Sunday Stuff

~ Went to my home church today.  We were honoring graduates, so I got some nice hugs. 

~ The gospel text today is the story of the "sinful" woman in Luke who weeps and kisses Jesus' feet as she anoints them with oil and wipes them with her hair.  (During Lent, I preached on the version of this story that appears in John's gospel.) Four reasons why I love my church: (1) In her introductory remarks, one of our pastors made the point that whenever Jesus interacts with a woman, something significant is going on, and since this story of his interaction with a woman is told in in all four gospels, we are talking major significance.  (2) I can characterize her remarks as "introductory" because today the sermon was a congregational group discussion rather than a pastoral homily.  (3) One of the folks who spoke up said that she thinks that Jesus and this woman must have had a previous encounter, and always wonders about that back story.  (Great sermon topic there.)(Or discussion topic.)  (4)  Instead of the usual focus on forgiveness that this story generates, our emphasis this morning was on Jesus' extension of inclusion in community. All good stuff, all hallmarks of our church.

~ One of Josh's high school teachers and his wife have recently joined our church, and so I pulled him aside to talk to tell him about Josh.  As it turned out, he knew that Josh had died, but not how.  The strangest thing: after a conversation like that, I always think: OK, all done; he'll be back tonight.

~ I am trying to create an account so that I can sign up to re-take my Exegesis exam.  The length of confirmation time is not bolstering my confidence in the PC(USA) capability for online registration.

~ I am also trying to get my passport application finished.  I realized last week that I can't just dash up to Algonquin to scatter ashes because my passport is no longer valid.

~ My hair is much shorter and browner than it was at my graduation a week ago.

~ I am going to another graduation today, that of the Jewish school at which I once taught.  In fact, I taught all of the seniors who were there then in both 8th and 9th grade, so I know them well.   There will be some screeching.  "Ms. Craig!  Ms. Craig!  Are you a rabbi yet?!"  Well, no ~ there is this little matter of YOUR language . . .       .

~ My father is quite ill.  My family's dynamics are challenging at their best, but I will probably plunge into the middle of them later this week.

~ Another good thing about my church: our summer lay preachers series.  (How I got started in the pulpit!)  A friend sent me his first sermon draft ever a few hours ago.  I must be at a new place, if people are sending me drafts to critique.

~ My imaginary walk has gotten me to Nauset Beach.  Another scene of high school adventures.  I could never stand up on a surfboard, so maybe misadventures is the more appropriate term.

Graduation

Always both things at once: a bench in a cemetery in memory of my beloved son, and a baccalaureate service and graduation ceremony tonight and tomorrow night.

Seminary has been a very different experience from the one I had anticipated.  (Understatement there.)  Many, many years ago, when it was nothing more than a passing thought (or so I surmised) in my mind, I had lunch one day with a student in-process from my then-church.  He was in (or past!) mid-life, a hugely successful trial attorney; I was a mother of three young children.  "Academically, you won't have any trouble," he said.  "As an attorney, you're accustomed to digesting vast amounts of unfamiliar material."  (What can I say?  He's Methodist, and so Greek and Hebrew were not in the picture for him.)  "But at this time of life, there are other things . . . ".

Oh yeah.  There are.

Yesterday, someone from my school posted a FB comment for someone else: "I can promise you that nothing in life will ever be as difficult as that Greek paper you just finished for Dr. X."

I can't say that I exactly laughed.  And seriously, my hopes for the two of them go something like this:

As we planted flowers around the bench the other day, my friend, whose husband has been seriously ill and increasingly and almost completely disabled over the last sixteen years, told me of a conversation she had had with a friend when our kids were small and she was agonizing over where to send her son to preschool.  (Thankfully, she eventually chose the Montessori school in which my children were enrolled, setting the stage for our wonderful friendship of twenty years.)  Her friend, a Holocaust survivor, leaned over and said, "Sweetie . . . may this be the most difficult challenge of your life."

Well, I thought Greek was pretty awful when it was on my plate, and Hebrew wasn't much better.  But overall, my academic career has gone well.  I wish I could have been involved in the activities and events to which I had looked forward during my second and third year of seminary but, as I've said before, grief takes about 500% of your energy.  Whatever else you have to do gets squeezed into what's left.  So I squeezed in what I could, and fantastic professors and wonderful friendships came my way.  And while I wondered pretty much 24/7 what I could possibly have to offer in ministry, I don't think I ever wavered from the sense that it is the call to which God is beckoning me.  Even when God's silence was deafening.  Oh, I wobbled a lot.  I guess it's a good thing that I crossed all those creeks via unstable logs when I was growing up.  I wobbled a LOT, but  I didn't fall off.

Last night I got an email from someone at my field ed church, telling me how much it meant to have me there, knowing that as the year passed, I was experiencing the holidays as she was.  I had not known that she felt that way.  I figured that people just thought that . .  oh, who knows what they thought?  But at least one person was apparently seeing it more or less like this: "She knows exactly the sorrow I know, and she's leading the Call to Worship anyway." 

That's something. 

Perhaps that's why . . . 

I'm graduating!  (And yes, I'm going.)

!!!

(P.S. Three more miles  yesterday and three in the next couple of hours, for a total of 13.  I'm somewhere in the vicinity of Wellfleet now.)

From North Truro to Truro Beach

Another 3 miles this morning, and I really did imagine walking along this shore, as I was mostly in the gym,which is a good deal more boring.

So far: 7 miles.

From Provincetown to Truro

I'm planning on a lot of walking this summer, and 

to entertain myself, I'm taking

an imaginary trip across America.  

It looks to be about a five mile walk from the Provincetown dunes to Truro, and that's how far I walked today.

Long, long ago, a boyfriend and I spent the day hiking out across those dunes.  It was a very hot and wearying day.  I still remember the bikini I was wearing ~ which tells you that it was indeed eons ago!