Third Question

My answers to No. 2:

Colors ~ Those of the sea and sky.

Cities ~ The first thing I think of when I see these names together is art: visual ~ including architecture, musical, theater.  And lots and lots of people from just about everywhere there to soak it all up.

Landscapes ~ What I see that they have in common is that they are all edges, borders, places where different terrains or terrain and water merge into something new. Even canyons, formed as they are by water and rock, are created by the encounter of two distinct ingredients.

Interiors ~ With some exceptions, these are all places that blend inside and out: books and views.  The Wernersville library is more about cozy reading spots and stacks of books, and the "treehouse" was an octagonal room high in the trees at the edge of a deck with windows all around but no books at the moment ~ although if it were my personal treehouse it would be filled with books.  My grandmother's living room had two walls with books and looked out on gardens and birdfeeders and hills and fields.  Our condo last Christmas ended up wth books all over the place because we were there, and looked out over the Gulf of Mexico.  And I've never forgotten the living room of the folks whose children I cared for during two high school summers on Cape Cod, which opened onto a porch on three sides and from the porch to the water on one, and looked up to a second floor loft that served as the hallway for the bedrooms on three sides.  A cozy room for reading and listening to music, but wide open to the sea and sky.

Attire ~ I looked at my list and realized that these were all clothing items for the out-of-doors.  Even the sundress is for an afternoon of relaxed reading in an Adirondack chair or an evening meal al fresco.  I see that I did not include a single item that I would consider "professional" wear.  And I had to add a sixth, because I always wear earrings.

Third Question:  What do you consider to be the big question or conundrum of your life?

I should probably warn you at this point that there is absolutely nothing behind these questions other than my own imagination.  I dreamed them up a couple of days ago when I was trying to work something out for myself, and they produced what seemed to me an intriguing insight.

You might just find them fun.  I'm going back to look at all of your answers again.

Blogging Break

Despite having had a major experience of God's consolation over the past several days, my everyday life is one of deep discouragement.  It's filled with frustrations: the lack of employment means that much around the house that we had to neglect during my seminary years remains undone; the profusion of rain and cold means that the yard looks as if no one has lived here in a decade; my double vision means that almost everything I attempt takes twice as long as it should and that I have to depend entirely on others for transportation.

The hardest thing is the empty hole where the call process should be. RevGals today optimistically and joyfully  addresses the process for those just graduating from seminary.  It's been a year since I graduated, six months since I was certified ready to receive a call, and . . .  nada.  I remember how incredibly excited I was about the future on both of those occasions, but now I find myself baffled and bewildered.  I'm not alone; my best friend from seminary,  a remarkably gifted and accomplished woman, remains call-less, and I keep hearing stories of folks two and three years out, still hoping.  There is one church possibility at the moment for which I am both optimistic and enthusiastic, but possibility remains the key word there.

It's not as if I have nothing to do.  In fact, I have begun to receive enough invitations for spiritual direction, retreat work,  teaching, and community work that I am even more uncertain:  How is it that my own church can't come up with work for me, when other people and organizations and institutions seem interested in my contributions? and:  Am I being called into something else entirely? 

Among the many non-pastor items on my plate are a couple of writing projects which may turn into something.  And so I'm going to step back from blogging for awhile and head down that path with as much focus and discipline as I can muster.  I'll still be reading, and I have book reviews to post, but I'm going to start limiting my online time , dramatically, effective . . . NOW.

Image: Path through Atsena Otie, a tiny island off Cedar Key, Florida

Lenten Break

"We are built for contemplation."

~ Martin Laird, OSA
Into the Silent Land

 

Image: Cedar Key FL

Cedar Key: Merger of Sea and Sky

Yes, the subject is the same as that in my blog header, but that image was taken at sunrise, and this one late on the previous afternoon.  

I love that the horizon is invisible.

You could swim into the water or into the sky.

I've been looking at my calendar, and the coming week is going to make an astonishing number of demands upon my time and energy.

And so I leave you for a few days with this view of the horizonless Cedar Key horizon.

Atsena Otie ~ New Year's Eve

I love islands.  Perhaps everyone loves islands.  I particularly love remote islands, islands mostly devoid of human presence.

I don't mind if people sail or kayak by.

This horseshoe crab shell was the size of my palm, shed and left behind by its growing owner.

Atsena Otie means Cedar Island in one of the tribal languages of what today is Florida.  (Internet sources suggest several possibilities.).  The very small island is a short distance from Cedar Key.  For a time in the 19th century it was home to a pencil factory and a small community of year-round residents.

Here's a view of the Cedar Key waterfront from the beach on Atsena Otie..  The Lovely Daughter's first canoe trip ever was the one made from Cedar Key to Atsena Otie and back when she was two and her brothers were five.

Mapless Frontier

Atsena Otie Trail

New Year's Eve 2o10

This is not
any map you know.
Forget longitude.
Forget latitude.
Do not think
of distances
or of plotting
the most direct route.
Astrolabe, sextant, compass:
these will not help you here.

~ Jan Richardson, "Where the Map Begins"

Read the entire poem and see the artwork here.

It's been 28 months since I had any sense of recognizing the map.   It seems to me that this year, with Frontier as the word, is well begun with the first stanza of this poem.  A frontier may not be synonymous with a wilderness, but it does not seem to be mapped with any more clarity.

Atsena Otie is a very small island off Cedar Key.

New Year's Eve (Friday Five)

Singing Owl posts the following at RevGals:

<I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions, but it does seem a good time for some reflection and planning. For the last few days I keep thinking of Psalm 90:12: So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Among other things, that seems to say that reflection is in order if we want to learn and grow.

For some of us, this has been an incredibly difficult year; for others it has been a year of many joys. For all of us, there have been challenges and questions and there have been blessings and--maybe even an answer or two! As we say our goodbyes to 2010 and look towards 2011, share with us five blessings from 2010 along with five hopes or dreams for 2011.>>

From 2010:

1.  My seminary BFF, whose joyful expression of her gifts is a wonder to behold, and without whom I would not have made it through the second two sad and agonizing years of a program to which I had looked forward with such anticipation.  She is re-taking ords in a couple of weeks, so prayers are in order.

2.  The professor who struggled to get me through an impossible independent study (Freedom and Grace?  WHAT was I thinking?); taught a couple of courses that have had a huge impact on my thinking about the church, about theology, about Scripture, and about experience; and continues to challenge and assist me in articulating the impact of my son's death for call committees.  (Are you out there, call committees?)

3.  The fact that each of my two surviving children, two years after their brother's death, have made successful forays into graduate programs and seem to be thriving in them. Their health, their energy, their hopefulness.  Their alive-ness.  Their very lives.

4.  The compassion and wisdom of the three Jesuits who spent time,  in different contexts, helping me sort through the wreckage of grief and accompanying me toward what I now see as the frontier of the life I could never have expected.

5.  My week on retreat at Wernersville and our week right now on Cedar Key: times of sunlight and prayer and restoration and re-orientation.

 Great Egret, Cedar Key FL

6.  (Five is not quite enough) The amazing friends, online and in person and both, who have shared their own life horrors and struggles and listened to mine, who have shared their thoughts and their books and their writing and their own movements forward and backward and around, so that all over the place little pools of community have grown, reflecting hope and determination.

7. The astonishing gift of a multitude of opportunities to minister, in churches and in spiritual direction, and the welcoming hospitality of so many people whom I've had the privilege of serving, when I had thought that I was completely washed up, finished, and done for.

It seems that there have been a lot more than five blessings in this year that has been so impossibly difficult.  Who knew?

Five hopes or dreams for 2011:

1. That my children and husband will continue to move forward in their own lives, integrating loss and hope and finding paths toward the future.

2.  That a call to ordained ministry is percolating out there somewhere.

3.  That another week at Wernersville is waiting for me.

4.  That I will figure out what to do with the stack of writing on suicide and loss and spirituality that has been piling up and for which a vision is beginning to form.

5.  That all of us for whom loss is so omnipresent will begin or continue to find hope.

Two years ago I could not stand to listen to music.  Really, you cannot imagine what it means to me to write about hope as if it is a real thing in my own life.

Thanks, Singing Owl, for this nudge.

Day is Done on Cedar Key (Tonight)

Walking and Reading and Ruminating

We are passionate about adult education in my home church.  It's no big secret that most Christians in the United States, of whatever stripe, possess about a fifth grade understanding of the Bible, and less of one when it comes to theology and other religions of the world.  In fact, in our Bible study courses last fall, it became clear that many adults lack a grasp of basic world history and are therefore unable to place the Biblical narrative in context.  But we are, as a congregation, very interested in remedying that situation, for ourselves and for our church community, and we work hard at it.

A couple of days ago, immersed in my cold weather reading, I came across a column by David Brooks on adult education which I immediately sent to one of our pastors.  She responded that she'd already received it from the current chair of our education ministry (my successor and yes, QG, another lawyer!) and that, like me, she thought it affirming of what we try to do.  Take a look:

". . . This [Erica] Brown woman was leading Torah study groups and teaching adult education classes in Jewish thought, and was somehow inspiring Justin Bieber-like enthusiasm. Eventually, I went to her Web site to figure out what all the fuss was about. 

. . . 

Then I invited her to coffee, and it all became clear. Brown has what many people are looking for these days. In the first place, she has conviction. For her, Judaism isn’t a punch line or a source of neuroticism; it’s a path to self-confident and superior living. She didn’t seem hostile to the things that make up most coffee-table chatter — status, celebrity, policy, pop culture — she just didn’t show much interest. As one of her students e-mailed me: “Erica embodies Judaism’s stand against idol worship. It is actually true that she worships nothing other than God, which is particularly unusual in Washington.” 

 . . . 

In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes-or-no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.

Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”

. . . 

She writes about the fear adults bring into the classroom: the fear of looking stupid; the fear of confessing how little they know about their religion; the fear teachers have of being unmasked in front of students. With prodding and love, she tries to exploit those fears and turn them into moments of insufficiency and learning. 

Her classes are dialogues structured by ancient texts. She may begin with a topic: “When Jews Do Bad Things” or “Boredom Is So Interesting.” She will present a biblical text or a Talmudic teaching, and mix it with modern quotations. She may ask students to write down some initial reflections, then try to foment a fierce discussion. 

. . . 

All of this sounds hard, but Brown thinks as much about her students as her subject matter. “You can’t be Jewish alone” she told me. So learning is a way to create communities and relationships. 

I concluded that Brown’s impact stems from her ability to undermine the egos of the successful at the same time that she lovingly helps them build better lives. She offers a path out of the tyranny of the perpetually open mind by presenting authoritative traditions and teachings. Most educational institutions emphasize individual advancement. Brown nurtures the community and the group. 

It’s interesting that her work happens in the world of adult education. Americans obsess about K-12 education. The country has plenty of religious institutions. But adult education is an orphan, an amorphous space in-between. This is a shame, but it also gives Brown the space to develop her method.

This nation is probably full of people who’d be great adult educators, but there are few avenues to bring those teachers into contact with mature and hungry minds. Now you hear about such people by word of mouth."

Or, I might add, on blogs.  Read the whole piece here.

Ready for another image of Cedar Key?

I've finished reading a novel (see tab above), and drafted the basic outline of a syllabus for next semester and of two sermons for January.  I was able to do five miles of walking yesterday, and I'm doing a lot of stretching, and finding a lot of quiet time.

And best of all, I glanced up from my writing this morning to see about ten great egrets fly over our deck.  Look at this one and imagine ten!

I wish that I had one of those massive telescopic camera lenses.  I leave you with a more pedestrian (pun intended, I suppose) view:

Birds So Far (Updated 010111)

In no particular order, in St. Augustine and/or Cedar Key:

Laughing gulls

Ring-billed gulls

Bonaparte's gulls

Herring gulls

Ruddy turnstones

Dunlin

Sanderlings
Semi-palmated plover 

Brown pelicans

Kingfishers

Boat-tailed grackles

Yellow-crowned kinglets

Palm warblers

Yellow-rumped warblers

Scaup

Great blue herons

Great egrets

Little blue herons

Snowy egrets

Magnificent frigatebird !!!!!!!!!!

Turkey vultures

Double-crested cormorants 

Brown-headed cowbirds

Phoebes
Willet 
Red-bellied woodpeckers
Mockingbirds
Oystercatchers
White ibis
Kingfishers
Hooded mergansers
Red-tailed hawk
Red-shouldered hawk
Glossy ibis
Scrub jays
Spotted sandpiper
Ring-necked ducks
Red-breasted mergansers
Common loons - New Year's Eve surprise!
Black-bellied plover 
Reddish egret - New Year's Day surprise!
Royal tern
Marsh wren

In pursuit of:

White pelicans ~ On Wednesday, a platoon of 20 or so flew overhead!

Osprey

Eagles - 12//31.10

Yellow-crowned night herons

Storks

Tri-colored herons - 1/1/11 (Stratoz!)

Sunset Sunrise

We're in Cedar Key, Florida ~ a small Gulf island pretty far north, at about the same latitude as Gainesville .  Record cold weather, they say ~ although I noticed in the condo guest book last night that folks here in late December and early January during the past two years had remarked upon the unusual cold -- 40s in the daytime and 20s at night.  I would say that three years in a row equals standard rather than unusual!

As a consequence of the cold, there is no kayaking, no hot tub, hardly even any walking.  (Maybe later today.)  And I am therefore doing a lot of reading, and writing, for myself, and for the class I'll be teaching next term, and for the two churches for whom I'll be preaching through January, and for my own imagined future.   I expect some of that writing will make its way to this blog, along with some completely unrelated photos.

To start with, last night's sunset:

I've decided to try and keep track of the books I'm reading, for whatever purpose, and I've added a tab for a page in which to do that.  But once in awhile, I might paste what I've written into my blog.  Or who knows, maybe more often than once in awhile.  For starters:

12/24/10 - Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.  

I'm teaching this book next semester, and so I read it in the car on the way down to Florida.  It's a book which I encountered for the first time as a high school senior, in my senior elective religion course entitled Church and Society.  (No doubt today it would be called something like Religion and Society.)  

I was stunned, as I re-read it, to realize what a profound influence that little book has had on my life, in its insistence that even when all else is taken from us, we retain the freedom to choose our response to our circumstances.   Dignity and responsibility, for instance, over hysteria and selfishness. 

"Really?" asked The Lovely Daughter over Christmas Dinner.  "You would trace that conviction back to a book you read when you were seventeen?"  

 "Absolutely,"  I responded.  "It was a fresh and compelling idea to me when I was so young, and I think that it has grounded much of my thinking about life since."  

The students whom I will be teaching are college freshmen, about the same age that I was during that long ago course ~ I wonder whether it will leave the same imprint upon any of them.

Ready for another image?  This is what I saw this morning, from the warmth of inside.  It was 19 degrees outside!

And finally, here's something I picked up yesterday at The Episcopal Cafe, pertinent (I hope!) to my future:

Bruce Epperly, in this week's missive from the Alban Institute says:

New pastors are most successful in the transition from seminary to their first congregation when they expect and accept imperfection as an essential ingredient in the art of ministry. While some congregations are clearly dysfunctional and may even fall into the category of clergy killers, most congregations are healthy enough to provide adequate support, challenge, and acceptance for pastors embarking on their first call. 

A good pastor needs to join appropriate boundaries with curiosity about the human condition. In Tending to the Holy, Kate Epperly and I noted that, in the spirit of North African monastics, the pastor should be "all eye" and "all sense" as she observes the physical, spiritual, and emotional environment that surrounds her. This curiosity and awareness is essential for good ministry as well.

One of my favorite detective shows is Columbo. In that series, the cagey Columbo appears to be clueless as he fumbles his way through murder investigations. He solves cases, so it appears, only by accident and good luck. While pastors may not wish to be viewed by their congregants as the dumbest person in the room, pastors as observers, spiritual ethnographers, and keepers of secrets always know more than they can tell. To keep confidentiality and promote healing within the congregation, pastors often have to play dumb in situations in which they know more than they can let on.

New pastors enter a multidimensional, nuanced, and confusing world when they begin their first call. Things are not always as they seem. They may intuit certain unspoken communal understandings, past experiences of misconduct and betrayal, feuds and alliances, and secrets that "everybody knows about." Successful pastors take time to listen well to the spoken and unspoken messages of their congregants in order to discern how best to minister. Observation enables pastors not only to be healers but also to avoid issues of triangulation and unintentional offense. Careful observation also forces pastors to listen before they speak and to speak to the real, rather than assumed, situations in their congregation's life.

So . . .  I have plenty to photograph, to read, and to think about.  

I did think, though, that I would be kayaking!