Patience

Over at Abbey of the Arts, the annual search for a word for the coming year is on.

Last year, I eagerly reached for the word frontier.  And then, sucked into the quicksand of the Presbyterian ordination process, I forgot all about it.

In retrospect, nevertheless, this past year was one of frontiers for me:

Preaching in all kinds of churches.

Interfaith work.

Invitations to make presentations on parental grief for nursing students and on discernment for pastors.

A graduation speech for brand-new spiritual directors and their guests.

A call to ministry.

Breast cancer.

Ordination.

All pretty much frontiers for me.

And all leading me to my word for 2012:

Patience.

It's not nearly as sexy a word as frontier.

At first I toyed with some words that promised more drama.  Words like generosity and magnanimity and creativity.  And maybe 2013 will be the year for one of them.  But even to wander in their vicinity requires a foundational year in patience.

Patience with my body, with its slow processes of healing ~ physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ~ and the reality that in some ways it will never be close to what it was six weeks ago.

Patience with the reality of my work and the hours of driving it requires ~ hours that can be used for listening to books and presentations and for prayer, if I am gentle with myself rather than hurried and irritated and frustrated.

Patience with my new congregation, which as a whole has an experience of church and a view of the world much different from mine ~ working on what I have to learn rather than on what I have to teach.

Patience with technology ~ figuring out what will really work for me and making the effort to learn it.  This includes things like laptops and ipads and kindles and  cameras and all the associated software.

Patience with the people I love and like best ~ my affection for them does not make them me, or mind-readers of me.

Patience with how long things take ~ I am not required to do five things at once at breakneck speed.

Patience with grief, and with how it changes.

It seems that there is rather a lot to patience.

Now that I think of it, it might be way too big a project for me.

Or it might be a synonym for gratitude.

It might be a frontier all of its own.

Image: Presque Isle (PA), 2011

Seven Things for Seven Years

1 ~ A little while ago, I was reminded by Martha's post about seven years of blogging that, as of about today, it has been seven years for me as well.  That means that when I started blogging, my boys were 19-year-old freshmen at Ohio State and the University of Chicago and the Lovely Daughter was a 16-year-old high school junior, doing a lot of choral music and theatre tech.  I was teaching high school English and History to Orthodox Jewish kids, was very involved in my church, and was busy with lots of friends.  My grandmother was turning 98  and would live for nearly three more years.  Josh for five. Usually at the end of March we would have been in St. Augustine, but that would have been the year that we pushed our trip to June, since for the first time ever, the kids' spring breaks did not mesh.  I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall: Things Change.  Everything Changes.

2 ~ I got a unintended blogging present today: a lovely, lovely book from an online friend. Review coming eventually.

3 ~ I started thinking about that plan I had back in December for frontier to be my word for 2011.  Haven't done so well with that.  Haven't done anything at all.  I started thinking about it because I had a brief conversation with the young man who inspired the homily that inspired me.  It seems that I am going to live.  That being the case, I need to start thinking about who I want to be.

4 ~ This past week, someone who is deep into grief asked me about trust in God.  And so I asked someone else who might know a good deal more about that than I do.  And he wrote, in part, "Trust is a handing over of the quest for certitude into the contemplative rest of waiting with love for God to reveal the meaning of being a creature for whom God sent his only Son as companion on the quest and an exemplar of holy waiting . . .  the willingness to hand over your future to Love." 

5 ~ I would like to be that person, I think.   That person who could hand over her future to Love.  It's harder than you might think.

6 ~ Of Gods and Men won't be here for another three weeks.

7 ~ There's a lot of snow out there.

Words (Friday Five)

Jan at RevGals offers the following:

There is a dramatic and surprising venue for Spiritual Formation/Sunday School classes at my church: Each week a different person teaches about a "word" that expresses his/her passion or interest. The first week someone spoke about "hospitality" with abundant treats on her mother and grandmother's china arrayed on tables. Other words have been "connectivity," "Trinity," "money," and "dreams." No one knows which person will be teaching until the class convenes. I am teaching this Sunday and plan to talk about "stirrings."

For this Friday Five, please list five words that identify your passions, spirituality, and/or life. Describe as much or as little as you wish.

**********

In no particular order:

Images.

Desert Wilderness Tsunami  (So, pretend they're one word.)

Companionship.

Silence.

Frontier.

Maybe I'll do some writing about these this week.  In the meantime, an image:

Wernersville Jesuit Retreat Center (PA) ~ October 2010

All At Once

Within about the same half hour tonight, moving back and forth from one thing to another:

Final preparation for Sunday morning preaching: one last read-through of sermon and a new layer of sparkly nail polish (because that's what the old layer is);

Reading through the humorous comments on RevGals as other preachers pull things together for tomorrow;

Reading through comments in a place where four of us are discussing the last moments of our children's lives;

Wondering: This is it, really?  This is my life?  This is the frontier ? This blend of "Come and see" and those excruciating images? (It seems that it is.)

And pondering this, from Joe:

"How, finally, does our own experience of loss and separation prepare us to meet the Risen Lord?"

AMDG, indeed. 

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.

A Word for the New Year: Frontier

Some days ago, Christine over at Abbey of the Arts suggested that we adopt the ancient spiritual practice of seeking a word as a source of life for the next year.    It's Advent, which marks the beginning of the new year for me, and so I immediately responded with what I thought would be my word: confluence.  

It seemed to me that the wriggly tributaries of my life were beginning to merge into what might be a varied and surprising whole: seminary and ordination exams complete, and call process approved and underway; a little bit of a spiritual direction practice coming to life; the opportunity to teach a college religion class during the spring semester; the waves of terrible grief that had overwhelmed me for months beginning to soften into gentle swells that roll gently in, over, and around my life so that it has become possible to accompany and care for others, and to organize and teach and preach, within this context of unfathomable loss.

And so the word confluence made some sense to me.  I thought of the merging Willamette and Columbia Rivers, over which I have flown en route to visit The Lovely Daughter in college in Oregon.  I thought of the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, which I have observed from a ledge on a hike high above Harpers Ferry, West Virgina.  And later I thought about Pittsburgh, where I attended seminary, and the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny Rivers. Perhaps the recent geographic confluences in my life might serve as a model for the year ahead.

And yet, I was a little dissatisfied with that word, and couldn't seem to get around to writing about it.

Yesterday, as I said below, I spent some time visiting with First Spiritual Director, in town for the holidays, and he mentioned a homily he'd preached at a celebratory mass for a young man who's facing down a major life challenge.  He said that in his homily he'd talked about the gospel as frontier rather than boundary, as an invitation to the liberty to explore and discover rather than as a series of border checkpoints.

I hadn't even asked and there it was:

Frontier.  I have my word.

It isn't that I've felt trapped, but I have felt lost in the wilderness, as if I've been traipsing across an endless  windswept desert, hemmed in by boulders and mountains, unsure even of where to look, let alone walk.  Where were the hidden passes through the mountains; where were the shaded streams of running water?  

Now, after nearly twenty-eight months, I can look back and see where some of those markers stood, obscured by the blowing sands of grief and darkened by thunderclouds clouds of anguish.  

Most of them came in the form of people who opened their doors and their emails and their hearts.  Some came in the form of assignments: read this and write that.  Some in the form of professors and friends, who hung in there with me and refused to let me sink when the academic material became entirely personal, or who shared their own devastating losses.  Some in the form of invitations:  Will you preach next Sunday?  Will you teach a confirmation class?  Will you accompany me through the Exercises?  Some in the form of the courage of a husband and surviving children, stepping gingerly onto the shaky ground of the future.  Some in forms I'm sure I have yet to recognize.

And so here I am, for the new year, standing at the frontier of the good news ~ of exploration and discovery of all to which God might still be inviting me.

My son is still gone, and I still have to face the heartache of his death and his absence every day.  I don't see any of that changing. But somehow the capacity to integrate that terrible reality into a life of hopeful ministry is emerging, and the only possible word for it is: Frontier.

Image: Columbia River Gorge, May 2009