Body, Breath, Place (Sermon ~ Ezekiel 37: 1-14)

There's a good chance that when  I preach this tomorrow, I will refer to my son's death in only the most general way.  I realized, as I printed the bulletin into 28-point font so that I can read it, that there may be very young children in this congregation, as they do not usually have Sunday School during worship.  Their parents are not bringing them to church so that they can learn the definition of suicide.  (I remember my horror when one of my friends at my own church, whose wife sings in our choir and was there for our son's funeral, talked about explaining what had happened to his own little nine or ten-year old son.  Horror that my family's circumstances mandated such a discussion in his.)  But this is how it emerged earlier in the week, with a little subsequent RG editorial assistance.

**********

I’ve been here enough times in the past few months that I think we know each other a bit.  Enough for me to preach a bit more personally then usual, at least insofar as sharing some of my experience in encountering today’s texts.  Perhaps that experience will speak to all of us who have found ourselves in deserts filled with dry bones. 

 

As I think most of you know, we in our family lost one of our young adult sons two and one-half years ago.  He died of suicide, just as I was preparing to return to Pittsburgh for my second year of seminary.  I use the term “died of suicide” these days because I have learned a lot in those two-and-one-half years.  One of the things I’ve learned is that very few people “commit” suicide, not any more than they "commit a heart attack" or ""commit a stroke."  Most people who die of suicide suffer from unresolved or – in the case of our son – even unrecognized clinical depression or bipolar disorder.  And that’s a problem we won’t even begin to confront successfully until we get rid of the very language that implies the victim is somehow at fault.  And so – my son Josh died of suicide.  That means that he died suddenly, and unexpectedly, and violently, and alone – and left behind a completely crushed and devastated family.

             

A desert of dry bones, indeed.

             

Josh’s death also means that when I looked at the OT and gospel texts for today – the texts we’ve just heard, Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, my heart stopped for a second.  There are certain texts which preachers steer clear of, for personal reasons, and these are the kind that I avoid.  They’re just too hard – one of my seminary professors refers to the situation as one of “existential dissonance.”  My own life experience and that of the text simply do not match up.  Not yet, anyway.

             

Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have tried.  I would have just gone off lectionary and preached on something else.  But this year – well, Lazarus seems a bit beyond my capacity, but I thought that I might try Ezekiel.  And I tell you all this not to be self-indulgent, but because sometimes, as we contend with our own desert experiences, it helps to have something concrete in someone else’s desert to hang onto. To know that while our experiences are unique to us, the realm of the desert is something that we all experience, one way or another.

             

One of the things I try to do in my preaching is what I call “preaching ahead of myself.”  We are all called, I think, to move beyond ourselves, especially in our suffering – to move beyond our own self-absorption into a space in which we might have something to offer others.  If I were a nurse, for instance, and my son had died, I would try to work ahead of myself by returning to my unit and caring for other people’s sons, helping them to heal and live.  As a preacher, I try to preach ahead of myself by preaching into what I hope, what we all hope, rather than falling backward into the hard specifics of what I merely know.

             

 So once I had decided to give it a try, I started to prepare for this morning by thinking about Ezekiel, imagining him and this bizarre vision of his.  I looked at some paintings online; I even found a wonderful short video, which you can probably find as well if you google-image something like “Ezekiel dry bones.” I looked at all these images of deserts and bones, and I thought about all of the people whose bodies I have cared for and prayed with, in my family and in my chaplaincy training at the Cleveland Clinic, and I wondered what Ezekiel thought and how he felt.  What did he think and how did he feel when God invited him into this vision in which death becomes life?

            

 And so I went back and re-read the text, and I found out.  At least, I think I found out some of what the writer of Ezekiel, perhaps Ezekiel himself, was thinking and feeling as he shaped this vision into words for later generations.

            

I discovered that at both the beginning and ending of this passage, Ezekiel talks about three things.  He talks about bodies, incarnational beings.  He talks about Spirit – about breath enlivening those bodies.  And he talks about places – geographical places.  Body, breath, place – things we all need to live.

             

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that these matters come up on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday.  Lent begins in the same way: with Jesus, the incarnate one, the embodiment of God, being led by the Spirit, into the desert.  Body, spirit, place.  Jesus needs those things in order to live, just as we do, and he needs them in a specific way in order to live into his ministry.  He needs his body as a source of temptation: a body that hungers, that thirsts, that might triumph, that might be imposed upon others.   He needs the Spirit, the Spirit that belongs to and participates in both him and his Father, to lead him.  And he needs the desert, that empty, desolate, vacant place, in which to come to terms with the life to which he is called.  We heard all of this at the beginning of Lent –

             

And now we hear it with Ezekiel.  The same three requirements for life are brought to bear. “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”  Me – Ezekiel is the person, the ordinary, embodied human being.  So ordinary and embodied that he describes his encounter with God as a physical one: The hand of the Lord came down upon me.  As metaphorical as that statement might be, we visualize it, don’t we?  We see God’s hand - the same hand that reaches out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - we see that hand clamping down on Ezekiel’s shoulder.  The hand of the Lord came upon me –

             

And he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord – there’s the first appearance of the Spirit who will be so ey to this passage.  The Spirit leads Ezekiel just as it leads Jesus.  Just as it leads us. 

            

Now we like to think that with the Spirit’s leading, we will be directed to good places.  Joyous places.  Places filled with possibility. 

             

Not desert places. 

             

And yet, the place to which the Spirit leads Jesus is the desert. And the place to which the Spirit leads Ezekiel is the valley of dry bones.

             

Imagine this valley.  You don’t need all those internet images. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine:  the bare ground, sandy here, rocky there, stretching before you for miles.  Perhaps in the distance some mountains, but they are barren, rocky.  The colors?  Greys, browns, deadened colors, colors as devoid of hope as the ground itself.  And the silence.  The oppressive, weighty silence. 

             

And then you realize: the ground before you is littered with bones.  All sizes and shapes of bones, grey and brown and bones bleached to white. 

             

Now me – as you might guess, I see this scene pretty literally.  And perhaps some of you do as well.  It depends, I think, upon what the barren, desert places are in your own life right now.  What bones cover the ground, when you have the courage to look there?  What disappointments?  What frustrated hopes?  What losses?   What lies around, lifeless and hopeless, in your own existence?

             

Oh, this is a hard one, isn’t it?

             

God knows it is hard.  And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, and they begin to get up and be melded together again, muscles and tendons appearing and skeletons being reconstituted.

             

Now how do you think Ezekiel feels? 

            

 I’m guessing that he’s reminded that bodies are not enough.  It sounds as if these bodies are complete – but they do not live.  They do not live until God tells Ezekiel to speak again, so that the winds will come and breathe life into these bodies.  Wind, breath, spirit – all the same word: ruach – in Hebrew.  The cultural memory is triggered: In the very beginning, according to Genesis, “a wind from God swept over the waters.”  Now a wind from God sweeps over the desert valley.  In one of the Genesis stories of creation, God breathes life into God’s first human creation.  Now God’s Spirit breathes life into an entire population.  A population of bones.  Bones in the desert.  Bodies, spirit, place.

           

Where are these places in your life?  Where are the places in which bones lie, in which the wind of God needs to rush in, into which the Spirit of life needs to breathe?

              

This is the why of Lent.  We know that without the cross, there is no resurrection.  We know that unless we look deeply into the desert places in our lives, there can be no wind of life.

           

“O my people,” says God through Ezekiel. ^“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  Bodies, spirit, place. 

             

We can hear this story literally, as the Israelites would have done, as Zionist Jews do today.  Real people, enabled by the Spirit of the Lord, are returned to their land, to Israel. Or we can hear it as God’s engagement with us, regardless of the geography of the matter in question. We can hear that God cares about who we are – embodied people, animated by God’s own Spirit.  We can hear that God cares about where we are, because embodied beings have to be somewhere.  We require place. If we find that we are standing in the middle of a dry valley, we can hear that God is laboring there.  If we stand on the precipice overlooking the valley, afraid to move, we can hear that God is ready to force air into our nostrils.  If we have crashed onto the plain, we can hear God saying, “Oh, my people.”

             

What did Ezekiel think?  What did he feel?  Was he terrified, watching those bones being re-assembled  into bodies, and listening to those bodies being re-animated by the wind?  Was it all that he could do, to stand there and not run away?  Or was he filled with hope, astonished by God’s love and God’s willingness to try again with God’s people?

             

In another two weeks, we will celebrate a similar story – a story in which a body is reconstituted, breath is released – and people do run away. At least, some of them in some versions run away, before they all get it right. And when they do get it right, and are able to grasp the reality – body, spirit, place – then they will recognize, and perhaps we will as well, that God still sighs, "Oh, my people.”  That God still seeks to transform valleys of dry bones into meadows of life. 

             

This is what I mean by preaching ahead of myself.  I mean this: that our God, who sees the starkness, the emptiness, the shattered lives strewn across the deserts of human existence, says to us: This is not the end of the story.  This is the Lenten journey, this is the journey through the wilderness but, Oh, my people, this is not the end.  My hand will roll a stone away from a tomb, and you will know that your God speaks and acts.  You will know that you are beloved and that you live, O my people.

             

Amen.

Image: Barry Donaldson, Ezekiel Speaks to the Dry Bones

Women and Ordination

I wrote most of this a few days ago, before the double-vision thing made typing such a challenge.  This morning, reading and participating in the RevGals' conversation about preaching tomorrow,  I feel more strongly than ever the depth and breadth of women's voices bursting forth from the pulpit.


*************

The round of reviews of Half the Church and the flurry of controversy in the Catholic community over the U.S. bishops' recent criticism of Dr. Elizabeth Johnson's work have prompted some musings on my part.

The argument in some Protestant denominations against the ordination of women is based upon a couple of verses in which Paul denounces the prospect of women holding teaching authority over men.  This argument conveniently overlooks the women colleagues whom Paul praises and upon whom he placed considerable reliance, even in a culture in which women had no legal standing or social or economic status independent of men. 

The argument in the Roman Catholic church against the ordination of women is based upon the undeniable fact that Jesus was a man and on the metaphorical construct of the church as his bride; how can a woman stand in the place of Jesus?  That one conveniently overlooks the fact that many of Jesus' disciples were women and that women ~ the Woman at the Well and Mary Magdalene ~ were the first evangelists ~ in a culture in which women had no legal standing or social or economic status independent of men. 

The outcomes for me personally:

The Protestant church does feel very male to me.  Most of our historical leaders and theologians have been male.  My seminary felt something like a men's club; it often reminded me of my law firm life a generation ago.  In both situations, women were/are welcomed and encouraged in our endeavors, but the climate was/is a masculine one.  (Despite the fact that half of our seminary students are female.)  In my city, there has been one female senior pastor of a large mainline Protestant church over the past several years ~ and she's just moved away.  A friend recently commented that her United Methodist Church ~ to which I used to belong ~ feels like the 1950s: three white, male pastors in our community that is half African-American and Latino and half women.

All that said, women leaders are welcomed and supported, and I think that in another generation, the landscape for women in the mainline Protestant church will look quite different.

Ironically, the Catholic church often feels very female to me.  With its devotion to Mary, its plethora of women saints, and its still significant population of women religious ~ sisters and nuns,   highly educated women who often hold positions of enormous responsibility in hospitals, colleges and universities, and other institutions ~ the part of the Catholic church visible to me has a welcoming and feminine aspect.  Catholic priests and sisters have been among my strongest supporters  in my quest for ordination and in the recent dramatic personal challenges of my life.  But . . . no ordained women in the RC church.  The M.Div. program at the Catholic local seminary is off limits to women.  ("We can earn a Ph.D. there," one woman told me, "but not an M.Div.  They're afraid we'll want to be priests.")  When I attend a Catholic mass, I am painfully aware that, once we get to the Gospel reading and thereafter, the leadership other than in music is entirely male.  When I see photographs of Catholic ordination ceremonies of  deacons or priests, they look oddly off-kilter to me ~ because there are no women.  In another generation, I am certain, it will all look the same.

The general conversation around these issues tends to focus on issues of justice and discrimination involving women who are called to the ministry or priesthood.  That is certainly a critical discussion.  But increasingly I see the most significant one being justice and care for the people we are called to serve.  The voice missing from ordained leadership is even more significant to those who are not permitted to hear it than to those not permitted to exert it.

I have heard Catholic women friends say that they long to be ministered to by a woman priest. Perhaps more significantly, I have NOT heard Catholic men friends say the same thing.  It has not yet occurred to them that it might be a differently valuable experience to be ministered to by a woman. I know that in certain churches, no one will ever hear an Advent sermon from someone who has experienced pregnancy and childbirth.  No one will hear an Easter sermon from someone who has known the mother's experience of the death of a child.  In a church in which I preached some months ago, a woman came up to me afterward to relate her fears about some female-only health issues for which she was about to undergo testing.  Would she have had the same conversation with an unknown male pastor? 

And I am not talking only about "women's issues," whatever those might be.  I'm talking about all issues. I'm talking about voices missing from conversations, be they about Moses or about Miriam.  I'm talking about bodies missing from leadership roles in sacred encounters, encounters in which babies are baptized or communion is served.

Even my lovely and wonderful 80-year-old Jesuit friend, in response to my pointing out that he would never be ministered to by a female priest, argued that he often seeks the advice and counsel of women colleagues.  "But you will never receive communion, at least not in your own church, from a woman," I said.  I'm fairly certain that it had not occurred to him that he might be missing something.

I've only read one or two of Elizabeth's Johnson's books, as options in the course of a seminary education in which no work by feminist theologians was required.  The present controversy fermented by the Catholic bishops means that I will probably start working my way through all of them soon.  But in the meantime, I can ask, "Would a male theologian have ever conceived (pun perhaps intended) a book entitled She Who Is?" Based on the theological literature published in the nearly 2000 years of Christianity before that book's appearance, I think I am safe in presuming that the answer to that question is "No."

And how much, therefore, have we all lost?  Not merely the women called to ministry as priests and ministers, but all of us, women and men and girls and boys, who have never heard God speaking through the voice of a woman, through the scholarship of a woman, through the experience of a woman?

Darkness to Light

Dorcas at the RevGals' Friday Five today invites us to supply evidence in our lives of darkness into light.

I could probably do that in a big way, but instead I am reflecting on the very small space of dark-light frustration in which I find myself at the moment with this double-vision diagonal-world problem.

I have to choose between far and near distance.  I'm sitting at the dining room table typing, but if I want to go and do the laundry or clean the bathroom, I'll have to put a contact in first, so that I can see, you know, the walls. (Clearly, I mean. I can run into them just fine without a lens.)  Then if I want to do some reading or writing, I have to take the lens out.

My right eye gets really tired.  So I'll switch the patch.  Oops -- can't balance with my left eye only.  Can't even think about going near the stairs.  The table, seen with my left eye only, is not where it actually is.

How do I feel about going out in public with this eye patch?  Oh - not an issue.  There's no one available to drive me anywhere today.

I was worried about my Sunday sermon drawing too much attention to my own experience.  Now I have to worry about my very presence drawing too much attention to myself.  My sermon is in 28-point font at the moment.  I am going to have to do the same with the bulletin and readings. 

This has the potential to activate major depression.  I can't take any movement or activity for granted; I have to plan and try to foresee (ha ha) everything.  REALLY tedious.

There are plus sides, of course.  I didn't die of an aneurysm and I'm not trying to recover from a stroke.  The neuro-folks are five minutes away.  I had completely forgotten about the distance many people have to travel for that kind of expertise until I was leaving and the nurse asked, How long a trip home do you all have?  Up the hill, I said, puzzled, and then realized that most people don't have such speedy access to these kinds of specialists.  (Actually, most people here don't either, but I'm not harping on health insurance at the moment.  Although it reminds me to be grateful for my husband's job.  Our insurance is expensive, but it's there.)

I am hoping that embedded somewhere in my brain tissue there's a nerve in the process of healing itself.  That would be a good resurrection for me right now.

Too Much Adventure for Me

Acute and quite terrifying onset of double vision yesterday.

May I NOT recommend a sleepover at The Clinic, complete with CAT scan, MRI, and a House-like team of neurologists surrounding your bed to start the next day?

No aneurysm, no tumor, no stroke. In fact I am a remarkably healthy person according to all kinds of tests, except for probably a damaged nerve to the eye.

So another appointment with a neuro-opthamologist next week, a hope that this will resolve itself, and a Moshe Dayan fashion look.  Everything is very much double, but the literally blinding headache is gone.

Posting and response to emails will be light.   This post alone has been quite a challenge!

Half the Church (Book Review)

(This review is part of a blog book tour taking place this week.  I'll add links to other reviews as I come across them.  I received copies of the book ~ and nothing else ~  from the publisher, and offered no guarantees in return.)

I should like love this book.  Seriously.  Carolyn Custis James brings an easy style and a creative interpretation to issues with which women around the world contend.  Issues which should challenge and embarrass and horrify those of us who live in comfort and relative security, who are well-educated and work in comfortable and accepting environments.  We carry with us a host of presumptions about our freedom to travel, to work, to engage in relationships ~ and about our value to our families and friends and in the world.  When daughters arrive in our midst, we are wild with joy, and we imagine and expect that their lives will be marked by the same forces:  freedom, education, meaningful work, love, and hope.

James writes about girls and women whose lives are markedly different from ours.  Half the Church is evidently intended as an evangelical Christian counterpart to Half the Sky, the book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff and and his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, the husband and wife team who have written about the terrifying realities of life that challenge those females whose faces never reach our television screens.  Women whose lives are marred and shortened by forced marriages, by early and repeated childbearing without adequate  medical care, by lack of education and training, by abuse and violence ~ and, most of all, by the presumption that they are little more than chattel, born to be traded by men, to produce sons for men, and otherwise to serve men in whatever capacity men choose.

Caroyln Custis James's response to what she has seen and learned to is wrestle creatively with those Biblical texts which might be read as promising less for women than for men.  Her conclusions ~ that God creates both women and men in God's image, that women are created by God to be warriors for justice, and that God creates women and men to be in a "Blessed Alliance" of equality in which to serve God and bring God's love to bear in this world ~ are intended to affirm that Christianity has much to offer all peoples of the world.  The Christian story and message bring women and men together in unity and love.   The gift of God's love through Jesus Christ should transform both the status and roles of women and the relationship between men and women; it should not be misused to preserve a status quo in which women are undermined, disregarded, devalued, and forsaken.

So why don't I love this book?  Something irritated and troubled me as I read it, something that did not become clear until almost the end, when the author reveals a bit about the evangelical framework in which she lives and works. As someone who participates in the mainline Protestant church and who self-identifies as a progressive Christian, I seldom never encounter debates about whether the roles of women and men should be understood in complementarian or egalitarian terms.   I don't encounter debates about women's ordination (except in the Catholic Church, and that's a whole 'nother story, isn't it?).  When James addresses these issues, it becomes clear that she does, in fact, live in a world in which they are debated.  Her insistence upon God's hopeful project for women and men alike might be viewed in her church world as a radical re-interpretation of Biblical passages, passages that have long been understood by many as establishing secure and differentiated roles for women and men.  Consequently, she has to defend her approach.

And that, I suppose, is the heart of what rankles me about the book: its emphasis on evangelical assumptions that women and men are so different from one another in such fundamental ways that we actually have to debate whether we both have a place at the table.  Any table, let alone the table of leadership or service on behalf of Jesus Christ.  I understand that those are the assumptions that James must challenge in order to be heard in her world, but they are not the universal assumptions of all Christians.  My sense is that she is wrangling with a faith of liberation in a personal context of confining parameters, a context in which she is apparently pushing boundaries by asserting that God calls both women and men to leadership and to participation in all ways. (There seems to be a second book lurking inside the covers and between the lines of Half the Church.)

Perhaps unintentionally,  Half the Church brings to our attention two separate and yet similar worldviews in which the value of women is routinely diminished.  In the world of secular political, social, and economic realities, as James shows us, women are often ignored ~ overworked, undervalued, and seldom sought for the gifts we have to contribute to the shaping and flourishing of our world.  We who live in the United States can conveniently ignore this reality in the secular realm, but reality it is for most women across the globe.  And in the world of the church?  In its evangelical expression, there is an unfortunate strain of theology and practice that, contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, seeks to limit the offering of the gifts of women to arenas delineated by misreadings of Scripture and by rejection of the realities of ordinary life.

What Carolyn Custis James wants to show us is that, although it might be (mis)understood in traditional, evangelical interpretations, Christianity presents an alternative vision: a vision in which women are created and called by God as persons of strength and power, as individuals with gifts and skills which should be nurtured and welcomed in the building of God's Kingdom.  The gospel should be a powerful force for liberation of all people; it should not be corralled into the service of those who would use it merely to perpetuate outdated  political, social, and economic patterns of life.  Perhaps James is precisely the person needed to make this point, as she understands the pressures of conservative Christianity from the inside.

In any case, we should read this book.  The author may be trying to soften her approach in order to reach a broader audience, but the basic message is forthright and is supported by Biblical references explored in scholarly and imaginative ways..  Carolyn Custis James  brings to our attention much that fosters injustice and outright evil toward girls and women in our world, reminds us that the God of Jewish and Christian Scripture affirms the essential dignity of all human beings, and tells us that there is much work to be done.

**********

If you'd like a free copy, the publisher has kindly provided me with an extra.  Leave a comment, I'll draw a name, and I'll contact you for mailing info if you win!

Another review ~
A review from another RevGal ~
And from Quotidian Grace ~
From Diane ~
And one from Dorcas, who really "gets" the paradox of injustice at issue ~

Blogging Voices

What I love about blogging: the conversation.

I love the variety of voices.  I love writing my little pieces and hearing so many different responses.  I love reading what others write, and sometimes responding to them as well.  I love that I am not limited in my knowledge and understanding of the world to those whose views make the pages of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The New York Times, to those who write for America and The Christian Century.  I love that I have little blogging communities: what's left of the AOL gang, the RevGals, the Ignatian folks, the Presbies, the other moms whose hearts have been shattered by loss.  I love that I have readers and people whom I read who fall into none of those categories.

This afternoon, I'm thinking about all of these voices in the context of books.  I've been introduced to a LOT of books and authors by bloggings friends.  Tomorrow, I'll be participating in a blogging book tour of Carolyn Custis James' book, Half the Church.  And some days ago, one of my Karen friends reviewed the controversial new Rob Bell book, Love Wins.  I haven't read Love Wins yet, but I will go so far as to say that I missed the Life Instructions on Hell's Occupants, and so the clamor over the book is something of a mystery to me.  However, I am guessing that Karen's view (and she likes parts of the book) is something of an unusual one, at least this portion of it:

"The most personally offensive to me? Rob's discussion of life and death as the cycle through which all good things come. His reasoning is that life and death are a cycle since creation, and therefore part of God's great plan. He uses the example that the plant has to die to give us life; the firefighter has to die to save someone else's life. I had a hard time with his shallow thinking on this topic. Having lived through the death of someone essential to my life, I don't see death in general as the mechanism that God uses to restore the earth. He used One Death, Christ's death, to make sure that death died and He tells us that death is the last enemy that will die. Death is an enemy, not a friend. An aberration, not the original plan. It is a result of fallenness, a consequence with which we are forced to live, not a blessing to the planet. How did he miss this great fundamental truth in seminary?"

Karen and I both have sons who have died, and her words made me think of Nick Wolterstorff's in Lament for a Son:  "Don't say it's not really so bad.  Because it is.  Death is awful, demonic."

And that's what I love about blogging most of all. Everyone can be heard!

Physical and Metaphysical

As part of my plan to start taking better care of myself, I went to a yoga class this morning.  A very gentle, almost pre-beginner class.

I knew that every part of my body hurts, but the class was an intimate, precise confirmation of all of those aches and pains.  Such silence, such attentiveness to joints and muscles, to all kinds of things, bodily and otherwise, that I try to ignore.

Why is my left side such a problem? I wondered.  The order in which the pain revealed itself: left hip, left calf, left knee, left shoulder, left forearm, left middle finger, left side of my head.

Josh was left-handed.  Ah.

As we packed up our things at the end of the class, a woman who looked vaguely familiar came up to me and introduced herself.  A former neighbor, from across and down our old street.  I asked after her family.  "I'm a grandmother!" she said proudly.  "And you had the two boys, right?"

I nodded.  We moved from that house into this one when I was pregnant with the boys.

Her husband was and, it turns out, still is, on the vestry of the church behind our house.  I asked about the current goings-on there, and offered nothing at all about myself.

I wonder whether she goes to that class every Saturday morning.

Always something.  As if the video of the little twin boys filling the internet all week weren't enough.

Batter my heart . . .    .