Thinking about home

It’s been a very long time, almost two years, since I’ve written to you. Tonight, friendly reader, I hope this finds you nestled in your cozy space, drink of choice in hand.

You know the old tropes, home is where the heart is! Home is where your people are! Home is where you make it! We’ve shifted home, a bit, in these last several months. We still have home, and we go there often for respite and rest and the anonymity that I crave – and yet we’re working hard to make a home somewhere new, too.

Yesterday my snail died, but often when I think he’s dead he isn’t and has magically reattached himself to the tank wall the next morning and I think, Phew! So glad I didn’t toss him in the garbage. This time I waited, more than 24 hours, and still he was in the same place, no movement, but strange, nebulous tendrils emitted from his shell. And I knew.

Today I avoided writing my sermon, which is what I should have been doing. Instead I turned the laser beam of my energy toward our annual meeting packet, and then decided I should set up the altar in the Lady Chapel. My Altar Guild ladies, for whom I am so grateful, allow me the time and space to process in this playing dress up, this housekeeping, this stage craft thing that gives me so much space. I can set all the things on the back burner, actually visualize my hand moving the pot. I can go through the drawers in the sacristy, digging out fair linens older than me. I can lay the altar with an old and yet beautiful frontal, set the beeswax candles in their brass holders, build the stack, because Cinda and Jackie showed me how a long time ago.

For me, this is all consuming and holy work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately, not as a place, so much as a concept. And I’ve finally come to the conclusion that there is some deficit, some lack, in me. I am a horse, continually rolling head against the leather straps of the bridle, anxious to run, yearning to be free.

And I am also a human, who knows the value of the bridle even as she takes it into her own mouth and it pulls her lips back into a grin, as the leather caresses her cheeks. I am also a human, who knows that running toward something that isn’t there is inefficient and stupid. And I know that it isn’t there.

A long time ago I wrote about my disillusionment. The time I realized that there wasn’t a destination on this journey, that we all have the choice to keep walking, or to simply give in and camp out in high school, or our early 20’s. I had thought that completing Confirmation Class, being confirmed, that it would get me somewhere I needed to be. I thought the same through the first 18 months or so of my process, that if I could check off the courses, complete the work, I would ARRIVE.

I did arrive, along with some now good friends. I arrived in a gymnasium with a cement floor and crappy banquet chairs instead of pews. (Was my own nasty and ungrateful heart part of the recipe for my not arrival? Probably.) I arrived in a chasuble given to the church by the family of one of the dearest women I have ever known, whose actual last name was Bean. I arrived and said the sursum corda and lifted my hands as I commended the people to lift their hearts, and I realized I still wasn’t there.

I arrived at a large church and loved the people and my office under the eaves upstairs, and I wasn’t there. I arrived on Pentecost and thought I’d finally made it, this collision of my first Sunday and this birthday of the church had magicked my arrival into being.

But I didn’t arrive, in more than a physical sense. I realize now, alongside the death of Snail, that I am still looking, still searching, still vulnerable damnit. I can tell myself that I can go home in 28 years, but I know that I’ll have to find it long before that to even be traveling in the right direction.

My ungrateful heart persists (or does it?). I sit in a Thomas Kincaid painting, all clean sidewalks, historic homes glowing with warm familial light in the cold January crepuscule.

Today I walked into the nave, and the sun was coming in the south facing stained glass windows and for a moment I paused, emitted a slight gasp. It was so beautiful, the way it glinted off the old pews from a former cathedral, sank into the rich red carpet, bounced off the gothic interior.

I am probably walking mostly alone. This is a lonely job, after all. My path is lit by apples left on the porch, fresh and tangy. By the antics of a lovable and comical basset hound and his grandma. The notes and cards that arrive at just the moment I was thinking of throwing it all away and going to be a waitress at Applebees. I treasure those, thank you.

Those fixers will want to come and walk with me too, but the brambles are too thick, the path is only mine. Please don’t tear your clothes and rend your flesh for nothing, you can’t come closer than you already are, which is close enough that we can share our light, and I can hear your singing sometimes.

You can probably hear mine too, it rises not as regularly as it used to, but sometimes I remember the relief of controlled breath and a perfectly sung note.

I love you still. I haven’t given up. I am growing, and it just hurts. Don’t be sorry.

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I commend to you a new blogger I’m following. You can read along at https://susanstewart.org/

Event Planning for 11,000

A long time ago, and in a galaxy far away, I worked in a hotel. At the front desk we wore smart, egg plant colored, calf length pencil skirts with pockets and professional shoes. I am old enough to have done this job before computerized reservations systems, we had our big reservation book and a contraption we called a “rack” to keep up with what rooms were occupied or not. Though we did have a computerized system for Y2K, remember that? It’s another story though.

I did this job for a long time and I loved it. I loved walking the halls (though I blame the heels I wore on the sore back I sometimes have now), I loved meeting the guests and being a tiny part of their vacation or work trip. I did not love the parrot who lived in the lobby for a while only because he bit people regularly.

The excitement of a large group arriving is hard to describe. There are small frissons of energy, sparkling electricity in the air as reservations are checked again, as rooms are thoughtfully assigned. And then the tour bus rolls up under the canopy, or the large group of conference goers begins to arrive and all bets are off and it is BEDLAM. Of course it all settles down a little, once the rooms are filled, and your thoughts turn toward making fresh coffee, is the water for tea still hot, do we have enough Danish for breakfast? If you work the night shift, as I often did, you get to lay that breakfast out at 6am, make that fresh coffee, wish people a gentle “good morning” as they drift down to the lobby in varying states of disarray and undress.

I say all of this because I wondered today, as the sun rose and the road spooled out in front of me, what was happening in that other place where God lives. (because to be clear, God lives here too). I was listening to the radio, hearing of the more than 11,000 dead in Syria and Turkey and perhaps amazingly (but only if you don’t know me very well) I immediately wondered about preparations for that many, all at once.

I’ve helped to plan funerals and picked up the food, served the food and washed the dishes too. I planned my own wedding, I’ve helped to plan other weddings. I planned our daughter’s high school open house, and I’ve helped to plan black tie fundraising galas I dreamed up because I thought planning them would be fun – and it was. I have cleaned hotel rooms and winery/bed and breakfast properties and my own home and my own church and I have hosted friends, family and foe so I think I can tell you a little bit about what goes into the hospitality of welcoming 11,000.

First there’s the rooms. They must be clean and comfortable, it’s good to put same family names near one another, one must pay attention to special requests and attempt to accommodate them. Families should go near the pool, singles and couples at the opposite end because let’s be honest, the enthusiasm of children at an indoor pool on vacation is almost unmatched. The food needs to be organized too, 11,000 is a huge group, they’ll have to be divided into dining groups, and we should probably integrate them with existing groups so they can make connections and feel welcomed. We will need a lot of food, someone needs to let our vendors know, and let the cooks know we need them working OT for the foreseeable future.

Can you see the people who have the gifts of creating welcoming spaces flapping fresh sheets onto beds as the sun beams through the window and the tears roll down their cheeks for what was left behind? Can you see the fresh Rose of Sharon sprig in the bud vase on the nightstand, the fresh soap and the extra towels, the pack n play for the baby?

Can you hear the din in the kitchen, the flap and bustle of the holy chamber of God almighty as the people and the angels and the seraphim and cherubim come and go, a never ending stream of questions and plans?

Because I can, and it distracts me from the enormity of so many people they could fill a town more than three times the size of mine just gone. And more to come, if we’re honest and real which we are even when it hurts.

Why heaven, you may wonder. Well I didn’t say heaven until you did, but now that you mention it, I believe that the love of our God is so huge that it encompasses everyone. I don’t believe that anyone is ever left out of a chance to move deeper in, ever closer, more reconciled, loved and free.

The sun is just setting where I am, and man, it has been a hell of a start to 2023.

Photo by Studio Pizza on Unsplash

And the sun is setting up/over there too. And huge groups are coming out of the woods and into the meadow where a stone bridge crosses a river and we’ve a bit of a logjam. They are holding hands and making that last journey toward long low brick buildings lit from within, and they can smell dinner and probably hear, when the breeze is just right, the choir warming up before rehearsal because it’s Wednesday night and that is when all choirs rehearse there. They are warm now. They are safe once more.

Turkey and Syria reel and moan, in deep grief and we should meet them there. Heaven knows the last time 11,000 of our own citizens perished, the last time so many places were leveled, the last time we felt such sorrow. God is there too, that’s the good news. God is working in the hands of rescuers and rubble movers even when the only answer is knowing for sure. God is working in aid tents serving hot tea and medical professionals working to heal bodies and clergy working to bind up souls. Because the Kingdom of God is right here and we are called to get to work.

Finally, today I got to do the mass in the little chapel, with the blinding little lights that are on level with my eyeballs. I got to hold the priest host and break it, I got to say all of the words and then walk around the room murmuring, the body of Christ, the bread of heaven. I put my hand on the side of someone’s head and prayed for healing of body and mind, and I looked them right in the eye and told them their sorrow is legitimate, and that they can take it to Jesus because Jesus can handle it – you can’t really keep secrets from that one. They asked, don’t you think I have to work for my salvation, because I don’t think I have it yet. I said, but you do, my love, it’s already done. And we both cried a little and then went on with our day.

As I walked back up the nave, in the glow of the stained glass I thought, thank you. Thank you. Really I am so grateful, thank you.

Because you see, I plan a different sort of event now. The one I was always meant to plan.

Pray for the world, friends. But get to work too, ok?

I love you still.

In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.

The last time –

Picture this: a common early 90’s house on a tree lined cul de sac. You can hear Spanish rap music reverberate through the fan shaped windows, delicious smells waft from the kitchen where an Abuela stands over the stove, or at the counter chopping chilies. Teenaged boys drift in and out of the great room, they laugh and sometimes they dance. They tell stories and speak rapid Spanish. Usually they get to go home, people like me say “zappatos!” anxiously and demonstrate removing them and placing them in a TSA bin at the airport. The work rolls on and on, families reunited and families reunited and more amazing food and Spanish syllables dropping like fat rain all around you and you can’t believe this is your job.

I felt this way on Sunday too. I walked up the long aisle toward the chancel and the altar to get the heavy gospel book for the procession. As I passed through the bells rang close via long mysterious movements, arms extended, hands gloved in black, almost slow motion. The sun shone through the stained glass and all the lights were off, people set up aisle torches and lit them, the excitement over this supposed inconvenience palpable. It all smelled just the same, only there was an air of magic, fairies, thin-ness.

My brother preached about the man at the pool of Beth-zatha. He talked about how us religious types would rather stand around and argue than help any one person. He told the people there, half of whom I had never laid eyes on before, that if they were looking for a place where people would help them to the pool they had found it. It was right here, bathed in the glow of stained glass windows instead of electric light, smelling faintly of incense and damp, accompanied faultlessly by a grand piano and a bell choir. And I marveled, I could not believe, that this is my job now.

I found healing there too, you see. I sat in those hard pews and learned to sing properly. I signed up for those dirty jobs, I took the help that was offered to me, I showed up even when it was the last thing I wanted to do, I shared the real stories, was vulnerable to the point of no return. I rent my heart and killed my very self, purged my soul of ambition and pride.

I laid on the edge of the pool for years not even knowing I needed help and then people who wanted so much to see me well dragged me to the pool before they themselves could touch the healing water. They dragged me there first, and dipped me in, held me down until I could not breath, and made me clean again, whole again, healed, again. I monitor the pool now. I bring people there and toss them in or gently dip them, depending on circumstance, heh. I like to blow my whistle loudly when people start talking about “contemporary music” and withholding communion (go on and read page 409 friends).

And then, at the announcements something was said about me leaving for good. And the windows and the bells, the piano and the smells, standing centered behind the altar and feeling as though all I had to do was raise my hands and sing, the Lord be with you, and you would answer me. And the leaving for good language, it stabbed me in the heart and tears ran down my cheeks for the rest of our time together. Because even though I had a last time I didn’t know it then, and this time I knew, this time it was unequivocal. This was the last time it would ever be just like this. I don’t belong to you anymore.

I remember standing outside at my job when the January 6 thing happened. I stood there and thought, I am so upset but I don’t know if I should be. Because a big thing in our world right now is being so disconnected from ourselves that we can’t even authenticate how we feel. I sense that lapping at the edges of my patchwork cloak now, the one that I didn’t even realize I was making, the one I wear even when I don’t realize I am standing in a puddle of my own salty tears. I have so many feelings and so much to say, but I keep asking myself if I’m right to feel the way that I feel.

Let me tell you a story, a cautionary tale, which is what all fairy tales really are. One day there was an old man who lived behind a little cottage. He made friends with the woman who lived there, he told her stories and they shared many laughs in the soft vesper light. An evil usurper made a bid for the throne of the land, and with help from all the powers of darkness in this land and some others, he won. The old man believed what the usurper said, and the woman argued with him and he shut her down over and over again until, through her own agency, she realized she didn’t have to be friends with him anymore, and she never spoke to him again. He would wave and she would resolutely turn her face away. A few years later, on a fine May evening, a gaggle of the old man’s grandchildren were in the neighborhood and said they had come to town for their grandfather’s funeral. The woman looked on her magic Mac book and sure enough, the man had died and she hadn’t even known he was sick, and she didn’t ever get to say, or even wonder, if she was sorry for having walked away. It was too late, and he was gone. The woman felt as though someone had gotten the better of her. She felt sad and angry and full of regret.

Sometimes, a lot of times actually, we don’t get to know the last time. We don’t know that what we’re doing is something we will not ever do again, we are torn from it, separated from it, wondering how the rending happened and casting about for blame. Usually we blame ourselves. I’m not sure this is accurate placement, or if placement of blame is needed at all.

I have had so many lasts. The last time my child needed a ride, the last time I drove her to school, the last time I sat in the gym just for her, my back aching on the bleacher seats. The last time I walked down the halls of an elementary school that smelled like fruit snacks and paint, the last time I visited the middle school office., the last diaper, the last time I put my child to my very body and fed her.

I didn’t know it was the last time I would see you, I didn’t know there was a time limit to make it up and say how I felt. I didn’t know the house on the cul de sac would fall silent and empty, her clean kitchen gleaming and her bedrooms empty. I didn’t know I would be left without options. I didn’t know how much the people who are supposed to care simply don’t. I didn’t realize that I am too old now to work at Applebees, that I really don’t want to work anywhere other than where I am supposed to. It took me a long time to realize that vocation is a thing, a calling is not a job, a vowed life is death but life all wrapped up like the Lily of the Valley posy in my bud vase – chosen but dying all the while. Dying anyway, certainly, but plucked for a purpose.

I am left teary eyed and curious, with a stubborn headache, wondering what God is up to, what magic is being worked, what shuffling (painful or not, but probably painful) needs to happen for me to be shuffled into the right slot for the next chapter of this one short life. I am through the woods now, I’ve cut back the bracken and I’m covered with scrapes and scars, my hair is probably a mess, my cheeks tracked with dried tears, but I’m stumbling across the clearing right toward you waving like a madwoman, look! Here I am at last! We can walk together now as we have not walked together before, and as we will not walk together again. The juxtaposition of that takes my breath away. I am coming and I am here at the same time, and I hope what counts is that I am still moving, still bleeding.

I love you still, all these years and miles and tears later. I really do.

Mother isn’t here now…A review?

Who knows what she’d say?

It is funny isn’t it, the things we can’t know until we know?

This morning the drive to school and back was an adventure. We received a lot of snow last night and the lanes on the roads were obliterated, no longer a road, simply a slippery white velvet ribbon edged with danger. Each school day we pass a river, and in the spring and fall we drive right into the water color sky at dawn, all orange and pink and glowing somehow. This time of year the river is a blackness, a cold depth pocked with islands where not long ago a house cat was found wandering hungry and alone. I shit you not.

As we rounded the last “hold my breath” curve on the snowy road I said, I’m thinking about my grandma this morning, and how much I miss her.

We’re lucky to have these warm stories and funny memories, my husband and I. His grandma was bent backed with a long white braid by the time I knew her, in a denim tunic dress with small round spectacles that lifted on the apples of her cheeks when she smiled. My husband has memories of staying up at their flower shop, which was on the same land as their home. How she would go out in the morning with tin pie plates and fill them with milk for the barn cats, how in not many minutes his arms could be full of kittens with milk dripping from their whiskers.

I have these stories too. Of Grandma in her housecoat with her wet curls on the back of neck, surprised somehow by company she knew was coming. Of her goose glass ware, or the way she would rub my feet while we shared the couch, or the way she would sing, or the way she loved babies so much she collected dolls.

We finished Maid last night. It’s on Netflix and if you have any kind of addiction in your family, any kind of violence in your background, you will want to tread with care.

The show’s protagonist is Alex, a 25 year old mom of a toddler, who happens to have an emotionally abusive and alcoholic boyfriend. Through ten hours of television we followed (were dragged with) Alex on her journey to separate the lives of herself and her daughter from that boyfriend. We get to see the dirty underside of social services, we learn how even the social workers scratch their heads in wonder sometimes when new programs are rolled out that are anything but low barrier, how these have rules and policies that almost seem to double back on themselves, making the money basically inaccessible to even the people who need it the most – because your forms were due yesterday in triplicate and in Latin and you’ve missed the deadline.

I get where Alex traveled because it’s a map that I wish I could have left for her. While I have not been homeless I have had to navigate the social services office, to feel the same confusion, endure the forced (literally) sermons, to exit without a shred of my dignity intact. I know that I am not alone in that. Many of you have been there too, you remember the flickering fluorescent lights, the dingy walls, the smell of desperation.

Again and again Alex made choices that were almost purposefully destructive of the good things that were offered to her. She gave fourteenth chances to people that she should have walked away from, she said incendiary words, she tasted her own tears once more as she set fire to the neatly stacked kindling of her life. We watched her boyfriend isolate her, and we knew what was happening. We watched him drink “just one” and we knew exactly what that meant. We watched him put his fist through the wall next to her face and knew where it would land the next time. If you want to watch it you can see the end and decide whether you believe it, debate with your TV companions about which way you would have gone, if you would have been so stupid, if you would have had a better way out. Personally we sat in shocked, *seen* silence and I dreamed stress dreams that left me ragged and angry in the morning.

I said today, in a short meditation I offered at Noonday Prayer, that now is a growing time even though it doesn’t seem like it. What is obvious to us isn’t what always presents as special, it’s what hidden, what peeks around the corners and beckons us onward, that is where the magic is. Now the ground is covered in more than a foot of powdery snow, car tires squeak as they drive over it, the sounds of the world are muffled as the fat flakes continue to fall.

But a whole world lays in wait, sleeping underneath the world we can see. Fish in lakes and rivers, birds, squirrels and rabbits tucked into their nests, rose bushes and weeds, crab grass and literally millions of tulips all are waiting; silent, and growing strong.

I hope now really is a growing time, even if I don’t feel like I’m growing very much, even if I feel kind of stuck, all jammed up in a ball in some hole in the ground waiting for the snow to melt and spring to herald the time of new beginnings and realized dreams. I am homesick still. A sentence I write tentatively, delete, tap out, delete – a truth though that I think you may also share. A longing you may understand, for the ways our lives have moved on (the wheel of Ka turns my love) and the things we have had to leave behind.

I hope that when the seed that is me wakes, as the snow recedes and is replaced by spring rain, and the winds of March, as the grass swells and beckons me, also, to rise, I hope that I am ready to un-curl, to give that final push, and to stand. I hope to be a dandelion, not a rare flower. Dandelions are hardy you know, shining on in that yellow way of theirs no matter how often you don’t water them or cut them down or rub their yellow off their heads and onto yourself; they keep springing back out of nothing, resilient in a bitter and brilliant way.

I wonder if my grandma has come to me in my growing time. I wonder if she is singing to me and holding me near her, letting me rest while I grow, bustling around with bread and butter and Vernors and type writer ribbons and fresh paper, while the breeze blows the yellow curtains in the paneled back bedroom and the sun shines.

And the type writer *dings*

The thing I wished the most while we were watching Maid was that Alex had women in her life like the women I have and have had in mine. Women like my sister and my moms, like my few (and you know I like it that way) dear friends and my grandmas. I wished that she wasn’t so very alone, because no matter the things that you don’t know, the things that I will not ever tell you, I was not ever, for one second, alone.

And I am grateful for the now. The bear hugs and collusion, the future that rolls out before us like the hills of Scotland in the spring, green and verdant once more – and full of growing things.

Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you.
No one leaves for good.
You are not alone.

You’re not.

And if you’re reading this and you feel like there is not a way out for you please call 800.799.SAFE. You don’t deserve this, most people do not live like this. You can be safe. You deserve to be safe.

image credit: Daria Kraplak via Unsplash – because it’s important to give people credit for their work.

Reminder –

Less than a month ago we took over a fish tank that our 13 year old had in her room. Her favorite fish, the OG, had died, and even though the two left were schooling fish, not violent fish, she felt like they had somehow killed her favorite. She neglected the tank, she never turned the light on, she didn’t talk to them anymore.

We took the tank over and moved it near my desk in the little entry way that houses my grandma’s sewing machine used as a desk, an old table for my planners and notes, a repurposed bulletin board strung with rosaries and pictures my children have colored. We brought home a bright yellow guppy with a glorious tail, small striped tiger tetras, a small red tetra to be friends with the other existing one. They schooled and they played, they ate and slept. And then they died. One after another. We added another striped tetra when the first one died, and he was the last one. One moment he was there today, and the next he was gone.

The tank is empty of life now. The fish are wrapped in soft paper towel, buried in the soon to freeze ground at the feet of St. Francis in our yard. They join a crab, a beloved cat, and the fish that started the apathetic fish mom phase of a 13 year old girl: Rio. I wonder, in a macabre fashion, how long it will take for their bodies to be nothing.

Photo by Gabriel P on Pexels.com

The tank sits dark, full of water that probably still carries whatever disease killed them all over the course of a week. It is too heavy to lift, too much to empty. I didn’t name any of them because I didn’t want to care.

Sometimes our hearts have had enough of care. Sometimes we hide, or protect ourselves, from all the ways the world and our own people can hurt us. Simon and Garfunkle had it, I am a rock, I am an island.

I thought about the fish today as I attended a funeral at a field parish where I am working and learning. Not a funeral for someone I knew, though the processional anthems always bring a tear to my eye. I pictured myself on my knees in the front yard with a sharp pink handled trowel, the way I moved the earth to make a hole, and the words I said eight different times: Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints. Where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting. In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Time marches on, and July has turned to November, with beautiful foliage on the trees and snow in the air today. Soon the ground will be frozen, and though I want to try again, to clean the tank and do a partial water change, scrub the weirdly formed algae off the sides and the fake plants, I wonder where I will bury my dead when this happens again, when the ground is frozen and I can’t bear the idea of a fish carcass in the freezer.

Time marches on and, as Lauren O’connell says, I am making some new friends here, who I can like and then avoid. So I can reaffirm my reasons for making loneliness a choice.

I am learning that the parts of me I thought I had corrected forcefully, or even cut out in a bloody event, are still there, still to be reckoned with, never far away.

I had the great idea to bring the Eucharist to my small “parish” at the memory care unit where I am doing part of my CPE work. I had worked hard to incorporate Communion Under Special Circumstances into my liturgy, a beast unto itself with no Book of Common Prayer or lectionary to guide me. I forgot that consecrated bread, meaning an extra trip, and a long commute. I did the worship plan, worried that it was too short and the aids who were on a little break would have to come back early. I passed out the wafers and they didn’t know what to do with it. They didn’t eat it. They held it in their hands as I tried to get them to put it in their mouths.

I was torn between a real worry for the body of Christ being crushed in someone’s fist until it was nothing, and the absolute lack of understanding, and the gap between what I thought was helpful, and was not, actually helpful. I had, once again, decided what I thought people needed without asking them. I had placed myself in this weird place, this little room that looks out on yellow leaved trees, with people who are still verbal and some not so much, and people who hand me their shoe when I ask for their copied paper hymnal – I had placed myself and Jesus there – and it hadn’t made any difference.

What did I expect? That they would receive that wafer and become the things my grandmas didn’t? That they would suddenly remember me and be well? That they would somehow know what I was talking about or what I was handing them? I’m not sure.

Do small children understand? Do I understand? Probably not completely. But this was worse.

In better news: I love my work staff. The Colada Morada y pan we had to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. The way we MacGuyver printers and assessments, the beds that are made and ready with extra soft blankets and warm pajamas for kids the age of that 13 year old fish abandoner who have come here without their moms. And I love my church people; the discussions of messy buns and thin hair, the coffee, the long and thoughtful silences, the sudden laughter, the cincture tying lessons.

You asked me to remind you and so here I am, 8 fish burials, one derelict fish mother, a failed communion service and more in – we are ok. We are going to be ok. Today might be just awful, but tomorrow might have a redeeming quality, like fog lifting from the warm lake into the freezing sunrise. Sometimes we have to let those small things sustain us for a long time. Like a can of baked beans on The Walking Dead when we would rather have grilled burgers and potato salad. Sometimes we have to eat what is there, because there isn’t anything else that will keep us alive. The Israelites knew this well as weird birds and bread rained from the sky and Moses looked on sort of helplessly.

The tank is dark tonight. Honestly? The last dead fish is still in there. I can’t bear to scoop it out. I will ask someone else to do it and I will bury it in what I hope is ground that is not frozen yet. I will say the prayer again as I move the dirt around (and hope not to run into one of the other massacred innocents). I’ll think about cycling the tank, cleaning the things inside, beginning again. I’ll think about the hope that requires and whether or not I have that right now, whether I should try to conjure it up from nowhere, the cost of doing this again, the risk. Today the priest said that our dead have moved into a place new and profound and soaked through with the love of God. And it was beautiful.

Oh, the risk.

It’s everywhere. In our trust of other drivers on two lane roads. That our paychecks are not drawn on empty accounts, that we matter to the people who should love us the most – that the wifi will hold, that the traffic won’t be so bad or the winter so cold. That we are who we thought we were and can be the people we never dreamed we could be. That simple wafers could really become the body of God, crucified so many years ago, that cajoling a woman trying to give me her shoe at the same time could possibly mean anything to her.

Today I sat with a new friend. She asked me about the “anthems” listed in the funeral bulletin and I showed her where it was in the Book of Common Prayer. I showed her how we aren’t magic in knowing how this should look, that it’s all there, laid out in a red covered book older than she is.

There was a soprano anthem, an organist who is fabulous and so young. And the priest in a chausable for the first time, and it fit her frame so well. And the anthems.

I am resurrection and I am life.

And there are fish that I commended to God, that I thought somehow belonged to me. And the guilt of all the things I think I’ve done wrong or could have done better. And there is glorious freedom too, a life laid down, a constant seeking to learn, a will to be better, the gift of complete obedience. But that is for another day.

I love you still.

We don’t need him.

We’re going to be ok.

Funeral

I simply cannot believe I have not written to you since January. I will put on my afternoon dress, dip the quill into the inkwell, as I smooth the parchment, and see where we go.

I started a lovely new job in early spring. I am delighted to be back with a population I am so passionate about, unaccompanied minors. In this iteration we work in the house where the children live, there are no foster parents. Today I reflected, after I stopped in to chat with the manager of the house, and enjoyed a piece of watermelon, “sandia”. He talked about having only daughters himself, his experiences beginning in shelters like Homestead in Florida, to kids who have come directly across the border, strapping little ones into car seats to be sent back to their country of origin, hand and foot cuffing very young children. How it hits different when they could be your kids.

As he spoke his eyes filled with tears and I was able to see, for a moment, another side of him. And I admit to being glad that these are not children who hold up their arms to be held, who need me to comfort them when they cry or change their diapers. Teenaged boys are not five year old little girls. These boys are capable of managing themselves, they seem to know what to say. They are, largely, adults, or at least they were until they came here and we made them schoolboys again.

Yes, I am grateful to be working again with these kids and with people who are so passionate about them. I am still working on my Spanish. I probably seem a little a crazy to anyone who visits my often not occupied desk, with my little post it notes of the names of the animals we see outside our office window, ardilla, raton, conejo, cierva.

I am currently auditing a course at Bexley Seabury named Pastoral Offices. I have turned in my homework and commented appropriately. I have been assigned group work too. Though we got a little bogged down in our zoom call last night with baptism and confirmation, we are talking about all of the rites, many of which lay people can do. A woman I can see being great friends with said that babies belong before they know they do. Our professor said that if we listen very deeply we will know what to pray for even if we don’t have a prescribed collect. Add this to a fruitful meeting with a CPE site and a new field placement and I am fairly burning my way through the woods toward you.

We have had our share of sadness too.

Last weekend we stayed at a cottage in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our cottage was amazing, rustic and yet equipped, on the shores of Big Manistique lake, it literally lapped at our deck. A little boy with another party threw a rock at a duck, and he hit a duckling square in the head. Apparently he’d been there all week. Apparently this wasn’t the first time he’d been told not to throw rocks at the ducks. The bathroom floor sloped and the shower was very small, but the curtains were new.

For whatever reason he didn’t listen. This little duck went sideways and turned circles in the water, his head underneath. My sisters (all three nurses) leaped in and grabbed him, wrapped him in a towel, fashioned a cervical brace from an empty toilet paper roll, offered him oats and water. All day long they held him, and my oldest daughter, and my dad. And none of it was enough. By 4pm we were praying for God to take the little duck. The girls played him lullabies and stroked his beak and back on my daughter’s bed when he seemed to have gone into a type of coma. At about 11pm they processed solemnly, breaking into sobs when they told us the duckling was dead. They held him in a little silver tote, wrapped in a towel that had come from my house hundreds of miles away. They sat him down and didn’t know what to do. They had named him Curtis of Curtistown. They put daisies in the cervical collar.

None of us knew what to do, to be fair.

My dad shared that earlier in the day, how, when he’d held the duck to his chest its siblings had swum by, making their little duck not quite a quack sounds. The little duck had struggled against his chest, kicking its legs and opening its mouth. I’d found a collect, though not the one I wanted, and I said, authoritatively, into the campfire lit dark, as the lake lapped just feet away, The Lord be with you. They replied, as they have been trained to do, even with me, and also with you.

We gathered close around the fire, on the shores of a beautiful lake, tears running down our faces and I said the words of the collect. We commended little duck, Curtis, to God, a creature that had never been ours, but that we had had the (dubious) pleasure of caring for. We went to bed rather early, all of us tired and full of grief.

I think that I learned that I won’t ever be ready. I learned that every family is different, if the family even exists. I learned that I can plan in advance a collect and say it without crying. I learned that we can’t plan for the types of grief we will encounter.

I would also like to share, in a necessarily oblique way, that a very terrible thing has happened in our family. We are all physically ok, but quite sad and betrayed. Someone we thought was one of us, someone we thought we could trust has turned out to be not at all what he said he was. That has resulted in trans Atlantic moves, the selling of houses, the leavings of people and jobs and habits and regular grocery stores. It has resulted in one of my children going a bit dead about the eyes, as if she always expected such, and not saying another word. And one admitting that she needed to cry, that it was as if someone had died because she knows she will never see or hear from him again and she needs to sort out what do with that.

I’m not sure where the offender is, or if he subscribes to this blog. But I do know he’s set on a new apartment and a new girlfriend, comfortable, apparently, with infidelity. And so I wonder, as so many have at the short end of a betrayal, who I ever was. Who my children were. I wonder about the memories that we made and the nicknames and the experiences. I wonder about giant white wolf dogs and large yellow dogs, both dead, and I wonder if any of it was true. I wonder about my 10 day old child in his arms and then him walking away from her, 12 years later. I wonder about that house, with the view over the valley and the train station, the too small room I shared with my sister, using the antique radio for a makeup table. I wonder about begging to drive but he wouldn’t let me, and the GPS he called Kinky Kate, that time Kate led us through a cow pasture where we literally were driving on someone’s field and had to get out and open the cow gate. I wonder about the Isle of Skye and didn’t you feel anything at York Minster? Or St. Paul’s, where I held you up on your sightseeing tour to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday when I didn’t even know that was important to me?

To be clear; this is not my husband, but another person that existed within my family unit.

And so, with pastoral offices, and dead ducks, and men who walk out on families I am faced with a very CPE choice of where to go, and what to say.

And I just don’t know.

I want to breathe hope and healing into everything that has happened, but I’ve learned that sometimes people aren’t ready for hope, and they don’t want to be healed, not yet anyway.

This week I stopped in, for a very legitimate reason, at my home parish. I can’t stand the sight of my drawer full of English tea towels, souvenirs and air mail packages. I’ve packed them into a hope chest my sister gave to my oldest daughter. My friend had purchased several, a whole new set really, of kitchen towels and I was picking them up; watermelons and lemons, cats and flowers. I heard the unmistakable swell of the organ, I walked swiftly up the side aisle of the dimly lit nave, breathing in the familiar smells. I waited until the hymn he was practicing was done and I said, softly, bravo. He started and beamed, me and him, here in our place. 80 something and 40 something, I have never loved him so much.

I thought about the men I have loved on my drive home. Courageous and wonderful and flawed men. I gave thanks that only until now had none of them left me like this, wondering what, if anything had been true.

I thought of little duck, Curtis, and the funeral rite, “and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.” I thought how comforting it would be to little duck to behold a friend. I thought how someday I too might behold a friend and not someone who has become a stranger because he has betrayed us.

I thought about redemption and what that means. I thought about the little boy with the rock. I wondered if he can be redeemed too.

Look.

Sometimes I am the little boy with the rock. Sometimes I am the betrayer. There is nothing perfect in me.

Except for the urging to walk with you. That is the small and painful part God would choose to refine, an ache that does not go away. An ache to obey a weird and expensive and inconvenient call to love you anyway, to love you despite the moments when you threw a rock at someone or something who was helpless, and it died.

I guess my point is to agree that the moral arc of the universe is long but that it bends toward justice. My point is that someday I long to walk toward one who is the friend I thought and not the stranger who has appeared. My point is that if I can say a collect for dead duckling my child and my sisters have nursed with all their might I can certainly sit with you, at the end of all things.

Though it is not the same. Though it is raw grief.

I love you still. I am burning up the forest looking for you. I am calling and chanting and singing, whistling when my embouchure will obey. I will do whatever it takes to reach you and to bring you back safe with me to our shady tent, on its brief stop over, its give-way, on the way to something else, to where we are truly meant to be. Together.

The Isle of Skye and York cathedral beckon. But I am yours, first. I promise.

Mostly True Stories

I like to tell the romantic story of how I came to the Episcopal church starting with the moment that I received what was basically an engraved invitation (it was an email) inviting me to come and sing in the choir. And while that was certainly a central plot in the story braid, that Kyrie sang on my knees, that heart cracked wide open, all those tears, how snug my hip fits in the bend of the piano, the right notes traveling up my hip and through my ribs to my throat – but there is a different story too.

I was asked to help out in a kitchen that makes free meals for anyone who wants them, twice a week. I’ve written to you often of the red tent of that kitchen, the way the (mostly) women came together (pro tip, if you search “red tent” on my site you will find these stories).

I’ve told you about the things we learned; that marriage is hard, how every kitchen manager does it differently. That the beautiful faces of girl children can hide their spiney and ugly growing hearts and that it’s all a necessary part of growing up. I’ve told you about how I could almost hear the WHOOSH as the curtain fell, how the light changed and became tinged with scarlet, about the clink of cutlery, the smell of food, the aprons and the hats and the chats cutting salad vegetables. I realized that if anything started anywhere it all started there, in that kitchen with the windows over the washing sinks that look out over the Memorial Garden, the tufts the deer make when they rest there, the strange knowledge that the mortal bodies of people I have known are now intermingled with the flowering shrubs and sandy dirt.

We were talking the other day, the cousins, asking each other who remembered Grandma’s yellow plastic bread basket. This was the one she capped every meal with – no supper was complete without that plastic basket full of plain store bought bread and a tub of margarine to spread on it. No table was set without the goose glassware, or the tall Tupperware cups. My Grandmas were different types of ladies, but they loved to feed people, a passion that has been passed down through my grandmothers, and my mothers, to me.

And so the real story begins not with notes on a yellowed page, not with commands to sing higher or to sing purer vowels, but with a bunch of women in a kitchen, preparing food for people to eat – because of course that felt immediately like home.

One of the primary functions of a priest is to feed people, a different sort of food, sure, but there it is. You get to actually put it in their hands, you get to hold the cup to their mouths while they sip, to make sure they got enough.

Huh. Crazy how stuff works out.

All of this bubbles up for me, I think, because this is a Major Feast. This is EPIPHANY. And today the world kind of exploded.

I was outside, pacing around and looking for my kitty pal (a sweet little cat with a collar who likes me to pet her through the chain link fence that separates our properties) this afternoon and actually wondered to myself if I was overreacting. I wondered if my sudden tears were indicative of a weak mind or constitution rather than an actual crisis. What the hell even is a crisis anymore, I wondered aloud. I decided that in most books if the capital building is stormed that definitely spells C R I S I S and P A N I C. Books have been telling me for a long time how I should act and what I should say, and what to expect next, and so I took that to be proof that my shaky self was not an over reaction.

It’s been a bit galling really, to see social media personas post that this was just like the #BLM protests. That “if they can loot and break things so can we”. I guess I missed it when we crossed over from love your neighbor to an eye for an eye. I know the finer points are being conveniently passed over as I see photo after photo of white men terrorizing our elected leaders compared to the thousands and thousands across the world who finally WOKE THE HELL UP after we watched a police officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd – so focused on the violence and shattering glass and fires are we – you know, the really juicy bits.

Today a friend who is vocally pro-Republican said she is upset because everyone will lump her in with them. She isn’t them. She really isn’t. She loves rules. She loves people. She loves God and she practices justice and mercy, she walks humbly with our God.

Today we sat, wide-eyed, we shouted news back and forth down the short hall. We watched videos and we looked at photos and were overwhelmed and unsurprised all at once. We talked contingency plans, because it’s dangerous at times to have two highly anxious people working so closely together. We made more coffee. We wondered, with all of you, what would come next, when our cities would burn, when our capitals would be stormed (again, because this already happened in our state). I explained the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale. We (I?) ate too many peanut butter cups.

And tonight the sun sank low, the sky lit up again, painted by a Bob Ross-esque God. She went to her Bible study and I went to church. I gazed at the white paraments, I closed my eyes to hear the psalm better. I saw myself in my black and white polka dot bathing suit floating in the deep end of a pool with all of the noise of my family, of the world, happening on the surface. I was submerged. I managed to escape for just a moment.

The cities stopped burning and the children stopped crying in their cages, the doors springing open. The hungry had food and the homeless were granted a reprieve. I felt my arms float up in the strange blue water, saw the bubbles leave my nose as my hair drifted in the current and the sun slanted sideways. I thought to myself that it’s a good thing I’m ace at floating. That I’m learning to be still. That I have new friends that I can take with me even as our lives and situations change. All of the books say this is important. I am pleased to have achieved what I thought was not, for me, achievable.

As I floated in that pool I thought of how I feel so lost, so bereft of you, so in the bracken and thorns. How sometimes I’m not sure who I am. Maybe I’m supposed to sell real estate or clean houses. Who knows? You forget is the problem. I can’t glide over new high notes because I’ve forgotten how. I have to learn again to sight read a hymn I don’t know. I am out of practice.

And yet.

I can still see our graves up ahead, the ones we made for ourselves when we decided we were going to change who we used to be. The ones we laid down in and rose up from, those pine needle covered mounds in a quiet forest full of moss and stealthily growing things. That sacred place of putting down all of things we thought we were and becoming, so beautifully, who we are really supposed to be.

My friend Cindi took communion tonight for the first time in ten months. TEN MONTHS. She cracked that wafer between her teeth and swallowed it down, strength for the journey, sustenance for the road ahead. She has so much work to do in that kitchen I have had to move away from, a red tent that I hope to find is moveable as I journey outward from that church on the hill.

My own gentile epiphany is in the feeding.

It’s in the gentle meows of my cats early in the mornings, the way my children ask me over and over how long until a dinner they probably will claim not to like, the collaboration with my husband on all things food and cooking – and in the broken body of a Jesus who came to us knowing just who we are. I am convinced that feeding a flock is very important business and I am looking forward to getting to it in the tiny kitchen space behind an altar, with only a paten and a chalice, a few white purificators and the promise of renewed life and strength as we walk away from each other for what, I now understand, in a way that I didn’t before, could be the last time.

And so I’m here, away from you still, unable to know you in the ways that I wish, unable to grieve with you in ways that make the loss not real for me, running toward you nevertheless. The pine needles are slippery, the light is strange and the world tilts again, and still we journey onward.

I love you still. I long to feed you. Hang on.

One of the songs I have been asked to sing is Fairest Lord Jesus. It was for a funeral and the second tune was suggested. I’ve linked it below, and you should probably listen to it because it will tell you my heart tonight, sung in a minor key, not like the one you know, but the words are still true.

A cold and broken hallelujah, as Leonard would have said. Tonight the second tune is the one I can sing.

I have so many words and not enough time.

Little deaths

I mentioned the other day, just in like a heads up kind of way, that I feel like I’m going through a lot. I wanted my husband to know that when I disappear, even though I’m physically in the same room, it’s not about him. It’s about me resolving things that can’t be resolved in a matter of days or weeks.

I approach dreaded anniversaries now, I loathe the month of August.

Last August I turned 40, lost my job, and then watched my children sing our dog home, all together on the kitchen floor, over the space of a few days.

As the light turns magical and reflects strangely off the tree leaves, as the heat breaks for just a hot second (thank you Jesus!), as the calendar rolls toward what should be Coast Guard weekend well, I feel like it’s a lot.

I told my husband that I see her everywhere, my old boss. I see a car that looks like hers and I have to know if it IS her. I remember her license plate number. My heart pounds and I wonder what I would even do if I saw her again. It’s never her.

There’s the peculiar rustle of parchment paper that I learned to use with you, the way I move my head to keep the Crystal Light powder out of my nose, the intuitive copier I miss on an almost daily basis. It’s a velvet tee shirt like one you would wear, it’s Brooklyn Bagels and Los Amigos, your testing Spanglish. It’s still knowing how to ask if you want your taco hard or soft. Creating yet another new filing system. Submitting payables. Doing your job for you when you just don’t have the heart to do it today. 

I dream stress dreams about my husband leaving me for the neighbor lady, or my child being swept off the pier and taken with long, cold, dark blue tendril waves to the place where the children who drown in the lake are kept. I wake up smelling the lake after a storm, the scent of fish and cold water and sorrow lodged deep in my nose.

I keep my things at work organized, always ready to leave at a moment’s notice though there has been no indication that I need to be this way.

Sometimes, the things that happen to us change us. Maybe forever.

I worry (even now, this second) about dumping my anxiety on you, about throwing up on your shoes and then realize this space was always mine and you can leave if you want; that I can’t.

I worry about weird things, about ventilators and arguments.

I worry about Eucharist and how I haven’t had it yet because I want to wait for us all to be together again. I crib and steal Ramadan, fasting and fasting until I forget what Jesus tastes like, until I forget the way his blood runs down my throat and soaks my white cloth when I serve him to you. I want the full dark of sunset, to light all the candles and make the big meal, to have more Jesus than we can ever consume and stuff ourselves on that pan de vida and give the rest to the sacred birds.

I think of the seeds and seeds and seeds I bought in an absolute frenzied panic back in the spring. I dream that they’ve all bloomed and sprouted in the shadowy stairwell where they live and are wrecked for who knows when I’ll need to sow them. Of the powdered milk taking up valuable space, it becomes a goat in my kitchen, unruly and loud.

I dream of ICE and dialects and little girls with lice. I dream up recipes made of canned meat and egg noodles and cream soups and how to fill a food box when I know I don’t have what you want.

And I wonder how I live in this place and don’t have fresh produce or bread or milk to give away. I wonder why we don’t have tampons or shampoo, why the peanut gallery is strangely silent on anything but peanut butter and expired canned goods.

I hope this week to have my fate decided. I think of Anne Boleyn, pacing in a chamber in the Tower of London as the River Thames dances on her prison walls. I wonder how much longer I will be exiled. I wonder if I’ll be able to move forward into what and who I’ve almost forgotten I am. Stockholm Syndrome is real. I’m in love with my captors and in love with you too.

I’m in my rusty camper, way way out, waiting for the bus that comes by. I’m waiting to throw down my busy work and run, waving my arms and yelling for it stop. I’m ready to move closer in, diesel fumes and all. I’m ready to leave this post apocalyptic wilderness I’ve made, saving every bit of thread, watching and listening to the birds for cues.

Let me in so I can tell you what I know about life out here. Let me hold you while you cry. I understand. I miss it too, all of it. I don’t know who I am anymore either, constantly battling an inner confrontational hoarder I didn’t even know I harbored.

Saturday it was so hot, humid and disgusting but the beaches were packed and we try to be so careful. I put on my bathing suit and for the first time entered our small backyard pool. I laid on a ridiculous gold float and felt I still wasn’t right. I rolled off and felt that delicious and awful thrill before the first big breath that makes me float. I spread my arms wide and filled my body with air. I floated for a long time that way, conscious only of my sinking body and the next deep and buoying breath. There isn’t room for much else.

I remembered how to breathe.
I love you still. We’re going to make it. Let me in.

Below is my sermon from today, based on the Year A Proper 10 Lectionary readings.

And a sort of weird invasion of privacy as this manuscript includes my notes and private cues.

The Parable of the Sower – Sowing Hope 

 

There’s a billboard that some of you may have noticed. It’s large and white and it says (marquee hands) FEAR IS CONTAGIOUS – SO IS HOPE.

 

 This billboard is on interstate 96 between here and Coopersville, and its one of what I like to call the  “positivity “billboards. What the billboards actually are is a public service campaign called The Foundation for a Better Life. They make billboards and videos that sow good news, good seeds, on an at times questionable soil bed. 

 

The Parable of the Sower, or Parable of the Soils, is found in all of the synoptic gospels and is one of eight parables found in Matthew 13. The next parables, interestingly enough, will be the parable of the weeds and the parable of the mustard seed. This is one of what are know as parabolic discourses, or, Jesus speaking in parables about the kingdom of heaven just as he spoke of the kingdom when he taught us how to pray just a few chapters back in Matthew 6. 

 

Thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The true hope that dwells deep in the heart of God. 

 

At first it seems like the message is garbled, veiled in riddle and mysticism, this isn’t helped by Jesus leaving his audience only with the parable and sharing an explanation only with his disciples. 

 

At face value it seems that a wise sower would sow only on good soil. You don’t build a business that you know will fail just as we wouldn’t walk through our yards randomly dropping and scattering seeds. 

 Because the soil hasn’t been cultivated! The ground isn’t ready! The rows aren’t orderly and we can’t mark what each seed was to watch anxiously for growth – for proof that we are indeed good sowers of seeds. 

 

The sower in the parable seems willing to just (fling) FLING seed anywhere! Why does she do this? Why does Jesus tell us this story? 

 

Could it be, perhaps, that the story is more than the orthodox practices of planting, though in those times the seeds would indeed have been tossed first and then tilled into the soil – no doubt resulting in an iffy harvest — 

 

Perhaps the story is less about practice and seeds and ground and more about the sower. Maybe the story is about God’s love being as extravagant as a sower tossing seed willy nilly – maybe where the seed lands DOES matter – but not in the ways we may think. 

 

We like to have our efforts work out and our investments pay off. We wouldn’t throw money at a failing venture or send our kids to the worst schools just to see what would happen. But the economy of God isn’t like our economy, and the seed, or LOVE, of God fortunately is not like our own often self interested, self righteous love. 

 

The sower throws the seeds on the broken soil because IT IS broken.  

 

The love of God shoots up in unexpected places – a living and green reminder of the kind of love that can make wounded places whole, a love that can patch broken places together again. The love of God isn’t just for the well off who will manage it wisely, it isn’t JUST for the well educated who will make educated decisions, it isn’t JUST for those who came here legally. It isn’t JUST for people born with a binary gender identity and heterosexual leaning and it isn’t JUST for one branch of the Jesus movement. It isn’t JUST for the people who have made no mistakes. 

 

No! 

 

God is a high risk gardener! The kind that throws seeds randomly into the wind not knowing, but hoping that the seeds will take root because THE LOVE OF THE SOWER is meant for the man carrying his child on his shoulders across the Rio Grande. It is for Philando Castille, George Floyd, Eric Garner,  and for Breonna Taylor and every black life that has been beaten and taken and held down in systems that I am complicit in. 

 

The LOVE OF GOD is for the single mothers who we think have way too many kids. It is for the rehab centers full of alcoholic men and the soup kitchens full of families that are doing their damndest to make life work as they live in a campground because there is no other place to go.

 

THE LOVE OF GOD is made manifest in that rocky soil, in that not ready and IMPERFECT soil. 

 

Just as it is made manifest in you. And in me. We may outwardly be doing it right, but if we are honest we have our secret sins, our shameful failures, the wrong we choose over and again. Our soil is not perfect. 

 

I think this parable was never about the ground and was always about the person of the sower. This parable is about the economy of the kingdom, extravagant, unexpected, and who ME? You want me? Yes! 

 

 It was  never about first century Palestine, or American in 2020, a country gasping on the shores of racial strife, political divide, record unemployment and raging pandemic. 

 

This parable is the best good news right now – this parable tells us that the love of God can take root in even our imperfect forms and lives. There is not a place or circumstance in which God’s  love, God’s seed, cannot take root.

 

But Jesus doesn’t stop there! He doesn’t stop with a so so harvest because only some of those seeds took. He doesn’t stop with a doubled harvest or a tripled harvest – Jesus ends with a ONE HUNDRED FOLD HARVEST. An unheard of abundance. 

 

A one hundredfold harvest is literally thy kingdom come and thy will be done on earth. It is literally a realizing of the kingdom of heaven right here and right now. It is no hunger, no oppression. It is the problems of our world faced directly and conquered with gardening gloves and a bag of seed and a sower instilled willingness and bent for love. 

 

As we have been planted now we must grow up, grow up and be sowers. Now we must sow for the world and the kingdom to reap. Now we must toss the love and GOOD NEWS of God to a world and to people that maybe we secretly think don’t deserve it, on ground that we think is n inhospitable to our precious seed. 

 

We do this by sowing contagious hope instead of contagious and poisonous fear. We do this by loving extravagantly regardless of circumstance. We do this by choosing and striving again and again and again to be like the original and eternal sower.

Astute Lectionary nerds like myself will know that the epistle reading is omitted from Morning Prayer. Today it would have been Romans 8, and that is where I’ll leave you.

 

So no. There is no condemnation in Christ. The law of the Spirit in the life of Jesus Christ has SET YOU FREE from the old laws of sin and death. For God has done what the law could not and cannot do. Your soil no longer matters, only your love does because the sower did not care about your soil – the sower only saw the potential in you. 

Go and do likewise.

You are not in the flesh. You are in the Spirit, and Christ is in you and if the Spirit of the one who raised Christ is in you then your mortal body is given life  – and life eternal – and abundant and verdantly green  full of hope and promise. 

 

So go. Sow Hope. God has planted you and has set you free. 

 

Amen.

 

Mother

The Catholic conference center is a big place. It houses hundreds of retired Catholic  clergy and group retreats, school groups,  and even some small schools, like mine.

For three years I attended. I moved through varying degrees of defiance, loathing, and laughter. I deconstructed, the point of any good seminary experience. And reconstructed, also important, utterly necessary to the point of the experiment.

In those first years Father Eric would go home at night. I remember seeing the back of him walking down the hallway and feeling an untethered feeling. Like authority had gone skipping out the door alongside him, like we were adrift in this giant 1950’s brick building, left to our own devices.

Patriarchy is a subtle, damaging thing I do to myself. Eric did not do this to me. I do it to myself.

Only the mothers were left. Only the mothers could shepherd us through those delicate hours until daylight, and powdered eggs, and morning prayer.

As I consider I realize that mothers were the centrifugal force of my schooling. I was raised by, pushed by, grown by, spun by women. At any given time the female staff outweighed the male staff two to one.

It won’t make a lot of sense. But I’d like to paint for you the long hallway. It has some sort of quartz floor, all shiny and with definite lines. Small wooden doors line the halls. There are compartments for food and such to be passed through the wall. I used to trade rooms with my friend so she could be closer to the bathrooms. Leaving lights on in the hallways at night was hotly debated.

Your feet make a thrum thrum thrum noise as they climb the short ramp to the classrooms and academic hallway. The coffee was mostly plentiful as were the snacks.

We loaded up on chocolate bark and bananas, coffee and iced wine, good theology and bad. The mothers oversaw this kingdom.

What I wouldn’t give right now to thrum thrum my way up that ramp. To fill my coffee mug and take my seat (third in). What I wouldn’t give for an uncomfortable hour of personal reflection. For a no nonsense reformed Presbyterian to clear her throat and reassure me with her no nonsense attitude and mother’s heart.

She would say something like this:

No one is perfect. You will make mistakes, sometimes grave ones. This is very terrible.

What she would not say but what we would hear is: I love you. You are going to be ok.

The reason I long for the half light of that classroom, the soothing green carpet, is because I don’t want to be in charge of this. Because I know that I make so many mistakes. Because I know that I let people down. Probably the people I love the most the most often.

The mothers would tell me I am not in charge. They would make this clear. They would question my desire to make this about me. I would have to go deep. It might be on my permanent record that I tried yet again to take responsibility for something that is not mine, if only to clear it up and make it go away.

Tonight the lake smells like rain, a fishy electric smell. Tonight I’m casting about for an adult in the room and realize it’s only me. Me and the women in a video call, processing in our own way that we must be in charge, that’s the only way it has always been, could ever be.

Tonight my worst thoughts are manifest, they walk like tall specters down the street, and I beg forgiveness, work to reorient my mind and my heart to the ways of grace and love.

Tonight she isn’t Dr anything, not for me. She is mother.

Mother, spread wide your white chasuble, the one shot through with gold thread. Gather your chicks like mother Jesus. In the midst of your own weeping comfort us.

Mother. Please.