It's TAX day! Some of us enjoy the privilege of paying taxes that others who can't pay may enjoy needed services provided the government manages tax and service with equity and generosity in balance. If you can swallow that sentence whole and digest it without much argument you're in balance yourself!
One of my favorite biblical characters turned out to be Lady Wisdom, spirit of creativity and formation. Wisdom is portrayed as the feminine face of God, God’s sidekick in all things. Without Wisdom you don’t get very far in life. I’d valued wisdom, the integration of knowledge with experience, but had often confused it with bookishness, reading more than I digested and way more than I could possibly use—or integrate.
Biblical Wisdom calls us to “lay aside immaturity” (Prov 7:6a) She invites us to the table to eat of the meal she has prepared and drink of the wine she has mixed. She confirmed for me my principal reason for wanting to be a priest.
Wisdom was female now. I couldn’t afford to be without her, apocryphal or not. I prayed for ordination and for Wisdom, my vocational arc increasingly bending like a birch toward a truth I trusted: that all life is sacred, sacramental, everything a visible sign of an invisible grace, everyone holy.
As I read about Wisdom, I learned she had many fine attributes, more than her Boss in fact. One of her qualities listed in the Book of Wisdom is shrewdness. I loved that. Shrewd is related to the now obsolete shrew, something I once heard my father call my mother. Shrewdness enables someone to make astute judgments sometimes without cold hard facts. It’s like cunning and maybe wily, which brings me straight to the holiness of many biblical women who used their wiles to seduce dangerous men and eliminate (murder) them as enemies of the plans of God. May not be the best ethics or theology but in a power-happy world what can you expect even if you don’t approve? Today the same.
Wisdom, shrewd and wily, also seemed like a divine kind of mother to me, one who trains her children in survival skills, who teaches all her children wisdom, and fills them with joy. I also read: “At first she will walk with them on tortuous paths; she will bring fear and dread upon them and will torment them by her discipline until she trusts them.” (Sirach 4: 17)
What kind of mother was that? Well, maybe Mother Church. She could fill me with dread and fear and torture me with her closed doors. When would I be trusted? I wondered as I wandered.
All I could do was keep on, keep on, keep on. I got lots of support, lots of “milk” along the way. But the wilderness could be lonely. Friends and family got sick of my laments and my desires, to say nothing of my radicalized politics.
Determination to achieve my goal made me gritty.
As the years went by I reared four children, went to seminary, did everything in the parish church that I could except join Altar Guild—enough washing and ironing at home. I developed spiritual muscle. I grew tall inside. Adversity, not comfort, shapes souls.
A tender sorrow accompanied me, but it wasn’t bitter and no longer overwhelmed me. My own true voice began to sound more and more like the voice of divine Wisdom I’d heard from time to time inside myself.
That inner voice had awakened me and set me on the wilderness path in the first place. It spoke one day when I was baking chocolate chip cookies, batch # 1 million. They were good and brought pleasure and I was a good mother, but God-in-me gave me Wisdom who said, “Why are you doing this?”
Now I was in the wilderness trying to answer that simple shrewd question, trying to make it to the promised land which I thought was ordination.
Once along my “prayerful” obsessive way Wisdom interrupted me saying, “Lyn, I don’t care if you’re ordained.” Insulted as I felt, She made me laugh. Wisdom can be fresh—funny with a bite. But I suppose she takes her assignments seriously.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Memoir Musings Part Three: Staying the Course
It’s Holy Week, an important one for Christians. We remember the events leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection and we honor all our own grief and pain and place our trust once again in the hope that we have a God who reaches into our worst darkness, even death, and raises us up body and soul together, wounds and all. In these days we all have our own memories of death and resurrection.
I had experienced myself and life in a sacramental way by instinct from childhood. My movement towards priesthood seemed obvious. All I had to do was turn myself inside out. I thought the Church would be, well, nice.
It took a record-setting eleven years for me to get ordained, the usual time being four or five years. I stayed alive in the wilderness by thinking that if only I got ordained . . . what? My father would love me as I am? My mother would acknowledge my authority as an adult? I’d be happily married? All my life my way of establishing myself in the world had been by achieving, one glittering triumph after another. Now I was stopped cold.
All one can achieve in a wilderness is survival.
God as well as my self, my direction, my values, my vocational track, came under scrutiny and into question in my wilderness.
Going to seminary whether the Church liked it or not felt deliciously defiant—also dangerous. Sometimes in a wilderness you just have to find a building, a temporary shelter, a tent even— and of course a library! Falling in love with the bible and its motley cast of characters raised my spirits. In the bible, a best seller I’d never understood, I found vocabulary for some of my own spiritual experience.
For example, when, at three under the dining room table, I’d sit and chat to my imaginary friends who never listened and to God who did listen, I felt that I mattered. I received the gift of the authority of my selfhood without any judgment or abandonment. The psalmist calls it feeling yourself to be “the apple of God’s eye.”
Personal authority and belonging came together for me under that table. This “marriage” is rare if at all in a world full of fear, but perhaps it’s a gift only God can give, a gift of love not conferred as reward or power except the power of one’s being. I feel it in my body of flesh when my spiritual body takes residence in every bone, muscle, sinew. I feel alive even when I’m tired of trying. It’s what helped me stay the course.
Recently a woman in my yoga class asked me what I did. I told her I was an Episcopal priest to which she replied “Oh, I’m done with all that religion. I was raised in the Catholic church. My mother believes every word.” I told her I had many doubts myself. She said something like “We’re all just light, Just light. None of this matters.” She patted her body. I resisted for once a little sermonette on incarnational theology, simply saying. “You are a beautiful, graceful athlete. Your body is Light, sacred all by itself.” She looked stunned.
Our conversation ended and I don’t know what she thought. But that’s the way we connect isn’t it, by sharing what matters most to us with each other? I know I’m thinking of what I call the “light of Christ” in a more expansive way because of her Light.
I had experienced myself and life in a sacramental way by instinct from childhood. My movement towards priesthood seemed obvious. All I had to do was turn myself inside out. I thought the Church would be, well, nice.
It took a record-setting eleven years for me to get ordained, the usual time being four or five years. I stayed alive in the wilderness by thinking that if only I got ordained . . . what? My father would love me as I am? My mother would acknowledge my authority as an adult? I’d be happily married? All my life my way of establishing myself in the world had been by achieving, one glittering triumph after another. Now I was stopped cold.
All one can achieve in a wilderness is survival.
God as well as my self, my direction, my values, my vocational track, came under scrutiny and into question in my wilderness.
Going to seminary whether the Church liked it or not felt deliciously defiant—also dangerous. Sometimes in a wilderness you just have to find a building, a temporary shelter, a tent even— and of course a library! Falling in love with the bible and its motley cast of characters raised my spirits. In the bible, a best seller I’d never understood, I found vocabulary for some of my own spiritual experience.
For example, when, at three under the dining room table, I’d sit and chat to my imaginary friends who never listened and to God who did listen, I felt that I mattered. I received the gift of the authority of my selfhood without any judgment or abandonment. The psalmist calls it feeling yourself to be “the apple of God’s eye.”
Personal authority and belonging came together for me under that table. This “marriage” is rare if at all in a world full of fear, but perhaps it’s a gift only God can give, a gift of love not conferred as reward or power except the power of one’s being. I feel it in my body of flesh when my spiritual body takes residence in every bone, muscle, sinew. I feel alive even when I’m tired of trying. It’s what helped me stay the course.
Recently a woman in my yoga class asked me what I did. I told her I was an Episcopal priest to which she replied “Oh, I’m done with all that religion. I was raised in the Catholic church. My mother believes every word.” I told her I had many doubts myself. She said something like “We’re all just light, Just light. None of this matters.” She patted her body. I resisted for once a little sermonette on incarnational theology, simply saying. “You are a beautiful, graceful athlete. Your body is Light, sacred all by itself.” She looked stunned.
Our conversation ended and I don’t know what she thought. But that’s the way we connect isn’t it, by sharing what matters most to us with each other? I know I’m thinking of what I call the “light of Christ” in a more expansive way because of her Light.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Memoir Musings Part Two: Priest's Song
It’s April Fools’ Day and I should be writing about fools or at least April, but instead I continue my memoir musings with this poem.
Actually it is about some kind of foolishness —the kind I felt trying to get the church to ordain me when my life was messy, euphemistically, and I was lost in my wilderness. Growing up is be definition chaotic. You try all kinds of different behaviors, taste all kinds of different treats, experiment with all kinds of different role-free relationships and create grand messes only you can clean up. It’s painful and exhilarating.
Imagine my hoping and praying that the Episcopal church, known both for its breadth of heart and its stuffiness of mind, would find me acceptable for ordination anyway.
I didn’t write this poem in my wilderness state. I wrote it it after my lostness and my acting up days were, at least for a time, done with. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote his famous Serenity Prayer before he had to live its wisdom in the midst of a stroke. Before or after, I guess most people don’t write clear-headed wisdom in the middle of stark vulnerability. (Jesus didn’t recite all that biblical wisdom while stretched thin and gasping on a wooden cross. His followers knew what he would say if he could and wrote it much later.)
So I wrote my song of hope after I was ordained, remembering how it had been to be longing, lost and lonely—unwanted.
PRIEST’S SONG
When I have no title
I make one up - irreverend.
When I have no collar
I roll my neck round.
When I have no church
I steeple my fingers.
When I have no pulpit
I preach running.
When I have no altar
I celebrate my back yard.
When I have no wine
I weep blood tears.
When I have no bread
I am a sacrament.
When I have no God
I pray anyway. (this poem is published in Women’s Uncommon Prayers)
Actually it is about some kind of foolishness —the kind I felt trying to get the church to ordain me when my life was messy, euphemistically, and I was lost in my wilderness. Growing up is be definition chaotic. You try all kinds of different behaviors, taste all kinds of different treats, experiment with all kinds of different role-free relationships and create grand messes only you can clean up. It’s painful and exhilarating.
Imagine my hoping and praying that the Episcopal church, known both for its breadth of heart and its stuffiness of mind, would find me acceptable for ordination anyway.
I didn’t write this poem in my wilderness state. I wrote it it after my lostness and my acting up days were, at least for a time, done with. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote his famous Serenity Prayer before he had to live its wisdom in the midst of a stroke. Before or after, I guess most people don’t write clear-headed wisdom in the middle of stark vulnerability. (Jesus didn’t recite all that biblical wisdom while stretched thin and gasping on a wooden cross. His followers knew what he would say if he could and wrote it much later.)
So I wrote my song of hope after I was ordained, remembering how it had been to be longing, lost and lonely—unwanted.
PRIEST’S SONG
When I have no title
I make one up - irreverend.
When I have no collar
I roll my neck round.
When I have no church
I steeple my fingers.
When I have no pulpit
I preach running.
When I have no altar
I celebrate my back yard.
When I have no wine
I weep blood tears.
When I have no bread
I am a sacrament.
When I have no God
I pray anyway. (this poem is published in Women’s Uncommon Prayers)
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Memoir Musings Part One: Wilderness
Today the Christian Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation. In the biblical story a young girl Mary had a vision of the angel Gabriel and heard in her heart an invitation, an announcement, a deal: conceive, bear and nurture a son named Jesus. In return for her female gifts her biology and her commitment to a hard journey (Jesus wasn’t an easy son you know,) God promised blessings for Mary and for her son. Mary said yes.
Today is also the twenty-first anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest in the Church of God. It’s Mary’s day and my day too, a good time to begin to tell you how my own call to say yes to God’s invitation to me.
What, I pondered, would be the right word to describe what it’s like to be moving, sometimes without consent, toward maturity? Mind, body and soul are all involved—not one holds back, not one dominates. Growth spurt seems too mild. Mid-life crisis lacks luster, too psychological. Transition is shopworn. And paradigm shift is for things much bigger than me. Liminality works but is close to spiritual cliché.
Into my mind popped wilderness and a quote: “The wilderness is where the child learns to love the mother more than the milk.”
Wilderness? A bit tired among the biblically literate but when something pops in like that I don’t resist much. Wilderness catches the ambience of a mapless pilgrimage, going nowhere and everywhere. Lost.
To learn to love the mother more than the milk? At a literal level, I don’t resonate with this wisdom. My mother didn’t nurse me or my sisters, thought is was “disgusting,” not part of her class or day. But of course milk and mother are metaphor for what life is like in wilderness time.
My wilderness was wild but it wasn’t hot or dry like a desert. There was plenty of water although nothing slaked my thirst. It wasn’t uninhabited, not bleak wasteland but teeming with people, places and things, forces driving me from within and whipping me from without. Tumbleweed.
I don’t know how I got into my wilderness or exactly how I got out. I careened through it tethered by one slender thread: I wanted with all my heart to be ordained a priest and celebrate the Holy Eucharist. I kept trying to persuade the Episcopal church, then (1970’s and 80’s) in its own wilderness of change—shifting words, hymn tunes, genders, and all manner of traditions.
My campaign began officially in 1977 in the diocese of Connecticut. I with five other women—the very first female aspirants—applied to enter the ordination process. We were “legal” now, voted so in 1976 by the General Convention, our legislative body. Fifteen women pioneers paved the way. In 1974 and 1975 they were been ordained priests outside of canonical authority. Roman Catholic women are doing the same now. (Such efforts remind me of the valiant and herculean way grass makes its way up through concrete taking the tiniest cracks as invitation.)
But since we Episcopal women had been accepted by vote, we thought we had an open door. We were thrilled, triumphant, and naive about the difference between the vote counts of our “congressional” delegates and the more invisible slow heartbeat of church officialdom back home. The numbers didn’t tally.
Before I applied for ordination I had entered and was lost in my personal wilderness, trying to break free from societal roles and rules for women, but this ecclesiastical wilderness was vast, harsh and sometimes toxic. I was rejected twice by “Goliath” after which I descended into the hell of my one million three hundred thousand internal demons—echoes of parental demons now mine— all proclaiming me inadequate.
I kept on–no promise, no blessings, no mother, no milk— driven by my soul’s adrenalin.
Today is also the twenty-first anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest in the Church of God. It’s Mary’s day and my day too, a good time to begin to tell you how my own call to say yes to God’s invitation to me.
* * * *
I’ve been writing all my life, most recently at length about my spiritual journey, trek really, from child to adult, girl to woman, and edging into old woman, with most of the focus on my middle years—thirty-five to fifty-five roughly. What, I pondered, would be the right word to describe what it’s like to be moving, sometimes without consent, toward maturity? Mind, body and soul are all involved—not one holds back, not one dominates. Growth spurt seems too mild. Mid-life crisis lacks luster, too psychological. Transition is shopworn. And paradigm shift is for things much bigger than me. Liminality works but is close to spiritual cliché.
Into my mind popped wilderness and a quote: “The wilderness is where the child learns to love the mother more than the milk.”
Wilderness? A bit tired among the biblically literate but when something pops in like that I don’t resist much. Wilderness catches the ambience of a mapless pilgrimage, going nowhere and everywhere. Lost.
To learn to love the mother more than the milk? At a literal level, I don’t resonate with this wisdom. My mother didn’t nurse me or my sisters, thought is was “disgusting,” not part of her class or day. But of course milk and mother are metaphor for what life is like in wilderness time.
My wilderness was wild but it wasn’t hot or dry like a desert. There was plenty of water although nothing slaked my thirst. It wasn’t uninhabited, not bleak wasteland but teeming with people, places and things, forces driving me from within and whipping me from without. Tumbleweed.
I don’t know how I got into my wilderness or exactly how I got out. I careened through it tethered by one slender thread: I wanted with all my heart to be ordained a priest and celebrate the Holy Eucharist. I kept trying to persuade the Episcopal church, then (1970’s and 80’s) in its own wilderness of change—shifting words, hymn tunes, genders, and all manner of traditions.
My campaign began officially in 1977 in the diocese of Connecticut. I with five other women—the very first female aspirants—applied to enter the ordination process. We were “legal” now, voted so in 1976 by the General Convention, our legislative body. Fifteen women pioneers paved the way. In 1974 and 1975 they were been ordained priests outside of canonical authority. Roman Catholic women are doing the same now. (Such efforts remind me of the valiant and herculean way grass makes its way up through concrete taking the tiniest cracks as invitation.)
But since we Episcopal women had been accepted by vote, we thought we had an open door. We were thrilled, triumphant, and naive about the difference between the vote counts of our “congressional” delegates and the more invisible slow heartbeat of church officialdom back home. The numbers didn’t tally.
Before I applied for ordination I had entered and was lost in my personal wilderness, trying to break free from societal roles and rules for women, but this ecclesiastical wilderness was vast, harsh and sometimes toxic. I was rejected twice by “Goliath” after which I descended into the hell of my one million three hundred thousand internal demons—echoes of parental demons now mine— all proclaiming me inadequate.
I kept on–no promise, no blessings, no mother, no milk— driven by my soul’s adrenalin.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Spirituality Trumps Psychology
I’m good at psychoanalyzing. I can be right, even helpful in assisting someone to understand the internal dynamics of an impasse by feeling their way through it. Sometimes I can even help myself see beyond gloom to understanding and from there to acceptance. Psychoanalysis isn’t bad, just limited.
A woman client I’ll call Rose has come a long way in eleven years—from trauma, homelessness, poverty and serious depression to having her own small apartment and developing skills to get services. She is clever and valiant, once even faking suicide to get shelter from the cold. Her successes are notable, but Rose is not secure. Her life is spent managing calamity after calamity. No peace. Some days I feel as if I’m on a roller coaster with Rose's ups and downs, the pattern inevitably four steps forward and three and three quarters back.
Rose is better than I am at accepting her state. She summons enough daily energy to fight against systems that entrap her and others like her. She keeps going as if her life depended on the struggle. It does.
Rose has picked a name for herself, a name she will take on fully when she is completely well on her own in a home of her own. I dream that too. Rose has some friends but her family has deserted her except for a few cards and a little money from time to time sent through my office. It’s Rose’s most agonizing pain.
Psychology offers a million diagnoses and few positive prognoses for someone like Rose. But I am a pastoral counselor, a priest. I have another training track besides psychology, another passion. I hold out hope that the Spirit is at work in this process, not just me and Rose.
One day a small package arrived at my office for Rose. I gave it to her. After our session I asked her to open it. I was curious. It was from her younger brother, the boy she’d tried to protect from abuse when they were children. Rose made up many stories, happiness fantasies to tell her little brother. She gave him warmth and as much love as she could muster. She hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. What was in the package, so well secured with layers of tape?
Inside was a beautiful silk scarf in the earth colors Rose loves. Astonished, Rose pulled it up out of the box and stroked it. She put it on, modeled it while I admired.
As Rose was leaving she handed me the package wrapping to throw away. I looked at it. Sure enough it was her brother’s name and address. “What’s this?” I asked.
Rose looked. “Valey.” she said. Valey was written near the address in red with a heart shape for the V. “It’s Valey. See? He hasn’t forgotten me.”
Rose looked up. Crying. It’s the first time I’ve seen Rose cry.
(The next week I found out that Valey had been the hero of one of Rose’s little tales. Valey came on Valentine’s Day. He wasn’t as fast as the Easter Bunny but he got around well enough by hopping on his little point.)
A woman client I’ll call Rose has come a long way in eleven years—from trauma, homelessness, poverty and serious depression to having her own small apartment and developing skills to get services. She is clever and valiant, once even faking suicide to get shelter from the cold. Her successes are notable, but Rose is not secure. Her life is spent managing calamity after calamity. No peace. Some days I feel as if I’m on a roller coaster with Rose's ups and downs, the pattern inevitably four steps forward and three and three quarters back.
Rose is better than I am at accepting her state. She summons enough daily energy to fight against systems that entrap her and others like her. She keeps going as if her life depended on the struggle. It does.
Rose has picked a name for herself, a name she will take on fully when she is completely well on her own in a home of her own. I dream that too. Rose has some friends but her family has deserted her except for a few cards and a little money from time to time sent through my office. It’s Rose’s most agonizing pain.
Psychology offers a million diagnoses and few positive prognoses for someone like Rose. But I am a pastoral counselor, a priest. I have another training track besides psychology, another passion. I hold out hope that the Spirit is at work in this process, not just me and Rose.
One day a small package arrived at my office for Rose. I gave it to her. After our session I asked her to open it. I was curious. It was from her younger brother, the boy she’d tried to protect from abuse when they were children. Rose made up many stories, happiness fantasies to tell her little brother. She gave him warmth and as much love as she could muster. She hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. What was in the package, so well secured with layers of tape?
Inside was a beautiful silk scarf in the earth colors Rose loves. Astonished, Rose pulled it up out of the box and stroked it. She put it on, modeled it while I admired.
As Rose was leaving she handed me the package wrapping to throw away. I looked at it. Sure enough it was her brother’s name and address. “What’s this?” I asked.
Rose looked. “Valey.” she said. Valey was written near the address in red with a heart shape for the V. “It’s Valey. See? He hasn’t forgotten me.”
Rose looked up. Crying. It’s the first time I’ve seen Rose cry.
(The next week I found out that Valey had been the hero of one of Rose’s little tales. Valey came on Valentine’s Day. He wasn’t as fast as the Easter Bunny but he got around well enough by hopping on his little point.)
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Cartesian Musings
René Descartes (1596-1650) is famous for his one-liner, “I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.
Volumes have been written on the Cartesian formula. The distinguished theologian William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942), the author of Nature,Man and God, and a scholar/philosopher in his own right, disputed Descartes’s idea as putting the cart before the horse.
“I exist” according to Cartesian thought is an absolute and irrefutable truth. (No wonder Jesus didn’t answer his accuser Pilate’s question, ‘What is truth?’) Existence lies beyond doubt because in order to doubt you have to think you’re doubting and to think that, you must exist. Oddly, Descartes thought God beyond doubt as well as his own existence.
Now, shall I go on? No, I shall have mercy—also admit I can’t do justice to Descartes, Temple, Jesus and some days even myself.
Having just seen the movie Doubt, however, I have no doubt that one can have doubt without a single thought to it.
I think a lot. My totem, or spirit animal, is an owl. All owls think a lot. Unlike Descartes I don’t favor thought over sensation or feelings. I tried to run my life from the neck up for years and couldn’t think myself in or out of my wounded body. I needed my feelings to help me come alive. And I needed biblical theology to remind me that I am therefore I think. (But I hope too that I began as a loving thought in my parents’ minds and bodies before I became an I am.)
The biblical Moses, on his way to confront Pharaoh and persuade him to let the people of Israel go free, asked, “Whom shall I say sent me?” The answer slides like honey off the tip of the divine tongue, “Just tell ‘em I Am sent you.”
I’m in an exercise group. We are all there for cardiac or pulmonary conditions, and we all are supposed to be exercising to stay healthy. While we stroll, puff or jog on treadmills, bikes, rowing machines and more, some of us have enough breath to talk, to philosophize even.
The hero of exercised thought is a small intelligent loquacious man named Bud. He has more knowledge at the tip of his tongue than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s our resident scholar. To Decartes Bud says with a twinkle in his eye, “I think I think, therefore I think I am.” That’s just before he launches into an exposé on the latest political fracas in city hall.
I’m always tempted to see if I can get the last word with Bud. Once I did, or at least I thought I did, because I left while Bud was still thinking up a comeback. We laughed. We laugh, therefore we are.
When I pray I kneel before an invisible Lover. I am, think, feel, and keep silent all at once. I pray therefore I am.
What say you out there in blogger land? Do you think? Are you am?
Volumes have been written on the Cartesian formula. The distinguished theologian William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942), the author of Nature,Man and God, and a scholar/philosopher in his own right, disputed Descartes’s idea as putting the cart before the horse.
“I exist” according to Cartesian thought is an absolute and irrefutable truth. (No wonder Jesus didn’t answer his accuser Pilate’s question, ‘What is truth?’) Existence lies beyond doubt because in order to doubt you have to think you’re doubting and to think that, you must exist. Oddly, Descartes thought God beyond doubt as well as his own existence.
Now, shall I go on? No, I shall have mercy—also admit I can’t do justice to Descartes, Temple, Jesus and some days even myself.
Having just seen the movie Doubt, however, I have no doubt that one can have doubt without a single thought to it.
I think a lot. My totem, or spirit animal, is an owl. All owls think a lot. Unlike Descartes I don’t favor thought over sensation or feelings. I tried to run my life from the neck up for years and couldn’t think myself in or out of my wounded body. I needed my feelings to help me come alive. And I needed biblical theology to remind me that I am therefore I think. (But I hope too that I began as a loving thought in my parents’ minds and bodies before I became an I am.)
The biblical Moses, on his way to confront Pharaoh and persuade him to let the people of Israel go free, asked, “Whom shall I say sent me?” The answer slides like honey off the tip of the divine tongue, “Just tell ‘em I Am sent you.”
I’m in an exercise group. We are all there for cardiac or pulmonary conditions, and we all are supposed to be exercising to stay healthy. While we stroll, puff or jog on treadmills, bikes, rowing machines and more, some of us have enough breath to talk, to philosophize even.
The hero of exercised thought is a small intelligent loquacious man named Bud. He has more knowledge at the tip of his tongue than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s our resident scholar. To Decartes Bud says with a twinkle in his eye, “I think I think, therefore I think I am.” That’s just before he launches into an exposé on the latest political fracas in city hall.
I’m always tempted to see if I can get the last word with Bud. Once I did, or at least I thought I did, because I left while Bud was still thinking up a comeback. We laughed. We laugh, therefore we are.
When I pray I kneel before an invisible Lover. I am, think, feel, and keep silent all at once. I pray therefore I am.
What say you out there in blogger land? Do you think? Are you am?
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Ashes to Ashes
A friend forwarded to me a comment about this blog made by a Hospice chaplain in Connecticut. It reads:
This comment comes to me at just the right time.
It’s Ash Wednesday for Christians, the beginning of the reflective season we call Lent. On Ashes day priests smear foreheads and their own with ashes and say, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” The ashes remind us of our mortality, our dependency on Godde and on other people for our well-being. Humility is being right-sized—not too big or too small. That's what ashes tell us.
Some adults fear that children will fall into panic, start to fear death. Not so. In our parish, kids gather each year for their own time with ashes. They are curious. They want to touch the ashes. They love to know that the ashes are what’s left from the burning of last year’s Palm Sunday palms, the fresh green fronds they snapped and brandished as "swords" or curled up and folded into little palm crosses. I’ve heard statements like, “That’s just what Grampa looked like after he died.” They giggle and it isn’t nervous laughter but rather an oddly joyous explosion of mirth at the very thought of such a reduction: the six-foot plus old man with the ample lap who loved to tell them funny stories is reduced to the size of a small box.
When my father died and his ashes were brought to the church for burial my own children and their cousins wanted to see. They gathered around, peered in jockeying for position. They poked fingers into the blackish-gray softness and wiped it off on a shirt sleeve, their own or someone else’s. “That’s Big G? Wow!” Eyes brightened as they began to remember and talk about their grandfather in life.
That’s the point isn’t it?
I’ve been feeling glum and ash-ish about trying to get my memoir published. Will it die? Is it worth it? Can I afford to self-publish if it comes to that? All my precious, to me, memories are but ashes in the end. Who cares? (I'm not humble; I'm getting too small as if I could fit in the little box.)
Then I click on the email from my friend and read the chaplain's encouraging words. I don't press delete.
“I will read that blog in the future as there is richness in her writings."
This comment comes to me at just the right time.
It’s Ash Wednesday for Christians, the beginning of the reflective season we call Lent. On Ashes day priests smear foreheads and their own with ashes and say, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” The ashes remind us of our mortality, our dependency on Godde and on other people for our well-being. Humility is being right-sized—not too big or too small. That's what ashes tell us.
Some adults fear that children will fall into panic, start to fear death. Not so. In our parish, kids gather each year for their own time with ashes. They are curious. They want to touch the ashes. They love to know that the ashes are what’s left from the burning of last year’s Palm Sunday palms, the fresh green fronds they snapped and brandished as "swords" or curled up and folded into little palm crosses. I’ve heard statements like, “That’s just what Grampa looked like after he died.” They giggle and it isn’t nervous laughter but rather an oddly joyous explosion of mirth at the very thought of such a reduction: the six-foot plus old man with the ample lap who loved to tell them funny stories is reduced to the size of a small box.
When my father died and his ashes were brought to the church for burial my own children and their cousins wanted to see. They gathered around, peered in jockeying for position. They poked fingers into the blackish-gray softness and wiped it off on a shirt sleeve, their own or someone else’s. “That’s Big G? Wow!” Eyes brightened as they began to remember and talk about their grandfather in life.
That’s the point isn’t it?
I’ve been feeling glum and ash-ish about trying to get my memoir published. Will it die? Is it worth it? Can I afford to self-publish if it comes to that? All my precious, to me, memories are but ashes in the end. Who cares? (I'm not humble; I'm getting too small as if I could fit in the little box.)
Then I click on the email from my friend and read the chaplain's encouraging words. I don't press delete.
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