A TIME.
THEN BREAK MY HEART WITH YOUR GRANDEUR.

2011.06.15 Human Animals?

2011-06-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

The editor’s page of the June issue of Presence, journal of Spiritual Directors International, began with an invitation to complete this sentence: THE HUMAN BEING IS THE ONLY ANIMAL THAT......

My first thought was “believes in Godde.” Or, in sophisticated Neibuhrian language, “can self-transcend.”

My next thought was “thinks s/he is not an animal” and I thought this second was more gut-wrenchingly honest.

I don’t know if animals believe in Godde or not; nor can I know if they self-transcend, behave on more than baseline instinct for survival.

My daughter Jill has always loved animals, secretly more than people. She talks to them and tells me they communicate to her or at least she can understand them in her gifted way of loving them. And she has lots of them.

Animals, particularly horses, dogs, cats and certain apes demonstrate intelligence and awareness of heart. Once a horse followed his owner to a lakeside, nudging at her all the way with his velvety nose and imploring with a low whinny that sufficed for words of life-giving compassion—enough to dissuade the young owner from her intent to take her own life.

And I have watched squirrels patiently give their little ones fence-top skittering and nest compilation lessons. And birds place small Blue Jays in the driveway each waiting their turn for their own personal flying lesson.

There is a continuum of creation not a rank order. Creator God is in all of it to the same degree. There is no spiritual hierarchy as human beings imagine. It is all good.

THE HUMAN BEING IS THE ONLY ANIMAL THAT THINKS S/HE IS NOT AN ANIMAL.

The human being might resist the temptation to lift the phrase in the Genesis creation story that has YHWH/God exclaim VERY GOOD about humanity. Get humble.

P.S. The Presence editor suggested this completion: “The human being is the only animal that can learn to live with the mystery of not-knowing.” Another possibility.

2011.06.12 Pentecost. What About Israel?

2011-06-12T13:30:00.000-07:00

It’s the day of Pentecost for Christians, a day we celebrate the Holy Spirit, an honored member of the Trinity, the self-expression of Godde that is pure energy in motion. Spirit pulls for transformative healing connections throughout creation. The Spirit represents the breadth, the reach of divine compassion. I call Her the Great Connector.

A good friend and writing companion brought me to attention recently asking a question about Israel. She didn’t say What about Israel but wondered if lawn signs might be in order to remind people not to forget Israel and not to abandon her.

It’s a question again of balance, or both/and not either/or.

The concern brought me up short. Of course we haven’t forgotten Israel. How could we? I plan to visit her in 2012.

But concern for Palestinian displacements and harsh defensive Israeli politics has perhaps displaced compassion for Israel. She is a little country with so much at stake, a country that is also full of innocent people who are afraid of losing a dear homeland. Everyone needs a dear homeland and there is room for all.

Spirit helps people and leaders bend without breaking. This peace is Her job now.

If I were to put up a yard sign it would say something like SAVE ISRAEL TOO.

2011.06.08 Sacramental Dentistry

2011-06-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

One would not normally associate a visit to one’s dentist with anything but pain. But in this case I received radical hospitality, spirituality talk for extending to all warm welcome and first class compassion with grace.

The office staff was warm, natural and humorous sharing their confusion about an insurance recipient named “Ee-pis-CO-ple.” We have insurance with the Episcopal Church.

The dentist took time to find out who I was other than the info form. The assistant was equally relational. They went over every tooth in my mouth, all numbered and with each one’s own pride of place and identity. Every move was thoroughly explained and I was asked if I had questions my comfort level checked at every point.

Dr. Gregory André, Silver Lake Dental in Willmington, MA., had a way of jiggling my cheek whereby the Novacain needle did its business with absolutely no pain. Light interesting conversation went on about their weekends above me as the drill did its job. A nice distraction.

While I waited for camera and computer to be set up the assistant Barbara gave me a shoulder massage!

A little camera went into my mouth, took a picture that registered onto a nearby computer where I watched André fashion the tooth that would go into my mouth.

In a half hour VOILA a crown was inserted into the emptiness and I had a new tooth. (If you will need a crown don’t wait till the tooth breaks and you then need root canal.)Is this laproscopic or its equivalent?

The whole procedure took about two hours. When it was done the dentist and the assistant thanked each other and they thanked me for my good work as a patient. Amazing!

The experience was entirely mutual, non-hierarchal, all of us experts, all of us with necessary gifts to give to the task. I was included and my dignity and needs were as important as theirs.

I felt safe, held and, yes loved, the entire time.

And when I went out I found I’d locked my keys in the car and didn’t freak just calmly took the appropriate actions.

This dental practice is a sacrament: an outer sign of an inward and spiritual whole-heartedness.

2011.06.05 Slow Down for Sabbath

2011-06-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

Today in the world the weather slows us down; in fact it can bring some of us to a grinding halt, forcing us to to pay attention.

Occasionally going to Church can slow us down, praying in silence and in community, listening to lessons, sermons, or drifting free; or listening to music or your lover’s breathing next to you—or your own.

I don’t think the current measure of time is a clock. I think it is a speedometer. To wit:

Now I Become Myself
by May Sarton

Now I become myself.
It's taken Time, many years and places; 
I have been dissolved and shaken,
 Worn other people's faces, 
Run madly, as if Time were there,
 Terribly old, crying a warning, 
"Hurry, you will be dead before--" 
(What? Before you reach the morning? 
Or the end of the poem is clear?
 Or love safe in the walled city?) 
Now to stand still, to be here,
 Feel my own weight and density! 
The black shadow on the paper 
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
 As thought shapes the shaper 
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
 All fuses now, falls into place
 From wish to action, word to silence,
 My work, my love, my time, my face
 Gathered into one intense 
Gesture of growing like a plant.
 As slowly as the ripening fruit 
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
 Falls but does not exhaust the root, 
So all the poem is, can give,
 Grows in me to become the song, 
Made so and rooted by love.
 Now there is time and Time is young. 
O,in this single hour I live
All by myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran.
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun.

2011.05.31 Three Muses on Spiritual Writing

2011-06-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

I have been guided along my way by three Muses—Religion, Spirituality, Feminism. The three often contend for my soul and they also come together as one when it matters most.

These three Muses taught me:

-that Religion offers nourishing gifts like Eucharist, the Bible, and Jesus
-that institutions though clumsy are not the enemy, and that most communal efforts are organized in some way, hopefully placing equal value on every part of the whole.
-that patriarchy is not men’s fault and that women must help to change it for the sake of relationships
-that Spirituality is not only a catch basin for deep and true feelings but an inner crucible where the divine Spirit stokes holy fires within individuals and also takes divine energy beyond the one to the many, igniting healing connections and creating human community
-that Feminism wherever She lands is a force for justice helping realize the radically egalitarian dream that all creation is one and a beloved community is possible
-that all genders, and today there are many variations, are holy
-that some day Femin-ism won’t be needed to urge us along

Spiritual writing at its best pays attention to the Muses as it seeks to plumb the depth dimension of people, places and things. It seeks within the holy, divine, eternal, beyond. It speaks of Mystery which can not be measured replicated or contained in any way because it is not yours; you don’t make it happen; and it does not belong to you though it is graciously given and shared with you.

The paradox of spiritual writing is this: you have to write it, to put it into some kind of words, but the more you try to explain or define it the more it sluices away from you. (See, I've just tried to do it anyway!)

So just write! (Bull Durham as a hesitant baseball player at bat was told: Just bat!)

Write your words. Write it down. If your words are true and deep they may by accident or grace communicate Mystery to someone else.

That’s all you want isn’t it?

2011.05.30 Time to Remember (Memorial Day)

2011-05-30T06:24:00.000-07:00

I remember summers on the farm in Ancramdale NY.

On the farm I learned everything I ever needed to know about life, death, love, terror and courage.

I saw a horse birthing a colt, feet first. I saw a surgeon slash open one of a cow’s four stomachs, heard the blood splash onto the concrete floor, smelled the stink of gastric air that rushed out, cringed as the gloved arm of the surgeon plunged in and pulled out a piece of hardware the cow had swallowed. God knew how. The cow ate during the procedure.

I rode my pony bareback into the swimming hole, buried my face in his mane and felt safe as large water rats sluiced by. My friend and I on our ponies herded the cows back to the barn to be milked each evening. One cow was missing. We found her and had to watch her sink to her death in quick mud, the last bellow, the last reach of one nostril snatching at life as it disappeared—while we stood by helpless.

There were rats in the old farmhouse. We stuffed old newspapers into their large holes. Rats once chewed the flesh off a baby. The father a farmhand caught as many rats as he could and burned them alive nose down on a hot stove burner. He had to hear them scream like his baby had before she died.

Even sex. The bull mounted the cow and hopped around while she bellowed—then she resumed eating. My mother told me it was the way they made babies, that she and Daddy did that too, and that it was the most beautiful thing two people could do. There’s only so much a six year old’s imagination can bear.

I learned the freedom of wind in my hair, dirt on my face, and bare feet pounding and toughening on dirt roads. I learned that cornfields whisper and, like Godde, hold all secrets sacred.

Once I watched my father, along with Farmer Kurt and another hand, herd a raging bull onto the back of a truck using pitchforks. It wasn’t enough protection. What if the bull killed my Daddy? I knew what bulls could do. My father was city not country. This wasn’t something he knew about. I saw the fear creep into his eyes. But he stuck it out. He did his brave part. I was proud of him.

What I remember most though was how much I loved him for his answer to my question, “Daddy were you afraid?” He said, “Yes I was, my darling.” Then he hugged me and planted a kiss on my forehead. My Daddy, so brave and so scared all at once. A hero.

Isn’t that what Memorial Day is all about?

2011.05.25 Death of God?

2011-05-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Godde doesn’t die but ideas about Godde do. They come and go according not to whim but to the particular spiritual needs of the times.

The Godde spelling is an example. It came about because Christian women, feminists and libbers and just plain confident blossoming women, cared deeply about being known and valued as women. They saw themselves as comprising half of the divine image.

The divine name in English, God, sounded harsh, was always attached to masculine pronouns, and needed a tweak. So they started a tradition of spelling the divine name GODDE. It is open-ended and has a soft sound. I like it.

That sounds as if Godde is a change artist? In a way, yes.

Godde is simply and always loving and desiring to be known by those who desire to be equally known, known to the roots of your sweet soul. Why wouldn’t Godde want to be known in ways people in each age can understand?

According to the late great writer Grace Paley: “Change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused.”

Not even Godde!

2011.05.22 Close to Nature in the City

2011-05-22T05:02:00.000-07:00

It’s odd that we live closer to nature now that we live in the city than we did in the burbs. In fact we are embedded in the beauty of nature, close enough to practically reach out the window and touch the heavy blossoms on the trees or grab a squirrel‘s tail as she skitters along on a nearby branch, or breathe scents as we fall asleep, or watch the day by day construction of a robin’s nest.I feel wrapped and sheltered.

I actually saw two robins doing it, or what I imagined to be it. They flew by upright beak to beak wings slapping the air and keeping them both steady, suspended in love. Amazing. A kiss in flight.

Bluejays it seems don’t stop to love or linger much. They are swoopers who light, give me the eye and swoop off.

Chipmunks are scarce and shy. They zoom.

And on clear nights we can say goodnight moon to Her Majesty. I feel as secure as the millions of children who like that book read to them nightly as I close my eyes and fall safe into Godde’s great womb, murmuring thanks as I drop.

Am I getting sentimental in my old age or is this kind of appreciation part of the territory, a gift?

2011.05.18 Covenant Daughter

2011-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

I know a wondrous girl who is smart and clear-minded. She will be a good business woman some day. She is already a daughter of the God who makes covenants agreements with faithful people to establish and assure the steadfastness of mutual promises of faith and grace.

After meeting the man her divorced mother had been dating for the first time she told her mother that she liked this man.

Later she summoned her mother to her room to announce that she had made a contract.

Her mother asked what for and the girl replied that it was a contract with the new man.

The contract read: “If you break my Mommy’s heart I will break yours.”

This girl has a voice with heart.

2011.05.15 Paradoxical Metaphor from Biology

2011-05-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

2011.05.15 Paradoxical Metaphor from Biology

We have so many wars we don’t know what to do with them all. Worse than old Mother Hubbard!

The latest is the war on infections, a bacteriological war, a “good” war. Still, I wonder if germs will ever befriend their destroyers or if we will ever accept death as part of ongoing life.

Don’t misunderstand me. I fear infection and bacteria and impotent anti-biotics, too. And I want to live healthy for as long as I can.

In the May 12 Boston Globe I read about “persisters.” Persisters are “bacteria that evade medications by slipping into a zombielike state, then mysteriously reawaken to cause new infections.” (Carolyn Y. Johnson, A1) Know any people or groups like this?

What awakens persisters of the bacteriological kind? Sugar. Imagine!

But in people a degree of tenacity and persistence is a good thing. It’s all in how you persist and for what? Life lived is risky.

The strategy of “persisters” is to play dead and evade the good guy anitbiotics’ detection. Clever indeed. Persisters don’t fight they just dissociate. This is how some children survive in families. They are good and quiet; they escape notice and maybe a blow or a slap or a curse. Clever—for a time.

The paradoxical metaphor is the more asleep you make yourself the more you miss— of BOTH good and evil.

I know a woman who lived dying like a clam until bacteria awakened her to illness and she came alive, discovered people loved her, chose life, then died quite alive.

Awakened, you could come out of your coma and face possible danger; or you could stay alert enough to see life in whatever tiny manifestation it might present itself. And choose it.

Which I believe is what God, according to the biblical deuteronomist, had in mind with this wisdom: “See! I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life... that you may live.”

Would that we could choose life for everyone, even bacterial types. We might perhaps have chosen to put a dent in our American persistence and brought Osama bin Laden to trial and justice instead of death.

Impossible vision? Persist in it anyway.

2011.05.11 How Good Godly Was Good Friday?

2011-05-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

Haven Kimmel in her memoir, A Girl Named Zippy. Growing Up Small in Moorleland, Indiana, writes with the illuminating candor of a young girl child with an independence of spirit and a love of life that challenge and humbles the overly intellectual or anxious about naked human feelings.

Here’s what she as a child of about 8-10 has to say about Jesus:

“I wanted him to be my boyfriend. My feelings about Jesus didn’t alarm me at all, because it appeared that everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn’t be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn’t afraid of blind people. I didn’t buy the bit about his terrible death and resurrection for a minute. I knew, beyond any room for doubt, that nothing in the world is both alive and dead. And this was the thing I most wanted to say in church: if you want him to be alive, you’ve got to stop hanging him on that cross.”

Is it a word of wisdom to Christians who obsess with the cross? Is it too much Protestantism as some would say? Or is it just a kid wondering?

Myself, I think the Episcopal Church strikes the right balance between life and death in its liturgies, provided of course we get rid of the atonement idea that someone up there sent someone down here to die in order to assure us we are embraced in God’s love.

Where there is real love there is always some sacrifice for its sake, is always sacrifice, and that truth inspires. But to set it up as a demand, requirement, or guarantee of divine grace forever?

For me? No thanks. Not for my boyfriend Jesus.

2011.05.05 Another "Happy" Ending?

2011-05-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Today is el Cinco de May, May 5th, when in 1862 Mexicans in the Battle of Puebla defended themselves and defeated mighty French forces. A David and Goliath story. A day to commemorate unexpected reversals.

That is hardly the case in the Bin Laden death. I make no defense of terrorists or their tactics which seem to me to be insanely desperate, but ................ we are Goliath, for gods sake, not David!

I was disturbed to see front page photos of Americans waving flags and cheering about the death of Osama bin Laden, terrorism master mind.

The President spoke of justice. I understand the idea but for me it makes no sense in the face of so much tragedy.

People imagine this a happy ending?

I am a Christian;I do not cheer for anyone’s death. The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel tells us that God “desires the death of no one.”

As a Christian too I know that death is an opening to new life.

Osama has been a source of great fear in this country post- 9/11 but I feel cautious about too much hoopla of joy or relief. The apparent victory could encourage more resolve in terrorists, inflame their religious culture that honors martyrdom. The passion to serve God by being a martyr is not an impossible outcome of too much cheering too soon. Hardly a “happy ending.”

A Muslim woman, originally from Pakistan, Naila Baloch, spoke wisdom at our recent clergy conference. Naila is one of a group of Muslims who pray their Friday noonday prayers at the Episcopal cathedral in Boston.

She said, “Osama is more a symbol than a person. We have lived in collective fear for a long time. I hope we can start to feel safe again, that this death will be the symbolic death of our fear.”

I pray and hope so.

May we refrain from a lot of ill-timed celebration. Instead let’s breathe fresh spring air and befriend our Muslim neighbors.

Let’s talk, get to know and understand each other, pray together.

It’s all the same to Godde and Allah.

2011.05. 04 Royal Happy Ending

2011-05-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

It’s paradoxical that the governmental phenomenon we Americans overthrew for independence is now for many a glittery attraction provoking comments like “We don’t have anything like this in this country.”

I refer of course to our fascination with all things British, especially what is royal and especially what advertises hopes for happily ever after.

There’s nothing like a royal wedding to get our glands going. In the USA we celebrate celebrity divorces. Not as sexy.

People seem to be filled with exuberance, perhaps we long with all our hearts for happy endings.

Or perhaps the high spirit is wanting to make up for Princess Di’s tragic early death, the last princess? No wait!.....there is one more.

The Christian idea of resurrection identifies Godde as the provider of happy endingsm especially ones that are happily ever after.

I put my trust in that and also go gaga over the royal pomp, glamor, and promised bliss.

2011.04.27 Becoming Mercy

2011-04-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. It wasn’t a princess. Maybe a horsewoman.

Maybe I just wanted to be the apple of my dad’s eye or at least not so much the apple of my mother’s eye.

Maybe I just wanted to be left alone to create—mischief, dramas, daring games with creepy plots, even liturgies—anything my imagination could stretch to.

I imagined God at just three. I was the apple of God’s eye, but I didn’t get the implications till I actually did grow up and into a religious vocation.

One thing I’m sure I didn’t want to be when I grew up was a nun or a priest. Now I am both—sort of.

I was drawn to the richness of the Roman Catholic Mass but found its misogynous politics stifling. Anglocatholic Episcopalians had the liturgy and hopeful politics so I became an Episcopal priest.

To satisfy my earlier Catholic leanings I became an Associate of the Religious Sisters of Mercy (RSM,) a Catholic order. BUT associates, according to their guidelines, are “ordinarily” Roman Catholic—“ordinarily” is a permissive word.

To be an Associate one makes a commitment to live a mercy way of life. Be compassionate and just. Not hard really, but hard as hell some days. A liaison Sister with whom you covenant helps. You keep each other honest to mercy.

I was attracted to the Mercies because their foundress Catherine Macauley, up for canonization btw, had a simple vision to help the poor. "Poor" is not restricted by an economic definition.

The Mercy vision and mission is to work and pray for connection: of the poor with resources, the ignorant with education/knowledge, and the sick with healing. The Holy Spirit Herself is the Great Connector and helps the process along.

This fit with my early Catholic leanings and it fits with my own ministry as priest, counselor, author and spiritual director.

Mercy satisfies my three guiding Muses: Spirituality, Religion and Feminism.

FEMINISM is happy because most of the “poor” are women. RELIGION is happy because many people are ignorant of the graces of sane and good religions and need good prayer guidance and teaching. SPIRITUALITY is happy because every soul is wounded to varying degrees of severity, and we all need healing.

To find out more about becoming an Associate of Mercy go to their website. Mercy Associates are “ordinarily” women.

Pray then click. www.sistersofmercy.org

2011.04.24 Easter Blessing from Unexpected Place

2011-04-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Conventional spiritual wisdom insists that good news about Divinity’s word and action comes from the margins of society and religion. Here is something from the center.

This may top the classic “Dear Virginia, there is a Santa Claus...” response to a child’s query, full of faith and hope, salted with a healthy dose of wariness, too.

An eastering word for an age of agnostic craving.

A six-year-old girl writes a letter to God. And the Archbishop of Canterbury, the only one of a variety of “heads of theology” of various religious traditions in the UK responded. The girl's question: “To God, how did you get invented?”

Dear Lulu,

Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It’s a
difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

‘Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were
quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and
thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it
came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own
and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected.

Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them
not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in
the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I’m really like.

But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like
somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the
world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward
questions!’

And then he’d send you lots of love and sign off.

I know he doesn’t usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on
his behalf. Lots of love from me too.

+Archbishop Rowan

(I credit the Rev. Eliza Kaeton for posting this lovely message from an article in The Church Times by Lulu’s father Damian Thompson, a non-believer, to the Episcopal House of Bishops and Deputies. Brava! )

2011.04.23 Holy Saturday Musing

2011-04-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Easter Vigil officially begins at dawn. Of course most parishes engage in this amazing all-encompassing liturgy tonight, because God forbid we would be too tired to do the whole thing again on Easter Sunday.

Tonight I will celebrate the ancient story and the dawning of Easter by 9 p.m. Tomorrow I will stay home—and feast.

Today is quiet, rainy, cold, bleak. I'm waiting-in-hope. A wise Jesuit once said to me that Holy Saturday is the day when:

The Father is silent.
The Son is dead.
The Holy Spirit broods.

2011.04.20 Holy Week Wisdom

2011-04-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Be wise. Speak wisely. Act wisely. Practice Wisdom.

Wisdom in biblical parlance is a holy figure, a powerful symbolic figure, usually portrayed in feminine form and voice, who basically guides the whole enchilada of developing faith between Divinity and Humanity. Big job!

For Jews Wisdom (Hochmah) is found instructing the people of YHWH in the Torah to bind the law of love for God into their hearts as a constant guide for all they do.(Deut 6:6-8, Psalm 19)

For Christians Jesus Christ is the Wisdom of God’s Spirit (Sophia) in human flesh, quite like binding divinity to your heart. (John 1:1-18)

To be wise the thoughts of your heart must be congruent with the words of your mouth and the actions of your body.

Wisdom is not knowledge alone. Wisdom is the integration of knowledge from without with experience from within.

Quakers are all over this one.

Wisdom guides the integration process. She is Who gets us through the worst and best of times. Holy Week for Christians is both. Wisdom hold it all together, keeps us whole and holy. (She actually is spiritual velcro.)

Pray. Ask. Follow.

2011.04.17 Women Bearing Palms

2011-04-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

It is for Christians Palm Sunday, a day of hope and fear, remembering all the hope Jesus brought to his age and beyond, also knowing the terrors that come as we struggle to realize that vision of justice, peace and love.

In the parade that followed Jesus into Jerusalem there were many women tossing palms in the path and hoping for something better, while fearing the worst.

“As innumerable global studies have shown, a country’s economic health and security are deeply linked to the status of its women. Even the poorest societies are more stable when children are educated, resources are shared, and women are free. Countries that sideline women not only forfeit the human capital of half of their population but also create conditions of unrest.” (Boston Globe, April 16, 2011, Renée Loth, “An Uprising for Women’s Rights, too.”)

“So God created humankind in God’s own image,
in the image of God s/he created them;
male and female God created them.” (Genesis 1:27 touched up by Lyn Brakeman who
is doing her part to include women in the image)

Genesis is the theological equivalent of the secular sociopolitical statement in the newspaper.

Contemplate the connections. Throw palms, and your weight, toward the wholeness of Godde—and the world.

2011.04.14 Intermediate Retirement

2011-04-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

I am retired—and not.

Officially I’m unemployed, have no boss, no set schedule, no salary or office to go to. I’m free—sort of. All I have to do is take time management skills training!

It’s bad enough I’m my own boss and I have a computer and home office that calls me to write daily.But I can say no—sometimes.

I’m busier than ever, as people say they are who retired. So not retired at all in a traditional sense.

Hence, I’ve invented something called Inter-Ret, Intermediate Retirement. The time, about 70-80, when many of us are still vital and we can choose what to do.

This applies to those of us who have pension security and few severe limitations. The precious lucky!

Inter-Ret is a thin space time, a time when you can re-tread, re-up, re-boot. Choose your own re-.........

I like re-soul.

2011.04.10 Chiropractic Spirituality

2011-04-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever heard of chiropractic manipulations was in the morning milk delivery truck with dairy farmer Kurt and his daughter Isabella. We would travel to Millerton NY for a visit to the chiropractor who would, Kurt told us, crack every bone in his back.

Paying to have all your bones broken sounded neanderthal to me, but on the ride home Kurt was joyful. We girls bounced like popcorn on the front seat of the pick-up and all of us sang at the top of our lungs, “O my darling Clementine...” which always made me cry. I don’t know why.

Chiropractic back in the ‘40s was considered tantamount to witch doctoring or voodoo. People looked askance, but Kurt, who had suffered more than his share of near-death farm accidents, swore by it.

I didn’t think of chiropractic again until my neck froze up solid and I was sure I’d be crippled forever. Remembering Kurt I found a chiropractor who set the vertebrae in my neck and spine straight. No medication! It felt miraculous.

After the first treatment I told my husband I’d experienced righteousness in my body—all the vertebrae fell into line.

Righteousness in biblical parlance means to be congruent,in right relationship with God, yourself and your neighbors. What you think, say, feel and do agree. You have integrity, speak truth. You’re all lined up, like your spine should be.

If you're out of alignment you feel pain. Your body aches, not necessarily in your back but joints, even headache. Spiritually your soul aches, you feel phony, chaotic, out of focus. Not credible.

I’ve been under chiropractic care some 30 years now. Many chiropractors use the Activator method now. Instead of aligning your spine by hand with quick deft manipulations that go CRACK and hurt psychologically, they use a small miracle of a power tool called an Activator that drives painless pressure into the right spot and BINGO embodied righteousness begins.

The process is painless, not costly, covered by many insurances, and medication-free.

A chiropractor is trained to develop skill in locating the exact place that needs pressure. Good chiropractors have skill, yes but going to the bone is a gift and an art. My chiropractor, Dr. Cheryl Lubin, has that gift.

Choose well because you want a chiropractor who, like Godde, knows exactly where you need a small nudge of grace.

2011.04.06 Lenten Laugh

2011-04-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

May West, stopping at nothing, once tried to seduce the Pope.(She died in 1980 so you figure out which one:)

She was good at her part and the Pope apologized with a deep papal bow, pulled a reversal by kissing her hand, and hid behind Lent. “I’m sorry I can’t, it’s Lent.” Well, West retorted, “When you get it back let me know.”

Lighten up for Lent. Sin is serious and also hilarious when you get perspective.

Mercy triumphs over judgment anyway.

So lighten up and laugh for Lent —and don’t loan anything essential.

2011.04.03 A Day with Teen Girls in Boston

2011-04-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

One way to spruce up Lent, if you so need, is to banish sombriety (yes, I made that one up!) and spend the day with two 15 year old girls in a big city.

One of these two enchanting teens is my grand daughter Gillian. She has reached five feet and is statuesque with pride, having anticipate a life worse-than-death-as-short.

Just getting on the red line subway was an adventure. Everything was an adventure even if it wasn’t really new. The two giggled their way along city streets.

They walked ahead of me as if they knew where they were going. I got to watch their Gilly Hicks butts swinging along, perky. If it weren’t for the color (not flesh colored) of the tight leggings (all the rage) you’d never know they had a thing on.

Some guy called “Hey cutie” to Gillian. This inspired a flurry of hysterical giggles—embarrassment and thrill all at once. I hadn’t seen the man but she said he was sitting in a chair on the sidewalk.

Each girl had some money. Grammy treated for lunch and took cellphone photos of them, their heads tilted toward one another, mouths fixed on straws as they sucked up their twin strawberry frappes.

Gillian asked if it were rude to noisily suck up the remainder of the frappe with the straw. I said go for it. If it’s delicious, delightful, get as much of it as you can. They slurped, pleased and innocent as suckling infants. My own motherly love knew no bounds as I took in their mutual delight. Eden joy!

After ogling the scant overpriced putative clothing options, they found an “everything” shop and purchased souvenirs of Boston, selected carefully and with conversation about what would be just right for Mom, Dad, siblings and their grandparental hosts.

Grampy and I got little duckies and a panoramic postcard of the Boston skyline. Mom got a rubber bracelet “Superstar” and younger sister one that said “Spoiled.” For themselves they bought the same woven pink cord bracelet— a cut above rubber.

These girls are nice girls. They have soul because both have resisted the temptation to be mean in order to belong.

The highlight of the day was the trip to the ladies room at the lunch place. On the wall were wise or witty quotes, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Charles Manson, and more.

They came rushing out of the bathroom wanting pens to write quotes. “But we don’t know any quotes! Can you give us some?”

I jotted down one of my favorites: “I have set before you life and death. Choose life” paraphrased from Deuteronomy 30:15. “That’s great Grammy!” They never asked what Deuteronomy was but raced back to the bathroom to write themselves, and a little of God’s wisdom, onto the wall.

That’s how faith-in-memory happens—and then gets written over and over.

A day with nice girls in a buzzing big city is enlivening and therefore holy.

2011.03.30 Bible as Memoir

2011-03-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Bible is a memoir. It is written from memory and out of love.

It is passionate about the unfolding of a powerful faith story written to tell how Divinity is present in transformative, creating, and healing ways—and continues to be present.

Because it describes an evolving process of understanding of the relationship between humanity and divinity over time, it is necessarily more impressionistic than literal.

Memoir is like an impressionist painting. You stand back and you see a whole picture but when you go up close you see a bunch of multicolored dots, daubs of many colors, fragments of happenings, fragments of feelings, snapshots of detail.

You remember the bright yellow dress you wore, the red tie of the man who bent over you, the dappled sky of the afternoon your first felt like a grownup when you were only eight. You zoom in and pull back, over and over until you know where all the colors belong—and maybe why.

Because the Bible was written many years after a spiritual experience, and because it is revelation-over-time, it is open-ended, and subject to multiple interpretations.

Interpretations, both individual and collective, are made in the context of time, over time. This is what makes biblical memoir Holy. It is flexible, speaking from generation to generation.

Every memoirist hopes that her own story will speak to a fraction of people— enough to be remembered—and be a little holy.

2011.03.25 Anniversaries: My 23rd and Mary's 2050th

2011-03-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

I write my tears into words all the time. Some are for what I'm remembering and writing and some are just the creative act itself and all its frustrations. Do I cry or write? Both.

The beauty of holiness is not a piece of cake! You get what you wonder and it is always delightful,also doubtful Trust both.

Biblical story satisfies the more literally-minded readers as well as those who can know through imaginative seeing. Both/and. Most of us dance carefully along the via media without compromising either history or spirituality. Is it true or false? Both.

Mary saw an angel. Or did she? Yes and no. When I was ordained many heavy hands were laid on my one small brown bowed head. I felt as if I were sinking and shrinking. When the hands lifted off my head my brain was so suddenly empty of any thought that I was in heaven—just for a half second. Was I? Yes and no.

Mary followed the vision and got pregnant with a messiah. I followed mine and became a priest.

My anniversary gift to Mary this day is candied birth control pills. And to myself, a batch of chocolate chip cookies to remember God’s awakening words to me while I was lost in midlife domestic doldrums, making chocolate chip cookies, and God asked, Why are you doing this?

2011.03.23 Placebo Prayer?

2011-03-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Moving along the placebo track I wonder if intercessory prayer has a pleasant placebo effect?

I confess that, with my memory as it is these days, and actually always, I sometimes don’t remember to pray for someone I have said I would.

I have best intentions and my caring is sincere. But I am limited. I don’t worry too much as I believe that Godde IS prayer. The sacred heart at prayer for all of us each moment —praying for me when I forget.

But sometimes people tell me they have really felt the prayers of the community, including mine, supporting them in some effort of healing or other.

I do not doubt such feelings at all. It’s a little embarrassing if I have forgotten. But I also wonder if just knowing that people INTEND to pray for you IS itself prayer.

If no one remembers to pray for you, you still have faith in their intentional good heart towards you, and so you believe they do pray for you— you feel it and it helps you. Like Eucharist.

Sounds like a good enough placebo effect to me.

2011.03.20 Placebo Eucharist?

2011-03-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of writing about the placebo effect. Evidence that something works even if you tell someone that a pill, for example, is only a placebo, has no medicinal ingredients. (Deborah Kotz, Boston Globe G, 3.7.2011)

Why? Many reasons: personality, authority says so, desire for healing/relief, suggestibility. In short, they don’t really know why placebos works.

I have wondered about the placebo effect in the Eucharist/Holy Communion. Yikes! Heresy.

Does Eucharist nurture your soul and deliver a shot of grace because it does, or because you have faith that it will in relation to your experience in a Christian community? OR because the priests told you so from when you were little, or just yesterday? OR Jesus said it in the Bible? OR Mommy said so!? OR— all of the above?

For me the Eucharist is a relational event: my faith opens to divine grace and TOGETHER they (my faith and God’s grace) make a glorious sacramental placebo.

(After all, the word placebo does derive from Latin, “I shall please.”)

2011.03.16 Moveable Feast of Justice

2011-03-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

I wanted to be a priest because of my attraction to the Christian Church’s holy meal, a sacrament of grace called Holy Eucharist, the action of which speaks volumes to me about justice.

In a eucharistic meal everyone is invited to the table; everyone gets fed; everyone gets the same just-right amount— not too little and not too much.

This little miracle of economic distribution at the center of Christian worship should be grace enough in a culture that suffers from obesity—too much—and a dangerous widening gap between those who have and those who have not.

The other reason I wanted to be a priest of the Eucharist was because for a priest Eucharists really ARE moveable feasts. They happen on stone platforms on the Sea of Galilee and at altars in cathedrals. They happen with bread, biscuit, wafer, cracker, stale wine or fine; they happen standing, sitting, leaning, kneeling; in churches and kitchens, at bedsides, over hassocks, on floors and grass.

Justice should also be a moveable feast.

2011.03.08 International Women's Day

2011-03-08T08:51:00.000-08:00

It's International Women's day. I dream of the vision: the blessing of wholeness in church and world— with no -isms!

It's also Mardi Gras. I savor the grace of joy and people and look forward to Lent: the precious opportunity to be quiet and alone and know myself and Godde better so I can know and love others better.

No matter your gender or what your faith, celebrate and bless yourself.

2011.03.09 Ashes. Ashes......

2011-03-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

I think like an adult .... but I wonder like a child.

I thought “ashes ashes” was a nursery rhyme, a kid’s game (not about the Bubonic plague, btw)

I wondered if it were also the Wisdom of God reminding me that any minute now I could fall down and skin my knee, or more.

Today I thought . . . phone poles are dead trees put into service so we humans can gossip or call loved ones to make sure they are alive.

I wondered if the tall straight once-tree poles drew water from the well of the earth like living trees do, miraculously defying gravity one of our most precise and precious laws.

I THOUGHT on Ash Wednesday that the ashes in the small bowl were the remains of the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday— funeral reminders of great expectations gone sour. And I thought ashes were a powerful symbol to let us know we all will die unrequited in many ways.

I THOUGHT, then what?

I WONDERED if the ashes in the small cardboard box were really my father, at last all contained and right there to scoop up into the palms of my hands, kiss goodbye, and toss once more into the waiting hole in the damp ground.

I WONDERED, then what?

I THOUGHT Lent was a somber but not depressing time, just to stop and reflect, maybe learn a thing or two about what to do differently the next time you . . ., or he . . ., or they . . ., or it . . .

I WONDERED if Lent were really 40 days of Jesus’ starving and praying and wasting away in the desert wilderness without his Mom and Dad or any friends to love, stuck alone with an invisible God he began to call Abba.

I THOUGHT that was a crucible of unnecessary proportions for a very good man.

I WONDERED if that was why my small grandson insisted on having his door open at night, wide open to house light and moonlight, to escape, to give an opening for the sound of his voice should it call out, or to the sound of his Daddy’s footsteps running toward his open door.

2011.03.07 Reflection on Well Being

2011-03-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

How does the phrase "my well being depends on your well being" sound? It's one of those snaky half truths. Fine, until you stop to think that it's a child's point of view, a child’s truth.

Substitute "is enhanced by" for "depends" and you have a whole truth:

My well being is enhanced by your well being.

(You think on such things when you get older and fear for your partner’s well being—and yours.)

2011.03.02 Serenity Prayer for Today—and Tomorrow

2011-03-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Today's version of the Serenity Prayer, aka Lyn trapped in a den and din of words, trying to sort, sift, order, disorder, love and hate—and all in order to write an intimate letter to strangers! (That’s what writer Pico Iyer called writing and I call memoir writing.) Sheesh.

God, grant me the serenity to hate my life
the courage to love what I hate
and the wisdom to know the goddamn difference.

AMEN

2011.02.27 Your Preferred Spiritual Posture

2011-02-27T11:15:00.000-08:00

IF you saw and really believed that God by whatever name you call Her suddenly appeared in the flesh and stood before you smiling would you:

fall on your face prostrate before the grandeur of God?
jump for joy, toss boundaries out the window, and rush into His open arms?
bow your head and create a little steepled “church,” hands in prayer-pose
drop to your knees in reverence?
smile in return, cock your head, and wait?
drop to one knee and genuflect as you speedily cross yourself?
burst into song?
turn and run?
shout OMG! and open your arms?
head for the “hills?”

Your body doesn’t lie. It usually leads the way. What is your preferred spiritual posture, the way your body responds before you think too much?

OK...... so many of you, especially if you are Anglo-Episcopalians, will say, “It depends...” On what? Your mood? The weather? What your neighbor will see if she’s looking out the window? Your actual physical capacity?

I learned this wisdom long ago and didn’t trust it, because I thought I had more control, and I told myself I behaved differently with God than with my neighbors:

HOW YOU STAND BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE IS HOW YOU STAND BEFORE GOD.

Check it out.