Architectural Detail (Daily Photo 9)

QG suggested this subject, so on my last couple of walks through the Highland Park neighborhood near the seminary, I paid some extra attention to my favorite houses.

Retreat - Conference - A Friendship Like No Other

I'm off at the crack of dawn tomorrow for a two-day retreat/conference featuring Bill Barry, S.J., the author of numerous books beloved by spiritual directors, at least by those in the Ignatian tradition.  

Interestingly, the concept of God as friend, God seeking friendship with us, became something of a hot topic at seminary this year, thanks to one of my favorite professors and his work on supralapsarian Christology. I had not realized that God's friendship was a  matter of controversy, having spent considerable time in the company of people for whom it is not, but I see now that even Bill Barry acknowledges it as having been a challenging concept for him at first.

I am very much looking forward to the next two days, to be spent in the company of many friends in the spiritual direction community.  The topic has to do with experiences of spiritual direction in which your own (the director's) faith is challenged, which has caused me to think (only a tiny bit, admittedly) about what it has been like for my own spiritual director the last 21 months, contending with my grief, sadness, and desolation.  Someday, I suppose, it will be me, accompanying people through unthinkable trauma and loss.

So ~ I'm hoping to learn a lot.  This conference should be a really nice way to begin my new life adventures ~ the ones about which I haven't a clue.

Charles Reidel AP Photo

This appears in today's New York Times.  In the paper it's printed in black-and-white on an inside page of the front section, so I looked it up online.

No words.

M. Div.

!

Graduation

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

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

Oh yeah.  There are.

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

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

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

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

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

That's something. 

Perhaps that's why . . . 

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

!!!

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

Memory (Daily Photo 8)

I think that my brother put it best when he said on FB," In the midst of thinking of those who protect us and have given so much, and those who have gone before us in our own lives....whom we miss so much."

In our family, at least in recent generations, we have not been touched by death in wartime.  My own family's generations were slightly off the timetable; my husband's father and his three brothers all headed for Europe in WWII, and they all came home.

But my brother and I, we miss our mother, and our brother, and our grandparents, and our stepmother Jewel, and now our son and nephew.

My brother did the work in getting this bench in memory of Josh placed in the cemetery in which I walk so often.  Due to various foul-ups, it took the past nine months for the task to be completed, but this last week-end the mother of one of Josh's best friends and I were able to plant some impatiens.  The bench is on a dirt path in the woods; the view through the tress is of a small lake, where mallards and wood ducks sailed by this morning.  I like to think that those few cemetery visitors who are a bit adventurous in leaving the main roads and paths will find some delight in stumbling upon this small patch of color, and that the words, "And may perpetual light shine upon him" will deflect a bit of the sadness coming from the dates indicating that a young man, a boy, really, died far too soon.

From North Truro to Truro Beach

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

So far: 7 miles.