Retreat

One day.  Tomorrow.

 

I had some plans to get away to Chautauqua for a day (John Carroll, where I teach, is on a long week-end, so no class), but I've abandoned those. And I don't think the weather is going to cooperate as hoped for per the image above, so . . . an indoor retreat at home. 

 

I am unraveling here. Yesterday I had a flat tire way over on the other side of Cleveland.  This morning the tire store came up with ideas for $1,200 of repairs beyond the free tire replacement.  (Which were ultimately deemed  unnecessary, but not before I had completely flipped out.)  This after $$$ of repairs during the last couple of months, and at the same time that the furnace guy was at my house installing a new panel, whatever that is ~ also not inexpensive. 

 

At church, the day care director's anxiety over the Presbytery's indecision about its continued tenancy is spilling outward.  There was correspondence about the closing to which to attend, and food gone bad to throw out, and two Bible studies to lead.  I wrote most of my sermon at 7:00 am because I was up, so why not? . . . after having been wide awake at midnight when I realized that I had left the thing that covers the spare tire in the trunk behind at the gas station where someone had kindly changed my tire.  (Got that?)

 

And then there is this stray cat I have been feeding for more than two weeks.  I was freezing last night in our furnace-free house, so I was also awake worrying about her. Hoping that she makes it until her date with the shelter, and hoping that then she can be found.

 

Just too much. 

 

I did tell my assistant today that as I was getting out of my car at church, I was thinking that I should get back in and start driving.  I could call her from wherever I was at about 6:00 p.m. ~ Wisconsin, maybe?

 

But I didn't do it. 

 

So: A day.  Tomorrow.

 

Nankin 01

I haven't done any serious photo work in sooooooooo long, and have I ever missed it.

 

Today, with a sermon finished, two ahead for next Sunday, and three major writing projects underway, I cannot produce another word.  So I downloaded a free 30-day photoshop trial.  I am much happier than I was an hour ago!

Serene New Year's Neighborhood Walk

 

Even on the most bleak and dreary of days, color and texture proclaim their distinctive identities.

 

A hundred-year-old brick wall, its hues and striated textures dimmed and stained by the decades.  A newly painted fascia, gleaming free of flakes and cracks.  And H2O in the form of snow and ice and liquid drips.

 

My word for this year?  Serenity.  More on that tomorrow.

Retreat

Hanging around waiting for spiritual director: the view out the third floor window.

Prayer - 1

I've been pondering, here on my little sabbatical, the following question: about what might I like to blog for the next while?  Is there something I'd like to explore with some consistency in this context?  

And then, out of some conversations with a whole wide variety of folks over the past few days, waltzed my topic of choice: Prayer. Something those of us who hang out here from time to time might focus upon in a more or less concentrated way for a number of weeks.  

And because this is a blog, and the blogs I enjoy most and those I have written myself focus on explorations of personal experience, I'll approach this topic through the same lens.

I took the image above one morning three summers ago, having rolled out of bed early enough to catch the sunrise over the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I like it as an illustration of prayer. Light and dark, mountains and valleys, trees right before us and vistas inviting us into a distant unknown.  A vast landscape for a vast topic.

But I'm going to start at the beginning.  And lest you think that I have a lifetime of experience upon which to draw, let me say, right at the outset, that the following represents my interest in and attentiveness to prayer for about the first forty years of my life:

How about you?  Was prayer a feature of your childhood or young adulthood?  Or not so much?

Retreat Vignettes

Morning walk ~ the sun came up at about 5:50 am.

Morning walk ~ Walter Ciszek, S.J.  is one of my heroes, and I spent some time re-reading his book He Leadeth Me. (Click to enlarge and read.)

Morning on the East Cloister walk.

Afternoon wanderings ~ Jesuit symbol on the altar in the crypt chapel.

The pool ~ as is everywhere on the grounds during a retreat week, a place of silence and prayer, afternoons and early evenings.

Late at night.

Places I'm Not

Just posting old pics, here and on FB, because other people are where I might like to be.  These are all from the Guelph (Ontario) Jesuit Center:  Bell Tower, Barn, Labyrinth, Speed (?) River, Path to River, Ignatius the Pilgrim.

Back to My Break

Thanks to all who provided help and encouragement for the sermon.  Hours later and I am still completely exhausted, but it seems to have been appreciated!

And now, back to my blogging break.  And back to the countdown: six weeks till a week's silence at Wernersville!

Images: Wernersville (PA) Jesuit Center and 
Detail of St. Ignatius the Pilgrim Statue, 
both October 2010

Lenten Break

"We are built for contemplation."

~ Martin Laird, OSA
Into the Silent Land

 

Image: Cedar Key FL

Cedar Key: Merger of Sea and Sky

Yes, the subject is the same as that in my blog header, but that image was taken at sunrise, and this one late on the previous afternoon.  

I love that the horizon is invisible.

You could swim into the water or into the sky.

I've been looking at my calendar, and the coming week is going to make an astonishing number of demands upon my time and energy.

And so I leave you for a few days with this view of the horizonless Cedar Key horizon.

Atsena Otie ~ New Year's Eve

I love islands.  Perhaps everyone loves islands.  I particularly love remote islands, islands mostly devoid of human presence.

I don't mind if people sail or kayak by.

This horseshoe crab shell was the size of my palm, shed and left behind by its growing owner.

Atsena Otie means Cedar Island in one of the tribal languages of what today is Florida.  (Internet sources suggest several possibilities.).  The very small island is a short distance from Cedar Key.  For a time in the 19th century it was home to a pencil factory and a small community of year-round residents.

Here's a view of the Cedar Key waterfront from the beach on Atsena Otie..  The Lovely Daughter's first canoe trip ever was the one made from Cedar Key to Atsena Otie and back when she was two and her brothers were five.

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.

Day is Done on Cedar Key (Tonight)

Sunset Sunrise

We're in Cedar Key, Florida ~ a small Gulf island pretty far north, at about the same latitude as Gainesville .  Record cold weather, they say ~ although I noticed in the condo guest book last night that folks here in late December and early January during the past two years had remarked upon the unusual cold -- 40s in the daytime and 20s at night.  I would say that three years in a row equals standard rather than unusual!

As a consequence of the cold, there is no kayaking, no hot tub, hardly even any walking.  (Maybe later today.)  And I am therefore doing a lot of reading, and writing, for myself, and for the class I'll be teaching next term, and for the two churches for whom I'll be preaching through January, and for my own imagined future.   I expect some of that writing will make its way to this blog, along with some completely unrelated photos.

To start with, last night's sunset:

I've decided to try and keep track of the books I'm reading, for whatever purpose, and I've added a tab for a page in which to do that.  But once in awhile, I might paste what I've written into my blog.  Or who knows, maybe more often than once in awhile.  For starters:

12/24/10 - Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.  

I'm teaching this book next semester, and so I read it in the car on the way down to Florida.  It's a book which I encountered for the first time as a high school senior, in my senior elective religion course entitled Church and Society.  (No doubt today it would be called something like Religion and Society.)  

I was stunned, as I re-read it, to realize what a profound influence that little book has had on my life, in its insistence that even when all else is taken from us, we retain the freedom to choose our response to our circumstances.   Dignity and responsibility, for instance, over hysteria and selfishness. 

"Really?" asked The Lovely Daughter over Christmas Dinner.  "You would trace that conviction back to a book you read when you were seventeen?"  

 "Absolutely,"  I responded.  "It was a fresh and compelling idea to me when I was so young, and I think that it has grounded much of my thinking about life since."  

The students whom I will be teaching are college freshmen, about the same age that I was during that long ago course ~ I wonder whether it will leave the same imprint upon any of them.

Ready for another image?  This is what I saw this morning, from the warmth of inside.  It was 19 degrees outside!

And finally, here's something I picked up yesterday at The Episcopal Cafe, pertinent (I hope!) to my future:

Bruce Epperly, in this week's missive from the Alban Institute says:

New pastors are most successful in the transition from seminary to their first congregation when they expect and accept imperfection as an essential ingredient in the art of ministry. While some congregations are clearly dysfunctional and may even fall into the category of clergy killers, most congregations are healthy enough to provide adequate support, challenge, and acceptance for pastors embarking on their first call. 

A good pastor needs to join appropriate boundaries with curiosity about the human condition. In Tending to the Holy, Kate Epperly and I noted that, in the spirit of North African monastics, the pastor should be "all eye" and "all sense" as she observes the physical, spiritual, and emotional environment that surrounds her. This curiosity and awareness is essential for good ministry as well.

One of my favorite detective shows is Columbo. In that series, the cagey Columbo appears to be clueless as he fumbles his way through murder investigations. He solves cases, so it appears, only by accident and good luck. While pastors may not wish to be viewed by their congregants as the dumbest person in the room, pastors as observers, spiritual ethnographers, and keepers of secrets always know more than they can tell. To keep confidentiality and promote healing within the congregation, pastors often have to play dumb in situations in which they know more than they can let on.

New pastors enter a multidimensional, nuanced, and confusing world when they begin their first call. Things are not always as they seem. They may intuit certain unspoken communal understandings, past experiences of misconduct and betrayal, feuds and alliances, and secrets that "everybody knows about." Successful pastors take time to listen well to the spoken and unspoken messages of their congregants in order to discern how best to minister. Observation enables pastors not only to be healers but also to avoid issues of triangulation and unintentional offense. Careful observation also forces pastors to listen before they speak and to speak to the real, rather than assumed, situations in their congregation's life.

So . . .  I have plenty to photograph, to read, and to think about.  

I did think, though, that I would be kayaking!

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

Fall Bests - Friday Five

The real one is here, with one of the most wonderful photos I've ever seen!  This is the pretend one, from earlier today:

Well, the Friday Five isn't up yet, but there's some discussion about it, so I'm sure it will be soon.  However, I have to go out,  and I'm in the mood to post, so . . .

Best church opening event in which you've participated?

My Methodist church had a Festival of Opportunities early in September for several years running, in which every class, group, activity, etc. associated with the church presented themselves as a table in the Fellowship Hall.  Lots of conversation, lots of color and sparkle, and a few goats (Heifer Project).  

Best school opening event?

That was in January -- Tulane's opening week-end after having been closed all the Katrina fall.

Best fall activity:

Two of them: Backpacking Isle Royale in October long, long ago, and taking our kids out of elementary school for a trip to Baltimore and then to Chincoteague not quite so long ago.

Best fall color:

Williamstown MA.  

Best fall poem:

Mary Oliver's Wild Geese.

Bonus: A fall photo or painting. 

Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland OH

I Hereby Declare Summer Officially Over

Sorting

If you are reading over at my other place, you know that I am engaged in the task of sorting through my son's belongings, having finally emptied the storage locker into which we placed them nearly two years ago.

It's going to take me several days, not because there's much stuff -- there isn't -- but because it's work that requires many breaks of long hours.

It has become a time of deep prayer.  For months after Josh died, prayer was not available to me.  (One of my Jesuit friends wrote a Prayer for Those Who Cannot Pray for me, which I will always treasure.)  Perhaps that is why I had the sense not to undertake this project for such a long time.

Now, I can do it.  It's sort of like being deep in the ocean, listening for the swell of waves above that might be God.

And for today, with excellent timing, Denise Levertov's "Opening Words" (you can read the whole here) ~ HT to People for Others.

Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.

Image: PEI Sunrise, 2005

Good Memories Only!

Sally posts this Friday Five:

This year Tim and I have planted and nurtured a vegetable garden, and I have just spent the morning preparing vegetables and soups for the freezer, our veggie garden is producing like crazy and it is hard to keep up with, that said it'll be worth it for a little taste of summer in the middle of winter :-). That got me thinking of the things I treasure, memories are often more valuable than possessions. How about you, can you share:
 

 A treasured memory from childhood?

The utter freedom of growing up in the country: field and creek explorations, long bike rides to anywhere, high tree climbs over deep ravines.   

A teenage memory?

Horseback rides in the Colorado Rockies with a best-boarding-school-friend the summer after we graduated. 

A young adult memory?

A weeklong backpacking trip in Glacier National Park with The Quiet Husband.  No grizzly sightings, though!

A memory from this summer?

The climb up to The Rock at Gwynn Valley Camp with The Lovely Daughter.

A memory you hope to have?

The Grand Canyon with grandchildren.

Bonus- a song that sums up one of those memories

It seems that the song must be America, the Beautiful.  

Image here.

Just for Fun - Sliding Rock (Daily Photo 24)

When I was a little girl at camp in North Carolina, an afternoon at Sliding Rock was a highlight of the month.  I slipped up there early one morning last week for some photos, knowing that within a couple of hours it would be covered with screeching kids sliding into the icy pool at the bottom.  And adults, too ~ it hasn't been all that long since my own last slide down.