One foot in heaven

This blog has moved

2006-11-07T07:52:00.000-05:00

The blog formerly known as "One foot in ... " has moved to "Widening Circles."

I'm past wanting to be defined by my denominational deliverations and I'd like to have more control over the blog itself, so I decided it was time to move on. I've packed up everything that was here and taken it with me, though; it's all part of the same story.

The title comes from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It resonates with me in part because I think I have spent my life circling around God in one way or another, but also because the phrase "widening circles" brings to mind an image of ripples spreading across the surface of a pond. I believe our prayers and actions and attitudes do cause ripples that spread across the world, and I try to be mindful of that.

I haven't decided on a blog name for myself, though, since I'm still not brave enough to go with my real name. Widening doesn't have much appeal for obvious reasons, and w.c. doesn't seem quite right, either. I'm leaning toward Hope, but we'll see ...

Meanwhile, update your links and come on over!

(Click here to be redirected.)

Tempus fugit

2006-11-07T07:31:00.000-05:00

I thought four days in the company of the generations immediately above and below me in the family tree would leave me with plenty of blog material, but not so. It only left me exhausted. Here is the bottom line: I'm really glad that I'm not old, and I'm really glad that I'm not young.

I did have a laugh at myself on Saturday. In the afternoon, I found myself in a room permeated by the distinctive, lingering scent of a certain smokable weed while everyone sat around complaining that they should have been doing work but they were goofing off instead. Ah, yes, I thought, this feels very familiar; I could almost believe I'd gone back in time. Then, at 10:30 p.m., they all went to a party and I went to bed. I can only imagine what their hormones were urging them toward; my were telling me to keep the sleeping bag unzipped so I could periodically slip out of it to vent the heat I was feeling. (The room was pretty warm, but ...)

Oh, yeah, make no mistake: It definitely is 30 years later!

2006-11-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

I am learning that sadness can be more than a feeling. It's become a place I inhabit.

I'm talking here about sadness for the home I've left. This sadness is both more and less than grief, that shocked, protesting reaction to having things torn away from us. People talk about working their way through grief, or coming to terms with it, both concepts born of their hope that in time, the feeling will lessen.

You learn to inhabit sadness when you've embraced it. I don't want the feeling to go away. I don't seek sympathy; I don't feel regret. Walking away was my own choice; I needed to be someplace else. I think I knew this sadness would be part of it, though I'm not sure I understood just how vast it would be. Now I need to keep this huge empty place inside my heart because I need to remember what was there--because, as paradoxical as it may seem, I am what was there.

Living in sadness can stretch us, I think. I am learning a greater compassion, because we've all lost something, starting with Eden.

More endless cycles

2006-11-02T11:55:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time there was a young couple who fell in love and married. They got a mortgage and bought a house, then a car. Soon there were babies and baptisms, first communions and confirmations, and before they knew it there were graduations and weddings and more baptisms.

So far so good, but now comes the hard part. They got old.

Could this frail elderly man with the uncertain gait possibly be the strong Dad who used to carry me in from the car when I fell asleep on the way home from family gatherings? Could this difficult, obviously sick and suffering woman who has a different dumb excuse for not going to the doctor every time I see her possibly be the Mom who nursed me through rheumatic fever and a dozen other childhood illnesses?

Nothing pretty about getting old, so far as I can see.

Now I have taken two days off from work and driven to get them and bring them back to my house for a visit. Give me strength ...

Tonight FavoriteSon will drive out from his place in the city to have dinner with us, and he will be gracious and charming (how come he got to be so nice after he stopped living here?!) and they will comment later on what a good man he's grown up to be (he has). And the evening will be a joy to all of us.

And tomorrow I will drive them home again (whew!) and continue on to Boston, where for the first time I'll be a houseguest in FavoriteDaughter's apartment. And so it goes; I'm feeling a little older already.

I'll drive back Sunday, and by the time Monday morning rolls around, I'm sure I'll be more than ready to go back to work--and relax.

November 1, All Saints Day

2006-11-01T08:04:00.000-05:00

A day when I usually spend some time thinking about my godfather, my father's uncle, the humble grocer who is regarded as the family saint. It felt so special to be singled out for his affection when I was little. He was also the family bartender, and he would pick me up and sit me on the counter beside him while he worked. I thought, based on the experience of these family gatherings, that there were only three alcoholic beverages in the world: martinis, Manhattans, and beer. Martinis were served with olives, which were good, but Manhattans came with maraschino cherries, which were even better, and every so often as he worked he would slip me one. Life didn't get any better than that.

My cousin, his daughter, told me a few years ago that she thought he would be proud of the adult I grew up to be, which meant a lot to me. I don't know what he'd think about where things have gone since then, though. It's hard to imagine that the guy who was a quiet, steady presence at the 6:30 a.m. Mass would approve of this Episcopal thing I've got going. Ah, well.

I was trying to explain how all of this feels to a friend who is not religious, and the closest equivalent I could think of was emigration. Among my family and friends there are quite a few people who were born in other countries. They left home for good reasons, and found a place for themselves here. They don't want to go back, but even so, many of them still regard that first country as home. I think I know how that feels.

We grow up, we leave home, and no matter how fondly we may look back on those early days, there's no going back. Ain't nobody gonna pick me up, sit me on the counter, and feed me maraschino cherries again--or at least, they better not try!

Makes perfect sense to me

2006-10-31T07:07:00.000-05:00

It's fall break week and even though a lot of students have stayed around, things are noticeably calmer than last week when they had midterms. I felt the difference as soon as I got to campus yesterday, and I realized the stress had been affecting me even though I don't have to jump through those hoops any more. Been there, did that, as they say.

I worry sometimes about the amount of pressure these kids are under, and I try to be sensitive to how the ones I know are doing. I've also been turning my bulletin board (home to plastic Jesus and plastic Freud) into a sort of self-help station.

I put up the seal that says I sat through the school's official depression awareness training, along with some fliers that describe the symptoms of depression and list where you can turn for help. Then I put up my Feminists for Life flier with resources for problem pregnancies. I stuck my "I'm straight but I'm not narrow" button from the LGBT center next to it, to suggest that that being pro-life doesn't mean I'm narrow-minded or judgmental.

One of my colleagues, teasing, said I put the gay-acceptance button next to the pro-life flier so the world would know how truly confused I am. I told him that I myself am not the least confused.

What I can't understand is why the rest of the world doesn't get it.

Endless cycles

2006-10-29T16:25:00.000-05:00

I spent the afternoon raking leaves and (because I didn't finish the summer jobs when I should have) mowing grass.

(DearQuakerHusband doesn't do these jobs because he is violently allergic to grass and leaf mold, as well as to dust, which pretty much rules out the inside maintenance jobs as well. Because he tends to be more fun when when he's breathing, I do all of them. Mighty convenient on his part, if you ask me. In fairness, though, he does do some other jobs that I hate, including folding laundry and shopping for groceries, so I can't complain too much about this.)

Anyway, as I worked, I found myself wondering how many billion leaves I have raked in my life, and how many billion blades of grass I have mowed.

Not to mention how many socks I have laundered, how many dishes I have washed, how much dog hair I have swept up ...

And how many times I have regretted being short-tempered and snappish with husband and kids, turning away from a situation where I could have helped, saying unkind things about someone ...

Wouldn't it be nice if we could break these circles? I don't mean the raking and mowing, obviously; I figure global warming is about our only hope there. But sometimes I wish my sins were more dramatic, or at least more interesting. ("Sin boldly," Martin Luther said.) What hope is there for building world peace if we can't even stop picking at each other in so many little ways?

(Thought-provoking bumper sticker spotted on a car parked at church this morning: Who would Jesus bomb?)

No such thing as a coincidence?

2006-10-28T07:59:00.000-05:00

In the mystery stories I like to read, the characters will occasionally encounter some incredible coincidence which of course has great significance to the plot, then announce to each other that there is no such thing as a coincidence. In fiction, that's probably true, but in life? I wonder if everything's connected by a Divine hand, or if it's the way we make the associations that creates that patterns that in turn give meaning to our lives. Maybe a bit of both?

I stopped working at my desk to enjoy a few quiet minutes before I had to leave for work yesterday. This is something I keep making resolutions to do, but things always get ahead of me. There is always more I wanted to accomplish each morning, and I so I always seem to be falling behind according to my mental plan for the day before the day's even really started. And it's true that commuting gives me plenty of time for thoughts and prayers, but I find that generally it's not such a good idea to close your eyes and empty your mind while driving--although at times the traffic moves so slowly I don't think it would make much difference if I did. Anyway, I had taken my hands off the keyboard, leaned back in my comfortable desk chair, closed my eyes, and tried to step away from everyday pressures and concerns. I put my usual question to God: Where am I going in all of this, and what am I suppose to do next? This lasted for about two minutes before the phone rang.

What to do? Answer it, or sit listening to it ring and waiting for the answering machine to pick up? After two rings I answered. It was the priest from my church, calling to follow up on my offer to work on the church website. Among other things, he would like to see it grow to be more of a spiritual resource. I'm excited about doing that, and when he thanked me for volunteering I told him I was glad to have an opportunity to make a contribution in an area where I feel modestly competent, since planning teas and such--the other areas where they've been looking for volunteers lately--definitely is not my area of expertise.

So I was glad I picked up the phone, and I think maybe the call did represent an answered prayer, though I must say that I'm not accustomed to receiving such a prompt and direct response, and I'd like it if that trend continued!

I am still waiting, though, for a response to my request for information about the program in spirituality I mentioned in a recent blog. I know it's not an emergency but I am excited about the idea and eager to have more details to consider. If nothing comes by the end of next week I'll call, but I'd rather not have to do that because my thoughts about this are still in a state where I'm not sure what I'd say if asked why I'm interested. Some things are easier (?) to write about than to talk about.

A final comment: Today is my 28th wedding anniversary (28 on the 28th, and to make things even more connected, we will be back this morning in the place where we were married, for a memorial service for a man who attended the wedding and went outside when it was over to paint a glorious picture of the scene--blazing fall foliage and all--that hangs in an honored place in my living room). Love is still a miracle and a mystery, which I continue to explore and understand only a little more with each passing year. Marriage is a relationship that in some ways resembles the relationship we have with God: we love, we trust, we try to live in harmony with the Other, we have confidence that we are loved in return. With God, though, we believe that love will never be withdrawn, that trust will never be violated. In the human relationship we know it could happen, and yet because of a promise exchanged we go on living as if it won't happen, and that is what makes it both scary and miraculous. The adventure continues ...

One more story

2006-10-27T07:26:00.000-05:00

One more story about ethical behavior before I get off the subject, because I think you could go crazy if you spent too much time trying to figure these things out.

Most of the ethical decisions we make are very small scale. The larger ones don't up very often, and few of us ever face the really, really big ones. I'm thinking now in particular about the mother of a college friend. She was still a student in Holland when the Nazis arrived. One day she watched Germans carelessly tossing Jewish children into the back of a truck for deportation, and she was changed by that experience. She felt she could no longer stand by and do nothing; she had to get involved She began working with others to protect Jews. She helped move many Jewish children to safety, and she hid a Jewish man and his three children for nearly three years. One night they were all discovered by a Dutch policeman. She reached for a hidden gun and shot him dead; others helped get rid of his body.

What would I have done. I've given that a lot of thought since I first heard this story. I hope I would have become involved. I hope I would have been courageous enough to risk my own life if that were necessary to do the right thing. But what about shooting the policeman? That I don't know about it. If it were just me, maybe I would have been willing to lose my own life for the principle of nonviolence, but what about the others? What about the children?

And how could you ever go back to normal everyday living after an experience like that? This woman went on to marry, moved to the United States, raised three boys in Westchester County, and is now living in Vermont. Amazing.

Tough love, indeed

2006-10-26T08:01:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about war and peace lately. Well, who hasn't been, I know, given the state of our world, but I'm coming at it more from the head than the heart this time around. Pacifism is a big topic in the Christian ethics class I'm taking, in part because it is so timely but also because some of the authors we are reading see it as the central, defining stance of Christianity.

The biggest surprise for me has been discovering myself seriously willing to consider the validity of the just war tradition. As I have hinted in earlier blogs, I am a child of a certain time and place and we aging flower children still tend to lean toward pacifism, but what I'm realizing (yet again) as I rethink this issue is that having children has changed everything. As a parent, I have a much greater appreciation for order and stability as foundational to living out our human calling and potential.

I still want to be a pacifist, but here's what I see more clearly now: If you reject the idea that force may regrettably be necessary at times in the name of justice, you bear a heavy burden of responsibility for those who suffer genocide, systematic starvation, and the other injustices we have seen in the closing years of the twentieth century. Some writers call that kind of military intervention policing, as opposed to warring. If you're willing to accept that we need a police force to maintain order in our own relatively tranquil civil society, isn't using military force to establish order and justice on wider basis the next logical step?

I do find some merit in this argument, but would I be willing to send my son or daughter off to do it? That's another matter altogether, and if it's selfish I'm willing to extend that selfishness to everyone on either side. I want to cry every time I hear another story about the death and misery and heartache that have come out of Iraq. Forget Saddam and forget the futile search for weapons of mass destruction; I can't imagine (approaching it from the heart, now) how spending human life this way could ever be right. Why should any mother's child be sacrificed?

For love, some would say. As an act of love and mercy, to deliver God's children from oppression.

And that thought takes me back to some of our earlier reading about euthanasia, where the more "conservative" thinkers remind us that we're not God, and because we're only "creatures--not Creator" there are limits to how far we have to go to make things turn out right. That's God's problem, in other word.

If it isn't right to kill people in order to preserve human dignity, or to relieve human suffering, why is it right to kill people in war in order to preserve peace?

Because in war (or at least in policing) the people we aim to kill are the bad guys, I suppose, but still.

Switching ethical questions, at dinner last weekend we were talking about capital punishment and one of my relatives said she thought it was justified in cases where very heinous crimes had been committed, and she listed a few examples. I asked if she saw executing those criminals as a matter of justice or vengeance, which really was a loaded question since I think most people can see that pursuing justice might be noble but pursuing vengeance probably isn't, regardless of how they feel about it. She dodged my question and said her reasoning was based neither on justice nor vengeance but rather on her belief that the people who committed such heinous crimes simply did not deserve to live.

Wow.

This and that

2006-10-25T08:07:00.000-05:00

You might have thought midterm week would present an excellent occasion for a little extra prayer, but apparently not. Our Tuesday afternoon congregation was reduced to three students and myself. I sometimes hang back a little on the responses because I tend to blurt out the wrong ones (slightly different wording from another church, that is) and the students were hanging back also, which meant our poor presider was left to answer himself a couple of times. Oops. I'm not sure preaching to a congregation of four would be very rewarding, either, but he did an admirable job with that as well. Afterwards, we all took a close look at the carving of the man and guide dog behind the altar and decided the writing was in Welsh, but that's as far as we got with it.

===
One of the students who works in our office is a senior who was thinking about applying to seminary for next year, but now he's pretty sure he won't. He's a religion major who took the same course last year that I'm taking now, and we've had some interesting conversations about it. In fact, through our conversations I sometimes feel I'm vicariously completing his religion major with him without having to sit down and write the senior thesis, which is fine by me. I think I was also sort of hoping to vicariously go on to seminary with him, so I find myself a little disappointed, but overall I think this is a good thing. If it's meant to be he'll get there eventually, and he'll be a better seminary student for the other things he's done in the meantime. I'm going to miss him when he graduates, though; time to start looking for a new conversation partner.

===
Meanwhile, I've been looking into my options for a course to take or audit next semester and finding nothing on campus that feels just right. Poking around on the web I discovered that a Catholic college about an hour a way from us offers a Graduate Certificate in Spirituality at a location that's more or less just around the corner. This would be a very strange thing to sign up for under the circumstances, but it struck me as an intriguing possibility so I asked them to send me info. Out of the frying pan and ... what, back into the frying pan? Ah, well, they probably wouldn't have me anyway, but it's an interesting possibility to consider.

Family feud

2006-10-24T07:52:00.000-05:00

One of the things I particularly enjoy about being part of a university community is the diversity you find here. I love being in a place where ideas are valued, where you hear different languages and accents everywhere you go. I like the variety of religious viewpoints represented, and the respectful dialogue that takes place between people of different religious faiths.

Why is it that the religious group for whom I feel the least tolerance is those other Christians who don't share my view about how we're supposed to live out the Christian message?

Some guys with bullhorns and big gruesome photos of aborted fetuses showed up on campus yesterday, along with a truck with more huge bloody photographs plastered on the sides that kept roaring up and down the street, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to go out and dialogue with them. This group turned out to be part of a national organization that travels around doing this, and I found myself relieved that they weren't our students. I stopped to talk with a young man who pressed a gory full-color flier into my hands.

I didn't expect to change his mind, but I had to try. I asked him if he thinks women have abortions because they don't know that pregnancy produces babies. I asked him if he thinks this protest is an effective way to reduce the number of abortions taking place. I told him I think working on ways to support women so they can raise their children would be a more Christian approach. He told me there are plenty of Christians out there willing to adopt unwanted babies, which wasn't my point at all.

He wore a sort of deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression, but his lips were pressed together in resolve. He explained that he must tell the world that abortion is murder; like Jesus chasing the moneychangers from the temple. With a whip! he added. I told him I thought the situation in the temple was different, and I asked him if he could think of a time when Jesus dealt with someone who was suffering by lecturing them instead of taking care of them. He couldn't; in the back of my mind I was wondering if there is such a story that momentarily escaped my recollection.

I don't think he was expecting this. To be challenged by people who disagree, yes, but not by someone who claims to agree and cites the Bible back to him. He seemed to be leaning just slightly backward, away from me.

I went on about the compassion of Jesus but he didn't answer that. At a certain point it became clear that we would continue going around in circles until one of us broke it off. I went back to work thinking I'd won the argument on points, but neither of us changed. Maybe he was thinking the same. I was frustrated because I think this tactic is all wrong. I believe that if we're ever going to change minds about abortion it isn't going to be by waving ugly photos in peoples' faces. I think we should be concentrating more on changing attitudes and advancing programs to support mothers and children, but I haven't gotten anywhere with that idea here. This group is also known for being very confrontational about other issues such as the sinfulness of homosexuality. I don't think they succeed in convincing many gays, either. I hand his flier back to him and walk away.

I'm not the kind of Christian who normally lectures people about the Bible, and that part was sort of fun. Maybe this is a whole new start for me? I imagined walking back into my office and asking everyone if they've accepted Jesus as their savior; that would certainly turn heads. But no, I would never do that. I like to tell myself I proselytize by the way I lead my life, but part of me knows that's a cowardly answer. Back at my desk I continue to feel upset, at least in part because of all the dead baby pictures--but maybe also because I suspect I shouldn't have been so pleased with my part in this conversation?

Thank God it's Monday, so I can relax

2006-10-23T06:30:00.000-05:00

It happened again. I arrived at church yesterday feeling a little homesick, and then as everyone came together I was deeply moved and grateful to be part of this community. There was a notice in last week's announcements that they needed a webmaster, and I volunteered, so now I have my first official job in my new church. For a while I believed I'd never let myself get involved in a church again; why am I not surprised to realize I've pretty much tossed that resolution aside?

A lot of thoughts came together for me this weekend. Friday will be the two-year anniversary of the event that marks the beginning of this time of looking inward, and I know it's time to look outward again; the webmaster gig is just the beginning.

It was a busy weekend, as we spent time with family, old friends, and the boy we call our "Russian son," who has fits into both categories. He has been in the U.S. for the past nine years pursuing an American education, and during that time he has become a part of our family, though his own parents are alive and well back at home. For him we have done most of the things parents do for their kids, everything from cheering him on at soccer games and wrestling matches, to staying up with him most of the night while he completed his college applications just barely ahead of the deadline, to helping out with tuition.

It is an odd thing to try to love someone else's child as if he were your own. Some boundaries you cross, but others remain. Now he is two semesters away from completing a five-year business degree and two hairs' breadths away from being tossed out for academic insufficiency. As amateur psychologists we diagnose depression; he started to work with the mental health services people at his college but now says they didn't help and he has to solve it on his own. Stubborn, stubborn. At his age you can't force your own children to do anything they don't want to do, and there's even less we can insist on with him. But once he's out, he'll have to go back to Russia, where he won't have a Russian education or a complete American education. What will happen to him then? Sometimes we feel angry that he is wasting the resources we've invested in him, emotional and otherwise; other times we feel heartbroken because we know that if he is sent back home now we'll lose touch with him, and that will feel like losing a member of our family.

Kids ...

Off pitch and out of sorts

2006-10-20T07:35:00.000-05:00

We had Taize worship at my church last night. I look forward to this hour of chant-like singing, silence, and readings, which we do once a month. I wish I could say last night's version was a sublime experience, but it wasn't. One of the women had to leave early, and in order to fit more in before she left we moved things around and cut a few parts short, making it all feel a little disconnected to me. The singing wasn't very good and I thought that had a lot to do with one voice in particular that was loud, off pitch, and preemptive, which tended to drag the rest along to the point where we had to stop at one point and start over again. This problem wasn't helped by the organ, which seemed to be playing everything higher than it should have been. Our organist insisted she was playing everything as written, but I don't usually have trouble reaching notes until we get to d if I'm not really warmed up, and I was straining to hit b's.

Well, you get the picture. I arrived home feeling a little disappointed, but for some reason at the exact moment I came through my back door it hit me that God couldn't care less what the singing sounded like, and if I was unhappy the only possible reason for that was that I hadn't been able to show off my great (yeah, not really) voice. And the reason for moving things around was because the woman who left early was getting ready to go stay with her daughter who is going to have surgery, and she still wanted to be in church for some of the parts she finds sustaining, so making those adjustments for her was absolutely the right thing to do. And if I had a problem because our worship didn't please me that sort of suggested that I thought I was God and it had all been done in my honor.

I had a laugh at myself and I was OK with it, I really think I was, but for the rest of the evening I felt sort of sad, as if I'd lost something I cared about. I'm pretty sure it wasn't all about one evening's Taize worship, but then I'm not sure where it came from.

I'm thinking maybe I'll play something in the car on my way to work that I can sing along with and pretend that I have perfect pitch and see if that helps. (At least I know I'll be playing to a thoroughly appreciative audience.)

And now for something completely silly

2006-10-19T07:05:00.000-05:00

Anybody remember the Firesign Theatre?

If you answered yes to this question you've just identified yourself with a certain time (late '60s, early '70s) and place (the great American counterculture). It may be hard for those who know me today as a middle-aged housewife to imagine that I once wore hip-hugging bell bottoms, granny glasses, love beads, and ragged army surplus (what were we thinking?), placing me squarely in the group who thought the Firesign Theatre were really, really funny (though I admit that much of my amusement was probably chemically induced, which may be why I can't get my own kids to see their humor, or at least to admit to it in my presence).

For those who don't know the group, let me introduce them. The Firesign Theatre were (and actually still are, though I no longer find them very funny; I'm not sure whether to blame that on me or them) a comedy group that specialized in complex skits mostly spoofing radio programming. Their albums that are most dear to me are Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers and I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus, released in 1970 and 1971 respectively. I'm sure I still have them somewhere in the house, but I'm not sure I could bear the memories digging them out would bring. Wikipedia notes that "because of their complexity, Firesign recordings tend to become funnier with repeated listenings as new jokes are revealed." Yes, that certainly is true. They also tended to become funnier as the night wore on, as I recall, for reasons hinted at above.

Anyway, the group came to mind Tuesday when I was in chapel. (Really!) The wall behind the altar where the Roman Catholics and Episcopalians hold their services is wood-paneled, with several carved bas relief memorials. Actually the entire chapel is filled with memorials to various alumni, most of them soldiers who didn't come home from the various armed conflicts of the twentieth century, and I generally don't pay much attention to any of them.

From where I usually stand when we gather around the altar, though, I get a good view of this bas relief of a man and a large dog. It has fascinated me for the past year, and on Tuesday I finally went up to have a good look. I found writing carved into an oval frame around it, but that didn't help because I couldn't read it--I'm not even sure what language it's written in. Up close, the dog appeared to be wearing the kid of squarish lead you see on guide dogs for the blind. A religious reference: God is my guide dog? As I walked away, unenlightened, I found myself humming the tune of a "hymn" featured in a Firesign Theatre skit poking fun at religious programming. I could sing it to you today:

O blinding light
O light that blinds
Look out for me
I cannot see.

The person I was remembers the words. The person I am today no longer finds them particularly amusing, but the next step is, I start thinking about their meaning and decide it is scarily close to the truth: Look out for me, I cannot see.

I'm pretty sure the Firesign Theatre never imagined anyone would actually meditate on these words in church. I'm sure I didn't, either. How strange life is!

To want is to have

2006-10-18T07:45:00.000-05:00

This blog is about rain and joy and the way things sometimes fall into place so you get just what you need when you need it. I'm not talking about manna falling from heaven here. I mean things that would have been there with or without you, so the miracle lies in whatever led you to see what you needed and then go find it.

Though maybe it is like manna from heaven, since God didn't send bread until the Israelites complained in their own grumpy way about how hungry they were.

Following? Let me go back to yesterday and I'll explain.

It was a rainy, rainy day. At lunchtime the campus looked so deserted you might have thought we were on break. I didn't think anyone would make it through the rain to the chapel for the Tuesday afternoon Episcopal service. I was tempted to skip it myself. I thought I was tired of it. I was tired in general. I didn't want to be there with just one or two others. I expected it to be even gloomier than usual inside the chapel, which is beautiful but does tend to be dark. But I couldn't put it out of my mind and so at 4:20 I found myself slopping through puddles in that direction, and when I arrived, I found perhaps double the usual attendance, my favorite presider (not what it had said in the email reminder they sent out), the light seemed brighter than ever and I experienced a more intense level of something--joy?--than I had been feeling lately.

I was still thinking about that feeling when I got home and started the reading for this morning's class and found this about joy:

It might seem strange to stress the significance of joy for the Christian life, since we normally associate joy with the momentary response to the unexpected. Joy, we think is spontaneous but has little staying power. It cannot sustain us over the long haul. But the joy we receive as Christians is not that of a passing occasion. Rather it is a joy that derives from finding our true home among a people who carry the words and skills of God's kingdom of peace. That such a people are joyful does not mean they think that their struggle is over, for their sense of the tragic character of our existence cannot allow any shallow optimism or sentimentality. Rather their joy is possible because of their assurance that they are at least in the right struggle.

Stanley Hauerwas
The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics

Interesting, I said to myself, but I'm not sure that's what I'm thinking about. Maybe what I'm feeling is indeed "a response to the unexpected"--the discovery, no less surprising because we experience it over and over again, that God loves us.

I considered that idea for a while, and eventually I remembered reading a book by C.S. Lewis called Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. I'm not that much of a Lewis fan (heresy, I know) but this one I liked. I read it a long time ago, and what struck me at the time was his description of something he called "Joy," a feeling I recognized immediately but had never seen described in quite the same way anyplace else. How had I forgotten this book for so long? I wanted to read it again. I wanted to have it as a book I could flip through and write in, but I was so eager to see it I was willing to settle for an ebook download--but there were none to be had online. Eventually, when I took the dog out for the last rainy walk of the night, I decided to take my wallet and wander as far as the bookstore.

I live in an interesting little town, a place where things tend to close down early but if you are looking for joy the two things you can still buy late on a rainy evening mid-week are a drink or a book. I passed on the drink but was thrilled to find the bookstore still open when I got there. I dragged the wet dog in (she had no idea what it was about but she gets excited about any new adventure), told the clerk what I wanted, and was on my way home with book in hand (or more precisely, fortunately, in a big waterproof bag) five minutes later. Ask, and it shall be sold to you. (It wasn't terribly expensive, as a matter of fact.)

... an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in any sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Later, he says, "the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have."

Yes, that's it for sure. I'm looking forward to reading more. I told the clerk in bookstore how great I think it is to live in a town where the bookstore stays open for anyone who happens to need a book late on a rainy evening, and she sort of shrugged and said nothing; it's a line I'm sure she's heard before. I trust my thanks to God were more graciously received.

The home team won, by the way

2006-10-17T06:51:00.000-05:00

I went to a football game Friday night with friends at the university. The stadium is near my assigned parking lot so I pass it every day, but I had never been inside. It was like going on an anthropological field trip. Cheerleaders, marching band members in bright blazers, hunky boys in football uniforms, gangs of girls on the prowl, adults clad in more fleece in the strikingly odd school colors than I might have expected to find in the entire state--what a strange little world they've got going in there.

I suppose this is what a lot of people imagine when they think college, but it's not the side of campus life I know best. I guess it's not surprising since the mission of my office is to get people focused on the problems of the world beyond, but the students I encounter are thoughtful individuals. They all seem to be at work fine-tuning life plans that account for how what they are doing now will get them where they want to go. Their goals generally have something to do with making the world a better place, and most of them have already started on that part. They know they are lucky to be where they are, and they see that they owe something back in turn. If the future is theirs, we have much to be hopeful about.

When I tell people I work at a university they often have disparaging things to say about young people today, and indeed there are aspects of the current youth culture that I don't necessarily appreciate, but these kids are an idealistic lot and it's hard not to like and even admire them.

I flatter myself, I know, but I like to think we--they and I--have things in common. I feel like a kid again myself when I hurry off to class (though this time around I have generally accomplished the assigned reading, which was frequently not the case in my first college career), and I am experiencing my own new beginnings. I don't have any plans, though, just the hope (and trust) that my future will unfold the way it is meant to.

Sometimes I want to these students them to relax, that things will work out just fine even if life doesn't t proceed along the exact track they are imagining (and to warn them that it probably won't!), but I expect that's a lesson they'll have to learn in their own good time.

Living in the now

2006-10-16T08:02:00.000-05:00

The best sermons in my view are extemporaneous as per Merriam-Webster's second entry: "carefully prepared but delivered without notes or text." (I'm a tough audience, I know; would it help if I said I see preaching not as a performance art but as a sort of partnership in which what I do with it is important, too?) In most cases I find those easier to absorb than something that's been written out in advance, then read from a piece of paper. I'm usually sitting there thinking that I could just as easily take that paper home and read it myself--though one advantage of written sermons is that you can do just that. I have a copy of a sermon by a priest whose reflections I appreciate very much, and I've gone back to it repeatedly over the past few months. In it, he talks about the need to take exodus risks in following Jesus, and about understanding God's purpose in giving us places to rest along the way.

Jesus, he points out, “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out ... " Out, that is, not in--out of the relative safety of the sheepfold and into a place of uncertainty, where trusting and following the shepherd is the only way to go.

He goes on: "It is all too easy for us to misinterpret the peace and respite God may give us along the way. We can convince ourselves that we have reached our journey's true goal, when in fact we are very far from the Promised Land. It is also easy for us to forget that these grace periods are often the direct consequence of our refusal to be shepherded further by God."

I'm still thinking about that part. I got where I am (I'm talking here about religion) by putting one foot in front of the other while looking to God for reassurance that I was going in the right direction. Each individual step felt right, and I don't see how all of them combined could have taken me anyplace else. But despite the comforts it offers, this isn't where I ever expected to be, and there are things I miss yet from the old place and haven't found here. So I'm wondering, is this the destination, or one of those temporary resting places? Doesn't matter for now, I suppose; I trust I'll know when I need to. Just got to concentrate in the meantime on being where I am.

It's not about the coffee

2006-10-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

These are some of the things that happened in my church this morning in the time between services, when some of the early folk and the later folk were briefly together:

The organizer of our Christmas giving tree bustled around a little Christmas tree in the back making sure everyone understood how it was supposed to work: You pick a gift tag off the tree, purchase the gift specified for a needy child in our area, and bring it back to church by mid-December. I think she's unnecessarily anxious about this project--witness the fact she felt the need to get started in mid-October--but it's understandable, since it's the first time she's ever done anything like this. "I was always complaining that we should do more outreach, and then it occurred to me that I should stop complaining and do it," she said.

A small group gathered around to listen to a woman whose daughter has been ill and will have surgery this week.

The reader, pressed into service on short notice, spent some time alone with the readings for the day.

A couple of people came in, took their places, and sat quietly.

The organist and one of our better singers went over a new piece of music they were getting ready to teach the rest of the congregation.

Other folks talked about what they did last night and what they planned to do on this glorious fall Sunday afternoon.

Two women discussed who would represent the church at this week's meeting of our local council of churches, which has a big food pantry as its major project.

And yes, there was a coffee pot in the corner, and that good coffee aroma did fill the room like a hymn.

And gradually the pews filled up for the second service and the early people left, and the room fell silent for a few minutes, until the organist started to play and we all stood and sang with our usual enthusiasm, and it was time to begin again:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid. ...

I think I have been looking for this place for as long as I can remember.

It's not about standing around and chatting with your friends. It's about building Christian community. How can we comfort the sorrowful if we don't know who they are? How can we effectively evangelize people we don't get a chance to talk to? Is there a better time than Sunday morning to get everyone together to plan what we'll do next to support the needy in our broader community? We care about each other in a personal way because we know each other, and together we care about God's other children. This kind of fellowship is deeply interwoven with the readings we hear and ponder and the hymns we sing during the formal part of our worship. We come together to celebrate the eucharist as a family, then we go out to be ourselves a sign of God's presence in the world.

We are a small church without much auxiliary space, so all these things happen in the sanctuary, and in a way that's a blessing. It's good to be reminded that our prayers flow from the rest of our lives, and our lives in turn proceed out of prayer.

... Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.

Show me the way

2006-10-13T08:02:00.000-05:00

Show me the path I might follow to be the person you created me to be.

Last weekend DearQuakerHusband's Quaker meeting observed its 200th birthday and we spent parts of both days celebrating. There was a lot of silence as well as plenty of talking, seeing old friends, reminiscing, feasting on two covered-dish lunches, etc. All the other churches in town were invited; few responded, but the priest from my new church came and ended up sitting next to me during silent worship the first day, an unexpected connection between old and new places in my life. This prayer jumped to life during that quiet, and it's been with me since.

FavoriteDaughter, the younger of my two children, just started her junior year in college. I remember thinking before she left for her freshman year that life would probably change for me once she departed, bringing an end to the daily, hands-on-mothering phase of my life, that her new beginning might be a new start for me, too. What I imagined was basically that I get more involved in the kinds of volunteer work I'd been doing all along.

If I thought my life might change a little, I could never have imagined all that has happened to me in the past two years. I have a new job, in an entirely different field, so it's really a whole new career, one that draws together my diverse interests and experience. Out of the job I have new friends. I also have the opportunity to audit college classes, which is a second chance for me as a student, since I must admit I was a rather distracted undergraduate. Even outside of class the university is a lively intellectual community where people are engaged in ideas and there's much to think about. I've also left the church I belonged to for 26 years, and now I have a new church, in a different denomination--a new Christian community to go forward with and within--so it's been an eventful time spiritually as well as intellectually.

So much is new and exciting, I'd really like to stop here for a while and enjoy this new landscape. And yet it doesn't feel finished yet. Something's telling me I can't stop now because there's still more to come. Where does it end--or does it? Do we ever experience enough of God, or learn enough, or feel we've finally found our place in the world, or does it just go on this way to the journey's conclusion?

Show me the path I might follow to be the person you created me to be.

The trolley problem

2006-10-07T07:12:00.000-05:00

I am frustrated by most of the "thought experiments" we're reading about in my Christian ethics class. They're supposed to reduce complex problems to simpler terms so they become easier to understand, but as far as I'm concerned, most of them don't accurately represent those complex realities. I'm fascinated, though, by the trolley problem, which I mentioned in yesterday's blog.

Originally devised by Phillipa Foot in an article addressing abortion and the principle of double effect (the distinction between intended consequences of our actions and foreseen but unintended consequences), the trolley problem has spawned a slew of trolley sub-problems and taken on a life of its own. I've started some interesting conversations by trying a few of them out on friends.

The basic trolley problem goes like this:

A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five innocent people, who will surely be killed unless something is done. You can't stop the train, but you can flip a switch that will divert the trolley onto another track, where only one innocent person will be killed. What do you do?

In a variation on the basic problem, you are standing on a footbridge above the track, in between the trolley and the five anticipated victims. A large man is standing beside you, and you know enough about this particular kind of trolley to realize that if you push the man off the platform in front of the train, his body will stop it. He undoubtedly will be killed, but the other five will be spared. (You may not try to stop the trolley by jumping in front of it yourself.) What do you do?

If you said you'd flip the switch but couldn't bring yourself to push the man standing next to you, you're with the majority in each case. Which is interesting, because the result of each of those choices would appear to be precisely the same: Sacrificing one innocent person in order to save the lives of five. For most of us, though, the idea of physically pushing a person into the path of a train carries a repulsion factor far beyond that attached to simply flipping a switch and letting it roll over someone. (Although it turns out that subjects with brain damage in the area controlling emotional reactions are significantly more likely to say they'd go ahead and push.)

I heard an interesting lecture last week by a guy who has used brain imaging to see what parts of the human brain light up when we think about things like this this. He went on from there to devise a collection of further trolley problems and tested them out on large survey groups to test his hypotheses about brain function with respect to moral reasoning (an approach known as neuroethics).

So all the times I thought I was praying to God and receiving divine guidance about the right thing to do in difficult situations, it turns out it was actually just my old monkey brain at work, according to his theories. It's fascinating stuff to ponder--not that I'm about to switch from prayer to bananas in facing my personal dilemmas.

Just don't get me started about unconscious famous violinists.

A collage of ideas for Friday

2006-10-06T08:18:00.000-05:00

I have no words of my own to offer just now. The ideas that are swirling through my head and heart defy synthesis into anything coherent. I am full of shreds of thought about the nature of God's presence and the meaning of Christian community (personal and church issues), trolley problems and unconscious famous violinists (these from my Christian ethics class), and how we are supposed to live out our calling to be followers of Jesus Christ (a combination of both of the above, I suppose). What does it mean to be good?

In place of my words, I offer instead a few snippets from other sources that I've been thinking about:

Let there always be quiet, dark churches in which people can take refuge ... houses of God filled with his silent presence. There, even when they do not know how to pray, at least they can be still and breathe easily.
Thomas Merton

For if we wish to dwell in the tent of that kingdom,
we must run to it by good deeds
or we shall never reach it.

But let us ask the Lord, with the Prophet,
"Lord, who shall dwell in Your tent,
or who shall rest upon Your holy mountain" (Ps. 14:1)?

After this question, brothers and sisters,
let us listen to the Lord
as He answers and shows us the way to that tent, saying,
"The one Who walks without stain and practices justice;
who speaks truth from his heart;
who has not used his tongue for deceit;
who has done no evil to his neighbor;
who has given no place to slander against his neighbor."
Prologue, The Rule of St. Benedict

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Acts 2:42-47

The Catholic tradition is unified in its belief in God's active and intimate care for the world and each person in it, and in our own correlative obligations to care for those who are in need--preventing unjustified harm, alleviating pain, protecting and nourishing the well-being of individuals and the wider society. There are deep roots in the Catholic tradition that anchor a commitment to the most poor, the most marginalized, the most ill; and that in doing so sustain a commitment to human equality in its most basic sense.
Margaret A. Farley

Consequentialism may be described as that moral theory which holds that from the fact that some state of affairs ought to be it follows that we ought to do whatever is necessary to bring about that state of affairs. And, although teleological theories of morality are very ancient, consequentialism as a full-blown moral theory is traceable largely to Bentham and Mill in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To remember this is instructive, since it is not implausible to suggest that such a moral theory would be most persuasive when Christendom had, in large measure, ceased to be Christian Those who know themselves as creatures--not Creator--will recognize limits even upon their obligation to do good. As creatures we are to do all the good we can, but this means all the good we "morally can"--all the good we can do within certain limits. It may be that the Creator ought to do whatever is necessary to bring about the state affairs which ought to be, but we stand under no such godlike imperative.
...
Our responsibilities (as creatures) are limited--that the responsibility for achieving certain results has been taken out of our hands (or, better, never given us in the first place).
Gilbert Meilaender

We have in fact to distinguish between two kinds of Samaritan: the Good Samaritan and the Minimally Decent Samaritan. ... After telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus said "God, and do thou likewise." Perhaps he meant that we are morally required to act as the Good Samaritan did. Perhaps he was urging people to do more than is morally required of them. At all events it seems plain that it was not morally required of any of the thirty-eight that he rush out to give direct assistance at the risk of his own life ... I have been arguing that no person is morally required to make large sacrifices to sustain the life of another who has no right to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices to not include life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another.
Judith Jarvis Thompson

(In fairness I've taken these last two quotes out of context; Meilaender was talking about euthanasia and Thompson about abortion, but I find them even more interesting to think about away from those significantly charged issues. Out of context I find it difficult to agree with them; in context ... well, that's a subject for another day.)

Fresh brewed

2006-10-01T11:44:00.000-05:00

I sometimes think coffee is the third sacramental element in the Episcopalian tradition. I'm not sure if there's any support in Scripture for this, but considering the intensity of my personal relationship with coffee, I'm all right with it.

Actually, if you were to go looking for a Scriptural basis I think you'd find it in the table fellowship Jesus shared with his friends throughout their time together, not just at the Last Supper. Coffee hour is where a church strengthens the bonds of community among its members and reaches out to newcomers. I think it really is a shame most Roman Catholic parishes I've known don't do this. (Though I know many staunch Roman Catholics such as my own parents who would be appalled at the very notion; they never thought going to church ought to involve that much togetherness.)

I was thinking these thoughts--not for the first time--as the pot gurgled and the aroma of fresh coffee filled the church this morning. Coffee hour takes place outside as long as the weather permits, but a driving rain drove everything indoors, and the church is so small the only place you can put a big coffee pot is behind the last pew. It was a grey day indeed when I arrived for the early service, and I felt cheered and welcomed to see the light pouring out of the church windows as I drove up.

Breaking with the usual schedule, the second service was canceled in favor of proceeding to walk as a team in the local AIDS walkathon this morning. Fortunately, the sky turned blue and the sun came out right about the time the walk started. About 18 of us participated--not a bad turnout for a small congregation. I cheated and walked back home after about a mile and a half because I knew I wasn't good for the full six miles, but it meant a lot to be there as part of that group. Most of us had come straight from church but a few turned up later at the start of the walk, and glad greetings were exchanged among all as we gathered. I suspect--in fact I know--that these people don't all like each other, and yet they seem to know how to make this community thing work.

I have wished for so long that I belonged to a church that did things like this.

It was a heartening finish to what has at times been a sad week for me, to be perfectly honest. I had a long phone chat with a good friend of mine from my old church who told me how much people missed me--not what I wanted to hear right now--and I sent back the where are you questionnaire that came with the we miss you letter from the same church. It will be interesting to see if they decide now to follow up or let me go; I'm betting on the latter. It was good to be reminded that what I did last Sunday was a matter of walking into a new community, not just walking away from the old one. Being sad is not the same thing as having regrets, but trusting you are headed in the right direction doesn't necessarily make it easy to let go of the past.

While we were standing around together waiting to start walking, a photographer from the local weekly newspaper posed us all behind our church banner and took our picture. It will be interesting if it is published, since this is a small town where it's sure to be seen by many people who would not have expected to find me in an Episcopal group portrait. With that in mind it occured to me to step out of the picture, but I'm glad to say I didn't. I'm here now.

Lost, found, still wandering ...

2006-09-28T08:39:00.000-05:00

Often these days I feel God is inviting me to let go of--or at least reexamine--everything I was once pretty sure I believed. This is not an invitation I'm particularly happy about, since I thought I was doing just fine where I was. But here I am. My church odyssey has been part of this process; so now is the class I am auditing at the university, called Christian ethics and modern society. We are reading so much stuff representing so many different points of view within the Christian spectrum that my head is spinning.

Yesterday I was thinking so hard about all of this on my way home that I got lost. Seriously. I was riding my motorscooter along my backroads route when suddenly I looked around and realized I had no idea where I was. My lostness didn't last long because I know this area pretty well and eventually I found a road I recognized, but meanwhile I'd gone way out of my way and ended up having to travel some roads I would have preferred not to be on.

What is the message here?

To serve you is perfect freedom

2006-09-27T06:59:00.000-05:00

To serve you is perfect freedom.

The bishop quoted that line in his homily on Sunday, and it has stayed with me. It comes from the Morning Prayer Collect for Peace in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know
you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom: Defend
us, your humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that
we, surely trusting in your defense, may not fear the power of
any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Formal written prayer and poetry are alike in that they try to express in words things that don't easily lend themselves to being expressed in words. (The best written prayer is poetry, and the worst—well, don't get me started … ) In the case of written prayer, those things are usually about our longing for God and how we work out that relationship. Some prayers are more transparent than others, though. It doesn't require advanced powers of interpretation to understand why Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid or Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart resonate.

But I'm still thinking about to serve you is perfect freedom, as I've been thinking about freedom and uncertainty. We celebrate freedom, but our simple view is that freedom equals happiness. I wonder if it's ever that easy. Limits can provide safety and security. Newborn babies know this. Released from the confines of the womb, they flail and sometimes they can't come to quiet until you pick them up and wrap them tightly in your arms.

Twice in the past two years, I've stepped outside the circle, leaving places that had been mine, places where I understood the limits of a certain structure and knew how to locate myself within the framework it provided. Boy, it feels weird out here. Not good, not bad, necessarily; just weird. Who am I, anyway, if I'm not who I thought I was? And where am I going?

Of course the situation looks different from other perspectives: You could say that I haven't really gone anywhere at all, I just made the circle bigger, or that I've stepped into a another circle. I just haven't had as much time to figure out how I fit into this new framework, to learn how to think about myself as a newborn Episcopalian.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known … send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.

In perfect freedom. Whatever that means.

The big day

2006-09-24T15:52:00.000-05:00

I'm still trying to sort out my impressions about this big day, which doesn't really seem so momentous now that it has come and gone. I feel a little like a kid who is asked on her birthday if she feels any different. Of course she says she feels older, because she thinks she's supposed to, though in truth seven feels an awful lot like six and 364 days. What is different is that, for a passing moment, she is the center of everyone's attention, and though she is too bashful to admit it, she's actually enjoying that.

It was nice this morning to be applauded and hugged and welcomed by all. I suspect that next Sunday will feel a lot like the day after your birthday, which is to say back to business as usual, but today was nice while it lasted.

Two of our Inquirers' group were still away on honeymoon, so six of us were called to the front of our little church together to restate our baptismal promises. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about this. By the middle of last week I was enjoying a measure of peace and certainty about it, but Thursday's letter from my old church was an invitation to enter into turmoil again. A friend from work sent me an email on Friday with this advice: "Enjoy Sunday. Remember why you came to this decision," and that really helped, though I doubt she understood exactly how much those words meant to me. By this morning I was calm again, and happy.

So we stood up together, renewed our commitment to Jesus Christ, and affirmed our belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We promised "with God's help" to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ," to "seek and serve Christ in all persons," and "to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." The bishop laid his hands upon each of our heads and said a prayer. There are some things that have special meaning in church but in fact are quite ordinary: shaking hands, for example, or sharing bread and wine. The laying on of hands isn't something we ordinarily do to one another, though, and it was an interesting sensation. I experienced it as a very peaceful, focused moment.

When that part was over and we returned to our places, the hymn that came next was Lord of All Hopefulness, which I've always liked, but which now will have special meaning:

Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust, ever child-like, no cares could destroy,
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.
...
Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.

(The bishop said "Wow!" to our singing, but I realized today that the building has a relatively low ceiling, at least in church terms, which probably adds to the effect.)

When the whole thing was over we went outside and had a party, and the rain stayed away until the very end. It was really a very nice morning.

I'm auditing a course at the university about Christian ethics and modern culture, and in these early days our reading is meant to lay the groundwork for understanding the sources of Christian thinking. Last week we read a piece by Nicholas Lasch in which he draws a parallel between interpreting the New Testament and interpreting a musical composition or play. In all three cases, he says, we can enhance our understanding through the application of academic kinds of thinking, but the real work of interpretation happens when we together with others and perform it.

I'm looking forward to that.

Sucker punch

2006-09-21T17:07:00.000-05:00

So I’m ready to be received into the Episcopal church on Sunday. I’m not starry-eyed about it. Churches may be divinely inspired but I know they’re all populated by human beings, and I don't expect any church to be perfect. However, in this little congregation I have chosen I am beginning to experience church as I have dreamed for years that it could be, and I’m pretty excited about that.

Then in today’s mail comes a letter from my old parish, where I was a member for 26 years before I left in the midst of a big brouhaha two years ago. At first I assumed they were sending raffle tickets. On those infrequent occasions when there was mail from that church, it was nearly always raffle tickets. I don’t know why I bothered to open it, because I wasn’t planning to sell any raffle tickets, but open it I did.

This is how the letter began:

Dear Parishioner,

We Miss You! Whether you have just been busy or are not sure St. Meltdown's is the right place for you we want you to know you are missed and we would love to see you again. Being an active member of the parish is important on a practical level because it is required for receiving Sacraments and for being a sponsor/godparent. But most importantly – we need you! The Church is a family made up of the people of God which is all of us, including you. When you are not here your absence is felt.

In September and October we will be celebrating parish unity at St. Meltdown’s. Look at the flyer on the other side of this letter for dates and times. Come and hear and see what is going on in your parish!

Turns out that "Hospitality Weekend" is happening this weekend. Too bad I have another engagement.

The letter is signed by the pastor, with a short, handwritten personal note from someone I actually liked and respected. Not exactly warmly personal, but that was always one of my complaints, and I guess they had a lot of letters to send out.

The mailing included a short survey, giving me the opportunity to register that

I/we are disillusioned with:
___ the Catholic church
___ St. Meltdown’s

and

___ I don’t feel like we are part of the community.

Well, yes.

But my favorite question and possible response is this:

I/we don't go to Mass regularly because?
___I/we do go regularly, we just don't use envelopes.

He calls his own sheep by name ...

What would I have done if I’d received this letter a year ago? And how am I supposed to react now to a form letter that says we miss you? (That is, if you're actually gone we miss you; otherwise, we're sorry we didn't notice you were still here.) And why should I think that anything's really changed there? (Note that the number one reason for being active is so your kids can make First Communion, while We need you! is number two.)

Working without a net

2006-09-20T09:48:00.000-05:00

It's all about trust, which when you think about it is one of the most irrational things we humans do.

Whether we're talking marriage or God, it starts out the same: I like what I know of you. I want to know more. I want to know know you completely. I know I never will, but I'm handing myself over to you anyway. Wherever you are, I want to be there. Whatever you're into, I want to be part of it. Just let me know what you need from me. I'm making you my one and only; don't let me down.

Logic says you could get hurt. Trust says you won't. Experience says you could get hurt, but trust tells you not to worry about that. One foot in front of the other; it's a little like making music together: You speed up, slow down, adjust pitch as necessary to keep the melody going. Sometimes it's easy to follow; sometimes more difficult. Sometimes you just have to improvise until you find your way back to the place where the music makes sense.

Relationships built on trust are what keep us going. Is there anything else we can do or possess or consume that can satisfy and sustain us in a way that endures?

It's crazy. It makes no sense at all. But then again, what else do we have?

Maybe I'm really a Quaker

2006-09-18T19:54:00.000-05:00

No, just kidding. I'm definitely not a Quaker, though certainly I have been influenced by those good people.

We had our final Inquirers' meeting over the weekend, and to wrap up the discussion each of the eight of us who could be there (10 are actually joining--a very big number for such a small congregation) was supposed to answer these questions: What do you believe, and what do you hope to get out of being part of the community you are joining?

In 90 seconds or less? Oh, sure, no problem.

I said I believe in a loving God who is very much present in the world, and I believe if we're quiet and take time to listen, we can hear what God is saying to each of us, but if we try to relate to God only as individuals, eventually we hit the wall. Good thing I blogged about this last week so I could quote myself about needing community for inspiration, encouragement, and to be grounded in worshiping together.

Beyond that I believe in all the traditional Christian stuff and I made a sort of shorthand reference to that without really going into it, since we were sharing abridged versions of what could have been a much longer conversation. Had I spelled it all out I might have sounded less like a mainstream Quaker, but as it was my statement was something any Quaker might have said. To add to that impression, at another point in the evening when we were for some reason talking about silence, I made a comment about the special quality of shared silence. DearQuakerHusband (who was a good sport and went to this dinner session with me) teased me later, saying he never knew I was really a Quaker at heart. Hearing that, one of my fellow Inquirers said it was interesting that the two of us had never realized this before, but of course we had; I don't think we'd have made it through 27 years and 11 months together without knowing we are in the same pew, even if we worship in different churches (in my case over the past two years, many different churches!).

Those 27 years and 11 months make a good segue to two still-vivid images of my wedding day that have been much with me these past few days. The first is my first conscious thought upon waking up that morning, which was something along the lines of, Holy ***, what have I gotten myself into here!? (Note: This was not a prayer, and the substitution of *** for an actual word is not meant to signify that I am too reverent to spell out the name of God.)

The other is the moment I joined DearQuakerHusband-to-be in a room away from everyone else right before the actual ceremony. (In typical Quaker fashion, we walked in together when it was time for the wedding to begin.) In that instant, everything else in the world faded into insignificance and I was aware only of him, all dressed up in his wedding suit, his curly hair (he still had some then) turned into a halo by the sunlight behind him. Leaving that room with him was the best decision I'd made in my life up to that moment, and maybe ever since. It hasn't always been easy to be married and at times I wonder if we are strong enough to stay married, but I have never, ever doubted we were going the right way when we set out to walk through life together on that October day so long ago.

So, yes, I admit to waking up in the middle of the night last week asking myself what in heaven's name I've gotten myself into here, but then again at 10:30 am on Sunday morning I looked around the church and thought to myself that it felt very, very right--so I hope the marriage paradigm applies here.

So I'm going to be an Episcopalian

2006-09-15T07:10:00.000-05:00

So I'm going to be an Episcopalian--if that's what you call it. I've got a whole new jargon to learn here, like when to say Episcopal and when to say Episcopalian, or when to say Episcopal and when Anglican. I must learn not to smirk at mention of the Primates. Got to remember, too, to say Roman Catholic, not just Catholic, when talking about where I came from.

Actually, those things come fairly easily, thanks to my copy-editing background and the fact that I have been through not one or even two but three rounds of Inquirers' Classes--call me the slow learner in the group. Putting on the overall identity will be more difficult. It is taking me some time to let myself feel happy about my decision. Of course I am glad, but there's sadness involved in letting go of something that seemed a bedrock part of my identity; sadness, too, in knowing that I'll be disappointing many among my family and friends.

I had to go fetch my baptismal certificate from the bank box, to show they don't have to dunk me again. It's a small, folded piece of white paper gone faintly yellow, filled out in good old Palmer method in blue fountain pen--a rather unassuming token of something so huge. I was three weeks (!) old at the time. This paper is dated seven years later, though, meaning that my parents must have sent for it when I was preparing for First Communion. Seeing the names of my godparents makes me happy for a moment, then sad again. I'm glad I don't have to explain this to them. (Coward!)

I took one last good look and slipped the certificate into a manilla folder to keep it safe and dry during this morning's trip back to the bank box. I can't imagine when I'll need it again, but I don't want anything to happen to it in the meantime. I'm glad I had this chance to see it once more, to remind myself that where I'm going isn't so different from where I came from when you get right down it to it, which is why this baptism still counts.

Believing that is the source of the gladness that's slowly taking its place alongside all of my other mixed feelings. I want to get right down to it again. I want to join this quirky little congregation because it appears to offer my best shot at finding the inspiration, mutual encouragement, and grounding in worship that I need to get on with being a follower of Jesus Christ. I hope it will work out that way, though I haven't totally overcome the fear that maybe it won't, but I can't put any more time into second-guessing this question now. It's time.

A salute to teachers

2006-09-13T06:54:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning remembering my teachers.

Specifically, my first waking thoughts were about my kindergarten teacher. I have just one memory of kindergarten but it is still vivid lo these many years later. When the class got ready to paint, we all donned smocks that had to be buttoned in the back. (Remember, this was in a time before Velcro, and apparently it was a time before anyone thought much about basic practicality.) The drill was to to slip into your smock and run around looking for someone to do the buttons for you, which led to brief periods of intense chaos in our classroom until all those smocks were properly fastened.

One day I suggested that we all put on our smocks, get in a line, and button the smock of the person in front of us, and my teacher said, "That's a wonderful idea! Everybody, let's try it."

What this story reveals to me today is not my brilliance (which is what I thought it was about at the time), or my rigidity and anxiety in the face of disorder (which is what I feared it was about later). I think this story really speaks volumes about my teacher. Obviously the reason I remember it so clearly still is because it was such a strong experience of affirmation for me, and I feel fortunate indeed to have had a teacher who responded that way.

I feel fortunate, in fact, to have had the teachers I did all the way from kindergarten through high school. I mean, sure, I could dredge up a few tales of bad teaching moments that would make everyone laugh and then sputter about the horrors of parochial school, but on the whole those were quite the exception. I was blessed to have been taught by many wonderful women (true--I was never taught by a man until college) who had a lot to do with the person I am today.

So, a salute to teachers everywhere at the start of this new school year!

2006-09-12T07:45:00.000-05:00

For those who caught that throw-away line at the end of yesterday's blog, here's how that part unfolded:

I reached a point where I had narrowed my church choices down to two, but I could not seem to get any clearness about what next. I decided I would just try to pray as if I belonged in whichever congregation I happened to find myself, which I thought was a very reasonable approach, but the follow-up was that I felt really crazy and I resolved to stop thinking about it or praying about it at all. I was going to try to put it out of my mind for the time being.

At that point the subject started to come up again in my prayers seemingly on its own, and what I heard God saying to me with increasing clarity was not that he wanted me in the Episcopal church, but that it was OK with him if that's where I felt I needed to be. Which I did, because over the past few months I have been seeing myself more and more as a serious misfit in the Catholic church. I felt God was telling me that if I joined the Episcopal church, "I won't change, and you won't change, and that other door will always be open to you. This is what I've been telling you for a long time, but either you think you're better than me and are refusing to hear what I'm saying, or you're considerably more dense than I've been giving you credit for."

2006-09-10T13:06:00.000-05:00

If you've read anything I've written here previously you'll know that I'm fond of looking for meaning hidden in things that happen to me, or at least of using things that happen to me as keys to understanding the meaning hidden in life. I'm still trying to figure this one out, though:

Inspired by my recent musings about Benedictine oblates, I decided yesterday that the time had come to go and visit my nearest Benedictines, who are (or should be) a little over an hour's drive away. This is something I've thought about doing in the past but it's hard to justify taking three hours away from your family for a jaunt like this, and hard to convince them they'd want to come along. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and with no one home but me and the dog, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

The first thing that happened was I went to the Internet (source of all knowledge) to find the details of the schedule and the address, and I couldn't reach any page of the Benedictines' main website. My browser would do its thing and eventually announce it was "done" but it yielded only blank pages. Undaunted, I persevered and eventually found what I wanted through another site.

In the afternoon, showered after a day of housecleaning and yard work and armed with the time of vespers and my my trusty GPS, I headed north. I should have had 20 or 30 minutes to find my way around once I got there, but 40 minutes into the trip, I ran into a line of traffic that wasn't going anywhere, with blinking police lights far ahead.

Figuring I'd never make it if I stayed this course, I turned off onto a side road and followed a couple of cars whose drivers obviously had the same idea through a sprawling office complex and out the other side. I ignored the GPS program's first few attempts to reroute me because I suspected it was trying to send me back into the traffic jam. I finally accepted the proposed route and meandered through some lovely countryside, but I wasn't exactly making great time when I hit more traffic, and this time I pretty much had to endure my way through it.

By now I could see that I was certain to be a little late, but what to do? I had come all this way and figured I might as well forge ahead and at least see where the place was, in case I ever decided to come back. Next, I missed the first and second driveways. I finally found my way in and drove all around the property looking for the church, which I assumed would be fairly traditional in appearance, missing it twice because it is in fact quite a modern pile of bricks. Now I was really late, but damn it, I was there and I wasn't going to quit. Just my luck, the church was at the top of two long, long flights of stairs up a hill from where you were supposed to park. By the time I reached the door, I was not only completely winded but also a good twenty minutes late.

I was afraid it might be over but as soon as I pulled the door open I knew I wasn't. I could hear the monks singing, their voices surprisingly sweet and light. The church turned out to be quite unusual and interesting and even, in its own way, quite beautiful. I had to make a few turns inside before I could actually enter the nave, and I don't know what I expected but what I found there was a bunch of old guys in black habits that struck me as somewhat sinister (the Franciscans may look like demented UPS drivers but there's something warm and homespun about the brown, whereas this black just seemed stark and unfriendly). I was the only one there beside the monks and the organist, and it felt strange to sit and watch them as if it were a performance, and it was weird also because I felt they were all looking at me, though I might have imagined that.

Still, it did really grab me. I wished so much that I'd been able to get there on time because it ended all too soon, though I thought the monks were probably thinking of dinner and glad to move on. I wanted to stay and I did for a while, as they filed solemnly out and the candles were extinguished. I sat while one of the monks stayed and spoke with the organist, but eventually I thought I ought to move on before they told me I had to leave, or someone asked me what I was doing there--which seemed like an even worse possibility. The place was really a huge spread with a school, playing fields, what looked like an orchard, a cemetery, and a retreat center in addition to the monastery, though other than one car that passed me on one of the many drives, I didn't see another human being anywhere outside.

And then this morning I told the priest at my Episcopal church that I wanted to belong there, and I realized he had probably been a Benedictine himself back when he was still RC, and I wondered if he missed it.

Hermit time

2006-09-09T11:07:00.000-05:00

I fell asleep last night to the music of singing crickets. This might seem unremarkable, but for me it's a special treat. Because of my husband's allergies we live in a sealed environment most of the year, but he's gone for a week on a business trip, so I get to do daring things like sleep with the windows open, eat what I want when I want, and revel in solitude.

Don't get me wrong; I love him and I'm looking forward to having him back, but in the meantime I'm going to enjoy some solid hermit time. There's so much I need to process--to think about, not think about, pray about, read about, write about--and a week by myself should provide some space for that.

I've been finding so much great stuff to read on the Internet: blogs, essays about Ignatian and Benedictine spirituality, articles, and etc. etc. Blogs especially. I wonder if God surfs the web; there's so much that's being sent his way via that medium. Rachel over at The Big Dunk wrote this past week:

"Sometimes I feel a little bittersweet about the fact that I can share that with so few people in my life. If a friend (even a close one) were to ask how I was, or what I was up to, I would say all the things that I am up to, but probably wouldn't say that I was struggling with my prayer practice, or loving the liturgy each week, or dreaming of the day when I can pray the hours on retreat."

And I know just how this is. There practically no one I can discuss this stuff with here in what I've seen referred to as "the meat world." Well, let's be accurate: there is exactly one person. It's exciting to find so many like souls out there, yet at the same time, there's something missing in that we can't all get together somewhere and have this conversation in real time. One thing I found that interests me is a Benedictine monastery in South Dakota with an online oblate chapter. I've been curious about the Benedictine oblates since I first heard of them a few years back, but the nearest Benedictines I know of are more than an hour away and time is short (and gas is expensive!).

An online group would be perfect (and would even allow me to dodge my question about whether I should still be receiving communion in the Roman Catholic church) but I can't help wondering how it could work. It's one thing to talk about this stuff, which is to say to apply your mind to it, but I also need the spirit of community that comes of gathering together in prayer. Even though the people I know locally may not totally understand where I am spiritually, that goes away when we gather to worship because what we have in common is so much more significant than what's different about how we approach God.

Anyway, I have a couple more books on order, though it's not clear if I'll actually use them or add them to my shelf full of other books I purchased with good intentions and never fully explored. I've tried for a while to stay away from acquiring books because of that tendency, but just now there seem to be so many things I want to understand more about that I'm falling back into the habit, and online shopping (hooray again for the Internet!) makes it so easy.

So, waiting for the postman ...

Five things I have enjoyed

2006-09-08T19:43:00.000-05:00

The revgalblogpals Friday Five: Name five things you have enjoyed this week.

A great topic. It was good to be reminded to stop and give thanks. There were a lot of good things that happened to me in the past week that I didn’t think twice about until I sat down to make this list.

1) Dinner/discussion with a group of freshmen who arrived a week early to work on a community service project before the official freshmen orientation begins. The topic: a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, the story of a heroic doctor whose dedication to what he calls the “O for the P” (option for the poor; more specifically, preferential option for the poor) drives his life. These kids are smart, demanding, idealistic, and yeah, they have a lot to learn, but that's part of the fun. I enjoyed the discussion, and the spaghetti wasn't too bad, either. (Any mean I don't have to cook and clean up has got to be good.)

2) A really excellent mushroom soup purchased for lunch yesterday in the university food court, a place not normally known for its culinary achievements.

3) Watching the movie The Sixth Sense over again, this time knowing how it ended. I’ve been meaning to do that ever since I watched it for the first time a couple of years ago, but never got around to it until now. Enough time had passed that I’d forgotten many of the details and enjoyed the story as it unfolded, but this time I was on top of all the clues I totally missed the first time around.

4) Having everyone at work back in the office again. Not that I’m glad their vacations are over, but it was just too quiet through most of August while the others were away. I am blessed to work with people I really like, and it’s good to have them around again.

5) Cool, delightful mornings, the kind of weather that makes you really glad to be up and out. I won’t miss the heat and humidity of summer one little bit.

It ain't over ...

2006-09-06T08:49:00.000-05:00

Lately I seem to have been on a sort of spiritual treasure hunt, searching for clues, figuring each one out, and following it on to the next station--or maybe I should say it's been more like tracing a thin but very strong thread that I'm finding running through so many different things. I feel as if I've been all over the place with this, yet at the same time it all seems very connected.

One stop in this adventure was an article about Ignatian spirituality that led to another article by the same author. Though not as interesting to me as the first, the second contained this statement: "Every so often we are almost overcome by a desire for 'we know not what' and, at the same time, are filled with a sense of well-being." Substitute "most of the time " for "every so often" and you're talking about me. Even though I didn't find the rest of the article particularly helpful, it led me to look for books about Ignatian spirituality, which led to a book called Inner Compass, by Margaret Silf.

It seems pretty interesting, despite some minor annoying quirks, but I've only started reading it, having just finished another book called Discernment and Truth by Mark A. McIntosh. That one I found both exhilarating and maddening, exhilarating because it included some ideas I found tremendously exciting, like the concept of discernment as a way of life and not just a decision-making process, and maddening because it seemed as if every time McIntosh tossed one of these exciting ideas out he immediately went off on a long and not very interesting tangent.

Meanwhile ...

I've been thinking a lot about asking to be formally received into the Episcopal church. And when I say thinking what I mean is something more like holding the idea in prayer. And when I do that I have to say it mostly feels very right. And very scary. And the strange thing is, this started after I, in exasperation, decided I would not think or pray about this subject at all. My Roman Catholic friends may find this alarming, while those in the Anglican camp may be wondering what took so long. All I can say is, stay tuned, folks--cuz it ain't over 'til it's over.

Impressions of Sept. 1 in Boston

2006-09-02T08:15:00.000-05:00

Furniture all over the sidewalks, rental trucks doubled parked everywhere, brooms and buckets and cleaning supplies in every shopping cart in the supermarket. It's universal movng day here, the day when every lease begins, and students all over the city are moving in.

In short, it's the day of maximum chaos.

Hard as it is to believe that any sort of order will emerge from this mess, I know it will. We carried loads of bags and boxes to my daughter's fourth-floor (high ceilings, no elevator) apartment yesterday, and last night my daughter could not find any of her clothes, or the flatware, or the sheets for her bed. Piles of cardboard boxes took up most of the floor space.

Furniture--a coffee table, a TV stand--sat in boxes, waiting to be assembled. The couch was the only free surface in the room. Four exhausted parents made sure of that, collapsing onto it in a row after umpteen trips up and down the stairs.

But I know my daughter; I'm sure she found the sheets before she went to bed, located clean clothes to put on this morning, and will be more or less settled by the time classes start on Tuesday. When we come back next month to visit, the place will look as if she and her roommate had been living there for years. (I just hope my aching, aging muscles have recovered by then.)

Slowly, slowly, things are falling into place for me, too. A pattern is emerging in what I take from the daily Scripture readings and my own prayers, and I have to admit that it's scary and yet at the same time there is a kind of calm that comes with seeing a pattern emerge.

I'm reminded of the joke about the priest who turns away all of the rescuers who come for him as the floodwaters rise around his church. He keeps explaining that God will take care of him, right up to the moment when he is finally swept away. When he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter asks what he's doing there, and he replies, "I don't know; I really thought God was going to provide."

"Look, we sent the guys in the firetruck," St. Peter says in exasperation. "Then we sent the guys in the boat, and finally we sent the helicopter. What the heck were you waiting for, anyway?"

So OK, I'm getting it here. Maybe I missed the message a couple of times already, but I'm getting it now.

Growing toward the light

2006-08-31T10:55:00.000-05:00

When you encounter unexpected twists and turns, you just have to keep working at it.

They're baaack!

2006-08-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

Well, not all of them, but the "Undergraduate Registration" signs went up this week and the early arrivals are starting to move in. The freshman in the university's pre-orientation community service program arrive Sunday, with the rest of the new class to follow in a few days. I'm excited. It's been quiet on campus all summer, but the last week or two has been downright deadly. I like the hustle and bustle when campus life is in full swing. There's a purposeful feeling in the air, and I find it contagious. I'm looking forward to starting a new year.

Ah, new beginnings. I remember getting a new bookbag and new shoes every August when I was little, preparation for the new school year. The distinctive smell of fresh shoe leather remains in my catalog of sensual impressions that have the power to transport me straight back to another time and place. Music does that, too. Bob Dylan has a new album out this month; his album Nashville Skyline had just been released when I was a freshman. It seemed to be playing everywhere in those early months, and when I hear those songs today I am filled again with all the excitement and anxiety I experienced as I put one foot in the boat and moved away from my parents, launched on the way to becoming my own person. It was a thrilling, scary time, though the photos from those days make me cringe. Bad hair, bad clothes--and more than a few bad decisions, I have to admit. What were we thinking?

The older we get, the less we anticipate new beginnings, and the ones that present themselves are often less than thrilling. I watch my parents and the difficult transitions they are making into old age, and I see just how very hard it is for them.

And then one day you find yourself facing an opportunity to start over again in a way you weren't expecting, and it's even more unsettling than being a young adult. For kids starting out on something new is a way of life, while we middle-aged types tend to think we've arrived at our destination. It's scary, and it's taking a long time to get to the point where it's beginning to feel right. But I don't think it even occurs to the young people I know to cling the comfortable past when it's time to embrace the future, and I admire that, so ...

Where are we going?

2006-08-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

I feel asleep last night and woke up again this morning wondering (or, perhaps more accurately, figuratively shaking my fist at heaven and demanding to know) where God is taking me.

I've pretty much narrowed my church choices to two: one Roman Catholic, one Episcopal. I made myself crazy for a while thinking too much about how they stacked up against each other and trying to choose one. Then I resolved to quit comparing and just be present, praying as if I belonged wherever I found myself, and waiting to see if in time I might come to know that one of them was the right place for me.

I thought that was a good approach. I thought it would make me happy, since there are things I really like about each of them, but the result at the moment is that I've become a hypercritical consumer of liturgy (as per yesterday). Both places feel inadequate to the point where I'm ready to considering giving up church completely for awhile, except that I know I'm way too much in the habit to see myself happily sitting alone somewhere on a Sunday morning.

Hmmm, what's the message here? You can't be two things at once? Maybe, but I figure I'm not what changes. I'm the same no matter where I am. I just gotta figure out where that's supposed to be ...

My sister came to visit this weekend

2006-08-27T11:23:00.000-05:00

My sister came to visit this weekend. Given her choice among my various churches, she picked the 8:30 Mass at my local Roman Catholic parish, where we sang the dumbest hymn I have ever heard. God forgive me for making fun of someone's earnest effort, but what is this?

For woman and man, a place at the table,
revising the roles, deciding the share,
with wisdom and grace, dividing the power ...

I support the sentiment, but I thought it had all the art of a badly composed public service jingle. Although come to think of it, maybe that isn't really fair to public service jingles. "Don't cross in the middle in the middle in the middle" is a lot catchier.

Anyway, I guess this was supposed to make up for the reading from Ephesians about wives being submissive to their husbands, which I've always found problematic. The priest skipped right past that in his homily, which he read from a piece of paper. He speaks so slowly I sometimes forget the beginning of a sentence by the time he gets to the end, so it's hard to remember everything he said, but as I recall he told us Jesus asks us to choose whether to follow him or not, and if we have faith, we'll choose to follow him. Can't quarrel with that, I guess. At least it was short.

This church used to have a priest who was popular for his witty and intelligent sermons, a retired guy who came to help out on Sundays, but he got swept away in one of the latest waves of the seemingly never-ending sexual abuse scandal.

Sad times.

Back to School Friday Five

2006-08-26T14:11:00.000-05:00

It's Saturday, so I'm a little late, but I couldn't resist playing the RevGalBlogPals Friday Five. Who doesn't have a blog full of early school memories just crying out to be shared? Here goes:

1. What is your earliest memory of school?

I do remember kindergarten, but not much of it. I clearly remember my first day of first grade. I thought the teacher told us we were all going to the laboratory and I got pretty excited. Science! What a letdown when she took us to a place where there were sinks and toilets. Turns out she said lavatory, not laboratory.

2. Who was a favorite teacher in your early education?

I don't remember any particular favorites until fifth grade, when we had Miss Carter. She took a small group of kids who did well in social studies to New York City (just a train ride away from my suburban home). It seems likely my parents had already taken us to the top of the Empire State Building, because they were big on stuff like that, but this is the trip I remember, probably because it was really windy up there and Miss Carter had a hard time keeping her skirt from blowing up around her face. We went to the UN, too; I remember the tour guide showing us a Persian carpet and explaning that the person who made it intentionally wove in at least one imperfection because only God is perfect.

3. What do you remember about school “back then” that is different from what you know about schools now?

Parents of other kids in my children's classes were horrified at the thought of class sizes over 20. I remember one year when we had 48. You know where those kids are now? The ones I am in touch with mostly have PhDs. Go figure.

4. Did you have to memorize in school? If so, share a poem or song you learned.

Any Catholic kid of my generation is going to answer the same way. Of course we had to memorize: Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with him in the next ... It doesn't seem like a very profound way to teach religion, but the funny thing is, when you get right down to it, "know, love, and serve" does pretty much sum it all up, doesn't it? Half a century later, I'm still working on those same three things.

5. Did you ever get in trouble at school? Were there any embarrassing moments you can share?

Did I get in trouble? Almost never. Were there times I should have? I remember hanging out in a bathroom cutting a class when a teacher walked in and started writing everybody up for being out of class. I walked over to the sink, washed my hands, said excuse me, walked past her, and left. Not typical because I didn't usually have that much chutzpah, but it does demonstrate what self-confidence will get you.

Uh-oh

2006-08-23T10:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I blogged about my motorscooter ride to work as a metaphor for my life's journey.

Today I thought about riding my scooter to work again, then decided it was just too hot for it.

Hope this doesn't indicate anything about where my life's journey might be leading ...

Lost and found

2006-08-22T10:13:00.000-05:00

When went out to leave for work this morning it was such a perfect day I turned right around and went back in to get my motorcycle jacket and helmet and trade the car keys for the keys to my motorscooter.

The first third of the ride was just terrific, and then I got to one of the roads I'd been planning to take and found it had just recently been tarred and chipped and was covered in loose gravel, which is a very treacherous surface for two-wheeled transit. I turned off as soon as I could onto a different road, but before long I had to detour around more loose gravel, so I ended up taking a convoluted route to work.

I was on some incredibly beautiful roads, roads I know about but don't travel very often because they aren't exactly on the way to anywhere. Sometimes my ride was a bit scary because I had to go a little faster than I wanted, but when my knuckles started turning white I just reminded myself to relax and loosen my grip and it was fine. Sometimes when I thought I was lost, I was actually very close to where I needed to be, and sometimes when I thought I knew where I was going, I was really pretty lost, but I didn't worry because I knew I would find my way. I never doubted that eventually I would turn onto a road I recognized, and it would take me where I needed to go. And I did, and it did.

I've got to remember that.

Making melody to the Lord

2006-08-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

Be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
--Ephesians 5:18-20

Having enjoyed several different hymn-singing experiences this week, I was already thinking about the singing of "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" before I heard this reading in church this morning.

Yesterday I sang at a Grange fair with an informal Quaker singing group. They had actually invited my Friendly husband to come and accompany them on his portable keyboard; I was sort of an add-on, but they let me sing with them anyway, and it was fun. I was reminded, though, of something I had already known about this group. In Quaker fashion there is no choir director, and one result is they tend to sing the same small collection of hymns over and over again.

I never joined the choir at my former Catholic church but for a while, when I was thinking about going back there, I considered it. I figured that up in the choir loft I'd be somewhat apart from the fray that was tearing the congregation apart, but I knew some of the others in the choir too well, knew who liked to gossip too much and about what, knew which side of various parish disputes they were on, and what subjects I shouldn't discuss in front of this one or the other, and that really was what I was running away from in the first place. (But I acknowledge that dealing with this kind of stuff may in fact be the unavoidable nitty gritty of being a community.)

I've also considered joining the choir at the Catholic church I attend most often now, because it might be a way to get to know some people and begin to become part of the life and worship of this church community while doing something I enjoy. I haven't done so, mostly because I don't feel ready to make that much of a commitment. I've also observed that in this modern church there is no choir loft but instead a sort of choir cave. The singers are a separate group occupying space apart in a darkish recess with a low ceiling in a back corner of the church, which I have to admit I don't find particularly appealing.

In the Episcopal church I also sometimes attend, there is no choir. Everyone sings, every verse and with great enthusiasm, but not always perfectly in tune, and a few of them really are too loud.

Seems to me you can tell something about each group just based on the singing ...

In the style of Taize

2006-08-18T07:04:00.000-05:00

It's been a big week for extracurricular church services for me. Last night I went to a Taize service at one of my churches. Taize is the well-known ecumenical monastic community in France. I'd heard of the place, and I've noticed the hand-lettered sign that appears outside the church every month or so for this service, but I'd never attended. When it was announced in church last Sunday I decided I felt comfortable enough there to give it a try.

Naturally I did a little online research before I went. I learned that Taize worship typically takes place in a candle-lit church and includes chant-like hymns, a couple of Scripture readings, and periods of silence. A good combination for a Catholic Christian who likes to sing and who has been heavily influenced by Quakers, I thought.

Six of us showed up. We sang well and read well, and as usual I really enjoyed the special quality of shared silent worship. It lasted about an hour, which I guess was a good length though I would have been happy to go on longer. At the end, one of the regulars said she had experienced a strong sense of community that evening, and I had one of those "duh!" moments. That was the one thing missing for me on Tuesday ...

A paradox in honor of the Feast of the Assumption

2006-08-16T20:43:00.000-05:00

I went to Mass last night in honor of the Feast of the Assumption. I really wanted to be there, and in fact I was glad I went. The choir did some modern stuff that was unfamiliar but sounded good, both in composition and execution. We got multiple verses of everything but the recessional hymn (the prudent choir director does not attempt to hold back a church full of Catholics once they think it's time to go) so I had ample opportunity to exercise my voice, as well as my sight-reading abilities. Despite the fact that I can't remember much of the short homily beyond the point that Mary was someone who gave of herself to others, my impression at the time was that it was decently eloquent. The rest of it was pretty much as it always is.

I left feeling satisfied, but also not satisfied. This is often the case these days, but how is it possible? How can you be full and famished at the same time? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be doing something more? Or is this just the human condition?

Long as I got my online Jesus ...

2006-08-15T08:24:00.000-05:00

Anybody out there been feeling their prayers aren't being answered lately? I have news: It turns out Jesus has been offline.

One of my favorite Internet oddities is the website of the Monks of Adoration, which offers the opportunity to sit in silent reverence via the Internet before an altar at the monks' monastery in Florida. (http://www.monksofadoration.org/chapel.html ) The monks have set up a webcam that sends a fresh picture every minute, 24 hours a day. There's a link to open the picture in a small window so you can keep it up on your screen while you work on something else. Another link down in the "Quick Picks" section of the rather cluttered web page lists the times when "the Blessed Sacrement is Exposed on the altar." (Yes, I know I'm being snarky, but I couldn't resist including the typo. The same page invites your prayers for more vocations, and I think I will pray that someone with editing and web design skills will hear the call.)

Silly as might seem, I have to admit that I am rather fond of this page. I am fascinated by the varieties of spiritual life in cyberspace. I think it's just amazing that you can sit down at your computer and pray along with a streaming Rosary, make an online retreat, go to a site to request prayers for a special intention, read the archived sermons of some great (and otherwise) preachers, jump into a discussion of the day's liturgical readings, or study long-distance toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree. I don't know if online religion is keeping pace with online sex, but at least it's in the running. I find it reassuring somehow to realize that no matter how advanced the technology we employ, we are still our same old human selves.

I like to drop in on the monks' chapel from time to time. In fairness, they do not want anyone to believe that they think they are projecting Jesus through the Internet to your computer. "Regarding the Webcam and adoration, just to clarify, it is not to replace visiting Jesus in church. It is for those times when you cannot visit Him in a church," they say. So you could think of the web page as a particularly vivid sort of 21st-century holy card.

On my most recent visit, when the altar stayed empty during the announced adoration period, I was honestly disappointed. Then I found the notice that the picture I was seeing "is a still capture of the chapel," taking the place of the live shot while the monks are moving to their new monastery.

I do hope they go live again sometime soon.

Lift every voice and sing

2006-08-13T14:30:00.000-05:00

I got to church about a minute late this morning. Actually, by my watch I was a minute early, but they were already well into the opening hymn when I arrived. I hurried up the path, eager to slip into a pew and find the right page in the hymnal while they were still singing.

I love to sing, and I especially love to sing in church. Though we don't cease to exist as individuals when our voices join in song, we truly do become part of something bigger than ourselves, and I wanted to take my place as part of that something. Yet anxious as I was to get inside, I paused to listen before I went in. There's something so sweet about the sound of a hymn that refuses to be contained inside the church and drifts away like a soft breeze on a summer morning. The sound was so pure, the essence of our prayers sent heavenward; in that moment it wasn't hard to believe that this church truly does embody all of our best ambitions for ourselves as a community.

Then I opened the door and the moment was over. I found myself fumbling to find my place in the hymnal, a little short of breath when I opened my mouth to sing. Heard up close, it turned out that some of us--myself included--were a little off key and off tempo this morning. Reality check: I am not Gracie Slick and this is not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir gathered around me.

And what about our best ambitions? We're not quite there, I'm afraid, but that's OK. We're only human, after all.

I believe that, I really do. I believe that the striving toward our ideals is what matters, despite the impossibility of achieving them. Though I like to think about what the perfect church would be like, I don't expect to find it here on earth. I believe church can bring us closer to God despite our shared imperfections. We may be only human, but we are inspired and guided and loved by God.

So why can't I let go and stop blaming the church I was raised in for being less than perfect? Why can't it be enough just to do what little I can to make it better? Why can't its great potential for goodness be what matters?

I ask myself those questions, and here's the problem I see: If I took my place in a pew and went along, even with my fingers crossed, wouldn't that contribute to making a statement that says it's OK to worry more about who we need to exclude from the table than about how to make all of God's children welcome, that it's OK to believe God gave more of his gifts to men than to women, and so on and on? And wouldn't that be wrong?

Pray it again, Mike

2006-08-08T07:57:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to note, as I ponder the meaning of community and how it ought to play out in a Christian context, that my steadiest morning prayer companion these days is a disembodied voice called AT&T Mike.

Mike is one of AT&T Labs’ “Natural Voices," and I paid extra for him as an add-on to the text-to-voice software I use to listen while I'm driving or walking the dog to interesting articles I find on the Internet. AT&T boasts that he and his friends represent "the most human-sounding technology available today," but I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that he sounds far from natural. On the whole, though, I have found him to be an earnest and steady presence whose reading is surprisingly soothing, without any of the chilling undertones of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I change the prayers Mike offers from time to time. Often he reads one of my favorite Psalms, then the confession from the Book of Common Prayer. I might splice in the day's Scripture readings, downloaded as an MP3 podcast, and end with a prayer I wrote myself. I try not to let my mind wander to the implausibility of it all. It was only while writing this that I thought about how absurd it is to hear Mike intone, "We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves." No, of course he hasn't.

He still has some idiosyncrasies of pronunciation. He's said to be trainable and I have taught him a few things, including how to pronounce merciful accenting the first syllable instead of the second. There are a few word he still has trouble with, though, unfortunately including amen, a word that tends to come up often in prayer. He doesn’t seem capable of giving both syllables nearly equal accent, as most of us do; instead, he bites off the first, flying past it as if he were embarrassed to have reached the end so soon. He hasn't got a great sense of poetry, either. When he reads, “My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water,” he's clearly no match for the best lectors I’ve heard--though frankly I think he might represent an improvement over some the well-meaning folks who read in church.

Mike is a strange prayer companion, and he's not much of a friend, either. He doesn’t ever ask how my kids are or invite me across the street for a cup of coffee when we're done, but then again, he's never shown the least interest in church gossip or politics. I guess after all I've just said you might wonder why I use him at all, and in fact, when I first thought of loading prayers onto my iPod to use during the dog-walking time or my long commute to work, I tried recording myself reading the prayers I wanted to use. I was entirely too self-conscious for that, as it turned out.

I've come to think of Mike as a companionable presence, a friend with a speech impediment. I know it would be better to go off and pray with real people, or to sit down alone with a book, but that isn't always possible. For those times, I'm glad I have Mike. I'll say it again: What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

From an ad for an online course offered by the University of London:

2006-08-07T06:18:00.000-05:00

Study theology by distance learning ...

They got that right!

Don't think I just wanted to keep my doughnuts to myself

2006-08-06T13:37:00.000-05:00

I was supposed to show up early this morning at the Episcopal church I've been attending lately, baked goods in hand, to be introduced with the others in the current Inquirers' group to the rest of the congregation at the little reception they hold between services, but I never made it. I had a bad night, feeling kind of lousy and not sleeping for more than a couple of hours, and I just couldn't do it.

Looking at it as one who tends to parse everything searching for hidden meanings, this one seemed obvious. Back when I still thought I would be there this morning, I was afraid I'd be appearing under false pretenses. The bishop is scheduled to make an official visit to the church next month, at which time most of the Inquirer's group will be officially received into the church. This visit looms as a sort of deadline for making up my mind, though it's an artificial deadline, because obviously this isn't a one-time offer. Anyway, I don't really expect to reach a decision in the next six weeks, but I wish I could. I'm still struggling to figure out how to even approach thinking about it.

How do you go about deciding which church to belong to? This was originally decided for me, long before I could take up the question for myself. Much later, I went through a process of embracing that choice and making it my own, but for me then it was a matter of being Catholic or not--I wasn't deciding whether to belong to the Catholic church or some other religion.

Do you decide based on what you think? I think my beliefs are a closer fit with the Episcopal church. Or is it better to pay attention to what you feel? I wonder if I'll ever stop feeling more Roman Catholic than anything else, but I also feel deeply hurt by by the Catholic church, by things that couldn't have happened as they did, in my opinion, if the institutional church was not deeply dysfunctional.

Do you make a list of pros and cons of switching, or two lists detailing what you like most about each of the churches you're considering?

Here's something I really like about the Catholic church: I like the emphasis on the idea that God is present in church in a special way. You might think that means that God isn't so present in the world beyond church, but in fact the opposite seems to me to be true. Though it might seem contradictory, the awareness of God's presence in church is just the beginning of the awareness of the Divine presence in the world, God with us always and everywhere, which is an amazing and wonderful thing to believe.

Here's something I really like about the Episcopal church: I like the way that people come to church on Sunday because they want to be there. For the most part no one comes late, and no one leaves early. People expect to arrive on time and they expect to stay until it's over, out of deference not only to God but also to the rest of us. They seem to recognize that we're there not just to pray but to worship, that our coming together to stand before God as a community is something that's important and deserving of respect.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that my issues with the Catholic church are all about some aspect of community. Who do we welcome to the table? How do we get along as a group? How do we go about making decisions, and who carries them out? What kind of community did Jesus intend to leave behind to go on his name? How I wish I could answer those questions ...

She who sings twice prays ... how many times?

2006-07-24T08:54:00.000-05:00

The 10:15 worshipers at the Episcopal church I’ve been attending lately like to sing—and I mean they really like to sing.

It helps that it’s a very small church so the sound doesn’t have far to go to fill every corner of the room. But this group sings with real gusto; I don’t think they’d have any trouble filling a space two or three times the size.

Yesterday, when we arrived at the final hymn, the organist started playing a different selection from the one that was posted. We did our best through a verse, gallantly struggling to fit the words of one hymn to the melody of the other, but it clearly wasn’t working. Finally someone called out the number of the hymn the organist was playing and we all switched pages and sang the first verse of that one.

Then the organist caught on to the problem and announced he would play the hymn that was listed, so we all flipped back in the hymnbook and sang through six verses of that one. Nobody moved until it was finished, and the last verse was accomplished with just as much enthusiasm as the first.

I’m not sure what it proves, but I don’t think you’d see this happening in a Catholic church.

On the way out, one of the most passionate singers commented that she really liked "being part of a church where oops! doesn’t matter.”

It’s an interesting way to put it, but isn't that exactly what it's all supposed to be about?

Stuck in gear

2006-07-23T13:57:00.000-05:00

I seem to be stuck wandering among Episcopal churches attending Inquirers' Classes but never managing to go the next step and join. I keep asking myself if that represents courage or cowardice. An interesting entry I found among some old scribblings: "Dec. 13, 1988: Lately--starting Sunday at Mass, in fact--I've had one of those ideas that's hard to track--is it a thought planted by God, or did it come from somewhere else? Should I act on it or overcome it? The thought was that if I really had courage, I'd find a different church, one that comes closer to being what Jesus established. I'm still not sure what to do with that one."

I guess I still don't know what to do with it, and reading that made me a little sad. If I'd gone over sooner, who knows what might have been?

I went to my latest Inquirer's session last night, a dinner gathering organized by the Episcopal church I've been attending for the past few weeks. The usual suspects were there, people looking for something: hospitality, acceptance, a dignified and satisfying style of worship. Of course each one of them is more complicated than a single phrase can convey, but you get the idea.

And me? I'm trying to find a faith community that is managing to be church in a way that makes sense to me, that is as close as humanly possible to what Jesus intended. I've read and thought and prayed and experienced and I sure do like the Anglican model, but I keep running into this deep part of myself that I don't really understand and don't know how (or whether) to change, where I find that I just am Roman Catholic.

Of the six of us "inquirers," I think five will probably proceed to be received into the Episcopal church when the bishop pays us his next visit. There was a moment last night when I felt the faintest stirring of possibility that I might go, too, but it still feels unlikely.

Of the six of us inquirers, we were all but one raised in the Roman Catholic church, as were the church members who hosted the dinner, another woman who just joined another Episcopal church, the priest who is vicar of this church, and one of two other priests who came to speak with us. Interesting, isn't it.

Offering it up

2006-07-21T06:34:00.000-05:00

If we complained about any kind of hardship, real or perceived, when I was growing up, we were advised to "offer it up," the idea being that by joining ourselves with the suffering of Jesus, we could turn our adversities into a way of doing something good for the world. It strikes me now as charmingly presumptuous to imagine that a scraped knee or the deprivation of a candy war constituted actual suffering, though I suppose for one raised in comfortable circumstances in a time of peace, it might have represented a child-sized portion.

Offering it up hasn't played much part in my adult spiritual life, in part because I tend to prefer a more thoughtful approach (or, at times, to be as thought-less as I can manage) but also perhaps because I've been fortunate to live a life marked by ordinary disappointments but with very little in the way of real suffering. That privileged kid grew up to be a privileged adult, in other words. These past two weeks, however, have brought an unwelcome opportunity to revisit the practice of redemptive suffering, as I experienced pain at a level of intensity unequaled in my entire previous life and, I most fervently hope, in what's left to come. I'm not looking for sympathy and I won't dwell on the details; suffice it to say my condition was not life-threatening and that I am now well on the mend, sill pondering the experience.

Its effect was to narrow my openness to the world beyond myself to a pinhole. Gone was that expansive feeling of God-present that I have come to rely on; in its place, I retreated into some place deep inside myself and shut out everything and everyone else. It became necessary to focus my entire being on the pain in order to endure it; words were a distraction, conversation impossible. Though at several points I turned over thoughts about consciously embracing the sufferings of Jesus, that was really a very abstract concept that was mostly far beyond my capacity to realize.

Eventually, I found, you reach a point where you feel you have nothing left; you may trust in God's loving presence but have no real sense of it, and only the barest sense of yourself, for that matter. When we get to that place where we have no words for prayer and can find nothing left of ourselves to offer, maybe that is where we pray the truest prayer of all.

Better praying through chemistry?

2006-07-16T15:18:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help smiling when I heard about about some research out of Johns Hopkins University that's been in the news this past week, namely that psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogen mushrooms, can induce spiritual experiences. Wait a minute, guys, didn't anybody check the file on the Sixties? I mean, Timothy Leary may be dead and all, but didn't we already know that?

To be serious, this study was supposed to be significant for two reasons, the first being that research in this area had pretty much shut down since the Sixties, thanks largely to the bad rep it got from association with old Tim, and the second being that these current researchers are the first to apply rigorous scientific standards to this work. The results, says Roland Griffiths, the study's lead researcher, show that "under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what's called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person" lasting long after the mushroom trip is over.

According to the Hopkins press release describing the study:

More than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a “full mystical experience” as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better. Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects' remarks. Results of a year-long followup are being readied for publication.

Interesting stuff, this, though I must admit that I do find it somewhat troubling. Maybe I'm just jealous; I have a little experience in this area myself (I'm a child of that era, remember) and while we certainly had fun, I can't say I remember anything profoundly mystical coming out of those adventures. Beyond that, I don't like wondering if subsequent experiences when I felt especially close to God were really just a matter of brain chemistry. Again according to the Hopkins press release, "The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors--as do some other hallucinogens--but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown."

Interestingly, those chosen to take part in the study were already spiritually active. "We felt that volunteers who had some engagement with prayer, meditation, churchgoing, or similar activities would be better equipped to understand and consolidate any mystical-type experiences they might have in the study," Griffiths says. In what I've read he doesn't indicate whether he believes in the "Beyond" his subjects experienced, but he does seem to say that just because the research subjects' experience of a "Beyond" was chemically induced, that doesn't have to mean that what they experienced isn't real.

===
In other news about new academic studies proving what we already knew, researchers at Princeton University have found that the link between wealth and happiness is illusory and mostly exaggerated. Didn't Jesus say something along those lines about two thousand years ago?

===
Final item, I went to Mass one day last week and noticed eleven women and four men in attendance, a slightly higher representation of men than we sometimes see. I checked out a Christian meditation group at the same church Monday evening, and there were approximately seven women and two men. Will someone please remind me why the men get to run this organization? Can anyone explain why the women let them?

Religion v. spirituality

2006-07-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

Even as I am feeling drawn more and more toward my local Catholic parish, this weekend found me playing my old game of parsing signs and signals about which church to attend until almost the last minute, when I got in the car and headed for the Episcopal church I've been appreciating recently. In his homilies, the priest there explores depths of meaning in the scripture readings and other topics that really interest me, and once again this week he touched on a subject I've been pondering lately myself, the differences between religion and spirituality, though I admit I'm not sure if those are exactly the right words for what I've been thinking about.

He mentioned a book called The Spirituality of Imperfection, by Ernest Kurtz; I was intrigued, and went straight to my computer when I got home to look it up on Amazon.

To quote his quotes from the book: "Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there." And: "A spirituality of imperfection suggests that the first prayer is a scream, a cry for help."

What I've been thinking myself on the subject of religion and spirituality is that religion is about taking words and forms and beliefs that come to you from some source outside of yourself and using them to express our common attitudes toward God: praise, thanksgiving, penitence, and so forth. Spirituality, on the other hand, is about looking deep within yourself, to the place where you meet God without putting anybody else's interface in between, and where you may hear God speaking to you, if you listen carefully. In my little construct, religion is about an attitude toward God, while spirituality is about an encounter with God. One of the things that finally led me to leave the Episcopal church I had been attending for over a year was that I couldn't seem to find enough opportunities there to take that further step toward God. I do also know many Catholics who seem more religous than spiritual, but I suppose one good thing about worshiping under the big tent of your typically much larger Catholic congregation is that among all those people you're likely to find a variety of ways of expressing the impulse toward God, and thus more likely to find one that suits.

But I'm not sure about that second quote from the book. For me, this encounter begins with the acknowledgement that I am nothing without God, in whom it has been said that we live and move and have our being; that God's love is the grounding of my reality. Does that equal a cry for help? It may be related, but I'm not sure it's precisely the same.

Whereas I came home thinking that I would certainly try to find a copy this book, after I'd read a little more about it I wasn't so sure. The review Amazon quotes says, "The aim of this book is to explain the underlying spiritual--although not necessarily religious--principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. Part 1 presents the emphasis of this spirituality, which is the recognition and especially the acceptance of humans as imperfect beings. Part 2 tells how the founders of AA put spirituality to use. Part 3 discusses the benefits: release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, and forgiveness." I may put it on my list, but not at the top.

I haven't been to an Episcopal church for a while, since a couple of weeks before the trip to Iceland, and this time fell right into one of the booby traps that open up for me in the places where Episcopal and Catholic words and practice diverge. I'm usually pretty careful about those things, and at communion time I managed to get my hands right on top of left in the Episcopal fashion, but at the next stop I blurted out my Amen right after the words The blood of Christ, without waiting for the cup of salvation, clearly startling the minister of the cup. Alas, sometimes it isn't easy to keep all this external stuff straight and still be spiritual (or maybe it just isn't possible to keep the Catholic in me from prevailing).

The woman at the tank truck

2006-07-08T15:54:00.000-05:00

So it wasn't much of a flood by Biblical standards; no ark was required for this one, although I did notice some displaced animals wandering in confusion through our backyard, including a groundhog, a turtle, and a deer. But, in another Biblical allusion, I have become the woman at the well (or, in this case, the woman at the stainless steel tank truck).

The place of Jacob's well has been taken in our town by a silvery behemoth parked in back of the local firehouse, which I more commonly visit to vote or give blood. If you get your water from a private well, one of the aftereffects of major flooding is that you can't drink what flows from the tap until it's been tested and proven safe. That can a week or more if the flood happens right before a long holiday weekend, so every other day or so we drive up to the firehouse to draw water from the twin metal nipples sticking out of the back of a truck that has been provided to us through the generosity of the county Water and Sewer Authority (and in this case I certainly hope the first word is the operative part of that name).

As I stood there last night filling my motley assortment of bottles and pitchers, I couldn't help considering the obvious ironies that an excess of water had brought us a water shortage, that we experience water not only as a source of life but also as a force of destruction. I was thinking, too, about the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, who was really pretty bold but who knew a good thing. I didn't find Jesus waiting for me at the firehouse, though, just the fire chief.

Buddhists with power washers

2006-07-04T18:24:00.000-05:00

Buddhists with power washers showed up today. Lots of them.

They went to work cleaning up flood damage at the home of some neighbors who are good people but profess no religious faith. The Buddhists supplemented their power washers with flood cleanup kits delivered to us by the Salvation Army.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in, and how silly all the definitions we use to divide ourselves up seem at times like this.

Learning to receive

2006-07-02T09:43:00.000-05:00

I was on the receiving end of a natural disaster this past week. River flooding is different from a hurricane, where there's more suspense about where it will come ashore and how bad it will be. When the river across the street from my home floods, we usually have about two day's notice. We know what's coming, and we have a pretty fair estimate of just how bad it will be. It is humbling to sit in your house (or, more accurately, run around your house trying to figure out what to save) knowing that big-time trouble is heading your way and there's nothing you or any other human being can do to stop it.

I also was on the receiving end of a tremendous river of caring last week, and that, too, is humbling.

We were traveling when the warning came, and there was no way we could get back home in time to do anything. The cell phone rang in our hotel room at 3:30 am with a call from our son, four time zones away, letting us know about the flood warnings and giving us until morning his time to think about what we wanted him to do for us. Making our list and finding Internet and telephone connections to communicate from a foreign city was certainly an adventure, but the real story is what happened back at home. I asked the people I work with for help, and our son asked other friends for help, and still other friends showed up at our house on their own. The group of a dozen or so that came together managed to move everything on the first floor of our house to the second floor--everything, that is, except a massive grand piano which they couldn't move and so raised on cinder blocks as high as they could lift it.

Thankfully, we were spared the worst of it. The water did not rise as high as the worst estimates, and it didn't quite reach the first floor of our house. Still, we can't drink the water from our well, we have to find someone to power wash and bleach the muck from the crawl space under our house, and we lost most of the contents of our refrigerator and freezer after three days without power. (And, of course, we have to bring everything back down put it back where it was.) Still, compared to many of our neighbors, we got off easy, and we experienced tremendous peace of mind knowing that no matter how bad it turned out to be, our family photographs and heirlooms would be safe. Of course they're all just things, and if we lost them life would go on, but they are links to people and times that matter to us, and we're glad we won't have to spend the next weeks carrying their soggy remains out to the street and throwing them into a Dumpster.

Some things I'm still thinking about:

Asking for help, asking your friends to do something really big for you, and having them respond by doing even more than you'd asked for.
Waking up in the morning not knowing where you will lie down that night; trusting that you will in fact find a place.
Knowing that however inconvenienced you've been, others have it much worse.
Seeing that people will help you in big ways without your having to ask.
Watching your 24-year-old son take total charge of a difficult situation and handle it gracefully and well, taking care of you when you are helpless to do for yourself (but our feelings about this are mixed; if it looks like evidence of our success as parents, it also suggests that the next generation is ready to start taking care of us now--does that mean it's all downhill from here?).

I still feel the glow of being in held in love by so many people, people who worked hard to save what they thought would be most important to us--though oddly, it also felt a little like surviving our own wake, knowing that friends from different areas of our lives were gathered together in our name, without us. And though I describe it as a glow, the truth is that it does not feel entirely comfortable. I'm not used to being so needy. I'm not used to being given so much, and I'm still getting used to it. Even Jesus said it's better to give than to receive. As a giver I may try to empathize with those I am serving, but the truth is that the giver has power, while the receiver has none. The giver is the one who is considered virtuous, who can choose to give or not to give. When you really need help, all you can do is accept whatever assistance is offered to you.

A long time ago I read a book by Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, called Creative Suffering. Paton made the point that those who suffer give a great gift to those who serve them by providing this opportunity for service. While I've come to realize this may not be a completely original thought, it made an impression on me then and I've thought about it many times since. As it happens, we've done a lot in the past to help one of the friends who came to help us last week. My husband has been worrying about what we can do now to express our gratitude for her help in our time of need, looking for some way to compensate her, and I told him that what we have given her is an opportunity to meet us on equal terms, to do something for us that we really needed and could not do for ourselves. He thought about that for a while and finally accepted the idea, but it was clear that being a receiver rather than a giver is something that doesn't come easily to him, either.

The flood has given us an opportunity to practice receiving, asking for what we need, accepting what's given to us with no expectation of payback, learning to look the giver in the eye and simply say thanks. Today's Gospel is also about asking for what we need. The woman with the hemorrhage and the synagogue official whose daughter had died didn't hesitate to go to Jesus for help, and they got it. We're always on the receiving end when it comes to our relationship with God. We can't escape God's love, but what would happen if we really opened our hearts to it? And no matter what I might try to do in return, there's no way I could ever earn what I am given. How good am I at saying thanks?

Falling out of the family tree

2006-06-27T03:17:00.000-05:00

You know you're tired when someone points out a sign with the Icelandic word for toilet, which happens to be snyrting, and you laugh until your sides hurt.

I can't remember when I'd been that tired. We'd just stepped off a plane in Reykjavik after a five-hour overnight flight during which I'd managed to get an hour or two of restless sleep. It was 6:30 am local time, and there was no chance we'd lie down in a bed until after lunch. We were so tired we laughed ourselves silly at the snyrting sign, and we laughed when we thought the Icelandic car rental guy told us we were getting a Hummer (we didn't), and we laughed our way across the city as we passed a series of incomprehensible Icelandic traffic signs, including one that appeared to show an adult dangling a baby in the air. (Question: "What do you suppose that means?" Answer: "It means that Michael Jackson's been here.")

We wouldn't have been laughing if we'd known just how frightening the roads outside Reykjavik would turn out to be, but we weren't up to that yet.

I've known my sister longer than almost anyone else--I remember the day they brought her home from the hospital--and yet in many ways I don't know her well. The first day of our six-day car trip around Iceland was all about realizing how different we are. My sister wore a pair of intensely stylish shoes to the airport; I wore waterproof country walking shoes with thick black nonslip soles. Her outfit was elegantly casual; I had on jeans because they were heavy and I didn't want to carry them in my suitcase. In the restaurant, she wanted fish, fruit, and vegetables, and I wanted anything else--which may account for why she is slim and I am not.

On the second day, our similarities became more apparent: The immediate need for coffee first thing each morning, a shared impatience with the detailed museum presentations that fascinate our husbands, and especially our reaction to driving the torture track that passes in Iceland for a national road system, which in places is unpaved, minimally marked, and narrow, and which includes many one-lane bridges, blind curves and rises, and one-lane bridges at the end of blind curves and rises. Yes, I thought when we both gasped as the car down an impossibly steep hill, we definitely are sisters from the same mother, the mother who passed along the profound insecurity that grips us when we are strapped into any vehicle that someone else is driving, especially when it is traveling a series of switchbacks that swing you out over sheer cliffs without guard rails.

Another thing we have in common is Catholicism. We're Roman Catholic because my parents are, as were their families before them. Of four siblings, all are at least nominally Catholic. My brother, who isn't particularly religious himself, says he and his daughters are Catholic because our family is and always has been, and that's enough for him. It's not enough for me.

Or is it? This is a question I'm particularly interested in exploring these days. How much is who you are determined by where you came from, in a familial as well as a personal sense? My head has pretty much decided I belong in the Episcopal church, but my heart seems unable to let go of being Roman Catholic. Why not? What holds me back? I ask myself again and again if it's courage or cowardice that keeps me on this side of the big leap. But thinking about religion doesn't produce answers to those questions, and I don't know how to read the map that shows the rest of the way. When is it right to follow your leadings because they point toward the very deepest truth about who you are, and when does clinging to comfortable old habits hold you back instead of carrying you closer to the truth of things.

All of this is quite odd to be thinking about in Iceland, where we've only across two Roman Catholic churches during hundreds of miles of driving. This has been an amazing trip, leading us to views of geysirs, glaciers, volcanoes, fjords, and landscapes that are unbelievable beautiful as well as others that are unbelievably desolate. Another thing we came across, this time by unhappy accident, was the realization that roads whose numbers are preceded by an F can be too rough to drive if you didn't get that Hummer from the car rental place. We didn't find out what the F stands for but we took a guess; if you get stuck having to drive one of these roads without an SUV, you are f'ed.) Later, when our husbands argued for a short cut on an F road, my sister and I both said no way. I have no doubt the family wisdom was leading us in the right direction on that one.

Condemnation, or conversion?

2006-06-21T10:03:00.000-05:00

While I was busy last Sunday trying to feel Catholic, my other church was getting ready to make history. When I heard the news that the Episcopal Church in the USA had elected its first female presiding bishop, my first reaction was a sort of you-go-girl feminist hurrah, but the more I hear of the continuing reaction and analysis, the more I wonder. I remind myself that the Catholic Church isn't the only one with problems; at times the Anglican Communion seems to be hurtling toward self-destruction at an alarming rate of speed.

I admire the ordination of women and the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the Episcopal Church. I adnire the the willingness to wrestle with the big questions. I wonder if any institution has a higher obligation to model justice than the church, and I admire the Episcopal Church for striving to do just that. At the same time, though, I can't help worrying about where things are going. I've always been impressed by the eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman, who saw a moral obligation to end slavery but felt equally responsible for ministering to slaveholders, trying to save their souls by persuading them to see that what they were doing was wrong. In the twenty-first century, we seem much more comfortable with condemnation than conversion.

Churches change slowly for good reason, and I am wondering if it might be better to live with injustice for a little while longer out of respect for those brothers and sisters who aren't there yet, to keep working on converting them instead of fracturing unity by charging ahead. And I wonder if I might use these arguments on myself, to talk myself back into the Catholic Church ...

I've got Jesus!

I celebrated my birthday this week and was delighted to find Jesus and Freud among my gifts, thanks to my daughter, who noted how excited I was last month when I found them displayed side by side in a shop window. Now I have to decide whether to go ahead and put them on my desk at work, so I can enjoy them all day long. I see potential there for offending believers and non-believers alike.

As I was admiring Jesus again this morning, it occurred to me that if we set having a body like Jesus as a requirement for ordination and used this Jesus to define the standard, it would be pretty hard to find any candidates. How many people do you know who have no identifiable gender parts but do have wheels embedded in their feet?

And, demonstrating the human tendency toward never being satisfied with what we've got, this morning we were walking back from breakfast in town and passed a shop window where a deluxe plastic action figure Jesus was on display. That one comes with a jug for wine (to be changed into water) as well as plastic loaves and fishes (for feeding the multitude), plus his hands glow in the dark. Proving that Jesus is always cooler on the other side of the fence?

Corpus Christi 2006

2006-06-18T10:22:00.000-05:00

The Lord fed his people with the finest wheat and honey; their hunger was satisfied.
--Psalm 81:16

When I looked online to preview the readings for today I saw that it is the second Sunday after Pentecost in the Episcopal Church; for Roman Catholics, it's the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. I had been planning to attend the nearby Episcopal Church where I've recently been appreciating and learning from the preaching of a very spiritual priest, a former Roman Catholic, as it happens, but when I realized it was Corpus Christi I felt a deep need to be in a Catholic Church. This was more than the gentle tug of the invisible string that pulls me to morning Mass from time to time, but leaves me feeling like an outsider come just to observe. This time what I felt was a deep need to be in a Catholic church as if it were my place where I really belonged, and everything fell into place to make it happen, and so it was that I found myself sitting there in my local Catholic parish looking around and wondering if this is where I am going to end up after all.

For me, what being Catholic is most significantly about is this: Incarnation, Redemption, Eucharist--and Eucharist speaks to us about the first two and is the symbol/reality of God-in-the-World (not God-in-the-Book), the centrality of which is what makes the Catholic experience of divine presence closer to how Quakers understand it than to the ways I have seen it described by some other Christian denominations. To take things a step further, Eucharist to me is first about receiving and then about sharing. I long ago recognized in myself a hunger that only this could begin to satisfy, which is how I explained things to myself so many times in the past when I might have left but didn't.

I was thinking that it would be sweet if this were the last chapter in my story. Back at home, issues resolved, everything forgiven, fade to black, with maybe a little hymn-singing by angelic voices in the background. It would happen that way in an old black-and-white movie like Bells of St. Mary's, but the last time I checked my world was happening in living color and nothing was that neat and simple. I was hardly settled in my pew this morning before some of the things that have irritated or angered or disappointed me began popping up in my mind again. I managed to push them all back down again this morning (in a spiritual version of the arcade game Whack-a-Mole?) but I doubt this will last. I have, after all, spent the last year and a half practicing a different experience of God-in-the-World, and I'm getting better and better at it.

Anyway, from where I sat in church I could see two babies, one about 10 months old and the other a little younger. The older babe was dressed just like his dad in a navy blue polo shirt and khaki shorts, and he sat in his father's lap facing forward, pretty well behaved for his age. They were cute together, but I saw in them a vision of God the Father: I have created you in my own image. The message being that this father's love is deep and strong but comes with high expectations. The other baby was in his mother's arms, and as she bounced and kissed him her utter delight in him was movingly obvious, as was his delighted response. When he got fussy she soothed him, and when he tried to push her away she pulled him back and settled him against her chest with her arms wrapped around him. A vision of God the Mother?

Holy places

2006-06-15T11:25:00.000-05:00

When I was little my parents taught me that church was God's house. Then I went to catechism class and they told me God was everywhere, which made me wonder why he needed a home of his own, or if he ever actually went there. And then the post-conciliar reformists came along insisting that the Church wasn't a building at all, which seemed to contradict the substantial physical reality of that large pile of stones where we all gathered once a week, though of course I understood what they were trying to say.

I've been thinking a lot lately about holy spaces. Are there physical places where we come closer to God, where it's easier to make contact? If so, is this just a result of conditioning, or is God really in some way more accessible there? Are there thin places in the cosmic fabric where a little bit of heaven leaks through to us? I was interested, as I played around with these ideas, to read Revem's thoughts about the basic need for a second space in life, a place to feel safe and "just be," as she explains it.

"At one point in time this may have been the church," she writes, "but this is definitely not the case today."

Maybe that depends on your particular faith tradition, and perhaps on where you find yourself geographically. I think many Catholics, myself included, still find refuge in church--inside the big building, that is, if not always (she says ruefully) within that bigger construct that comprises all of us. I've heard of places where it isn't considered safe to leave the church building open for anyone who might wish to make a visit, but that isn't the case where I live, fortunately, and I still take advantage of divine hospitality by dropping by from time to time. It's something I've missed in my Episcopalian explorations, where as far as I know churches are kept locked when not in active use and people don't think of stopping in unannounced. (Though I should point out that my experience is limited and I don't presume to speak authoritatively.)

What do I find in an empty church? Well, most emphatically and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I don't find silence. The building itself speaks, in creaks, cracks, groans, and hisses, and I know it's been saying those exact same things all along, even when I couldn't hear them through our Sunday morning busy-ness. What else did I miss, I wonder? Alone in church, I try to listen harder for all those things I should be paying attention to but usually don't. Sometimes I feel I'm alone with God. Sometimes I just feel alone. Sometimes the creaks and bumps of the building are the ghost sounds of absent worshipers, reminding me that in some sense I share this space with everyone who has ever prayed here before me. I almost always leave feeling my batteries have been recharged.

I don't think this has to be a uniquely Catholic experience, despite the Catholic claim to a unique sacramental presence. I think my feeling that I am closer to God when I am in church is more a learned response, and it's not unrelated to the fact that when I go there I have nothing to do but sit. I had a very similar experience when I spent an hour alone in my little Episcopal church as part of our Holy Thursday/Good Friday prayer vigil this spring, which was the only time I ever had an opportunity to spend time in that church alone and without interruption.

After 9/11, many churches of various denominations near my home announced that they would stay open for anyone who wanted to be there. I wonder if people would have made a habit of this if the invitation were continued.

I'll have a latte and a glimpse of eternity, please

2006-06-11T11:48:00.000-05:00

On weekend mornings when I have time and my dog is willing to accommodate me by walking a little farther than usual, I like to tie her up outside of Starbucks while I pick up a venti skim latte to savor on the way home. I keep a Starbucks card near the leash so I can slip it into my pocket and be prepared for this possibility. Unfortunately, I set out this morning not remembering that I had left it in my pocket through yesterday's wash cycle, and it turns out the magnetic strip containing the details of my credit standing was obliterated by the dryer.

I think if Purgatory exists, it must be a little like waiting in a long line and finally reaching the counter at Starbucks only to find that you've come up a couple of bucks short of what you need to get the coffee you so long for.

But there was an angel behind the counter this morning who, perhaps in recognition of my regular patronage or perhaps just out of the kindness of her heart, told me I could have this morning's brew for free. I could have left thinking thoughts about the colossal profit Starbucks has already realized from my steady patronage should more than cover it, but told myself not to. Instead I pondered how this small act of kindness had taken me past frustration to appreciation of the small pleasures of walking home behind a good dog with a hot cup of coffee in hand on a glorious Sunday morning in June.

I thought about one of the women who works as a cashier at the food court on the bottom floor of our building at the university. Not much of a job, most of us would probably say, but somehow she manages to greet every single person who goes through her line like a friend. When she looks at you she really sees you, and you come away feeling you have been given a small but not insignificant gift. What would the world be like if we all did our jobs like that?

@#$!%& crazy

2006-06-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

All week long I've been revisiting my decision to leave the little Episcopal church where I've worshiped most often for the past year and a half, which has been "my" church more than any other during this time. I'm sad about leaving and yet every time I thought about it, I felt even more convinced that it is time to move on. Last Sunday I said goodbye in my head; yesterday I picked up the phone and made it official.

I wanted to explain why I wouldn't be voting at their meeting tomorrow, and why I didn't expect to be back after that. It was a short but good conversation. I said everything I wanted to say (which doesn't always happen with me and which is why I usually prefer writing to speaking). Then I hung up and asked myself if I had totally lost my @#$!%& mind. I mean, I go looking for a church, find a place that manages to provide most of what I could hope for, where I am truly welcomed, and then in response I give it back because it turns out to be not quite perfect enough for me?

But I had to. I'm sad about that decision, but happy, too. (I really am @#$!%& crazy!) Even it wasn't the right place for me in the long run, it was the right place to be while I was there. When I was hurting and needed a place to settle for a while, those folks took me in as if I belonged there, and they will always have a special place in my heart. I’ll also always ask myself if it was fair to take from them as much as I did, but I tried to give back as I could; I hope it was enough.

Some things I've learned: That wonderful church communities do exist. That being a community of faith is about knowing each other but even more about praying together. That God is good. That trying to know love and serve God is an amazing adventure best undertaken in the company of others, and that even in our sorry world people all over the place are seriously trying to do just that. That you don't have to stay stuck where you are if it isn't the right place to be. I’ve watched a church community struggle with its own joys and sorrows, through birth and death and betrayal and the departure of longtime members. I've come to know a gifted woman priest, been part of a faith community that welcomed gay and lesbian men and women as if they were regular people, that was focused more on bringing people to the Eucharistic table than standing at the gate and announcing who would be excluded.

I should feel good about having narrowed my church choices a bit, but I’m not sure I do. Sometimes, when I look at the churches that are left on my list, I can almost imagine myself settling down in my local Catholic parish--and then I think of those three last things among others and I can’t see how that could ever feel right.

TGTG (it's summer)!

2006-06-09T08:28:00.000-05:00

It's quiet now on campus.

The students are largely gone; so are the alums whose pursuit of lost youth took them to the bottom of many a keg last weekend, and the proud-lost little families who trailed along behind their graduating seniors through several days of celebratory wevents. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about three months of this--I like the bustle of people moving purposefully toward class and the library (or lunch, a late-morning nap, or whatever)--but for now the stillness is almost palpable and very peaceful. This evening one of the deans is throwing a big TGTG party--short for Thank God They're Gone, a sentiment that resonates with all of us who are still here.

In our office, though, we have two undergraduates working with us this summer, which is creating a more lively atmosphere than we were used to and will certainly keep me on my toes, since I have the primary responsibility for keeping them busy. They are supposed to be working on our online resources, which they can't always do because of continuing glitches that keep us from accessing those resources, which means I have to scramble to find other projects for them. At this rate, they may have wrapped up every project I can think of by the end of the first full week.

The best thing has been watching them delve into understanding what our office is about. It's exciting to see that they are excited by what we do. Very broadly summarized, the work of our office is about encouraging people--the students of our fine university in particular--to use their varied skills and talents to make the world a better place. It's good work, by which I mean not just pleasant (thought it is that) but good in a moral sense, too.

It might seem curious that a secular university would have such an office, but this sort of thing is very trendy in higher education circles just now and the leaders of my educational institution are intensely tuned in to what's in style in the academic world. What I find interesting is the spiritual alignment of the four of us who work in this office. We are all very alike in terms of sharing the same values and passion for justice in the world. Two of us would say our values are shaped by religious faith. Two would say not. The two of us who profess faith come from two different Christian traditions. Yet I would say that each one of us has much more in common with the other three than with many others who would appear on the surface to be more alike.

We don't usually talk much about religion but the subject of faith did come up one day and I mentioned the Presbyterian campus minister who was recently quoted in an article in the student newspaper about the growth of conservative religious groups at the university. Noting that many of those traditions emphasize salvation, he said, "My tradition falls much more in terms of the theological concept of grace; that we are saved not by anything of our own doing or by our own choice, but because of what Christ has done for us ... I'm less concerned as a pastor about the saving of an individual's soul and more about responding to this grace."

Now I know there's a lot of subtle theology going on under that statement and I probably couldn't fall in line with all of it, but I like the idea and I said so. Of course I couldn't come up with the whole quote from memory, so I summarized: "It's not about redemption as much as it's about grace."

I said I thought that meant religion isn't a point system toward heaven as much as it is about being in a relationship, and my faithful colleague (who in fact is Presbyterian) agreed.

I like that idea. The hard part is living up to it.

Back on the road again

2006-06-04T13:45:00.000-05:00

Back on the bike today for a short (6.5-mile) spin in the hills above town, hardly worth getting all sweaty for but you take what you can get. I didn't sleep well last night and I'm dead tired today, but I promised myself a bike ride this afternoon and I wasn't giving that up, so when we got back from church I changed into bike clothes and off I went into the hills above town.

The wild roses are giving way now to honeysuckle, a slightly different sweet scent, which was mixed in here and there with the aroma of grass drying in the sun. That's a scent that straddles two worlds; in the country, it's what you get after hay mowing, while in the suburbs it's what the lawn smells like by Saturday afternoon. Either way, it speaks of human labor applied to what grows naturally, a good clean scent, and one of my favorites.

I also straddle two worlds, and I, too, am finding myself in transition. I said goodbye this morning to the church where I have mostly worshiped for the past year and half, not publicly but in my heart. I looked around at all those familiar faces and tried to love each one, seeing in each one a wonderful reflection of God in the world. This is a special place and I do believe God drew me here because he knew I'd be well taken care of, but in my heart I have known for a while now that this isn't where I belong for the long haul. Pursuing my reflection on places I have thought of as home in my life, I do believe the time has come to let this one go.

I made a similar resolution to move on in January, I know, and then I didn't keep it. I found it difficult to sort out the difference between being loved and welcomed and being convinced that you are where you truly belong. I will always be grateful for that little church and I will always appreciate what I found there. This time, though, I'm pretty sure I'm ready to move on.

It's Pentecost, which has always been one of my favorite feasts. I love the reading from 1 Corinthians that speaks of different gifts. I have a much broader sense of what this means than I used to, thinking now of the many different ways and places we followers of Christ live out that faith. Thanks, God, for this one.

You can’t go home again

2006-06-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

Until just a few years ago, my aunt still lived in the house where the family had moved when my father was 8 years old. It was a row house on a city street, and I remember running up and down its long, open basement, spending the night in the room that had been my dad’s when he was a boy, making pancakes from scratch on Saturday morning under my aunt’s supervision.

I returned to that house again and again over the years, eventually bringing my own children with me. I told them about family gatherings with my father’s mother, sisters, aunts, and uncles, and I showed them my old pictures, but I’m not sure they could really understand what that house meant to me. Though I never lived there, for half a century it represented home, a place where I could go to revisit happy times with departed relatives and remember what it was like to be a child with so many good things yet to come.

In time, though, my aunt grew old and feeble, and eventually she had to move. I joined in the sad work of dismantling our family’s urban homestead; the ensuing diaspora of household goods meant that all of us in the next generation now have a piece of the place to call our own. The house sold quickly to a young family who were excited about making a home there, and we were glad for them. I went back a year or two later, though, to look it over again. Though I still had a picture of every room in my mind’s eye, in real time I could only stand in the street and stare at the outside because the place wasn’t mine any more.

I made a visit last week to the church where I was an active member for 26 years, until I walked away in sorrow a year and a half ago, and it felt much the same as revisiting the family home of my childhood. No matter how familiar the church looked, no matter how many memories I have, it isn’t my home any more. I found myself yearning for the comfort of belonging there, of going to 8:30 Mass and looking around to find the old gang gathered just like old times, but though I willed myself to imagine going back, I couldn’t manage to make it feel right.

We move on, build new homes, make new families, and maybe it's wrong to try to cling to the places we’ve been. I grateful for all of my homes , but I think maybe it's time to let go of this one and move on.

The view from the back corner where I was hiding. Like any good Catholic, I tended to sit in the same place every morning, which for a long time was on the left side of the center aisle about seven pews from the front, although once it occurred to me that the women all seemed to sit on the left and the men on the right, I switched to the right just to be contrary.

Foolin' around

2006-05-31T09:30:00.000-05:00

For some reason I was thinking last night that flirting with another religious denomination might be a little like cheating on your spouse--not that I have any first-hand knowledge in that area, of course, but I can imagine that it must be exciting at first, new and different and a little daring.

In the beginning you would probably notice with approval all of the bad habits this person didn't manifest; imagine living with someone who didn't ever work late on Fridays, snore, or forget that wiping the counters is part of cleaning the kitchen. After a while, though, you might start to miss those traits you did appreciate in your partner. What if the new guy didn't bother to bring you your morning coffee so you wouldn't have to crawl down the stairs to get it, didn't understand that it wasn't a good idea to talk to you until after you'd finished at least one cup, or didn't think it was a man's job to clean the kitchen?

In time you might give up on the new guy and reconsider your partner with renewed appreciation, or maybe you wouldn't go back, but you'd move on understanding that this new situation wasn't going to be perfect, either.

Would gladness outweigh regrets, either way?

Bike riding on Memorial Day

2006-05-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Memorial Day, a holiday--hooray!

Even though I like my job and don't mind going to work, thinking about what to do on the third day of a three-day weekend is like balancing your checkbook and discovering that you miscalculated and still have a lot more money in the bank than you thought.

How to spend it? For starters, I took a 10-mile bike ride (all right, it was really only 9.2, not a lot but at least it's a start, considering I hardly rode at all last year due to my injured foot) through the woods and fields just outside of town. As Lance Armstrong said, it's not about the bike. For me it was about time to breathe the perfume of blooming wild roses which is everywhere in this season and sort through all the random thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain these past few days:

For starters, the puzzle that the beauty of the natural world on a day like this speaks to me about God's goodness, but how to hold that thought when old grannies drown in their attics in hurricane-swept New Orleans, or when children are swept from their parents' arms by tsunami waves?

Similar thoughts yesterday morning in church, as I admired the play of leaf-filtered sunlight across the fresh-cut flowers at the altar. I was at one of my alternative churches just because some small voice told me to go there. The first reading was about the selection of Matthias to replace Judas: They prayed and said, "Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place." And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles. (Acts 1:24-26) I have been thinking even more than usual lately about discernment and this reading inspired a sermon about the process of discernment, and the comment that a lot of people don't believe anything happens by chance, but see the hand of God in everything.

Which makes perfect sense to me, especially as I so often find that what I need comes into my life just at the moment I need it most--but still there is that same problem as above. If the hand of God is in everything, how to explain all the bad things that happen to people?

Anyway, here's a weird coincidence: I went on an educational field trip from the university to a large state prison last week, and afterward my thoughts kept going back to the terrible sadness and wasted humanity of that place. Then yesterday, as we were driving to have dinner with my parents, we made a wrong turn switching highways and unexpectedly found ourselves driving right up to the prison.

It was as if this place that had been pulling my heart back all week had somehow managed to pull my body there, too.

But would "Love One Another" have made it past the spam blockers?

2006-05-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

I like to think about technology and the ways it affects how we relate to each other, in our business and personal lives and for better or worse. It has occurred to me before that things might have been quite different 2000 years ago if St. Paul traveled with a laptop--though I'm not sure email would have been a net benefit. Sure, he would have had an easier time getting those epistles out and he might have written more often, but it's also possible he would have given less thought to each letter. And though it might have been more difficult for early Christianity to compete in the broader marketplace of ideas made possible by enhanced communications, the Howard Dean phenomenon certainly demonstrates the way the Internet can provide fertile soil for the right idea at the right time.

In a modern context, I've been interested in the way the smaller churches I've come to know in the past year use email and their websites to build community. Two emails arrived yesterday from the church I attended on Sunday, a precise demonstration of both the joy and disappointment I find there. The first was a birth announcement; a young couple who are regular attenders had a baby boy, and I was glad for them and glad to hear the news. The second was an invitation from the "Ladies Group," which will be going off together to see The Da Vinci Code, a movie I have no interest in criticizing but also no interest in seeing. I mean, why would I want to get together under the auspices of a religious organization and go see a film that got bad reviews and trashes some of our (or is it just my?) fundamental beliefs? This is a wonderful, warm, caring, and inclusive church community, but still I can't help wondering if there's enough going on there spiritually and intellectually to sustain me.

This morning, thanks to the "convenience" of the Internet, I sat at my computer in my bathrobe at 8 am and spent 45 minutes banging away in an effort to enroll in a course called Christian Ethics and Modern Society next fall at the university. Although I eventually did succeed, it took three different credit cards because things kept crashing when I was in the middle of checking out, and then when I'd get back to the payment screen I'd be informed that my payment had been rejected by the credit card company as a fraudulent duplication. I can't wait to see how many times the charge appears on my bill. The error message I liked best, though, was the one that notified me after more than half hour of working away at this that I'd been logged off the registration site due to prolonged inactivity.

Some thoughts on Sunday morning

2006-05-21T10:44:00.000-05:00

Sunday morning in the Episcopal church I have mostly attended for more than a year now. I am so moved to be here, I can't believe I almost didn't come. All the way in the car I was thinking about three other churches I might belong to, planning when I might attend each one and how I might approach the task of studying and comparing them. And then I walked into the church that is as close to being my own as any and wondered why I thought I needed to be anyplace else.

Sun was streaming through the stained glass window at the front of the church, and familiar faces were all around me. Everything seemed more beautiful than I could have imagined, from the flowers on either side of the altar, and the felt banner with cut-out hands representing members of the congregation young and old, to the prayers we prayed and the bread and wine we shared. I sometimes fret at the plainness of this church, but this morning I saw it the way you see the face of a family member, putting aside the usual abstract standards of beauty and replacing them with a fondness that's based on familiarity, that's based on love.

Lately I've been catching up on some reading I meant to do before I was inundated by assigned reading for the class I audited this past semester, and this past week I've been reading Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical God Is Love: "Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history," he says, "he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives."

These men, women, and children do reflect his presence for me. They share prayer and life, know and honor each other's stories, reach out to each other in times of need, and strive together to understand what God wants from us and to live it. All the time I've been coming here I've been thinking about what I'm looking for in a faith community. Isn't this it?

And yet, I know there's still more that I want, including, yes, a beautiful church building, but also a charitable presence in my own community, a large enough base to sustain more outlets for spiritual learning and expression beyond Sunday morning, and more formal liturgical celebration of important holy days. This morning I'm wondering if maybe the answer isn't to accept this community exactly as it is, appreciating its many gifts and especially its wonderful charism of hospitality, and looking elsewhere to satisfy whatever needs I still have.

Then I wonder if I shouldn't be asking the same thing about the parish community I left. Yet I find myself determined not to make the mistake I made the last time around, investing myself in a community which (I must admit if I am honest) really never did seem completely right. Is it wrong to want it all?

How will I know what place is right for me, I keep asking myself, how will I know? But that's a question for another time, not for this morning, as I stand after the service, coffee cup in hand, in the midst of a small group of people who are talking and worrying about the future of their congregation as it moves forward, and who accept my presence without question, as if I belonged there.

Long as I have my plastic Jesus ...

2006-05-19T18:50:00.000-05:00

As an afterthought to encountering plastic action figure Jesus on Comm. Ave. in Boston earlier this month, I've been remembering the little set of plastic Apostles we had when I was a child. I'd forgotten all about them until plastic Jesus brought them back to mind. These weren't exactly action figures, being all of about two inches tall and incapable of any jointed motion, but I was fond of them.

I think the set included Jesus, although as I recall we didn't have all twelve of his mates--and anyone who really knows me will understand how much that incompleteness bothered me, because I like to have things in order that way. I don't remember who was missing, but for some reason I do recall that Doubting Thomas was in the collection and that he was one of my favorites, which now seems appropriate.

My house had other statues, too, not made of plastic and therefore more probably for the benefit of my parents than for us kids. I remember Mary, and possibly St. Francis, but I can't remember exactly who the rest were. We also had a little kit for anointing the sick, kept handy in a convenient bedside drawer. The crucifix lid slid off and could be inserted into a special slot and stood upright; the kit also included a small pair of beeswax candles and a container for holy water. To my knowledge it was never used as intended, nor is it likely to be, though it likely still resides in my parents' bedroom, since in our world of modern technological wonders we seem far more likely to suffer and be anointed in a hospital than at home in our own beds.

I'd like to think that having these things around as familiar household items suggests just how much religious expression was part of everyday life for us in those days, but for one thing we never actually played with the plastic apostles; that wouldn't have felt quite right. (Although "playing" Mass with candy wafers seemed a perfectly suitable activity for small Catholic children.) We mostly admired the little statues and lined them up for display in various configurations (I don't remember if we did nor did not give the mother of James and John her wish by placing her boys at Jesus' right hand). One day, when we were supposed to be taking a nap, my little sister sat straight up in bed and gave plaster Mary a whack that sent her flying halfway across the room; she got glued back together but was never quite the same again after that.

"It was looking at me," was the only explanation my sister could provide.

We must all hang together or ...

2006-05-18T19:55:00.000-05:00

I recently had the opportunity to compare three very different styles of church in the space of a week. First there was the enthusiastic, drum-driven Sunday evening Mass at the local Catholic mega-church, then the companionable and rather intimate Tuesday afternoon Eucharist in the university chapel, and finally a Sunday morning with the Rite II crowd at the tiny Episcopal church up the road.

The Sunday evening Mass was crowded, and loud. The crowd swayed in time with the music (though I noticed that hardly anyone in the pews actually sang). It really did remind me of a huge, non-denominational Christian worship service in a hockey arena that I once saw on TV. Of course there would be no mistaking the university chapel for anything but a church, but the Eucharist there had its loud moments, too, thanks to the appearance of two small children who had their own ideas about how best to give praise. There were no children at all on Sunday morning and that felt odd, though the ten o'clockers were noticeably younger than the white-haired crowd that populates the early service at this same church. By and large this seems to be a fairly liberal church congregation, and we were well into the hour before I managed to figure out why it felt so very old-fashioned. The church is quite small and the altar stands against the front wall, with the priest facing away from the congregation. I can't even remember how many years it's been since I prayed to a priest's back that way.

I came away from all of this thinking how curious it is, really, that we humans should feel drawn this way to public worship. Certainly it's related to the impulse toward God, but it's not exactly the same. What is it we hope to take from our fellows at prayer? A turn at riding along in their slipstream? Affirmation that we aren't crazy for believing that there's a deeper reality beyond the bricks and mortar world that's most obvious to us? Or is there something that just doesn't happen until we’re all there together?

I don't know the answers, but it did occur to me as I took a deep breath and marched myself into the third church where I wasn't completely at home in such a short time that life would be a lot simpler without it ...

Sometimes a cigar is just a piece of plastic

2006-05-08T08:48:00.000-05:00

Spotted in a shop window in Boston: Matching 5-inch plastic action figures of Jesus and Freud. The mind boggles.

I wouldn't have recognized Freud without the help of the package labeling, but I knew Jesus right away, which seems curious since I have seen actual photos of Freud while there are no contemporary portraits of Jesus with the possible exception of the Shroud of Turin, which didn't help much in this case. But who else could it have been but Jesus, with his long, light brown beard and hair, creamy white skin, and white robe? It was dark and his eyes were too small to see if they were blue, but I wouldn't have been a bit surprised. Freud was dressed in a three-piece suit with a cigar in his hand (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar ...), but he didn't have the trademark dark round glasses you see in later photos, so maybe that's why I didn't recognize him.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) the store was closed, because if it had been open I'm sure I would have marched in and purchased both figures on the spot. I found myself trying to imagine what kind of imaginative play the person (one can hardly suppose it would be a child) lucky enough to own both would engage in. Would Freud and Jesus accuse each other of being responsible for screwing up a significant portion of population of our world? Would Freud inquire about Jesus' relationship with his mother? Would Jesus boast that, being all knowing, he could answer the Freudian question, What does a woman want? (and perhaps add a little dig that it isn't really so very different from what a man wants)?

I took a closer look at the little statues to see what gave them “action” status. Turns out their arms--held slightly away from their sides, with the front of the elbows facing forward--are jointed, so they can raise their forearms in a gesture of bemused wonder; I imagined them exclaiming, Momma mia! or words to that effect.

Poor Jesus; what we make him into.

Changes

2006-05-03T06:39:00.000-05:00

The group that showed up yesterday for the Tuesday afternoon Eucharist in the university chapel was a small (but hardy?) band. It's the last week of classes, junior papers are nearly due, senior theses just completed, and everything is winding down, but each one of us who was present really wanted to be there; I think we recognize that in each other, and appreciate it.

My head was telling me, "You know you belong here in this church." My heart answered, "You know you don't belong here." In church these days in rapid succession I feel joy, sadness, apprehension, confusion, impatience. I make up my mind to go, to stay, to join one church or another, and then I'm sure I'll never be able to make up my mind to do anything at all.

In our reading from Acts, Saul stood by while Stephen was stoned, not realizing how soon he would be a different man. The priest spoke in her homily about change: how we fear it, how we can't escape it; Jesus, she reminded us, tells us not to be afraid.

When reading takes the place of doing

2006-05-02T07:09:00.000-05:00

Thanks to comfortable circumstances and the proliferation of used book sales through Half.com and its successors, I could own pretty much any book I wanted. It wasn't always so. When I was a teenager, each book I owned was precious. I remember watching my little library grow book by book to fill the top of my dresser and then the painted white bookshelf my dad and installed on the wall of my old bedroom (it's still there, but no longer full of my books).

Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain was an early acquisition. It belonged to my parents, but I appropriated it for my collection since they seemed to be done with it. It was a book that made a huge impression on me at the time, though I reread it when a fiftieth-anniversary edition was issued a few years ago and found it a little prissy. Then there was more Merton, which I purchased, in paperback form, whenever I could find anything he wrote. (Before Amazon, that wasn't always easy.) I enjoyed his reflective, journal-like writings. I remember asking for and receiving Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander in hard-cover--way beyond my budget--for Christmas. Later, I discovered Malcolm Boyd (Are You Running with me, Jesus). An Episcopal priest--interesting.

After a long time--I'm talking about years--it occurred to me that what I was doing was trying to find God in a book, and that books weren't really the right place to look. I realized that it was more important to experience God than to read about God; more important to pray than to think about praying. That's a hard lesson for someone who's been conditioned to answer every question by looking it up in a book (this was before the Internet, obviously).

So it seems ironic that now I have this little pile of religious titles sitting on my desk: The Anglican Understanding of the Church, The Anglican Spiritual Tradition, Welcome to the Episcopal Church. I justify these because they aren't really spiritual reading, just me trying to understand context.

Anyway, what I knew a long time ago, I sometimes still forget, so part of the point of the moratorium on thinking about religion (aside from the fact that I could see I was making myself crazy) was to relax and experience it. I knew I needed more time for prayer, too, real prayer, not just the hit-the-button-on-the-iPod-and-listen-to-someone-else- pray-while-I-concentrate-on-turning-left stuff, and I've been working on that.

Time travel

2006-04-30T16:06:00.000-05:00

As a corollary to my moratorium on thinking about religion, I also resolved to stop making mental lists of churches that must be visited before my investigation of religious options can be considered complete.

The new plan was to go wherever I felt drawn to be, so this morning, I found myself at the local Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church. I've been there twice before. It's a pretty little church, very traditional in appearance. It felt comfortably churchy, though I must admit that it does feel strange to find them doing things I haven't seen in a Roman Catholic church since I was a child--kneeling at the altar rail for communion, for example. Last time I visited, there was even a very traditionally dressed acolyte who held a paten under each chin.

It also feels like a seriously religious place, which I would like. My faith informs most things I do; I think that will be true no matter what I call myself. I am realizing through missing it that part of what I expect from a religious community is to be with others for whom the same is true and who are interested in reflecting on that, no matter what they call themselves. I felt right at home discussing the question Why Do Service? with people from the university who identified themselves as Presbyterian, Jewish, Hindu, and not-religious (but whose lives are definitely informed by what they believe).

The last time I was here was right before Lent, and the priest announced a long list of Lenten events. I asked on my way out if that schedule was written down somewhere, and he promised to email it to me but never did. I figured he'd lost my email address, or forgotten, or both. Things like that happen to all of us, and I wasn't particularly upset about it. I thought he'd probably forgotten me, too, by now, but when it was over he managed to greet me by name--extra credit for that.

(I admit feeling a small tug toward the local Roman Catholic church this morning, but when a quick check of the online schedule revealed that I would have been headed for First Communion, I squelched the thought. Maybe there isn't much I feel clear about with regards to religion these days, but I knew I wasn't up for that.)

Next time I'll try a moratorium on moratoria

2006-04-29T17:49:00.000-05:00

I decided this week to declare a moratorium on thinking about religion, but obviously I didn't stick to it or I wouldn't be writing this. And twice in the past two days I've been involved in extended discussions about the subject. Talk about falling off the wagon big time.

Yesterday, I had a long chat with the Episcopal chaplain at the university. Today, I spent an hour and a half in an inquirer's class at the Episcopal church I've been attending. Yesterday was like being in college. Today was nice in its own way but it was more like being in confirmation class. I hadn't realized until yesterday just how much I needed to have a conversation like the one I had with the chaplain.

We covered a range of topics, from church history to Biblical exegesis to theology and liturgy, not to mention the personal stuff. It was really very interesting and informative. I came away with a couple of books I am looking forward to reading, which I should have more time for now that we are coming into the last week of class at the university. I wasn't really looking for advice and he didn't offer much beyond the suggestion that I might want to proceed with caution. As if I were ever anything but cautious.

This afternoon we gathered in the church basement, where there are no windows, sad on such a beautiful spring day. There were six of us, including two boys who came with their mother. We didn't speak about ourselves in depth, so my impressions might not be accurate, but they all seemed to have chosen to join this church mostly because it feels like a nice place to be. And indeed it does. So nice that I keep coming back, even as I'm deciding it isn't the right place for me. My heart goes in one direction while my head stays someplace else (and sometimes vice versa).

It was interesting to note that every single one of us potential Episcopal converts had some previous affiliation with the Roman Catholic church--as did the priest from yesterday's discussion, who was raised Catholic and converted in his 20s. Two of the women had followed their Catholic husbands into the church and then back out again. One had been raised Catholic but had followed her husband into the Episcopal church. I was thinking that Catholics are like ants; no one worries about how many don't make it because there are still so many left when they're gone. The two women whose husbands were Catholic had previously attended the local Catholic mega-church; one commented that there were times when she would look around and realize she didn't know a single other person there. Been there; did that.

The priest brought a selection of books down to the class and told us to go ahead and borrow anything we wanted. I was the only one to accept the offer. More books; yeah! (And so much for that moratorium on thinking about religion.)

A little rain must fall

2006-04-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

After a string of dry weeks it has rained for most of the past 36 hours, heavily much of that time. We lost power a little after 7 am, usually a sign that a tree limb has let go somewhere and fallen across the wires, but I guess God must have wanted me in church this morning because I woke up without an alarm, and my hair wasn't even standing straight up as it usually is in the morning, so I could leave the house without benefit of a shower and not look like the hapless victim of a strong electric shock, power or no.

That left only one question: Which church to attend. I'd made up my mind and unmade it again at least eight times already (I was considering four different churches) before I finally got in the car and headed for the little Episcopal church where I celebrated Easter. I really had planned to use this Sunday to try out another of the churches that's on my list for consideration, but what drew me back was something bad that happened at this church last week, something involving a breach of trust (almost certainly) on the part of a member who hasn't been identified yet. I won't bother with the details here, because it isn't my story to tell, but it seemed right to be there with the rest of the community during this sad time as I had been there last week for the joyous celebration of Easter.

It hardly raining as I drove, but the sky was still a dark grey that made the pale yellow-greens of trees newly in leaf stand out all the more. Inside, the electric lights and the candles seemed that much brighter, too, but what really struck me was the high spirits of everyone gathered there. I'd forgotten that last night was a big church dinner that I'd decided not to attend, perhaps mistakenly, because it didn't seem to me that it was really my celebration. At any rate, no matter how sad anyone felt inside about what had happened at the church, the spirit that dominated the morning was their pleasure in being together.

Who are you, anyway?

2006-04-18T21:31:00.000-05:00

I think every one of us has story to tell, and the urge to tell it.

I don't know, maybe I'm generalizing too broadly based on my own feelings, but I've been thinking about personal stories since Sunday morning when I looked around at the people in church and realized how many of their stories I was beginning to know. I think a lot of what we humans do is driven by the desire to be known, by each other and ultimately by God. Lord, you have searched me and you know me. I'm sure it isn't an original idea, but I've been thinking that part of what defines a community in this context is knowing and honoring each other's stories.

When I returned the campus Episcopal chaplain's book last week, he asked again if I wanted to get together sometime and talk. As a matter of fact, there isn't an Episcopal priest I've met anywhere in my explorations during the past year who hasn't made the same offer. I don't think this is bound up with being Episcopal; surely it has more to do with the size of the congregation. When you know who your own people are, you can also recognize the stranger among them, a necessary first step toward welcoming him or her.

But how can I not compare how it feels to have someone come right up and say, Welcome, it's nice to meet you, I'd like to hear your story if you'd like to share it, with the typical reception I've received at the various Catholic churches I've visited in the same period--which is to say, no reception at all: Don't know who you are, don't care, doesn't much matter if you come back again or not.

Or, from the Catholic church I left: Don't know where you went, don't care, doesn't much matter ...

Is it wrong to want to be known, and to matter?

Happy Easter

2006-04-16T13:59:00.000-05:00

Two days later I am back in the same place, but this time it is full of people. As it was meant to be, I am thinking. It's a glorious spring morning, perfect for Easter. Birds are singing, trees and flowers seem to be exploding back to life all at once, and most of the people are dressed up, too.

We are a little late and we can hear the opening hymn from the parking lot. We're greeted at the door by the woman who seems to me to be the heart and soul of the place; she assures us that there are still plenty of seats inside. All around me are people I know, not as old friends, but as people I do care about. There are the couple whose grown son died recently, the couple who lost a daughter to leukemia last year, the couple who are expecting a baby soon, the alcoholic who has asked us to pray for his recovery, the two women who did the Lenten Bible study with me, the girl who always brings the dog she is raising to be a seeing eye dog, and others I recognize, whether or not I've learned their names yet.

I am in the midst of a real community and I have a place in it. Whether it's a permanent place, or whether the lesson is that I will find community wherever I go--that's a question for another day.

Better to light one ...

2006-04-14T09:30:00.000-05:00

This morning I am back to pondering the question of whether God intends to send us meaning through small events in our lives.

We had an overnight prayer vigil at the little Episcopal church I've been attending for the past year, and a series of us signed up to spend an hour in church across the time from the end of the Maundy Thursday service to Stations of the Cross on Good Friday at noon. I put my name down for 8 am.

I was glad to be there. From my seat inside I could see the rolling field that was one of the things that drew me to the church in the first place. I could see flowers, and trees just barely putting out their first pale green leaves. I could hear birds. I felt alone, and yet not alone. It was a chance to look around and experience being in this church in a way that isn't possible when other people are there.

There were instructions for an hour-long guided prayer experience, and suggestions for an unguided hour. Either way, you were supposed to start by lighting a candle. There were several still burning on a table at the entrance, left behind by earlier participants, with a few from the night before that had already burned down to nothing, and I was moved because I thought they really did convey the sense of a communal prayer in which we all left something behind even after our hour was up and we departed.

There was just one problem for me. There were no more candles to light.

I thought, well, this proves I'm not meant to be part of this community. There's no place for me here, I really don't belong. And I wept. I laughed, too, and my tears didn't last long, but I think if I'd chosen to I could have gathered all my church-related hurts and frustrations from the past two years into that moment and cried for the entire hour.

But I chose to laugh, because my response to this dilemma really was pretty funny. I kept looking for the damn candles. I mean, it was perfectly obvious that all of the candles on the table at the entrance were either burning or burned out. It was perfectly obvious that there were no other candles on the table, under the table, or anywhere near the table. There was no candle for me, but I must have spent a full five minutes looking and looking again to see if I couldn't find one. So typical. Jesus might have seek and ye shall find, but I mostly just seem to seek. I sat down and then got back up again after a few minutes to look one more time, but there were still no candles. Finally, I gave up and settled in to pray.

The hour went quickly, and it was a good hour. It felt right to be there.

I looked around, and after a while I got up and walked around. I needed to take a thorough look at the church, at all its nooks and crannies, to experience it fully as a physical place. At one point I was standing in the middle aisle facing the back of the church, which is to say facing the entrance doors, and I kept backing up to get a better look up into what in another church would be the choir loft, though this congregation uses it as a refuge for people with very small children or people who otherwise wish to sit away from the folks downstairs (for reasons I think I understand but not fully). As I backed up I realized I was getting closer to the altar, to the place where the priest might be standing and facing the congregation during a service, and just as I was beginning to feel like a real imposter I heard something start clicking--a motion detector on the back wall, I think. Properly warned, I sat back down in my seat, wondering if this was another message from heaven.

Finally, someone arrived to take the next hour. I looked back and saw her standing there with matches in hand, looking for a candle to light, and I whispered that there were no more. She said that was OK, she'd go find some back in the sacristy. I wanted to tell her to light one for me, but I didn't. I guess my presence will just have to speak for itself.

The company of women

2006-04-13T07:05:00.000-05:00

A couple of times in the past year I've driven past my old Catholic church and expected to feel a sharp, sudden sadness over losing that place. And of course I do feel profoundly saddened by what I've lost, but it's much deeper and more complex than that pang of nostalgia you sometimes experience at the sight of someplace that was once important in your life and no longer is.

It hit me full force yesterday when I was out on my bike after work, in what is new cycling territory for me. I was enjoying a meandering ride and found myself turning onto the road that leads to the retreat house where a small group of women from my parish used to gather for a weekend every year. When the building where we stayed came into view, I felt my chest tighten until it hurt. We made it through many years together but it's been two years now since the group got together. The numbers were going down anyway as we all got older; a couple of the women had died, others had health problems, and a few had moved away. The catastrophe back in the old parish was the final blow.

I don't know what the folks at the retreat house thought of us; our routine was not entirely traditional. Ours was certainly not a silent retreat. If anything, there were times when I would have appreciated a little more silence; if you wanted to be left alone with your own thoughts and prayers, you had to go into the chapel or take yourself away to someplace on the grounds where no one would find you. Our schedule included the usual conferences where a retreat leader would talk with us, and we had Mass together, and time set aside for walks along the canal or visits to the magnificent chapel at the retreat center, which used to be a seminary for boys from high school age up. (I think there still is a seminary on the grounds, though the high school section is gone and the overall numbers are way down.)

Then, at the end of each day, we'd have a wine and cheese gathering, where we'd laugh and gossip and tell stories long into the night. A couple of times we tried getting together in the "off season" between retreats, but it never seemed to work out due to schedule conflicts and so forth. But when we gathered together again at the retreat house each year, it felt as if we'd never been apart. That community of women sustained me in the church for a long time, and I miss them.

The Lord gave the word; great was the company of women who bore the tidings.
Psalm 68:11

Loving the questions

2006-04-12T08:13:00.000-05:00

I returned Finding Home to the university chaplain yesterday afternoon with the comment that I found it interesting but hadn't been able to locate myself in any of the profiles of Roman Catholics who joined the Episcopal church, even though there were small points I could relate to. Like most of those people, I've found it easy (maybe even surprisingly so) to embrace the Episcopal church. Where I lost them (and this could be a result of the author's bias) was that I didn't have any sense they found it difficult to let go of the Roman Catholic connection.

So here it is the last Wednesday in Lent and I am not any closer to resolving my dilemma. I did not, as I had hoped, find one church to settle in for the season. I did not, as I had expected, leave behind the Episcopal church where I have worshiped since the beginning of Lent last year. I plan to be there for the Maundy Thursday Eucharist tomorrow night, and again for my hour Friday morning in the parish prayer vigil. I expect to be there Easter Sunday, too, unless my family comes to visit, in which case we all will attend the local Catholic church together. I'm planning to join the inquirer's class at the same Episcopal church later this month, even though I don't think I'll ask to be received into the church when the bishop visits next fall.

And so I find myself wondering if I've made any progress at all this Lent. Maybe yes, because I feel more assured that I am where God wants me to be, no matter how hard it is for me to understand why I'm here? Maybe no, because I feel no closer to being in the settled place I want to find?

(I admitted to someone out loud for the first time ever yesterday that I feel drawn to priesthood, which obviously would have to mean priesthood in the Episcopal church. Whoa, boy, but we aren't going to go there now!)

Though it isn't really a prayer, I find myself praying Rilke's words:

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it, Live along some distant day into the answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Added later: While I was driving to work it came back to me that, like a good problem-solver, I'd just tried to evaluate Lent on the basis of how much "progress" I'd made. Not exactly loving the questions ...

Finding home, continued

2006-04-09T10:40:00.000-05:00

I was reminded this morning of the Easters of my childhood. We might have called them Easter outfits but our new clothes were rarely properly warm enough for Easter Sunday itself, leaving us the choice of hiding our finery (and squashing our corsages) under the winter coats we were so very tired of wearing, or freezing as we hurried to and from church without them. Easter may yet be warm, but my computer reported a brisk 32 degrees when I headed out for Palm Sunday services this morning.

As I was leaving, Chris asked if the Episcopalians also read the long Gospel for the occasion, and I couldn't remember though I guessed that they must. But I couldn't recall standing for an extended period last year, when it would have been even harder for me than usual because my sore foot was still bothering me so much. Turns out that just like Roman Catholics they do read the long Gospel, with individuals from the congregation taking the various parts and the rest of us filling the role of "the people." However, we all sat through it instead of standing, which I suppose some people would cite as evidence that the Episcopal church (or at least this Episcopal church) had sold out, but which I certainly appreciated as it allowed me to concentrate more on the words we were reading than on my own personal discomfort.

Sometime during the sermon, or maybe just afterward, I found myself wondering how it would feel if I asked to be accepted as a member there--which surprised me not only because it's probably the first time I've thought seriously about taking that step but also because it's a possibility I (thought I had?) already pretty definitely ruled out. This particular church has given me so much over the past year that I know it will always have a special place in my heart no matter where I wind up, but (a) it's not in my own community, and I think I should be settling in closer to home, and (b) it doesn't feel "churchy" enough for me, by which I am referring to both the physical building and also to my perception of the congregation as more involved in the extended social aspects of being church than in the spiritual.

One of the things I identified with in the book I mentioned yesterday (Finding Home: Stories of Roman Catholics Entering the Episcopal Church) was how often these new Episcopalians mentioned being deeply moved by the words of the Book of Common Prayer. I've had that same experience, and been surprised by it. Of course I did come to the Episcopal church for its liturgy. I expected it to feel familiar and it did, but to be honest I thought it would probably seem somewhat inferior to what I was used to. Yet there have been many moments when I've found it more eloquent, moving, and dignified than what I'd experienced in the Roman Catholic church, so I suppose in that sense it has been like "finding home" for me.

Immanence v. transcendence: My question exactly

2006-04-08T11:17:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading a book called Finding Home: Stories of Roman Catholics Entering the Episcopal Church, by Christopher L. Webber, which I borrowed from the Episcopal chaplain at the university. I had never heard of this book until one day when I was browsing on Amazon.com and it popped up as a title I might be interested in. I was, but it turned out to be out of print and when I tried to track it down through my usual sources for used books, the cheapest copy I could find was thirty or forty dollars, and I decided I wasn't that interested. Later I asked the chaplain if he might know where I could borrow a copy, thinking he probably had access to some Episcopal library somewhere, and it turned out he had a copy of his own. (Leaving me wondering if I ought to interpret that and the Amazon notice as signs from heaven; see yesterday's entry.)

Anyway, it was an interesting book, but not as interesting as I had hoped it would be. I found common ground with the folks Webber profiled but I did not identify strongly with any of them. I did find myself irritated by Webber's slightly smug tone. I've always felt defensive when people criticize the Roman Catholic church without really understanding it, and that's what I thought was happening here.

I did find two particularly interesting passages:

Discussing theological differences among Anglicans: "Such differences of opinion are tolerable (though sometimes distressing!) because Anglicans find their united in worship rather than in statements of faith and principle."

and

"Where the mystic tends to overemphasize the immanence of God, the systematic theologian may prefer to stress God's transcendence. As we noted earlier, the systematic theologian may also have some professional interests to protect: if God is in all things, perhaps the institutional church is not so important and the sacramental system is not so necessary."

Which is where I find myself heading in my own thinking these days. Since my Catholic spirituality was so strongly rooted in the Eucharist, I found myself missing it very much at first. The question of whether God was really present in the bread and wine in the Episcopal church was an important question for me. But over the past year I've had a strong sense of the constant presence of God both in and beyond church, and it has indeed led me to wonder if the sacramental system that had been so important to me was really so very necessary after all.

No answers to that one; still wondering.

On going to church and finding nothing there

2006-04-07T08:49:00.000-05:00

I am so desperate for understanding these days that I've taken to parsing my experiences looking for hidden meaning in them. I've been thinking a lot recently, for example, about the "vision" I had in a prayerful moment some 25 years ago.

This is how I wrote about it at the time: "My mind does not usually turn to what I think of as traditional Christian symbols when I meditate, but several of those symbols kept popping up in different forms during worship-sharing this morning. Then I fell into a state that resembled a a trance or sleep. Just before we broke the silence to begin the workshop, I heard a voice say, "They are buoyed by the knowledge that he lived, and though he has gone away he remains with them in spirit and will come again." I do not know where it came from; it was certainly quite different from a consciously provoked or even allowed thought. Afterwards, I felt refreshed, but also surprised and grateful."

Over the years I've held onto this as a strong sign pointing me toward the Catholic church. But how then to understand that numinous experience I had in an Episcopal church a year or so ago, when the priest stood at an altar set in front of an open door on a warm spring day and raised the elements, with light streaming from the sky behind, and I was so intensely aware of the presence of God I felt almost overcome by it?

This morning I went up to Mass at the Catholic church nearby, or at least I tried to go to Mass. I had been there on Wednesday, too, responding to some tug I felt in that direction. I found it pleasant enough to be there, but was interested to notice that I didn't experience any nostalgic longing to return on a regular basis, so I was surprised to feel drawn in that direction again this morning. I drove up to church and got there a little before 8:30 a.m., the time of Mass on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (it's in the evening on Tuesday and Thursday). I was only a few minutes early so I was surprised to find only two cars in the parking lot. When I went inside, the chapel used for weekday Masses was dark and empty. I did find two people kneeling in the main church, so I went in and sat down there.

After a while the priest came out and lit the candles, which seemed to promise Mass sometime soon, but when 8:40 came and it still hadn't started, I was beginning to worry about getting to work and so I got up and left. Gradually it occurred to me that it was First Friday, when they bring all the elementary school kids over and start Mass at 9 for their benefit. I should have figured this out right away, since this has happened to me before, which is odd considering how rarely I go there.

I got to enjoy a few prayerful moments sitting quietly in church, anyway, but still I couldn't help wondering what meaning I was supposed to take from going to church and finding nothing happening there.

WWJG? (Where would Jesus go?)

2006-04-04T18:11:00.000-05:00

So how did I come to find myself seriously considering the possibility of leaving the Catholic church? It wasn't because I stopped believing in God or the sacraments, or because all of a sudden I couldn't accommodate the discrepancy between the official position and my own leanings on issues such as the ordination of women. I didn't really want to go. I love the church for what it can be at its very best, and for all of the wonderful people who call it home.

Good Catholic people have been my support and inspiration all of my life. Sadly, what developed at my former Catholic parish was a situation where good Catholic people were disregarded and disrespected at every level from the local church up to and including the bishop himself. Somehow propping up a foolish pastor became the most important thing. He was willing to stand by and watch a parish community be torn apart rather than admit he'd made a mistake, and those above him were willing to stand by and let it happen if that was the cost of covering for him.

I just can't believe this was what Jesus had in mind.

The right place at the right time

2006-03-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting and heartening thought as I drove toward work this morning.

I am in a spiritual place I never expected to be in, for reasons I don't begin to understand, with no clear idea of where I am going from here, and I still grieve the place I lost. The lack of vision for the future is something I find especially frustrating.

Yet all of a sudden I felt sure that where I am right now is exactly where God wants me to be, whether it makes much sense to me or not, and I found real strength and encouragement in that idea.

(I keep having these insights at a particular spot about ten minutes south of home; wonder if there is something more going on there besides road construction.)

Catch a tiger

2006-03-26T10:06:00.000-05:00

I can still clearly remember the precise moment when it first occurred to me that God might not exist. It was a sunny day and I was walking home from school, going up the last little hill that leads to the house where my parents still live. I remember feeling a little thrill of terror, as well as great deal of surprise that I had never before given serious consideration to such an obviously possibility. It seems to me that in that instant I resolved to become an atheist. It would be a few years before I could put this plan into effect, practicing atheism being hard to carry out in the parochial school environment of that time and place, but it would be many years before I wholeheartedly admitted to believing in God again.

I arrived at college a few years later and stopped going to church more or less immediately. Looking back, I can see that I never succeeded in suppressing persistent spiritual leadings, and I think if anyone (possibly anyone from any faith) had reached out to me in those years, things might have evolved differently. But being religious wasn't cool and I never shared that side of myself with anyone, to some extent including even myself (not that I ever succeeded in being cool, at that).

I still looked in from time to time at a series of Catholic churches; it would be fair to say I just couldn't stay away. Gradually, over the second half of my third decade, I found my way back. The challenge was to believe in God; if I could get past that hurdle, there was never any question about the particular religious tradition in which I would express my faith. I was heavily influenced by Quakers but did not feel tempted to join them. No other church seemed worth considering.

Like almost every Catholic I know, even the most conservative, I had to find ways to make peace with some parts of the whole. There were things I didn't agree with, but on the other hand they didn't drive me away. I was willing to accept the church as a big tent, and I was happy in my corner. The tie that bound me to the Roman Catholic Church was the sacraments. If my non-believing friends expressed surprise at the idea that I was a practicing Catholic, I would shrug and say, It's who I am; it's where I need to be. And I believed that as much as I believed anything. The struggle was to believe in God.

Which is why it's so strange that so many years later my belief in God feels unshakable, yet I find myself completely unable to choose a church. Every time I think I'm getting closer to making a decision, I'll suddenly find myself tossing away everything I thought I'd settled and starting over.

And here I am on a Sunday morning, ten minutes before the start of the earliest of several services I was considering (so obviously I won't be at that one today, since I am still sitting here in my bathrobe), pondering the schedules of four different churches. I am back to my old familiar prayer: Eeney, Meeny, Miney, Moe ...

Going along, getting along together

2006-03-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

I have been following the blogs of several ordained men and women, married people from (obviously) Christian traditions other than Roman Catholic, and I am struck by their humanity and the very ordinariness of their everyday lives, which combine a moving degree of care and concern for their church work with the same sorts of struggles the rest of us face. They worry about saving enough time for family, have children who delight and worry them by turns, must scramble to get everything done when the furnace gives out, company comes to stay, parishioners struggle with serious illness, etc.

I feel a great sense of companionship when I read the thoughts they share, a sense that we are all in this life together, walking the same path together, even if some take more responsibility for the others along the way. I have this same feeling with some of the Episcopal priests I have been getting to know over the past year. I have watched them share the joys and sorrows of the people in their churches, and we have shared a few of their joys and worries, too. In my thoughts about what a parish community could or should be that seems to me to be near the heart of it, that sharing of prayer and life, laughing and loving and sometimes crying together as we travel along "side by side." Though that ragamuffin band of disciples never seemed quite up to it, you could make the case that Jesus expected no less than this from his people.

Of course when I was growing up it was explained to us that celibacy left Roman Catholics free to work for God and worry about their people without the entanglements of family life. I'm not saying it couldn't work that way, but in practice, so often it hasn't. It seems to have created a class of men who are isolated from the ordinariness of daily life in order to pursue ... what? Even the priests who seemed to me to be the best and the brightest have put up some carefully constructed walls to separate themselves from engaging the rest of us too closely, too humanly--and then we find out they've been boinking one of the parishioners all along, or spending their off hours (loosely defined as "after lunch") drinking alone.

Do I feel let down? Sure I do, but in another sense I can't help feeling that we've all let each other down. How lonely life could be in those one-priest rectories.

Of course, anyone watching the sad spectacle that is playing itself out in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania as the calls for the resignation of the bishop and his resolve to resist both mount can see that we Romans have no monopoly on dysfunction. The only positive in that situation is that the people aren't left without recourse while the (perceived, anyway) tyrant rants.

(Of course in these modern times we don't have tyrants but rather men who exhibit an "authoritarian and controlling style of leadership.")

When prayer alone is not enough?

2006-03-16T18:59:00.000-05:00

Too bad the crummy camera phone isn't good enough to clearly show the sign on the door in this picture of the small Catholic chapel within the larger chapel at the university. It reads, "... for emergency use ..."

We're all in this together

2006-03-13T18:29:00.000-05:00

The deacon at the Catholic church I used to attend isn't a very flashy guy. His voice tends to be a little flat when he reads the Gospel, and he doesn't ever do homilies. You might be tempted to dismiss him as unimportant, but here's what really matters about this man: He was there when I first came to the parish 28 years ago, and he's still there now. He's there to open the church every morning before the 8:30 Mass unless he's sick, which is almost never. He's there to carry out the tasks of the St. Vincent de Paul Society no matter who else wants to help. He's there for the elderly when they need a ride to the doctor, and for the homeless when they need someone to arrange a place to stay for a night or two. He's there for baptisms and visits to the funeral home when the priests have other things to do. Those priests have come and gone over the years (and to be honest, some of them seemed more absent then present even before they left), but our deacon has always been there when anybody needed him.

I've only seen this man once since I stopped going to that church. I ran into him unexpectedly in the grocery store and didn't have time to think about how to explain why I hadn't been around, and so I didn't say much of anything and hated myself for it later. I really miss the guy and wished I'd said so.

I ran into him again today in the grocery store, and this time I didn't let him get away without telling him that I think he's the most faithful and committed person I've ever met. He told me he thought I'd come back to that church eventually. I shrugged and said maybe I would, even though I don't think I ever will.

And then I went out into the parking lot and ran into another old friend from that church, one who does keep in touch from time to time, and we hugged and chatted, too. She was in the hospital recently, and is a little depressed about that, and I was glad to have spend even a few minutes with her and tell her I'd keep her in my prayers.

And I remembered my recent musings about community, and thought about all the people I am blessed to have as traveling companions on this strange journey.

And I sincerely mean this, and yet at the same time, going to church with people I don't really know leaves me with a profoundly empty feeling. I used to look around in church and think to myself that I knew most everyone there. Even if I didn't know them by name, I could recognize the members of their family and had watched their children grow up, or remembered a husband or wife now deceased. I miss that a lot, but I hear that so many others have left my old parish, it wouldn't feel the same even if I went back now. Sad, sad, sad.

Going my way?

2006-03-11T12:21:00.000-05:00

The center of my little river town was flooded last spring. My house was mostly spared, though muddy water inundated our yard and filled the paved crawl space under our house, and even that much turned out to be an ordeal.

The priest from the Episcopal church I had been attending for a mere two months at that point called to ask if I needed any help. Which I didn't, but it was wonderful to be asked. Naturally I heard nothing from my (only recently former) Catholic parish; another example of its consistent failure to find ways--in the face of large congregations and reduced clerical ranks--to make church communities function on a human scale.

(Then, of course, there was the elderly woman down the street who thanked us for stopping by to ask if she needed anything, but mentioned that she'd been trying for hours to take a shower and couldn't get to it because she had to keep stopping to visit with people who came to offer help. Sometimes a little community goes a long way.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about spiritual community. I want to worship with familiar faces, but they need not be my best friends in everyday life. I want to feel that I belong somewhere, but I don't really know what that means. I certainly don't want to be tied too firmly to one place, or one perspective. Mostly I want to feel encouraged and supported by others who are going down the same road; there's strength in numbers, and comfort in feeling we are all going down that road together.

And the thing I am slowly, slowly realizing, is that this doesn't have to happen in just one place, and maybe it's even better if it doesn't.

Is this going to be on the test?

2006-03-09T18:58:00.000-05:00

I attended a Bible study group last night at one of my many churches. This church normally does this during the day, but they have added an evening session for Lent. One of the first questions asked was whether there would be homework. I thought about all the things I'm juggling, from work to my freelance work project to the course I am auditing to family responsibilities, and I thought, if there's homework, I'm out of here.

Fortunately, we will not be assigned to read anything outside of the time we are together.

But yeah, there is homework ...

Thank God it's Tuesday!

2006-03-07T19:14:00.000-05:00

I was dragging all day, a bit overwhelmed by Tuesday (and all other) responsibilities at work, so I was grateful when 4:30 finally rolled around and I could take myself off to chapel for the Tuesday Eucharist. This continues to be for me an oasis of peace in a world of constant busy-ness. Not that I would give up anything thing I'm doing these days, from the course I'm auditing at the university to my job there to the big outside editing project that is drawing to a close, but sometimes, like today, it all feels a bit too much.

Then it's a joy to enter the deep twilight space of the chapel, to find my seat and close my eyes and settle in among the small band gathered there. I really do shut out the rest of the world when I enter that building, and lift up my heart.

The Catholics and Episcopalians hold most of their services in the same shared space toward the front of the church but off to the side. Behind this area, which is outfitted with the standard altar and pews, the Catholics keep a small room called Blessed Sacrament Chapel where one can go for private prayer. The doors from that room into the main chapel are usually open, and I realized today that if I turned in my pew I could see inside to the candle burning behind its red glass and a kneeler set in front of the reserved sacrament there.

Which could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either it's a marvelous thing to pray surrounded by meaningful elements from two religions--or it's strange and a little disturbing to have to turn my back on the Catholic stuff in order to focus on the Episcopalian.

Be holy

2006-03-06T18:40:00.000-05:00

The LORD said to Moses,
"Speak to the whole assembly of the children of Israel and tell them:
Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy."
-Leviticus 19:1-2

That's how today's readings began. Next came the specific instructions: Don't steal, don't lie, don't swear falsely. They sounded so familiar, I was sure I could pretty much guess the rest of what was coming, but I was wrong. You shalt not withhold overnight the wages of your day laborer ... you shall not stand by idly when your neighbor's life is at stake.

Interesting stuff, followed by the gospel from Mark (Chapter 25), with its more familiar (thought perhaps better known in a slightly different translation): I was hungry and you gave me food.

We stand reminded that holiness is about more than getting along with God.

Something fishy going on here

2006-03-05T15:19:00.000-05:00

My sister and I went out to dinner on Friday. She ordered extra-cheese pizza; I had a cheese calzone. The waitress came back after we'd been served to see if we needed anything else and also to ask if we'd ordered meatless entrees because it was Lent or for some other reason. We admitted the former, then empathized about having to go back to thinking differently, on this first Friday of Lent, about what to have for dinner.

It brought to mind the Tablet editorial I read a day or two earlier, recommending the reinstitution of the Lenten fast and Friday abstinence from meat: “The value of such symbols of shared identity needs rediscovering.” A day before that, I had laughed out loud when one of my podcasts referred to Ash Wednesday as Catholic identification day, when it becomes very easy to pick out your co-religionists even in a group of strangers.

Twice within three days I had chosen to manifest these “symbols of shared identity” (I didn't stoop so low as to eat fish, though) with a group I'm having a lot of trouble identifying with. Interesting. I can't easily escape the fact that being Catholic is a huge part of who I am, but it isn't all I have to say about who I am. I was thinking recently about how I'd answer if anyone were to ask what religion I belong to. I decided this is the response that comes closest to the truth: “I'm a Catholic who has worshiped at an Episcopal church for the past year, and I don't know where I'm going from here.”

I went to the Episcopal church down the road this morning. Once again, despite my misgivings about whether that congregation is the right one for me in the long run, I just felt glad to be there.

An interesting contrast to last evening, when I took my sister to the Catholic church in town and felt nonstop grumpy, finding fault with the priest, the music, and a particular individual in the congregation who is someone I don't want to see or talk to. (Long story there, obviously.) The last straw: When Mass ended they gave everyone a wooden heart stamped with a crown of thorns, which we are supposed to carry around during Lent to remind us of something--I didn't exactly understand what--and then burn at the Easter vigil to symbolize something else.

So now the cross that has served as our central symbol for the past 2,000 years isn't meaningful enough for the 21st century? And we propose to replace it with something that looks like a Valentine craft project gone awry? Hmmm.