Maundy Thursday 2007

Josh and I were away on a trip together, celebrating his college graduation.  In the early morning he slept in, something I almost never do when I'm at the beach:


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I started my Maundy Thursday by driving across the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge toward sunrise on the beach at Assateague, with Bach echoing in the car and birds beginning to awaken on the darkened marsh.

As the sun bubbled over the Atlantic, flocks of willet and sanderlings sparkled out along the edge of the foam, and the just-past-full moon hung above the inlet.

My drive back was marked by scores of shorebirds wheeling over the marsh, a posse of Sika deer stopping to stare, and a loon floating serenely in the early morning sunshine.

An awesome day on the calendar beginning with such fragile beauty on the coast.

Anticipating Wholeness (Sermon for Tonight's Healing Service)

Because sometimes you preach to yourself.  

The texts are Isaiah 40:1-11 and Revelation 21:1-7.

                                                                                                                                   

There are dozens, many dozens, of passages in the Bible to which one might turn in planning a service of wholeness, a service of healing.    Certainly there are countless stories in the Old Testament that remind us of God’s unswerving care for God’s people.  There are numerous psalms in which God’s goodness and compassion are proclaimed.  There is Jesus – Jesus at the center of each of the gospels, Jesus who walks through Galilee for three years, bringing with him the healing balm of touch, curing broken bodies and spirits alike, and the gentle words of a good shepherd: “Your sins are forgiven you.”  One could plan services for healing and wholeness for months, for years, and not run out of new Scriptural approaches.  

As I began to plan tonight’s service, I found my imagination wandering across three realms of thought.  First, I thought about the many struggles which people in our little church and in our community itself face: Struggles against illness and physical pain.  Interactions with a convoluted and confusing medical system.  Families broken by heartache and misunderstanding and divorce, and reconstituted in ways that present challenges of their own.   Death, often too soon and never really expected, and the grief and sadness and dislocations that follow.

Second, I thought about the most recent deaths in my own small areas of the world:  the young pastor, ED killed in the car accident in January, and our own JC, who has just died after a lengthy illness.  Both of them young women, gifted women, women whose family and friends mourn the loss of anticipated decades of their love and presence.  And I thought about something that E’s pastor shared at her funeral service, something from tonight’s passage from Isaiah that I’ll share with you in a few minutes.

And finally, I thought about some work I did toward the end of my seminary career, some research and reflection and writing on tonight’s passage from the Book of Revelation.  It’s a passage that has become significant to my personal understanding of the Christian journey and my personal faith convictions, and it’s a passage that does much to restore healing in situations in which it seems that the possibility for  wholeness is simply out of the question.   

Let’s start with the prophet Isaiah, who spoke 2,500 hundred years ago to a people in exile.  The Jewish people, God’s own chosen people, had been routed in a war with the ancient Babylonians.  In that time and place, a conquering nation took charge of its defeated opponents and disbursed them, sent them into exile.  The idea was to make it impossible for those who had been defeated to rise again.  Remove them from their leaders, their homeland, their familiar landmarks and practices.  Break apart all that creates and fosters community, and they will be too fractured and demoralized to re-group and retaliate.  They will be unable to rebuild their shattered lives; if they are driven from their homes, they will no longer be a problem.
 

These are the people to whom Isaiah speaks, a people in exile, a people sent to Babylon, far from home, far from all the was familiar and loved.  These are the people from which come the words of the first verse of Psalm 137: "By the waters of Babylon – there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion".

And isn’t that how we often feel: that as a  consequence  of loss or illness, brokenness or grief, we live as exiles, cut off from all that is familiar, all that we long for?   When we walk the halls of an unfamiliar hospital, do we not feel ourselves to be women and men in exile, far from home?  When our family has disintegrated, do we not want to sit down and weep when we remember what was?  The words of the prophet and the psalmist so often ring true for us.

And what do we want?  We want healing and wholeness, of course, but what do we mean by those words?  

We mean that we want to be restored, or we want our loved ones to be restored to us, just as we were or just as they were.  We want the kinds of miracles that Jesus performs: the blind see, the lame walk, the mentally ill gain clarity, the dead rise. We want healing and wholeness in terms which we understand.  And we want them right now.

But the Bible promises something different, something concealed in a cloud of mystery. The Bible offers us hope in a future we cannot see, and it offers us the strength to await its coming.

Listen to the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort, O comfort, my people,” he says. – This is something I learned from ED’s pastor.  He began to talk about this passage and, as he did, I realized, for the first time, just before he said it himself, what that word comfort means.  I don’t know why it had never dawned on me before, but in that moment it was as clear as new daylight.  The prefix com – we know that it means with.  And the word fort -- yes, you know what that means: it means strength.  Like forte, in music: strong and powerful. Like the common word we know, fort – a place of strength and power in defense. “Comfort my people” -- give my people strength.

We have watered that word, comfort, down.  We tend to think of comfort as something reassuring, something soft and relaxing.  Nothing wrong with that – nothing wrong with a comforting song, or a comfortable chair.  But that’s not where Isaiah stops.  Isaiah offers the promise of strength in exile, strength in dislocation.

Isaiah tells us that yes, things change --  we are like grass, and the grass withers and fades – but the word of God stands forever.  And what does God, through God’s word, do?  God stands firm and rearranges everything else.  Listen to this passage:

“Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”  God changes the topograhy!  God moves the very earth around.  The world as we know it will be transformed; the events and experiences that cause us so much pain – they will be changed.    And this is the news that comforts us; this is the news that gives us strength.

Can we see and understand such a thing here, in this world where, as Paul says, we see only through a glass darkly?

We cannot see and understand when we insist upon falling back on ourselves.

But when we begin to grasp that there is another vision for us, another hope for us, when we begin to peer into God’s hope-filled future, perhaps we see that even in our present travails, we are invited into am experience of wholeness and healing.  An experience in which we open our arms to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth.

The new heaven and the new earth that the writer of the Book of Revelation proclaims: the new heaven and new earth where “God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

What a promise this is!  When I worked through this passage in seminary, it became clear that this promise of a new heaven and new earth, of a new life for us, contains within in the promise that all that we know here and now or brokenness, of sadness, of pain -- all of that will be eradicated.  That God’s healing will be radical and complete – so complete that we will not even remember the things that today cause mourning and crying.  That the life our God envisions for us, a whole life, an embodied life, a healed life, is a life without the heartache of life as we know it today.

We may not evade the cancer or the surgery that await us.  We may not be able to alleviate confusion, bewilderment, grief.  Not at all.  Not by our own efforts, according to our own standards.

But God has ways that are not ours, and standards of measurement that are not ours.

Perhaps when we pray for healing and wholeness, we need to remember that while we pray, of course, for healing and wholeness as we understand those words, we are also praying to be receptive to God’s understanding of those words.

We pray, naturally and hopefully, because God has invited us to do so; we pray that a loved one recover from injury or illness, be made whole again, return to life as it was.  But within that prayer might be a deeper one: a prayer that someone be made whole in an unexpected way, perhaps by reaching out to others and accompanying them on a similar journey.

We pray for financial recovery in this time of economic downslide; we pray for energy and resources for caregivers, we pray that the grieving and hopeless be released from the emotions that trap and limit them.  But within those prayers might be deeper ones:  prayers for a return to God, prayers that those who are burdened turn to Jesus and his friendship, prayers for a deeper trust and confidence in the God who invites us into God’s fold, who gathers us like sheep in anticipation of the new heaven and the new earth, places in which all will be made whole.

And so, when you come forward to pray in a few minutes, breathe in deeply the presence of the God who longs to heal you and your loved ones, whose greatest desire is for human restoration and wholeness.  Breathe in deeply the presence and movement of the God whose ways are not our ways, and who may be strengthening us for journeys we would not choose, inviting us into places we do not want to go, and healing us in ways that we do not seek.  Open your hearts to the God who makes all things new, and place your prayerful confidence in the one whose word stands forever.

Thanks be to God.

The Musician

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.

~ R.S. Thomas

This poem first came my way via a Jesuit friend and spiritual director, who sent it to me during some of my darkest days.  (This morning it appears here.)  He's in town this week, celebrating the Triduum masses at the Carmelite monastery, and that's where I went last night.  

Note to self: The first year, I made it halfway through an Easter vigil service and left.  Resurrection seemed far too improbable, and real life in the face of that improbability was too painful to contemplate. Last year, doing my field education, I survived several services over the course of the week-end in a state of numbness.  No idea what I was doing there, until that note a few months later from another mother with a son lost to suicide, telling me that she was helped by the knowledge that my experience of the holidays over the course of the year paralleled hers.  Last night:  a homily on memory, reverence, and service.  I am, finally, open to all of them, and to the Love at their source.  It seems that perhaps God listens most intently to each of us when our music is that of anguish.

Gethsemane

He-Qi's Praying at Gethsemane

...Become aware that God has been expecting you for quite some time in the deepest dungeon of your rubbled-over heart. Become aware that he has been quietly listening for a long time whether you, after all the busy noise of your life, and all the idle talk that you called your illusion-free philosophy of life, or perhaps even your prayer during which you only talked to yourself, after all the despaired weeping and mute groaning about the need of your life, whether you finally could be silent before him and let him speak the word, the word that seemed only to be like a deadly silence to the earlier person who was you. You should feel that you are not falling at all when you give up the frantically violent interior anxiety about yourself and your life. You do not despair at all when you doubt yourself, your wisdom, your strength, your ability to help yourself to life and the freedom of happiness; rather, you are with him suddenly as a miracle that daily has to happen anew and never can become a routine. Suddenly you will experience that the petrifying visage of hopelessness is only God's rising in your soul, that the darkness of the world is nothing but God's radiance which has no shadow, that the apparent waylessness is only the immensity of God who does not need any ways because he is already there.

(Karl Rahner in The Need and the Blessing of Prayer; HT to Ryan Duns, SJ)

What I particularly love about He-Qi's painting, which a friend sent to me a few days ago and which I have made my screensaver for the week, is that everyone, including the disciples who are out cold, is in the light.

Miscellaneous Monday: Blood, Vision, Holy Week

Conversation with phlebotomist this morning:

"So, how did you get into this line of work?"

"Oh, I always wanted to draw blood!"

Raised eyebrows.

"Yes, it's what I always wanted to do.  I guess that sounds kind of weird."

"It sounds very weird."

"Well, when I was little I was sick a lot, and it seemed that no one knew how to do their jobs very well.  So I decided that I wanted to do one of those jobs and do it very well so that people weren't hurt."

Fifteen or so little vials later . . .

"You did well!  I'm so glad that you were able to turn the bad things from your childhood into something good for others."

"Oh, it wasn't so bad.  Well, actually, yes.  Yes, a lot of bad things happened."

"Thank you so much for what you learned from them."

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I am actually learning how to get along with double vision.  The human brain's capacity to compensate is astounding.  I can't type with both eyes open, but I can look at you from a small distance and figure out which one is really you and which one is the extra.

Maybe I 'll be able to drive eventually.  Not yet.  Gregarious Son took me to Target yesterday and people kept appearing out of nowhere. I have no peripheral vision.  Imagine if they were cars.  Well, no - don't.

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This deserves a post of its own: I discovered an amazing website yesterday.  The art ~ incredible.  If you like to pray with art, may I suggest spending some time with these paintings this week?  There's an accompanying liturgy, too, if you are more comfortable with words.

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It's interesting, isn't it ~ how much you see when you think you can't?

Spiritual Practice (Friday Five)

Mary Beth asks the questions today:

"My Sunday school class has hit the "pause" button on our study of First Corinthians and is spending Lent on Richard J. Foster's classic Celebration of Discipline. I have had this wonderful and very readable book on my shelf, along with the study guide for it, for years, but have never discussed it with a group.

Because there are only five Sundays in Lent, we are fairly galloping through the book, getting a quick introduction to the various disciplines. The church is also sponsoring a Lenten Centering Prayer group, allowing some of us to sample this discipline in community.

Following the image above, I like to think of the spiritual disciplines as vessels that prepare us to ride the wave of God's amazing love and presence in a new way.

For today's Friday Five, please share with us five spiritual practices or disciplines from your experience. They can be ones that you have tried and kept up with, tried and NOT kept up with, ones that you flirt with at various times, or even practices that you have tried and found are definitely NOT your cup of tea. Let us know what's worked for you...and not."

1. I listen to Pray as You Go on a fairly regular basis, usually more or less first thing in the morning.  Sometimes I listen closely and pray through it, sometimes I journal my reactions and responses as I listen, sometimes I do yoga while I listen.

2. I do a lot of writing as I explore my spiritual life.  I started journaling about my spiritual adventures (and lack thereof) seriously when I made the Spiritual Exercises five years ago and have kept that practice up, to the point were I have filled something like fifteen journals.  Plus a lot of my blogging reflects my spiritual life.

3. Photography is a spiritual practice for me much of the time. Even as I write more and preach more, I am increasingly interested in the visual reception and expression of faith.

4. Reading and listening are critical spiritual practices for me.  I am endlessly interested in what other people have to say about the spiritual life, whether explicitly or implicitly, in nonfiction books and periodicals, in novels and poetry,and in blogs and conversation.

5. This list so far says little about communal spiritual practice, which has been the most challenging arena for me since Josh died.  Three years ago, words like hospitality and worship in community would have been high in the list, but those are matters I am having to reconsider and reframe in light of my sense of vulnerability and fragility.  I am so changed on the inside that I am still working on how to be both genuinely and lovingly engaged and  appropriately reserved on the outside. 

And the all-encompassing spiritual practice for me, the one that can't possibly be reduced to a number on a list, is prayer.  I was thinking about this last night, about how much over the past fifteen years or so my life has tilted, ever so slowly, toward a constant engagement with prayer: formal prayer, intercessory prayer, communal prayer, solitary prayer, visual prayer but, most of all, an increasingly steady prayer of contemplative listening.  This one, I think, gets a post of its own in the next few days.

Lenten Break

"We are built for contemplation."

~ Martin Laird, OSA
Into the Silent Land

 

Image: Cedar Key FL

Imagine ( A Not-for-the-Faint-of-Heart Post)

This is what I read when I opened my computer a moment ago, after bathing the dog in warm water in an  indoor bathroom, after seeing The Lovely Daughter ~ safely home from Guatemala ~ off to work, after making myself some breakfast, using a blender and a microwave in our fully functional kitchen:

"JAY ALABASTER and TODD PITMAN, Associated Press Jay Alabaster And Todd Pitman, Associated Press – 3 mins ago

TAKAJO, Japan – A tide of bodies washed up along Japan's coastline, crematoriums were overwhelmed and rescue workers ran out of body bags as the nation faced the grim reality of a mounting humanitarian, economic and nuclear crisis Monday after a calamitous tsunami.

Millions of people were facing a fourth night without water, food or heating in near-freezing temperatures in the northeast devastated by an earthquake and the wave it spawned. . . .

A Japanese police official said 1,000 washed up bodies were found scattered Monday across the coastline of Miyagi prefecture. . . .

The discovery raised the official death toll to about 2,800, but the Miyagi police chief has said that more than 10,000 people are estimated to have died in his province alone, which has a population of 2.3 million.

In one town in a neighboring prefecture, the crematorium was unable to handle the crush of bodies being brought in for funerals."

I have spent time with the bodies of only two loved ones ~ my last stepmother, whom I was with when she died of cancer, and my son, whose body came home to us two days after he died. (I'm not counting my mother; I was with her in the car accident in which she died, but I have no memory at all of that event.)

I have never had to contend with more than maybe a few bodies in the course of a day, and all of them during CPE at Famous Giant Hospital, where people die quietly in clean beds, sometimes struggling for those last breaths, but always well tended and almost always in the company of people who love them.  When I was on call one night, four of my patients died, and there had probably been one or two earlier that day, but that would have been the most in one 24-hour period.

I've only been to one crematorium, a place a bit off the suburban track but nevertheless well-staffed, pristine, and smoothly functioning.

Those of you who've been reading my blogs for awhile know how I protest against that phrase so frequently made to the grieving, that "I can't imagine" phrase.

I think that we should be trying hard today to imagine.  I think that we should imagine being the person who discovers that she is the lone survivor of  her family, trying to scavenge something to eat and drink, trying to pull some fragments of wood and concrete together for a bit of warmth and shelter, and trying to figure out how to get those damaged and bloated and beloved bodies to an overwhelmed crematorium when there are no roads and no transportation.

I think that we should be trying to imagine her shock and horror and anguish.

I think that we should be praying with her, in solidarity and for resiliency.

Imagine.

Lent in July

The following is a post from my Desert Year blog, from the summer of 2009.  My husband and I and two of our children had ventured to the wedding of our next-door neighbors' son.  Our own Josh, in love with a Vietnamese-American girl, had died less than a year previous.  Nevertheless, we felt that we should attend this wedding; our children had all grown up together and spent many years running back and forth between the two back yards.  It turned out to be even harder than we  had anticipated, and we've turned down all wedding invitations that have come our way since this one.

I've been thinking (wondering) a lot about happiness and freedom and suffering and God, and when I came across this post today, it suddenly seemed very Lenten.

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The wedding is much like one I had once imagined. Simple, elegant, a small crowd in a Catholic church. A quiet, self-possessed groom; family and friends here from Germany. A lovely and delicate bride; family and friends here from Korea.

The groom's grandmother approaches me at the reception. "I don't believe a word of it," she announces. "Ridiculous."

"Weddings?" I ask her. "You've given up on marriage?"

"No, no ~ weddings are fine. The religious stuff. It's absurd."

"Oh. I thought you were Catholic, too."

"Not me. None of that stuff for me. I can't believe that otherwise intelligent people buy into it." She squints up at me. "But I suppose you believe it, don't you?"

"Yes," I say.

"Does it help you; does it give you any comfort?"

"No," I say.

The real answer is actually much more complex. But this is a wedding reception.

"I don't know how you stand it," she says. "I suppose you have to."

I look at her and wonder if I am supposed to have some kind of answer. Some kind of satisfactory explanation of the universe. 

 

She has two daughters, six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. All well and happy. For the last two weeks, I have been watching her twin great-grandchildren, little towheads here from Germany for the month, playing in the back yard next door, where the groom and his sisters, one of them now the mother of the towheads, grew up. They look exactly like the little people who used to play in my yard. 

 

I don't think that I have any explanation of the universe, satisfactory or otherwise.

"I don't like the mushrooms and I don't like beef, so there's really nothing for me until dinner is served," she says. "I guess I'll get another drink."

Matthew 4:19

Reuters Image

www.nyt.com

New Venture: Books!

In the past few weeks, I've received requests from two publishers to review new books of theirs in my blog.  And I have the books!

My friend Quotidian Grace has graciously offered me some excellent advice on how to approach this new venture; hence the disclosure statement that now appears in one of the tabs along the top. (Yay for RevGals community and connection!)

Yesterday's Pray As You Go focuses on John the Baptist's activities and challenging words at the River Jordan as he anticipates the ministry of Jesus.  The meditation describes John the Baptist as re-enacting the arrival of the people of Israel in the Promised Land: This is it.  Heaven is about to take charge on earth.  This is what we've been waiting for.  Are you ready?

It has occurred to me, as I've thought about those words over the past 24 hours, that, in my own small arena of life, as in all of ours, this is it.  This is the life God offers us. In a big way, my life is not remotely what I want, or what I want to believe God had in store for me. But in many small ways, I see that I need to pay attention: This is, in fact, it.  And this new opportunity is a new facet of my new life.  So . . . bring the books on!

Something to Ponder During Lent

When God promises to do a new thing, God uses people ~ often, unlikely people; frequently, surprised and alarmed people.

~ from yesterday's Pray As You Go

~ Taize music from today's:

Ash Wednesday

"[We] become free with the perfect freedom of the sons [and daughters] of God by virtue of the fact that, having followed Christ into the wilderness and shared in his temptations and sufferings, [we] can also follow him wherever else he may go."

~ Thomas Merton, (speaking on the monastic vocation, but surely applicable to us all), found in Silence, Solitude, and Simplicity by Sister Jeremy Hall, OSB (2007).


For a thoughtful five-minute Ash Wednesday reflection on friendship with Jesus, listen here.

Approaching Lent

I suspect that many of us for whose lives the desert has become a primary metaphor have spent time contemplating Jesus' sojourn there as depicted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  This poem was unknown to me until this morning; I'm grateful to have discovered it.

Lent Darkness

Dragons lurk in desert spaces
Penetrating the mind with evil claw.
Serpent’s teeth seek out the chinks
insidiously, relentlessly, gnawing on the bone;
searching out the interstices of muscle and sinew.

Such is the pain of the wilderness.
Alone, alone, alone,
Christ sits
in the waste place of abandoned pleas and questions
until exhausted
finally
at last
the realisation
comes
that in the end
there is only
God.

In the night-time of our fears
in the present reality of abandonment
when family and friends
turn and run,
be present, ever present God.
Be present with those
camped out in the fields of hopelessness
with refugees and homeless,
those who live lives of quiet desperation.
Be present until the desert places
blossom like the rose
and hope is born again.

– Kathy Galloway (ed.), The Pattern of Our Days: Liturgies and Resources for Worship (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 1996), 130.

Kathy Galloway was the leader of the Iona Community when our church group spent a  week there five summers ago (I don't think she was there at the time).

 HT to Jason Goroncy at Per Crucem ad Lucem

Image: The hillside Columba climbed when he arrived on Iona in 563 CE and, according to legend, wanted to be assured, in his own loneliness and despair, that he would not have to see Ireland across the sea again. (In truth, he probably continued to travel back and forth.) (July 2006 photo)

Preparing to Prepare

Christine Valters Painter has written a thought-provoking essay on Ash Wednesday and lament, which I highly recommend to you.  I've been thinking about it since she posted it a few days ago, trying to discern where it does and does not resonate with me.  I've been thinking about it as I try to make a decision about whether to go to the Ash Wednesday service at our church.

The essay begins with these words:

"Ash Wednesday marks a threshold when we leave ordinary time to enter into the journey of Lent through the desert. The desert is that uncharted terrain beyond the edges of our seemingly secure and structured world, where things begin to crack."

I hadn't noticed the reference to ordinary time until just now.  It's only been a couple of days since I mentioned that the term "ordinary time" has lost its meaning for me. And as someone learning to make her home in the desert, I don't need Lent as a portal.  My secure and structured world is long gone and I'm here, building my house right on top of the cracks, because there is nowhere else to go.

Nevertheless, I sent the essay to a friend who has just lost her brother, and she responded with gratitude and said that she has forwarded it to family and friends.  And I'll be sending it to two other friends this week.  One's husband died of cancer a year ago today; we had breakfast Saturday. One's husband died three years ago Thursday, and we are planning a long walk in the cemetery that afternoon.  One told me that she has been focused on distractions; the other, that people clearly want her "to get over it."  I think that the essay will speak to them both, each in her own place of grief and longing.

And I think I'll stay away from the service Wednesday night.  As I did last year.  As I should have done two years ago.  I have spent so much time this past year caring so gently for ashes ~ ashes that have become one with the forests and streams of the North Carolina mountains and with the waves of the Atlantic ~ that they have lost the distance that a symbol requires to persist as an invitation and gift. 

I do plan to observe Lent.  But I am looking for signs of life around my little house in the desert. Perhaps I will find a truth beyond the song of lament I now know so well.  What do you think of this illustration ~ both the house and the name of its locale ?!

  

Plexiglass House in Wonder Valley CA, here.

Warm-Up for Lent

This morning I was able to worship at my home church. I'm so glad I got myself over there; last night's snowfall made the prospect of staying home an extremely tempting one.

Some of the highlights:

Sitting between and talking with two friends with whom I've worked many times, one a middle school band teacher and the other a big-firm attorney, both of them men  passionately committed to the mission of the church;

A lively and moving rendition of the spiritual Ride the Chariot by the men of the choir, with a spectacular solo by a high school senior;

A dynamite sermon by our senior pastor on Acts 19: 23-28,* urging us to remember the both-and-ness of our call:  to live on the margins and to draw others to the center, and to be disturbed indeed about issues of justice and inclusion;

A terrific offering anthem described in the bulletin as a dithyramb, a  wild passionate Indian hymn using just one syllable to express uninhibited festivity on this last Sunday before Lent;

More conversations after church with friends whom I seldom see these days.

Look at those adjectives I used:  lively, moving, spectacular, dynamite, terrific. It was wonderful to worship without leadership responsibility in a service that was so filled with energy and variety and community.  

*We are off-lectionary these days, as the adult education classes are studying the Book of Acts, in part because it was just a good idea and in part because a group is leaving for Turkey in a few weeks.  Our pastors committed themselves to a preaching schedule that both accompanies the study and gives us all a taste of the texts that relate to the pilgrimage, which will trace some of Paul's steps.

Image: The Great Theatre at Ephesus, here, where the great riot against Paul took place 

and where I am not going anytime soon.

Easing Into Lent - A Lifetime Journey

My friend Karen mentioned that she worships in a tradition in which Lent is not observed.  Her remark got me thinking about when and how I've encountered Lent.

In my childhood, almost devoid of religious content?  I suppose not.

In the Catholic boarding school I attended in grades 7-9?  It was most likely a big deal, wasn't it? But to me, it would have meant more layers of tedious Latin ritual, more possibilities for required chapel attendance, more opportunities for creatively disappearing from sight without jeopardizing  attendance records.  Truthfully, I don't remember a thing about it.

I don't think it was a feature in my Protestant boarding school life either.

When my husband and I began attending a Methodist church in our late 20s, Lent became a part of the year for us.  It meant community in the form of weekly dinners and programs; it meant thematic seven-week sermon series; it meant the introduction of new music.

In my Presbyterian life, the liturgical year has gained radically in significance to me.  Our preachers, for the most part, follow the lectionary; the paraments and stoles change colors with the seasons; and during Lent the Ash Wednesday and Tenebrae services are solemn and ethereal and, in the original sense of the word, awesome.

My life since my son died has been held together in part by the repetitious sequence of the church year (I think I'll write more about that later), marked by the disjunctions splattered about by grief.  But still.  Even though I no longer comprehend the words "ordinary time," I've been grateful for the anchor of the seasons.

Image: Lenten Textiles by Mary Ann Breisch, here

Savoring Lent (Friday Five)

Kathrynzj at RevGals offers the following Friday Five:

"My calendar taunts me with the [Lenten] schedule I'm supposedly going to keep. There are extra Bible studies, evening gatherings and worship services all crammed into a six week period of reflection and contemplation (ha!). But there are some things I truly love about the season of Lent even if I don't get in as much reflection and contemplation as I would like.

What about you? What are some things you appreciate about the season of Lent? Perhaps you would share 5 of them with us. And for your bonus question feel free to share one thing you could do without."

1.  When our children were little, I enjoyed the dinners and programs that we attended every Wednesday evening during Lent at what was then our church.

2. I am grateful that the reading from Joel (2:12-13 in particular) rolls around every Ash Wednesday, although it has been rather a  challenge for me the past few years.

3.  I love the beauty of the Ash Wednesday and Tenebrae services.

4.  I appreciate the opportunities for interfaith gatherings that emerge during this season.

5. Most of all, I appreciate the church's recognition that we need lengthy seasons in which to savor preparation in order to digest the feasts of celebration in the fullest possible way ~ and that in Lent that preparation incorporates contemplation and confession and lament, pathways of practice that lead us toward resurrection.

Image here.

Lent, Almost (2) : Life's Patchwork

Yesterday's link, with its reflection on how we are formed into people on a spirit-led journey, has had me thinking about the mysterious ways in which God works. 

My early life and experiences were quite different from those of Elizabeth Nordquist.  No one on my family of origin has ever indicated much of an interest in matters of faith.  And yet, here I am.  

Many, if not most, of my closest family members and friends today, are not much impressed by the claims of faith, despite having, all of them, grown up in churches and participated in Sunday Schools and holiday programs and choirs.

I am confident that God is at work at all times and in all places and among all people.

But God's methodology  is baffling.  Intriguing, too.

Image: Janet Wickell Design, here

Lent, Almost

My favorite season of the liturgical year, almost here.

For the past two years it was my favorite because it felt as heavy as my own heart did.

This year, I think ~ think, imagine, wonder, hope ~ that I might be able to engage it, some of the time, anyway, or perhaps, as it's meant to be engaged, as a time of preparation for the most impossibly wonderful day of all.  

I have some new books.  I'm going to dig out some of my old ones.  I have a stack of links. 

I think I'm going to be writing a series of short posts, some of them little more than quotes with maybe a couple of observations, for the next eight weeks.

Do you like quilts?  Elizabeth Nordquist writes, "In a few days the season of Lent will begin, a process of preparing for the holy week leading to Easter. It is a process of reflecting on one’s own life, particularly looking at the things that one needs to let go of or get rid of or unload, to clear the way for the new resurrection life that the the Risen Christ brings."  You can read the rest here.

Image here.