Hope (Daily Photo 3)

This one, too, is from Church of the Saviour.

Thanks to the focused attentiveness brought on by my picture taking, I checked out the words over one of the side doors.  I don't think that I had any idea that there were any words there at all, which only goes to show how completely oblivious one can be ~  walking in and out of a door over a period of 25 years and having NO IDEA that its designers or builders wanted you to understand its significance in a particular way.

Which, today, is twofold.  First, the verse itself (and I had to go home and look  it up, because I'm not one of those people who knows those kinds of things), from Isaiah 56:7:

"My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people."

As a spiritual director and future pastor, I'm thinking that that's a very nice sense of mission for a church indeed.

And second:  As I was trying to work my way around the steps and railing, to take the picture the words that came into focus are those above, from the very center.  Now we in the PC(USA) today struggle to understand what we mean by "all."  Or we struggle to be in a church that doesn't mean the same thing by "all" that we do.

So when I saw those words over the very center of the door, I thought:

Hope.

Doors

Wow ~  thank you all for all the ideas!

Already I am looking more attentively and contemplatively.  I took this photo this morning en route home from the gym.  It's the front entryway to my previous church, Church of the Saviour (United Methodist).

A couple of years ago in my spiritual direction  class, we were sitting around talking one night about the burning bushes in our lives ~ the ways in which God has sought to capture our attention.  I was listening to a variety of comments and suddenly I realized ~ Church of the Saviour!  It's located on a main street in our city, in a residential area up from a retail section which hosts some of our favorite stores and restaurants, the theater where you can see all the films which never make it to the mainstream mall movies, and the bakery where we all hang out all the time. Our first house was a few blocks away, within walking distance (on Canterbury, Mumpastor), and I must have driven by Church of the Saviour hundreds of times before I suddenly announced to my husband one morning that I thought we should go to church.

My husband was the one who chose the church in question.  It's Methodist, which we had both been (he for real and me in the vaguest sort of way); it's designed on the model of a medieval French Cathedral (always helpful, from my point of view); and the services were televised on local Cable, so we could check it out before setting foot inside!  Having not been church attenders since high school, we were extremely leery of what we might be getting into more than a decade later.

We spent many happy years there, our children were all baptized there, and most of our closest friendships were formed there.  We've all taken various journeys since, but those doors definitely represent a burning bush in my life.

(Michelle suggested Doors as a subject.  Stratoz suggested Door, which is for another day.  I notice that there were a lot of suggestions of Hope!)

Early Morning Walk ~ and a Request

It was a beautiful morning here!

Still using the Old Camera, but in a few days I'll be home with my work complete, my library books turned in, and my nonschool life beginning.

I haven't gotten much use out of the New Camera, since I was just starting to learn it when The Quiet Husband landed in the hospital in the Keys over New Year's and that was the last of any sustained time for myself.  Things are out to change, and I need help.

I want to compile of list of photo topics/challenges/whatever for the summer.  I need 100 of them -- one for each day through August counting today.  I guess I have today's: Morning Walk.  I'm hoping to be a but more imaginative, though.  I have some in mind, and I hope you'll add yours.  General, specific, space, time, abstract, people,whatever.  Please!  In the comments!

1. Morning Walk

2. Graduation

3. Noon

4. Shore

5. Boat

6. Early

7. ???? . . . .

Winding Down

I'm trying to finish my Last Paper Ever. I can't say that I'm exactly overwhelmed by motivation.  If I didn't admire the professor so much and want him to feel that his efforts have been worthwhile, I'm not sure that I'd be up to it.

In between . . . lunch today with my former department chair at my former teaching job, so lots of news about my former students.  (Lots of "formers" in my life!) My final class of ninth graders are about to graduate, heading off to Israel for a year and then to some wonderful colleges.

Tomorrow, breakfast with a friend I haven't really talked with in ages, and then a late afternoon RevGal meet-up.

Sunday - Nope, I am not going to church for Pentecost. I am quite worn out with celebratory Sundays.  They've been very difficult for me all year.  But I am going to a concert in the evening, as The Lovely Daughter sings with a local choral group, and then I am going to try to put in a last minute appearance at the party celebrating the 80th birthday of Wonderful and Wise Former Spiritual Director.  (Another former!  But not former in friendship.)

Monday, back to Pittsburgh to put the final touches on my paper and pack up and then - home again!  A stack of thank you notes await my effort, as does my new and arduous life of unemployment.

I seem to have decided to attend both our graduation and the baccalaureate service the night before, egged on mostly by friends who want to celebrate together.  I suppose that's a good thing?

Ashes

This (HT to Contemplative Photography) is for Karen, who is focused on a sad anniversary this week-end.  Oddly or, I suppose not, in the midst of final assignments and packing boxes and the graduation dilemma, I, too, have been thinking about ashes all day, every day.

Love to you, Karen.

Crying out loud and weeping
are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper
and she's there.

Cry out.
Do not be stolid and silent with your pain.
Lament,
and let the milk of loving
flow into you.

The hard rain and the wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.

-- Rumi, A Year with Rumi (May 5) 

Scattered Wednesday Thoughts

Taking a page from QG:

• My day started with a trip to a Pittsburgh Toyota dealer, brought on by a scraping squealing crunching noise in the brake system last night.  Nothing major wrong, but all the minors will add up to major bucks. Have to take care of it; don't want to drive the 135 miles home tomorrow night feeling like the car is on the brink of collapse.
• Spent the rest of the morning working on my final very last ever paper on Miroslav Volf's views on memory and forgetting.  Personally meaningful due to encounters and dialogue with my Jewish students of years past and my own recent history.  I have now reached the happy point where you realize somewhere in the middle of a project that you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.  Except that I think I have come around to his theory that we will in the new life ahead forget all the bad stuff and that that will be a good thing. Our loss of memory will not destroy our identities but will create us as new beings.  What do you think?
• Brightened up at seeing a friend at lunch but the presence of other not-well-known folks at the table constrained conversation considerably.
• Went to my last Hauerwas class, which I am auditing, so got to listen to other people present their ongoing papers.  The professor passed around Hauerwas' new autobiography and noted a couple of hours later that I had become completely absorbed in it.  Oops.  Well, Hauerwas is an engaging writer and I appreciate very much his ecclesial promiscuity.
• Now I am going for a long walk in what has become a gorgeous day, and then I guess it will be Volf till midnight.  Look for me taking FB breaks!

Glinda and Elphie

This morning I served as the liturgist for the seminary chapel service in which my Best Seminary Friend was the preacher.  Two weeks ago, we were in reverse roles.  It's beginning to dawn on us that this is it ~ after three years and a couple of major life transitions, we are about to graduate and will most likely land in separate states.

I plan to celebrate this friendship forever. It is, I think, one of the greatest gifts seminary has offered me.  We're very different ~ this morning we concluded that she is Glinda and I am Elphaba.  She is the summery Christian and I am the wintery one.    She arrives in a bubble, and I ride a broomstick.  (OK, the analogy isn't perfect.  She's not blonde and I'm not green.)

If you know about my obsession with Wicked from from my old blog, you know that the first time I saw it, I concluded from one of the first lines that it's a Calvinist musical:  "Are some people born wicked, or is wickedness thrust upon them?"   So it's appropriate, I think, that we have adopted those characters.  We are a perfect match, two best friends in the Emerald City.