kc's kaleidoscope

Three Reasons to Stay in Ministry

2010-02-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

One of my Lenten practices this year is to be able to find, in each day, something that points to the joy of ministry, particularly ministry in the local church.

One of my frustrations in the local church ever since I started working in one five years ago was my immediate discovery that you could speak the truth in the newsroom and newspaper far more freely than you can speak the truth in the church. This is a challenge for me for multivalent reasons.

So, rather than live into or out of those frustrations, I have chosen this Lent to find in each day something that brings joy or meaning in local church ministry.

On Ash Wednesday, the list was enormous.

Here are three:

The woman who told me after our small, intimate evening Ash Wednesday service how meaningful it was and how she felt she had found her home in our church.

A longtime journalism friend who is grilling me with questions on the Bible and belief each Wednesday in our new Bible study, adding a new dimension not just to our friendship but to my ministry.

A conversation of hope in the future with our music director as we prepared for worship. He then beautifully played Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah as his piano prelude, knowingly bringing a piece of exquisite beauty, unknowingly bringing my father into the moment as well.

I still long for a day when speaking truths in church and church meetings is as free as free speech. Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech were meant to walk hand in hand. And the gospel message is intended to set all people free.

Theology after Gutenberg

2010-02-06T06:08:00.000-08:00

I remember a day, years ago now, when I paused on deadline in the newsroom to give thanks for Google.

As an editor at a major metro daily newspaper, I had spent the earlier years of my career relying on an amazing array of reference books to research and confirm information in the stories I was responsible to edit -- phone books, cross-directories, almanacs, the AP Stylebook, Webster's New World Dictionary, the newspaper's own electronic clip library.

With Google, I could check many more references, including almost any primary source associated with the subjects of the stories. In later years, the whole world would open up through satellite map images, complex and interactive election result databases, even online dictionaries.

I paused on deadline that day, almost a decade ago, and gave thanks, but it would be many more years before I actually accepted "Googled" as a verb.

Google transformed my work as an editor, and I knew it. I had no clue, though, how Google and other emerging communications media would Google up the journalism world.

I left the newsroom in 2005, and the transformation of this new media world in just that time has been phenomenal.

I left the newsroom to attend seminary, and I see amazing parallels between journalism and theology. Many of them beautiful parallels about the connections people make through sharing meaningful stories.

I also see the need for both journalism and theology to move beyond Gutenberg. The printing press transformed journalism and theology.
Google has done it again.

Imagine the many ways we can continue to share our stories and theology.

I plan to attend "Theology after Google"at Claremont School of Theology on March 10-12 to help spark my own imaginings. Come join the discussion.

While I'm excited to attend and learn, I'm also excited to be leading an "on-ramp" workshop with my friend James Kang to help anyone interested in theology but not so well versed in new media understand the transformation from Gutenberg to Google and beyond.

Here's a bit more info:

Theology After Gutenberg
Fascinated by Theology after Google but not up-to-speed on new media? This on-ramp workshop travels through time and communications culture to quickly introduce basic concepts that will be useful for the rest of the conference and essential to imagining the future. James Kang is lead pastor of the Greenhouse District faith community in Pomona, Calif., and an MDiv. student at Claremont School of Theology. Karen Clark Ristine, a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 20 years, left journalism right before it got Googled up to attend seminary and is now pastor of a century-old neighborhood church in San Diego, Calif., who believes that, sometimes, Facebook is holy.

December 15

2009-12-15T07:53:00.001-08:00

Today is December 15.
The day four years ago that my father died.
A day that always reminds me that it's time to put up the Christmas tree.

It's really December 14 that is hard for me.
A day of recalling great hope and great hope dashed.
The day my father was released from cardiac ICU, just waiting for a room to open.
The day I said goodbye as I left to return home after a week in Texas.
It was a beautiful farewell, and it is a gift that neither of us knew that it was goodbye forever -- at least on this mortal coil.
There was a winter thunderstorm in Houston that day and the sky out the hospital windows was dark accept where lightning accented the clouds. I headed for the airport, at my mother's insistence, since Dad was cleared for release from ICU.

And then the phone calls began.
First the call to let my mother know that I had been able to catch a standby flight home. But she didn't answer. Much of the hospital was without cell service. Maybe she just couldn't hear her phone.
And then the call with my brother when I was changing planes in Dallas, telling me that he couldn't reach Mom or get the hospital to confirm that Dad was still in ICU. And another call trying to reach Mom.
Then the call from my brother when I had landed in San Diego, telling me that something had changed and they were keeping Dad in ICU.
And then the call just a bit later from my brother telling me that the doctor, the most renowned cardiac surgeon in Texas, had been called back to the hospital to care for Dad. It was now past midnight in Texas.
And then my call to the hospital asking that they send a chaplain wherever my mother was.
And then the call when I finally reached my mother, and she told me that the doctor was with her and had just told her that Dad had died. It was just past midnight in California.
There were other calls that night. The call where Mom asked my brother, who was heading from Austin back to Houston, to pull over so she could tell him our father had died. The call to me when Mom was safely in my brother's care. A call with my brother's wife the next morning confirming that my brother and mother had arrived safely.

December 14th is not the longest night of the year, but it was by far one of the longest nights of my life. And I always think of Dec. 14 as the day my father died, though the real date is today's, Dec. 15.

Four years ago, I awoke in San Diego after that long day of transition from hope to despair, from life to death. I awoke on Dec. 15, the day my father died, in that state of disbelief and false hope in those pre-conscious moments that maybe it had not happened at all.

I awoke to great grief and yet great hope. Great pain and yet great love.

Grief transforms profoundly. Those are the best words I have to describe the journey of these four years.

That first Dec. 15, in an unimaginable act of hope, we put up our Christmas tree. Dear friends had asked what I might need, and I said that there had not been time to decorate the house for Christmas and I wanted to decorate before we all headed back to Texas for Dad's funeral. Dear, dear friends and colleagues from church brought dinner and baked Christmas cookies and helped us light and decorate our tree. It was a hopeful act that brought blessing upon blessing. It wasn't until a year later that I realized we had decorated the tree on the same day that Dad had died. He would love that story.

When Mom visited at Thanksgiving this year, she brought me an ornament that I had given my Dad years ago. It is a pewter image of a great blue heron, a bird of special meaning to Dad, invoking many things, including his grandmother who loved the great blue herons, too.

It is December 15, and there has not been time to decorate the house for Christmas this year. Today seems like a perfect day to get a tree and bring a little Divine Light into my house and my heart in honor and memory of Dad.

Amen.

Four years ago tonight...

2009-08-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

Four years ago tonight, I left my desk in the newsroom for the last time.
My metaphor for editing was always that of the plate spinner.
I'm just barely old enough to remember having seen them on the Ed Sullivan show when i was single digits.
I always mark this anniversary with gratitude, but this year it seems bittersweet for numerous reasons, starting with the layoff of dear friends twice this year.

My journey these past four years has been remarkable.
And I marvel that it could really only be four years since I started seminary, and now I pastor a church.
I have lived so much life in these four years that I could not have imagined that night.

As a former-journalist, I can't help but wonder what the five-year anniversary story will be. Perhaps I should go start working on it...

Dreaming Dad's Poetry

2009-07-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

I woke from a dream this morning,
a vivid dream, of Dad,
Dad reciting poetry.

At first it seemed
the poetry
was not his own.

Yet, by the end it was clear
He knew this poem by heart
because it was his own.

In the dream, I heard all the words,
listening intently
for the message beyond the words.

I woke to breeze blowing in the window
a calming and comforting breeze
and, when I realized I had dreamed of Dad

Not only of Dad
but of Dad's voice,
Dad's poetry, Dad's presence.

I replayed the dream,
and I remembered everything,
everything except the words.

Celebrating the sacred

2009-07-02T22:03:00.001-07:00

As I traveled around the labyrinth at First United Methodist Church in San Diego on June 30, as my parting devotion of my appointment there as a local pastor, what came into my mindfulness were multitudes of times when I had been in prayer with people.

It was such an appropriate reflection for all my time there as a parent of a toddler in the preschool, as a member, as a student pastor and then as an appointed local pastor. Prayer centers me and prayer centers my ministry. To be flooded with memories of prayer was prayerful unto itself.

As I exited the labyrinth, I began to reflect on the New (appointment) Year. Last year, I actually committed some New (appointment) Year's resolutions to writing. So I began to reflect on what resolutions I might have for this VERY New Year. What came to me as an overwhelming awareness was my desire to celebrate the sacred wherever it appears.

As if on cue, the sacred hopped into my garage on July 1, New (appointment) Year's Day, in the form of a Horned Toad. I haven't held a horned frog in my hand since I was 10. I still hold an image in clear memory of catching and admiring one along the driveway of my grandmother's house in Jacksboro, Texas. I had never seen one outside of Texas. And this little baby came hopping up my drive and into my garage. Ryan saw it first and was amazed. It was as if a baby dragon had hopped into our awareness. I was delighted by his delight. And I knew as I held this horned toad and marveled at it some (ahem) 40 years later that this, THIS, was the sacred I had vowed to celebrate. It was one of those moments of connection with the Divine, one of those awarenesses of the transient and not-entirely-stable nature of time that connects me to all I have been and helps me imagine all I will be. It was as if the family totem had come to life to offer me blessing. I felt my tenuous Native American roots come alive with this gift of presence.

And so, I celebrated. I celebrated the sacred.

Last year, my list of New (appointment) Year's resolutions read like a litany of literary desire, hopeful appreciation, and trust in the Spirit:

1) Read more poetry.
1a) Write more poetry.
2) See more theatre.
2a) Research cheap ways to see theatre in San Diego.
3) Thank promptly.
3a) Live in an attitude of gratitude.
4) Keep it clean -- the desk, the coffee mug, maybe even the language
5) Delight daily in something.
6) Renew my resolve to follow the leadings and guidings, nudgings and shoves of the Spirit.
7) Hold on to hope.

This year, my singular resolution is more centering prayer than litany:
Celebrate the sacred.

And my hope will be that those celebrations sometimes include poetry, sometimes theatre, sometimes delight and always Spirit presence and great gratitude.

I am grateful for the Horned Toad
That traveled across time and memory
To bless the beginnings of this ministry year
To bless the future from the past
And to remind me that wonders never cease.

Thanks be to God!

Word Image of a Sermon about Word Images

2009-06-07T22:27:00.001-07:00

These are the words of my Trinity Sunday sermon.
At the 8 a.m. worship service, there was communion, and I added another story to my life's litany of communion stories, but that is a blog for another day!

Sunday's sermon (preview)

2009-06-04T23:57:00.000-07:00

"Wordle: Sunday's Sermon"

Making Art of Life

2009-05-09T21:44:00.001-07:00

"Wordle: Linda Major Clark"

Making Art of Life
By Karen Clark Ristine for Mom on Mother’s Day 2009

Cinnamon toast,
Georgia O’Keefe,
Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain;
I learned to appreciate all these art forms from Mom.

Y Lady,
Book store owner,
Yearbook adviser;
I learned how to transform lives through each incarnation of her.

Feminist before it was fashionable,
A challenge to rigid authority,
Unabashed advocate of underdogs;
I learned to seek justice from her.

Okie transplant to Texas,
Baptist convert to Catholicism,
B&W photographer to digital;
I learned to bridge differences from her.

Trees of life,
Dad’s love,
Blessed Ties that Bind;
I learned to appreciate all these art forms from Mom.

Can I Get a Witness...

2009-04-20T06:01:00.000-07:00

Jim and Molly each preached powerfully and wonderfully yesterday about how the church can be radical in its welcome of all people -- something the United Methodist Church struggles with,
something we all struggle with.

After her sermon, Molly led us in a ritual asking us to prayerfully consider those we most struggle to welcome and to remember times and places we have felt unwelcome or excluded and to prayerfully work to heal those hurts within ourselves. She asked us to recognize that we sometimes are those who struggle to welcome and at other times are those who feel unwelcome.

Introducing the prayer ritual, Molly showed a photo of Marian Anderson singing outside the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 because the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from performing at Constitution Hall. She was invited, instead, to perform from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
where 75,000 people heard her sing.

As we walked to the baptismal font, we drew out a stone to represent those times of struggle in welcoming or feeling welcome and our hopes for healing within the church, within our hearts, within all of humankind, and Molly played "Would You Harbor Me?" -- a litany in song performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a capella group of women who have been part of the soundtrack of my life since 1986.

As we walked forward together, the litany repeated:

Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?

Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew a heretic, convict or spy? Would you harbor a run away woman, or child, a poet, a prophet, a king? Would you harbor an exile, or a refugee, a person living with AIDS? Would you harbor a Tubman, a Garrett, A Truth a fugitive or a slave? Would you harbor a Haitian, Korean or Czech, a lesbian or a gay?

Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?

It was a powerful witness to a glorious hope for the future not only of our United Methodist denomination but for our own church, for our own hearts and for all of God's kin-dom.

It was also a powerful privilege for me to get to consecrate communion immediately after that ritual since Molly feared she might have a cold. I love the welcome table of the United Methodist Church. No matter what our constitution says, no matter what we struggle with as a people, our communion table is open to everyone. Our sacrament is a means of grace shared with anyone -- anyone -- desiring to receive it.

After worship in Water's Edge, two different families talked to me about exclusion within the church. One couple loves worship and fellowship at Water's Edge at First UMC but is taking a social justice stand not to become members until the denomination changes its policies and fully includes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Molly's sermon (and Jim's) talked about upcoming denominationwide votes on the UMC constitution that would change the language to make clear that all people are welcome as members. That change, itself, would be welcome and celebrated by many.

And there is hope, though not certainty, that a change in welcome in membership might lead to changes in the denomination's current prohibition on lesbian, gay, and bisexual clergy. (Transgender clergy are currently included.) The UMC has its own version of "don't ask, don't tell." The denomination bans "self-avowed, practicing homosexuals" from serving as clergy.

I went to seminary with United Methodists who identify within the LGB community and who love the church and are clearly called to ministry. Some are caring ministers gifted in pastoral care. Some are powerful preachers. Some are visionaries with a hope for the future of the church of Jesus Christ. All must remain silent on their true sense of self through their candidacy, commissioning and ordination process. Even people who care deeply about them coach them not to name who they are if they want to pass their written and oral Board of Ordained Ministry examinations.

For me, asking these ministers to remain silent about who they are is not unlike trying to silence Marian Anderson. Marian Anderson could not hide the difference for which she was discriminated. These pastors can. But should they? My prayer is that someday someone within the church is brave enough, prophetic enough, to see the human rights reasons to provide an open pulpit so that these pastors can preach from the steps of freedom rather than be bound in silence.

Only then will our hearts, minds and doors, truly, be open.

May it be so.

Amen.

Title TK

2009-04-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

Ryan's mama loves communion.
Ryan loves communion almost as much as his mama.
Ryan's mama loves Vespers.
Ryan loves Vespers almost as much as his mama.
Last night, Ryan and his mama and Vespers and the Holy Spirit and a bunch of good people came together in communion -- this holy mystery.

Karen's dad loved mystery.
That's how he finally came willingly to the communion table, through mystery.
Karen's dad loved fishing, too. And baseball.
Karen loves baseball almost as much as her dad.
Ryan loves fishing almost as much as his grandpa.

Fish used to be part of the communion meal in very early Christian churches.
Baseball did not, at least not recorded by Eusebius or Tertullian -- though Tertullian did provide Christian Tradition with a name for its own Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance combo, coining the term Trinity.
Baseball did not, at least until last night, when Ryan, a promising Mira Mesa Youth Baseball utility player and speedster on the base paths, decided to race to the communion rail.

From the middle of the sanctuary, Ryan began weaving his way quickly past other worshipers, breaking into a full run on the chancel to surpass Tom, who is almost always first to the altar on the side Ryan's mama serves. Tom seemed taken aback at first and then, when he saw that it was Ryan racing to be first, he broke into a smile as big as the one on Ryan's mama's face.

"The bread of life and the cup of blessing, given in love for you, Ryan," Ryan's mama said to him.

"Amen," Ryan said, looking into his mama's eyes.

Amen

(The title to this blog came to me as I sat in the front pew listening to the beautiful postlude last night. The title and a bunch of other words that aren't these words also came to me then. These words are better than the words that came to me last night, but I can't for the life of me remember the title, nor, for that matter, come up with a better one. So, I've used some journalism shorthand. Often stories are sent on down the production line without essential elements like headlines. So, at the top, you write "Headline TK." TK, for some odd reason, stands for "to come." It lets folks know you didn't forget to write the headline, you just haven't yet had time or inspiration, or both. Sometimes you even see the words accidentally published.)

The rooster is growing on me

2009-04-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

I confess that the rogue rooster who lives in the canyon my house overlooks and enters the urban landscape each morning to crow from sidewalks and fences has begun to grow on me.

This morning, I woke before the rooster to finish my income taxes. About 6 a.m., I realized I had yet to hear the rooster, who has returned to greeting the day in hours that begin with 4.

If I'm deep asleep, I don't hear his first calls, but by 5 a.m., my sleep is light enough to be awakened by this nature-provided alarm.

So, when I did not hear him at 6 a.m. this morning and realized I could not remember whether I heard him on Monday, my first thought was: O my gosh, some neighbor really did have coq au vin for Easter dinner!

I have come to realize that I like hearing the rooster in the morning as much as I enjoy the call of owls at night -- a much less frequent occurrence, but always a welcome lullaby.

My only previous experience with roosters came on daytime visits to Aunt Mary and Uncle Brother's place outside Jacksboro, Texas. They always had a rooster and some hens and, for a time, a longhorn steer.

I probably saw a rooster in my youth, too, because my great-grandmother's home had a hen house. I don't remember the rooster. I remember the hens. I didn't visit often, but I have a crisp memory of watching my great-grandmother scatter feed for the hens and then give me a handful to scatter to the wind. I remember waiting outside the hen house while she collected eggs.

These are memories from when I was five or six, because Mamie lived with her daughters for the last few years of her life after her husband died.

My memories of their place, though, are vivid still.

And the rooster takes me back there.
And the rooster makes me want some hens.

I wonder how long it would take for chicks to grow to hens and how long before there would be eggs to collect. And I wonder whether instinct or genetics or memories from age 5 would kick in to help me scatter and gather as Mamie did. My father wrote a short story about Mamie's lethal hands. His childhood memory is not of her gathering eggs but of her killing a chicken for Sunday dinner.
I think I'd just stick with the eggs.

I wonder all these things and then I wonder about practical matters. I wonder about zoning laws -- yet my friend Sharon just got two chicks and she lives in La Jolla. I wonder about cages -- what could I keep hens in that would keep them from becoming coyote food.

And that only increase my admiration for the rooster. How does HE survive the coyotes? For that matter, how does he survive the traffic on the streets he roams?

At 6:15 this morning, the rooster finally began to crow. I think the overcast sky may have caused him to sleep in. But during the silence, I realized that I will really miss him when he's gone.

He ties me to my past and he amuses me in my present and he helps me dream of a future that might include some fresh eggs. And if there are fresh eggs, perhaps there should be a garden to grow the scallions and tomatoes and peppers that would go so well in an omlette. And if there is garden, perhaps that means there is leisure time to tend it. And if there is leisure time, perhaps it won't matter when the rooster crows.

And so, in gratitude, I offer this ode to my rogue rooster...

Ode to a Rogue

He climbs up the canyon wall,
Squeezing through the iron fence,
And raises his voice to the day.

He calls me from sleep to wakefulness,
He calls me from present to past,
He calls me from current anxieties to past comforts.

He calls, and as he does,
I recall my great-grandmother,
Who fed her chickens and also killed them.

He calls relentlessly,
He calls insistently,
He calls boldly into the dawn.

Kaleidoscope Poem

2009-04-13T06:16:00.000-07:00

Kaleidoscope

Light, bits of glass, physics,
Whimsy, imagination, delight,
Sudden change,
New perspective,
Temporary art,
Portable stained glass,
Time suspended.

At just after 9 a.m. this morning, someone on the East Coast searched for a kaleidoscope poem. I know this because it was a google search that landed them on my blog on a page with a poem in progress of images and sensations from sitting on my grandmother's front porch one early morning last summer as she made the slow transition from this life.

In gratitude for being sent back to that sacred moment -- captured clumsily, I thought I'd try to write a kaleidoscope poem.

(This discovery also prompted me to look at recent blog traffic to a blog that hasn't been updated for months, and, to my delight, I discovered that Whispering Hope, still regularly brings searchers here. There's something poetic in that alone.)

I've written under the words "kc's kaleidoscope" since high school and I've collected kaleidoscopes at least that long. Not captured in the poem above is my delight in how a kaleidoscope brings so many possibilities and perspectives together in one place as art, not conflict. They are held not in tension, but in beauty.

And, as I was crafting the poem, I knew just which picture needed to go with these words! And it made me realize, anew, just how much I will miss the kaleidoscope of light and experience that has made art of my life all the years I have been at First UMC San Diego.

Praying into the Silence

2009-04-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

All week I have watched
as people who know me well
see me differently than I know myself to be.

(An awareness of amazing emancipation.)

My journey all of Lent
has been deeply internal,
prayerful and excruciatingly self-aware.

(An awareness of incredible blessing.)

All week I have watched
as people who do not know me well
help me see myself anew.

(A awareness of unexpected affirmation.)

My Lenten steps have been toward freedom.
Freedom to be myself unfettered,
Unfettered from criticisms that seek to destroy.

(A awareness of internal reconciliation.)

I have experienced daily acts of forgiveness
toward those whose pain and insecurity
blind them to love and understanding.

(And I pray such forgiveness when I have acted out of pain not love.)

Each day, even in the midst of very difficult times,
I have experienced sacred moments
of light and hope to hold fast to always.

(And I pray such sacred moments for all.)

This Holy Week has brought unexpected affirmation
of all of my callings, personal and pastoral,
at the culmination of a journey through deep self.

(And I pray such holy affirming for all.)

Through Lent, I expected tearing down, yet there was only letting go.
I expected to fear self-reflection; instead it embraced me.
I saw the rooster as self denial; instead it was about self worth.

(And I pray such loving self-embrace and healing release for all.)

I am all the things I know myself to be.
I am some of the things others say I am.
I can let go of those that I am not.

I only need to live up to my true self,
To know and cherish the me I was created to be
And to accept, at last, the holy embrace of self.

And so I pray into the silence of Holy Saturday
That it may be so.
And so it is.
Amen.

Ryan's Christmas song

2008-12-25T09:38:00.000-08:00

Ryan wrote this Christmas song, lyrics and tune, I just helped arranging it for guitar...

Feliz Navidad
Ho! Ho! Ho!

My poetic testament to Psalm 139:14

2008-11-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

When I consider my own heart in relation to the heart of God,
I hear the heartbeat of all humanity.
We are all made in the image of God.
And all are worthy of God's love and God's call.

My seedling faith...

2008-11-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

I came to my first faith in God through an oak tree.
I was 11.
In the front yard of a duplex my family had just rented, an enormous oak tree grew. It was full of leaves when we arrived in August and then the leaves turned beautifully to fall colors and dropped.
Some people love fall for the colors.
I love the smell of the leaves as they return to earth.
Among those leaves, there were acorns.
After months of enjoying that tree in all its seasons, I studied an acorn.
I held it in my hand as I had done many times before, yet, this day, I was amazed. When I considered that this beautiful and steadfast tree had grown from an acorn, when I realized that the acorn in my hand contained the beginnings of life for an oak tree, I knew that there must be a brilliant and imaginative and patient Creator. I knew there must be God.

Forced Sabbath

2008-09-24T04:31:00.000-07:00

I cannot fast today.

Not in the traditional sense, not in the Wesleyan sense, not in the not consuming food sense.

There's this pill I need to consume soon to calm the pain that is raging down my left shoulder and gathering at my elbow and shooting down to numb three fingers of my left hand. It's an anti-imflammatory. And soon, I'll take it after some toast and an egg and some two-day old coffee and wonder if it's doing any good.

Then, around lunchtime, when I can stand the pain no longer, I'll take the other pill. The stronger one. The one to kill the pain. But it doesn't really kill the pain, it simply masks it for a while. It does not require nourishment, but I have not dared to take it on an empty stomach.

I cannot fast today.

But I will rest.

And I will pray.

And I will seek the source of that which we call God. I will seek the voice of the Divine from which I sensed a call into ministry so many summers ago. And I will dare to ask: Are You sure?

In the day that remains before my next appearance before the District Committee on Ordained Ministry, I will find a way to contemplate, to consider, to open myself to the mystery and seek to understand or to be content in not understanding.

I cannot fast from food today.

But I will fast.

And I will pray.

I will fast from any of the distraction or misdirections or diversions I create to distance myself from myself and in so doing distance myself from the source and hope of my call into humanity and my call into reality and my call into my best possible future.

I will fast from any illusions of who I might be or might have been and live and pray into the reality of who I am.

I will fast from busy-ness. I will fast, for a day, from any sense of deadline or duty. For what in my life has more urgency than centering myself into myself and centering myself into the presence of the Divine to know what to do next.

And as I fast and rest and pray, a part of me will wonder if the disc that suddenly bulged out of place below my neck, between my shoulders, slipped out when I tried to lift a heavy object that has never seemed like a burden to me.

Did it slip out then or was it the new experience of bocce, a ball rolled gently and precisely across a lawn, a ball that is a fraction of the weight of the bowling balls I sometimes hurl across the room -- the bowling alley room -- as a form of spiritual practice?

Or was this disc finally forced onto my nerves from years of carrying my stress and worry in this very region of my body?

Regardless the cause, this bulging disc, this searing pain, has forced a sabbath. A sabbath of unknown duration.

Today, I will spend that sabbath at rest.

At rest and at prayer.

And, while I will consume needed food, I will not consume myself.

I will not consume time in order to prevent finding myself with time on my hands to to consider who I am.

I will not consume unnecessary energy with what ifs and will instead contemplate what is.

I will not consume other people's idea of art -- not Mad Men, not Eat, Pray, Love, not Oprah or Ellen. I will seek my own.

And, as my favorite answer to the hardest commissioning and ordination questions goes, I will, with God's help, seek to understand who I am, where I am, how I came to be here and how I live into a future that seems more unknown and uncertain than that night on the UCSD track not quite 10 years ago, when a voice inside me said: You need to be a Methodist minister.

I will fast.

I will rest.

I will pray.

May it be so.

Amen.

Busman's Holiday

2008-08-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

I love the Holy Spirit.
I love the infinite ways in which worship and fellowship,
prayer and community are birthed
and in turn give birth to new life.
I love scripture.
I love old hymns.
I love the ways our legacies of faith bring us together
and then send us forth.

I love worship as a collective and communal “sacred act,” a moment in time that will never be the same again. We come together in a sacred act of worship unique to the time and space and people gathered. Even when we gather again at a similar time and place, the gathering of people is never quite the same; the events of our lives and world – trivial and triumphant, solemn and stunning – have transformed us a bit since last we gathered.

In recent weeks, I have loved hearing a variety of pastor friends contemplate, wrestle with and, ultimately, proclaim scripture passages. I have marveled at the many – likely, infinite – ways the same scripture passage moves through the soul and experience and mission and call of different preachers.

This week I had fun listening to Molly and Elbert in San Diego and Jeri from Mesa, Arizona, talk about what to do with those Egyptian midwives who refused to follow Pharaoh’s orders that they kill male Hebrew babies during childbirth. (Elbert chose to start the passage later, drawing a friendly chastisement for omitting Shiphrah and Puah from Molly who said we don’t get to preach enough about wise women in the Bible.) Also this week, on the church web page of a pastor I needed to call for my annual appointment with my District Committee on Ordained Ministry, I noticed that her sermon title for the passage was “Uppity Women.” At that point, I stopped to consider just how many preachers approach the same scripture each week, telling the human faith story, all informed by their own experience, their own understanding, their own congregation’s traditions.

Molly and I had fun this week creating a big storybook to use this fall from which to read and tell the Exodus epic that begins with the tale of the midwives, and I was sorry I could not be at our Water’s Edge worship today to see the story unfold through her reading and telling and preaching. Instead, I’m in Grove, Oklahoma, with my grandmother. After living on her own through her 90th year, she moved to a skilled nursing facility this week after a month’s stay in the hospital where a bone break lead to the revelation that she has cancer throughout her bones.

I have been to a number of churches here as my grandmother has journeyed in faith through several congregations in her 25 years in Grove. Today, for the first time in all my visits, I was left on my own for worship. Grandma and I had planned that I would attend the church service with her at 2 p.m. at the nursing facility. So, I decided to attend First United Methodist Church of Grove in the morning. It was a nice service, with some thoughtful preaching. The pastor had just begun a sermon series on “The Road Back” about what happens to us after mountaintop experiences. His text was not those uppity midwives from the lectionary but the story of the mountaintop transfiguration of Jesus, the Gospel story I preached on the only time I have preached from the pulpit of our main sanctuary. And that reminded me, midway through worship, that there are only three weeks left until I preach in the sanctuary again. Probably time to prepare!

After church, when I got to my grandmother’s room, she was napping soundly, so I left her a note and went to a coffee shop, floral shop, sandwich shop, chocolate shop that is the only place I know of in Grove to get free Wi-Fi. I went to the UMC’s website to download the texts and background and a few key commentaries on the text I will preach on Sept. 14 for the sermon I submit for consideration to the Board of Ordained Ministry. That sermon will be on doubt, preached on Christian Education Sunday, based on a passage from Romans about dealing well with differences.

Back at Grove Nursing Center, my grandmother was out in a common room in a wheelchair, admiring some baby birds that had hatched in a small, enclosed aviary. When it was close to 2, we wheeled over to the area where church was to be but only saw one other person. At 2 o’clock, my grandmother announced the time, almost as a call to worship. After five more minutes, I decided to go check with the activities director to make sure we were in the right place. We were, but the church that was supposed to provide the service was not. So, I offered to lead worship if they wanted, and the center’s staff gratefully accepted. I went to get my glasses and Grandma’s Bible, and they began to assemble the residents who enjoy worship.

I have been amazed all my life – since my high school years – at how every experience or teaching or even conversation I have had has prepared me for whatever I needed to do next. It didn’t matter how different or seemingly unconnected that past knowledge and experience was, it came together in the present in ways that might not be imaginable when the individual elements were absorbed into my experience or understanding. (Not unlike the concrescence of process theology, but in a practical, anthropological theology kind of way. ;)

And so it was today.

As I walked back for my glasses and the Bible, I tried to consider whether I knew the Romans I had just reviewed at lunch well enough to test drive it. But I decided that a sermon on doubt, while perfect for Christian Education Sunday, wasn’t the best topic for some folks who might be gathered for reassurance and hope. Then I considered what I knew about the lectionary for this week and remembered Shiphrah and Puah. I decided that their story, while wonderful, might not be the best way to serve this impromptu call to proclamation either. I did smile, though, at the thought of preaching a liberation sermon in a nursing home. Some day, that might be just what the Spirit calls for.

I returned to the Transfiguration story, mixing a bit of this morning’s message from FUMC Grove with my own from earlier this year at FUMC San Diego. And I thought about the hymns I know by heart that were my staples during hospital and homebound visits in my first two years working in the church: Amazing Grace, How Great Thou Art, and In the Garden. I needed songs not just that I knew by heart but that others might because we didn’t have a pianist and we only had one hymnal. And then it came to me, the parallels between the mountaintop transfiguration and the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to Mary in the garden.

By this time about a half dozen residents had gathered on sofas and chairs and wheelchairs. We prayed, we sang Amazing Grace, and I read the Transfiguration story from Mark’s Gospel and retold it a time or two to illuminate various verses. I segued from the voice of God saying: “This is my son, my beloved, LISTEN TO HIM,” to In the Garden, a song about walking and talking with Jesus and hearing him. Then I told the story of how C. Austin Miles came to write that classic hymn from a meditation on John 20, and then I read John 20. And we prayed.

More and more residents and family members gathered, so, by the time we were singing In the Garden, more than 20 voices ranging in age from one single-digit grandchild to my nonagenarian grandma were singing together. As often had happened on my pastoral care visits, people who seemed non-communicative or in their own world, joined in on the chorus of the familiar hymn.

These words do not begin to do justice to that Spirit-filled, sacred act of communal worship. But it was a powerful time of worship for me. An unwavering reminder to me of my call, a joyous celebration of the faith story and legacy I share with my grandmother, a beautiful creation of community, a gift from God.

And, in a way neither of us could have imagined or would have thought possible, my grandmother got to hear me preach.

That’s the sermon I wish I could record for the Board of Ordained Ministry.

Thanks be to God.

Three years ago tonight...

2008-08-13T23:55:00.000-07:00

...I left my desk at the newspaper for the last time.

I find myself at a loss for words tonight and most nights lately, so I don't have many to mark this anniversary.

And yet, one of my joys in the past three years has been reclaiming my identity as a writer after years as an editor.

I would not have begun to predict three years ago that I would already be a seminary graduate.

As timing goes, I treasure the fact that this anniversary was spent as a celebrant at Vespers. Vespers sustains me. And today was a very hard day a the church -- not emotionally, not theologically -- just a hard work day, a realistic one, and yet one to celebrate at the end of the day.

As symbolism goes, I find it significant that on this anniversary, I opened the packet of forms and instructions and questions I must turn into an 80-page application for commissioning within the United Methodist Church along the path to ordination. I even found the question that will prompt me to voice my conscientious objection to some of the denomination's policies.

What a journey of the heart and mind and soul and Spirit these three years have been.

As I told a friend at lunch today, I fully expect I will spend the rest of my life answering my sense of call to ministry, I just cannot predict in what form.

Thanks be to God for the courage to step beyond the newsroom and into the future. May that same courage guide my steps this year.

The Voice of God

2008-07-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

In a half dozen conversations, most of them unplanned and one unexpected, I have heard the voice of God today.

I first sought the voice on the labyrinth, where I came away with a new clarity and a new focus.

Then, I heard the voice at lunch, almost as an interview, in a friend walking me through the past decade or so of my life.

Then, I heard the voice in someone who knows my son well and is concerned about his migraines.

Then, I heard the voice in a distant friend who listened as I talked of how hard it is to be someone in the "soul caring" business who nevertheless sometimes causes "soul suffering" in others.

Then, I heard the voice in an unexpected call from someone I was in prayer with yesterday, someone who told me she heard the voice of God today during a deep tissue massage.

I heard the first voice as clarity and a call to action to help a cherished family member also find clarity. I heard the second voice as truth and a call to stay true to myself. I heard the third voice as compassion and a call to find relief for Ryan. I heard the fourth voice as pain and a call to name, at least to myself, not just some but all of the soul suffering I cause -- even to myself and those I love -- and to accept that some is inevitable and grace is abundant. I heard the fifth call as revelation, a gift of a vision into one possible future, a future I hope to avoid.

Then, I heard the voice within my heart. A voice of love and compassion and grace.

And I knew the answer to my labyrinth prayer.

A Poem in Progress...

2008-07-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

Lightning Bugs and Surround Sound

Often the words to precisely capture an image remain illusive.
The eye takes in so much, the mind adds its own interpretations
-- from the moment and from memory,
The soul provides other layers from emotion.

It seems impossible now to link together a series of consonants and vowels
To describe the view from my grandmother's front porch.
The lightning bug ballet last night with the frog and cricket chorus.
The surround sound symphony this morning of gees and calling birds
-- the tweets, the whistles, the trills, accented by the rustling of light breeze through the tops of the oak trees.

Terry Rocks!

2008-07-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day Weekend, Jeff and Ryan and I traveled to Adrian, Mich., and Defiance, Ohio, to see our nephew Matthew marry our new niece Marsha. I loved being in Defiance! But wordplay aside, over the course of the weekend, Terry (my brother-in-law via his marriage to Jeff's sister Jan) and I engaged in some deep theological discussion, which left little time for the helpful tips Terry often gives me on genealogy. Also over the course of the weekend, I directed Terry to my blog, where some of my theology lingers in some posted seminary papers or less organized ramblings. (It's also where some seminary graduation pictures are, so I had directed others there as well to share the joy photographically. Thanks, again, Molly for the photos!) When I returned home, I noticed that someone in Adrian was reading methodically through my blog. I was pretty sure it was Terry. Affirmation of this deduction came in the mail this week, when I opened a package from Terry that included the above-pictured mug. A person would need to have read this blog entry on my old blog to understand the significance -- the deep theological significance not to mention the sweet gesture -- of the gift. To my delight, the package also included a cap with the word Defiance on it. Now, I can be regularly in defiance! Speaking of defiance, it seems important to note that Terry acquired the mug through legal trade routes, not by the waitress-recommended method that might violate a commandment.

Thanks, Terry!!!

Sadly, I had hopes to put this post up much earlier in the week, complete with a photo of me with said mug and cap, but getting me, my camera, my usb cord, a charged battery and a computer in the same room proved too much of a challenge. And, keeping with my New Appointment Year's resolutions, I wanted to Thank Terry promptly and already feel like I'm late, but my gratitude is enormous.

Happy New (Appointment) Year

2008-07-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

Entering my first year of full-time ministry -- well, official full-time ministry, it seems appropriate to make some New (Appointment) Year's resolutions...

1) Read more poetry.
1a) Write more poetry.
2) See more theatre.
2a) Research cheap ways to see theatre in San Diego.
3) Thank promptly.
3a) Live in an attitude of gratitude.
4) Keep it clean -- the desk, the coffee mug, maybe even the language
5) Delight daily in something. (Today I delighted in Ryan's delight in my explaining that I would no longer be talking on the phone in the car because I didn't want to make a $90 phone call.)
6) Renew my resolve to follow the leadings and guidings, nudgings and shoves of the Spirit.
7) Hold on to hope.

A Pictorial Guide to Blogs I've Intended to Write

2008-06-13T13:32:00.001-07:00

A number of blogs have been inhabiting my mind, my heart, my soul since January. They refuse to be abandoned to the passage of time. This little blog will provide a pictorial representation of the hope for those blogs. The first, which kept insisting on being written all through my final semester of seminary is about the amazing beauty and rebirth that happens on the CST campus every spring semester. Every week something new is budding and something else is in bloom. I first noticed the beauty of this natural rejuvenation in my first spring semester. Even with my heart burdened with heavy grief over the death of my father, I couldn't help but notice some of the blooms. The next spring, I noticed with attentive awareness that truly, every week, something new was in bloom. This spring, I eagerly anticipated this progression through the season of renewal. I had hoped to document it with photos. Instead, I simply appreciated the new blooms each week.

Another blog that has been begging to be birthed would be one about CST's outdoor labyrinth and how walking it, sometimes in tears, sometimes in joy, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, often alone, but sometimes in the company of beloved others, sustained me throughout my three years of seminary. I first walked it that same spring I was noticing the blossoms, and it sits in the midst of a mediation garden that is home to many of those plants. And each year, it seems, has at least one walk that served almost as an icon for the year. This year, it was the day that all of the commuters who formed our close community when we entered in 2005 and 2006 went to the labyrinth at 3 p.m. in California to be in solidarity and prayer with our friend,Jeri, who was attending the memorial service for her mother at 6 p.m. in Florida. We didn't walk the labyrinth; we weeded it. At the end of our time, we had transformed it, given it new life, made it inviting and walkable again. (Allison Rainey even preached about it in the valedictory sermon of the semester.) And my last week of seminary, I walked it again. My favorite time was always nighttime because you can look through the branches of the oak at the center and sometimes see the moon. My last day, I made a special trip to the center of the labyrinth and prayed in thanksgiving for all the life it had sustained and drawn forth and transformed within me.

This represents a blog I have wanted to write for more than a year. It is a blog about communion. It is a blog about baking my "first communion bread" for baccalaureate last year. It is a blog about my call, which has always included a strong call to sacrament, particularly the sacrament of communion. It is a blog about being at General Conference and seeing all the the things I could do for the church as laity should I choose not to pursue candidacy, yet walking the labyrinth there and knowing within moments that "it's about sacrament," my call I realized some years ago that I can tell my call story -- in fact my entire faith journey -- as a series of communion stories strung together. I am so very thankful for all of my experience of communion and all the people with whom I have been and am in communion. I am particularly grateful for a communion experience that came as a blessing and benediction in the last week of seminary.

And, I've been wanting to tell the graduation week story, beginning with our senior prank.
In the 50-year history of Claremont School of Theology, there has never been a senior prank. So, we decided to transform the Craig Academic Building into a cruise ship, complete with portals on faculty offices and a Bon Voyage sign.

And I would love to tell the story of how my friend Jeri and I became unofficial members of last year's baccalaureate worship planning committee and official members and participants in this year's baccalaureate worship planning committee. Both years it was a joy to be at the beck and call of Kathy Black, CST's worship goddess. And, both years, the worship service was a moving and healing experience. The cornbread in the right corner of the photo above is my "second communion bread."

And it may be some time before I have words to convey the depth of the friendships I formed at CST and the difficulty in not having these friends as a regular presence in my life any longer. My friend Eunice is returning to Nigeria at the end of this month. And Jeri and Carol live in Arizona, Jeri in Mesa and Carol in Tucson. I miss them already but I know that they will be a meaningful part of my life Always.

The Sisters Dance

2008-05-24T19:47:00.001-07:00

Our nephew Matt was married today in Defiance, Ohio, on a beautiful day in a wonderful ceremony followed by a reception that was cinematic in its Midwest realities.

It was my pleasure to offer a prayer before the meal at the reception. It was Spirit-led and well received by the happy couple AND by their Lutheran pastor who had officiated the ceremony.

Matt's mother Jan, my sister(-in-law but in name only, more my sister from the moment I entered her home more than a decade ago), thanked me. Cousins by marriage that I have previously only seen at a funeral and in annual holiday cards, wanted to talk theology with me. Friends of the groom's family wanted to know about my call.

So, later in the evening, when they were finally playing some music that didn't require a dance partner, when they were finally playing some rock 'n' roll after a long stretch of big band, square dance, and polka, my sisters(in-law in name only) and I got out and danced the Sisters Dance to "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" then we stayed on the dance floor to "Some Kind of Wonderful." During the refrain that asks: "Can I get a witness?" I was throwing my hands up in old-school evangelical, revival choir style.

My sister Jan leaned over to my sister Betsy as the three of us were dancing together and said:

Jan: You know what the best thing is that Karen learned in seminary?
Betsy: No.
Jan: How to drink wine.

There it is, my seminary experience summed up in one prayer and one embodied dance move.

Thanks be to God for sacred moments and sisters.

Graduation Day!!!

2008-05-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

With many thanks to Molly for her presence throughout this journey, and, particularly this day, her presence AND her camera and eye for the ceremonious and the delightful.

Graduation Day!!! 2

2008-05-21T21:09:00.001-07:00

It is finished!

2008-05-06T10:54:00.001-07:00

The last academic paper of seminary is complete.

I still have two presentations, one oral final and one personal reflection on the experience of attending General Conference to go, but none of those -- not even all of those combined -- has the weight of an academic biblical studies paper.

Now I really can see the light...

As a kindness to loyal readers of the kaleidosope, I WILL NOT post the paper, but I will post the title. The paper was for an advanced New Testament class called Jesus Outside the New Testament. It covered all the apocryphal gospels and writings.

My paper:

The Heavenly Laundress of the Transfiguration
Metamorphism as a Literary Signifier of the Divine

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
That's Texan for Woooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

One Big Paper, Two Presentations, One Oral Final to go...

2008-05-04T18:56:00.001-07:00

By 3 p.m. Wednesday, should I survive to see that hour, I will be done with all my written work for seminary. I have a 20-page, academic New Testament paper due by Wednesday morning, two group class presentations on Wednesday, and an oral final in United Methodist studies on Friday afternoon. Graduation, God willing, is May 17!

I would love to write a post about the joy -- truly -- of attending the UMC General Conference in Fort Worth as well as the ongoing heartbreak of the denomination's disagreement on the worth of all people. Until this moment, I hadn't actually pondered the name of the locale of the meeting -- Fort WORTH. Anyway, my hope is that someday we see all people of inherent worth within the kingdom of God. I am especially grateful to folks like Molly, who led the Cal-Pac, delegation, and the leadership of the bishops of the church and the witness of the Reconciling Ministries Network. There's a lot to ponder prayerfully from the meeting and no time really to process it much less blog about it. So, stay tuned...

Until then, I thought I'd post an ethics research paper on Peter, Paul and Mary. The course is Voices of Non-Violence and the topic was sanctioned by the professor. This is as cool as this time last year when one of my assignments was to read a mystery novel! The paper was properly footnoted but those citations didn't tranfer easily into blogger, so I've left the bibliography by way of citation.

Voices for Justice: The Music and Message of Peter, Paul and Mary

“And now, a group of singers, who have come to help express in song, what this great meeting is all about, I give you now, Peter Paul and Mary…”

With that introduction, the folk trio Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers took the stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – the march where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Peter, Paul and Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer,” by Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes – a simple song about freedom and justice – and they have sung about freedom and justice ever since.
Forty years later, in liner notes to the group’s 2003 album, In These Times trio member Mary Travers wrote:
Now more than ever, the world needs all of us to pay attention.
The rain forests vanishing, caught between poverty and greed.
The continent of Africa, awash with war and disease.
Here in America, human rights crumble under the threat of terrorism.
Now more than ever, we need laughter not tears.
Songs not screams. Hope not despair.
Now we need to put aside history that perpetuates war.
Now we must save our tomorrows by honoring today.
Now more than ever.

Peter, Paul and Mary’s musical activism has now entered its fifth decade, contributing not only to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement but to human rights and peace movements throughout the world.
While the trio began in 1961 as a group brought together when music manager Albert Grossman hoped to create a hipper version of the Kingston Trio, one of their distinguishing traits from the beginning was the presence of unveiled political positions within their appealing folk-pop sound.
Their 1962 debut album “Peter, Paul and Mary” included “If I Had a Hammer” and folk singer-songwriter Pete Seeger’s anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” From the beginning, their music had a message.
In his book, Which Side Are You On?, Dick Weissman notes that their commitment to political causes set the group apart from other folk groups of the time: “They took on the mantle of political folk singers, which either didn’t interest the other folk-pop groups, or was something they avoided out of fear of being blacklisted.”
Also unlike the other folk-pop groups, Peter, Paul and Mary had a series of hit singles and top-selling albums, with eight albums selling 500,000 or more . Their first album charted in “Billboard Magazine’s” Top 10 for 10 months, stayed in the Top 20 for two years, and did not fall off the Top 100 until three-and-a-half years after its release.
Their music had a message and it was popular.
When they stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963 and sang “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” by a new songwriter named Bob Dylan, the group was already well known. The group’s single of Dylan’s song was at No. 5 on Billboard magazine’s charts, their second album, “Moving,” had been certified as a gold album (the metallic musical standard of the time) the day before, and their debut album was in its 71st consecutive week on Billboard’s album charts, listed at No. 7.
In a 1995 interview with former New York Times music critic William Ruhlmann, Yarrow reflected on his hopes for the message of the music. “I knew that the world could be a better place,” Yarrow said. “I knew that folk music could and should have a role in making all that work … articulating the vision and expressing creatively the sense of consensus by the activist community, by the dreamers, by the organizers.”
Yarrow also differentiated between his love of music and his realization of the political and social justice possibilities of folk songs:
I really entered folk music more because I saw its capacity to be an actual expression of commonality than I did because the music is so extraordinary. Yeah, the music is wonderful. I studied the violin and so are the violin concerti. But, what really got to me was the way in which folk music communicated and allowed one to live the sense of commonality and how that sense could then be translated into any number of forms: spiritual connection, political activism, formation of a community of one sort or another in a geographical sense or in the sense of people united with a particular sense of their direction.

The group performed and recorded songs that became icons in the soundtrack of the anti-war protests and the emerging social justice movements of the 1960s. Their music spanned the decade, featuring their own songs and drawing on folk classics like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
They also shared their spotlight by recording new works by emerging songwriters, most notably Bob Dylan. The group’s third album, 1963’s “In the Wind,” was titled after Dylan’s protesting lament, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which the trio performed. (That album also featured Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Quit Your Low Down Ways.”) Weissman notes that Dylan’s own early recordings did not sell well and that it was these recordings of his work by Peter, Paul and Mary that drew national attention to Dylan.
Of those early years, journalist Barry Alfonso has observed, “They arrived on the cultural scene just as their nation was coming to grips with long-deferred issues, foremost among them the demand for racial equality. And, like countless other Americans, they decided they couldn’t remain neutral during this time of reckoning.”
Two events dramatically changed the tenor of the times and the intensity of social activism in their day. The first was the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy three months after the March on Washington – a devastating event that transformed the hopefulness of the early 1960s that had accompanied Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. The second was the large-scale entry of the United States military into Vietnam in August 1964.
Peter, Paul and Mary’s music already spoke to these times, and their songs for social justice as well as their personal commitment to the Civil Rights Movement continued. Alfonso writes: “In a real sense, Peter, Paul and Mary gave voice to a shifting in the national conscience. And, by risking their careers by plunging into direct action, they tried to live out the implications of what their songs talked about.” Peter, Paul and Mary joined other musicians and actors in support of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, where the threat was not just to their careers but to their lives.
The musical landscape had also changed with the popularity in the United States of British rock groups the Beatles and the Rolling Stones beginning in 1964. Pop and rock quickly replaced folk as the music of the day. Liner notes for Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1965 album See What Tomorrow Brings mark the transition, noting that “Bob Shelton no longer considers himself the folk music critic of The New York Times. He’s now the pop music critic.” As those liner notes also reflect, though, Peter, Paul and Mary’s popularity continued to grow, “filling stadiums, auditoriums and hi-fi speakers all over the world.” And, in the hyperbole of the genre, these liner notes concluded: “Their message is the same as that of any artist through the centuries, a sermon of truth and beauty in the context of their times. And the fact that PP&M can appreciate the Rolling Stones or even the Beatles is added proof that PP&M are in touch with their times.”
Their success as a folk trio continued for nine years from their debut, yet they each had the talent and prominence to pursue individual careers. In 1970, the group announced a year-long sabbatical to pursue individual interests that turned into an amicable split lasting until 1978. Had that been the end of the trio’s story, they still would be remembered as one of the most successful American folk groups. And they would also still be remembered as significant voices for social justice during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement and as voices for peace during the Vietnam Era.
In the decades since their 1978 reunion, however, their music and their social action have been present in many of the world’s human rights and social justice causes. Their greatest fame, their widest popularity, their greatest success may have been in the 1960s, but their broadest work for social justice came in the 30 years that followed their reunion.
Coretta Scott King, who carried on the civil rights work of her husband Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected in 2003 on the contribution Peter, Paul and Mary made not just in the 1960s but in their life’s work: “Peter, Paul and Mary are not only three of the greatest folk artists ever, but also three of the performing arts’ most outstanding champions of social justice and peace. They have lent their time and talents to the Civil Rights Movement, labor struggles, and countless campaigns for human rights for decades, and their compassion and commitment remain as strong as their extraordinary artistry.”
It was another social justice cause that reunited the group in 1978. During their time apart, each had recorded solo albums, but Peter Yarrow had also continued to be active in giving voice to social justice causes. In 1978, he was putting together an anti-nuclear song rally at the Hollywood Bowl and he called Noel Stookey and Mary Travers to see if they shared his concern and to see if they would join him for the concert. (Remembering the preparation for the event on the group’s website, Yarrow admitted that his activist work had been easier when the group was together. “I always was able to do the organizing that I had done in the past by virtue of saying, ‘Well, Peter, Paul, and Mary are doing it,’ then other people would jump on board.” )
The trio committed to the performance and then to a reunion album and a reunion tour, all of which were intended to be temporary. Yet what they found in that first concert was that their collective voice was more powerful and had greater reach than their individual careers. Yarrow remembered that anti-nuclear concert at the Hollywood Bowl this way: “We went out there, and it was amazing. It was explosive when we got on stage, and it was clear, not just that people remembered us, but we felt needed. … I said, ‘Yeah, people still make us feel like we can be useful and helpful and involved in the struggles of today.’ And, of course, for me, that was always the key to my involvement with the music because it did more than entertain.”
The album, titled Reunion, was not commercially successful, but the reunion tour had that same sense of energy and purpose that Yarrow described from that first reunion performance during the anti-nuclear protest. The group toured 18 cities, performing their iconic songs from the 1960s as well as songs from their reunion album and, as became their practice, taking the stage in individual sets to highlight each member’s passions and performance styles. Travers described the group’s reunion this way in program notes for the concert tour: “It’s a reunion of the best sort. There is surprisingly little reminiscing and a lot of what we want to say about life now.” I attended the last of those concerts at the aptly named Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas. It was my first Peter, Paul and Mary concert and it was intended to be the group’s last. What I remember most was the encore. The group came back to the stage and played and sang a lengthy encore set and then stood arm-in-arm drinking in the applause and affirmation. It was as if they didn’t want to leave the stage.
For about a year, they returned to their individual careers, but reunited again in 1980 to tour. In December 1981, they recorded a live album that was released in the United States in 1983. Where their Reunion album had contained songs of coming back together, their live album, Lifelines, reconnected them and their work to social justice causes and set the tone for years of concerts and recordings to come. The album included an anti-nuclear song called, “Power,” by John and Johanna Hall and Phil Och’s “There But For Fortune,” protesting hunger, homelessness and the costs of war. The album also included a short ballad, the chorus of which could serve as a living epitaph for the group: Music speaks louder than words/It’s the only thing that the whole world listens to/Music speaks louder than words/When you sing, people understand.
The reunited group was also recommitted to using their music for social justice. In 1983, Travers and Yarrow traveled to El Salvador, where U.S. involvement in a conflict between the Salvadoran government and its leftist opposition were reminiscent of the early U.S. involvement in Vietnam. By 1985, Peter, Paul and Mary’s music and message were, once again, inextricably linked. That year, they recorded as singles Stookey’s “El Salvador,” protesting the U.S. involvement in Central America, and Peter Yarrow’s “Light One Candle,” in support of the Sanctuary movement which tried to provide safety for Central American refugees, Russian Jews and others fleeing their homes as the result of human rights abuses.
The following year, with a new recording contract from Gold Castle Records, they recorded No Easy Walk to Freedom, an album that combined the sound and passion of their work in the 1960s with the social justice issues of the 1980s. The title song protests South African apartheid and the album cover has a picture of Travers and her mother and daughter being arrested protesting outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. The album also incorporated the Yarrow and Stookey’s social justice singles the group had released the year before.
Yarrow’s “No Easy Walk to Freedom, written with Margery Tabankin, ” ties the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and King’s marches to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa with a reminder that slavery once existed in the United States. For me, it represents the essence of the social justice message that has always been a part of Peter, Paul and Mary. It is a hopeful song, envisioning a future when all people will know freedom. Yet it also unapologetically bares truths that might be painful to some. It provides a sense of history – where we’ve been to help lead us where we’re going. And its lyrics draw on recognizable word icons to tie the listener into past times, into now and into the future. And, while it is a song written against apartheid, it can be sung for any social justice song. The lyrics are:
Brother Martin was walkin’ with me,
And every step I heard liberty.
Tho he’s fallin’, come a million behind!
Glory, Hallelujah, gonna make it this time!

Chorus:
No easy walk to freedom,
No easy walk to freedom,
Keep on walkin’ and we shall be free,
That’s how we’re gonna make history.

Across the ocean, the blood’s running warm,
I, I hear it coming, there’s a thunderin’ storm
Just like we lived it, you know that it’s true,
Nelson Mandela, now we’re walkin’ with you!

Chorus

In our land, not so long ago,
We lived the struggle, and that’s how we know
Slavery abolished, comin’ freedom’s call
Keep on walking and apartheid will fall!

Chorus

Oh, bread for the body, there’s got to be
But a soul will die without liberty
Pray for the day when the struggle is past!
Freedom for all! Free at last! Free at last!

No easy walk to freedom,
No easy walk to freedom,
Keep on walkin’ and we shall be free,
That’s how we’re gonna make history.

You and me!

In many ways, the song spans the music and message of the trio, referencing the March on Washington, coming into contemporary struggle for freedom of the 1980s and envisioning a future where everyone is free at last.
In the years since, their songs and their activism have protested the exploitation of laborers, raised awareness about homelessness issues, lamented “the troubles” in Ireland, championed many environmental concerns, advocated for peace in the Middle East, and opposed U.S. military actions around the globe, including the war in Iraq.
In an essay in the trio’s 2003 retrospective collection, author David Halberstam describes the group as “strolling players, as it were, strolling across the entire national landscape for three generations.”
The group still performs, though Travers’ health has limited the number of concerts as she recovered first from leukemia and then back surgery, and has scheduled a fall tour that includes a December 2008 performance at Carnegie Hall. The last new recording was 2003’s, In These Times, though compilations have been released since then, most notably 2003’s four-cd retrospective, Carry It On.
In an article within that retrospective collection, journalist Barry Alfonso describes the trio’s ability to connect their music through popular culture: “They helped to bring a sense of conscience to American mass culture in an all but unprecedented way. … Calling for justice amidst the romantic fluff of the (radio) airwaves was – and remains – nothing less than a radical act.”
It was a radical act whose activism began on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963. In Alfonso’s article, Travers recalls that day:
“We were up on the steps with Lincoln at our back. … And I remember when we were singing feeling almost an epiphany … this was the first time I’d ever seen that many people, and they were all hoping for social change and for something good. It was probably the most pivotal moment of my life…”

That moment has informed the group and their music through five decades as they continue to share songs about justice and live into their message through personal activism. The continuing success and the longevity of Peter, Paul and Mary is not about nostalgia. It’s about social justice – enduring commitment to freedom and fairness and non-violence not just in one pivotal moment but through a lifetime of moments, through decades of concern, to call both attention and hope to people who are oppressed throughout the world.
That is why the message and the music of Peter, Paul and Mary carry on.

Bibliography

Alfonso, Barry. “The Trio.” Peter, Paul and Mary: Carry It On. Burbank:
Warner Bros. Records, Inc. 2003. Compact disk collection.

Court, John. Liner notes. See What Tomorrow Brings. Burbank: Warner Bros. Records, Inc.
1965. LP recording.

Davis, Myrna. “Peter, Paul, and Mary.” Reunion Tour Program. 1978. Available from
http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/history/tbr.htm .

Halberstam, David. “A Recollection.” Peter, Paul and Mary: Carry It On. Burbank:
Warner Bros. Records, Inc. 2003. Compact disk collection.

Peter, Paul and Mary. Peter, Paul and Mary: Carry It On. Burbank: Warner Bros.
Records, Inc. 2003. Compact disk collection.

Peter, Paul and Mary. “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” No Easy Walk to Freedom. Los Angeles:
Gold Castle Records. 1986. LP recording.

Ruhlmann, William. “Peter Paul and Mary: A Song to Sing All Over this Land. peterpaulandmary.com [website]; available from
http://peterpaulandmary.com/history/f-ruhlmann1.htm

Szatmary, David P. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-And-Roll. Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Pearson Education, Inc., 2004.

Travers, Mary. “In These Times,” liner notes. In These Times. Burbank: Warner Bros.
Records, Inc. 2003. Compact disk.

Weissman, Dick. Which Side Are You One? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival
in America. New York: Continuum, 2005.

www.classicbands.com [website]. “Peter, Paul and Mary.” Available from http://www.classicbands.com/ppm.html .

Perfect Timing!

2008-04-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following paper as a theological reflection during the doctrine section of my United Methodist Studies class. I wrote it in February; it just came back to me on Friday. It is exactly the message I needed to see right now as I prepare to attend and observe the General Conference of my United Methodist denomination. And, the next three weeks are lining up to be my most stressful of seminary, with a trip to General Conference for three credits needed for graduation, a 15-page research paper due the day after my return, two class presentation/projects, and a 20-page academic paper on the transfiguration in the Apocryphal Acts of John due the following week. And, oh yeah, a report on attending General Conference.

Reading Randy Maddox and Richard Heitzenrater on John Wesley’s theology of grace and how that understanding affected his ministry, I understood, perhaps for the first time, why I am a Methodist – why I am Wesleyan.
For Wesley, grace was not simply or exclusively one moment in a lifetime but the ongoing presence of God (my language here might be Divine Spirit). The experience of grace is a possibility in every moment in every lifetime. And the human response to that grace creates a dynamic relationship between humanity and the Divine.
For several years now, without knowing it was Wesleyan, I have asked – not just at Easter but throughout the year about the events of that time – “What’s your response to the resurrection?”(I might try to reframe the question this year to better match my theology – “What’s your response to this gift of grace?” but I would lose the alliteration.)
This understanding of grace as an ever-present reality, allows salvation for Wesley – for Methodists – to be about spiritual healing through the Divine but also with the Divine. Humans participate in that grace through their response to such merciful love.
Maddox explains it this way: “God has chosen to allow a place for our participation, both before and after our justification – not as a means of meriting salvation, but as a ‘condition’ that upholds our integrity within the relational process of saving grace.”
This is the point where everyone feels a need to demonstrate how this is not works-righteousness. I understand why the scholars and theologians need to do so, but I find the debate tedious, so I will not repeat it except to say that I accept that this grace is freely given and it is the human response to that grace that engenders action.
For Wesley, for Maddox, for me, this active response to God’s grace – what Heitzenrater identifies as our awareness of God with us – is gradual and lifelong. The dynamic and relational interaction with the Divine allows for growth over a lifetime not simply a “legal transaction” of an instant that secures a final outcome. In this way, Maddox writes, “the fundamental goal of salvation remained therapeutic transformation.”
For Wesley, Heitzenrater notes, that this dynamic relationship with God as evidenced in Jesus was not just about his death and resurrection but also about his life and passion – his ministry, his own response.
For Wesley, this response in humans is enabled – empowered – by the Holy Spirit. And it is that Spirit that brings the sense of the active presence of God with us. I found Wesley’s own words, quoted from his “The New Birth” sermon beautiful: “God is continually breathing, as it were, upon [a human’s] soul, and [a human’s] soul is breathing onto God.” Those words give voice to my experience of the Divine and the relational nature of that Divine presence in my life and in Creation.
Astounding for me, though, was to find that Wesley had also given voice to a concept I have struggled with throughout seminary – and, perhaps, throughout my life. What about doubt? What about our brokenness and the breaking we do? What about our anxieties? In a life given breath by grace, why are they even present? Why do they sometimes feel ever-present? Is our humanity such that we will not know a relief from them until some future culminating grace? That has never been my understanding of grace. And, these readings on the ever-present nature of grace – unearned grace – would seem to contradict a sense of eschatological delay. And that certainly doesn’t seem very Wesleyan either. Wesley has a grace for every life stage.
Wesley struggled with this human reality, too. What he concluded, Heitzenrater writes, is that “pardon could co-exist with sin, that faith could stand beside doubt, and that both fear and joy were continuing parts of the Christian experience.” That’s big. Our humanity does not hinder our Christian experience; it informs it.
Accepting our humanity as reality and not as something to be overcome or ashamed of gives me an even greater sense of gratitude for grace – a grace that allows me to be fully human, fully me while seeking to be in partnership with the Divine. That sense of grace increases my response to grace. The result is a life – and, I hope, a ministry – that allows me to live and work and love in ways that demonstrate that loving and breathing presence of God and share its hope and soul-healing possibilities with others.
What Maddox calls “response,” Heitzenrater calls “results.” For me this nuanced difference is helpful in understanding grace manifest in a variety of ways. The response to grace is how we live our lives in relation to this Divine love. The results of grace – our human actions with one another and with the Divine -- are our eschatology. They are the end results.
Through years of experience and discernment – perhaps even coupled with scripture and reason if not tradition, I have concluded that I am clearly Protestant. I began my faith journey in the Unitarian-Universalist church and became a Christian through the United Methodist Church at age 14. In my early 20s, when my parents converted to Catholicism, I did, too, though more for family dynamic than theological reflection. My self-determination to return to the United Methodist Church was based on my sense that I was far more Protestant than Catholic. What I have found through these readings, though, is how unique John Wesley’s theology is even within Protestantism. His sense of grace and salvation seems far more freeing to me than the theologies of grace and salvation in other Protestant faiths. His sense of grace seems to relieve an anxiety over salvation that still seems present in theologies of other Protestant faiths.
These readings helped me affirm that I am a Methodist – a Wesleyan Methodist – with a passion for living in response to this gift of grace through loving action and service and breath.

Six little words...

2008-04-13T17:08:00.001-07:00

Learning to be authentic not emphatic.

Molly tagged me with a challenge to compose my memoir using just six words and a picture.
(I've always thought the ratio was 1 picture = 1,000 words.)
The words were easy, they came to me in a recent conversation with my friend Carol -- though I used a few more than six words in that conversation. The picture was harder -- for instance, I thought about an exclamation point, but, well, that's really the opposite of the image I'm going for. So, I wanted a photo of me. The closest thing I've come in seminary to being my authentic self in relation to God and creation WITHOUT being emphatic was in our play Noah's Flood, a recreation of a medieval mystery drama. (You can read about it here.) I've spent most of seminary learning to be authentically myself, but I've also spent most of it being emphatic. That's the rough edge I'm working on now.

I tag my Mom, who will likely just need to email me her six words and photo. I tag Jeri and Courtney, my only bloggin' friends left who Molly or Orangeblossoms didn't tag. And, I tag my friend Carol who doesn't have a blog yet but will soon cuz I promised to help her set one up. And I'll think of one more and tag 'em here in a bit. UPDATE: I tag Ryan who volunteered!!! (That's "big" Ryan from "little church", not my son Ryan, who, come to think of it, maybe I should tag, too.)

Here's what you do:

1) Write your own six word memoir.

2) Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration.

3) Link to the person who tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.

4) Tag at least five more blogs with links. (THIS FEELS A BIT TOO MUCH LIKE A CHAIN LETTER TO ME, AND, I ALWAYS BREAK THOSE, SO, JUST FEEL FREE TO PLAY WHETHER OR NOT YOU INVITE OTHERS.)

5) Don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

6) Have fun.

Courage inspires courage

2008-04-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a Voices of Non-Violence ethics class this semester and one of the voices we have studied is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a reflection paper I wrote for the class a few weeks ago. I post it today, April 4, 2008, the 40th anniversary of the attempt to silence that voice, an attempt that assassinated the man but could not kill the dream.

Forty years ago this April, I was sitting in a 1960 Valiant with my father in the parking lot of Montgomery Ward in Fort Worth, Texas, waiting near a loading dock for my first ever bicycle to be assembled. As we waited, news came on the car radio that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. I was eight years old. I did not know who King was; I only knew that word of his death had shaken my father to tears.
It fell to my father, in his shock and grief, to try to explain to me who King was and why my father was so sad. With the perspective of 40 years, and my own experiences of parenthood, I can imagine that it saddened him, too, to need to explain to me what assassination meant. (And as I write this, I realize that as I was explaining this same thing to my six-year-old son this January as he tried to understand who this King was that allowed him to spend a Monday away from school with me, I told of King and his work and his dream and I left out the part about how he died.)
Forty years later, the words and work of King and the words and work and reflections of Vincent Harding in Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero resonate with me in unexpected but welcome ways.
I particularly appreciated Harding’s ability to bring King’s work and message into more contemporary contexts. I appreciated the history and behind-the-scenes perspective Harding brought to King’s times, but the chapters that most captivated me were the one on King as “Blessed Astronaut of the Human Race” and the one comparing the Vietnam era with the violence today in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Harding writes that King was an explorer like many women and men who have been “explorers of the human capacity for union with the magnificent creativity of God.” He also writes that King, at his best, held fast to the truth regardless of where it led him. I take great inspiration from this conviction, and I hope that just as courage inspired courage for King in the early days of the Montgomery boycotts, his courage can inspire my own both in ministry and in staying true to who I am and what I believe in all my life. King held fast to the truth, Harding writes, “even when the denials were official government policy and even when the deniers were the leaders of the nation,” “even when the deniers were brothers and sisters in his church community.”
In writing of King’s strong and intentional opposition to the Vietnam War, Harding asks: “What do the children of God do when leaders say to us that all these people and all these other places are not really children of God but enemies?” So many of today’s human rights struggles, today’s economic struggles, and certainly today’s struggles for peace revolve around the same central truth. Since we are all children of God, how do we behave toward one another and how do we structure our communities in ways that affirm each child of God?
To have the convictions of King, Harding writes, we need to be “strong, convinced, integrated individuals, who have our own deep sense of who we are and therefore what we do and why we do it.” That is the truth I hope to live into. That is where I hope King’s courage can inspire my own.

Questions for further reflection:

1. There are still opportunities today for us to answer what Harding calls King’s calling to all children of God to be “pioneers in the realm of human community, in the realm of human compassion, in the realm of human justice.” Harding says King was doing all this as a part of “holding on to the truth of God’s unifying, all encompassing love” and while “holding on to the insane, impractical, magnificent truth of the call to ministry.” What are yours? What are those of your communities or congregations?

2. If King’s courage can inspire your courage, what courage do you want to strengthen or live into?

Pastor Praises Peep Show

2008-03-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

This is just too fun and funny not to share...

Apparently there's this craft craze -- Molly why haven't I heard about this from you? -- that involves making dioramas out of Peeps.

Trivial, you say.
Child's play, you think.

Perhaps, but, also sanctioned by The Washington Post, which for the past two years has run a contest.

Here's a link to this year's Peep Show.

I have too many favorites to name but U2PeepD is particularly amusing.

Here a link to last year's Peep Show. Peep Show.

Apparently the Chicago Tribune held a contest this year, but they seem to have let people submit their own photos, there's a definite difference in photo quality and consistenency. You can go here to see finalists and to get links to 100s! more.

(A word of warning if you're viewing this with kids, one or two of the dioramas are rated PeepsG for suggestive content, but even they would require explanation for kids to notice.) Exhibit A:

This seems right up the alley of my friend Michelle from seminary who once told the story of the Maccabees using troll dolls -- the sight of dismembered troll dolls in commuter housing was startling! But just think what she could do with Peeps!

Whispering Hope on Good Friday

2008-03-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Twice in the past week, people have reached my blog through Google searches for either the lyrics or the title of the hymn "Whispering Hope".

I know this because, about a month ago, I intalled a sitemeter on this blog. It provides basic information about the way people enter and leave the site and the time they spend on it. It tells the location of their internet provider, which is a general indication of where they are.

Because I'm curious, I always look at the referrals when someone from some other city reaches these words through an internet search. What is it, exactly, that they are searching for that lands them here? And, do the results satisfy or sustain them?

One time, someone reached my site searching for -- I'm not making this up -- kaleidoscope etymology. What they found was this.

Another time someone was looking for kaleidoscopes in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, which sent them to my page because of the name of my blog and an answer to a MEME in a comment section where a good friend named her hometown.

Someone's search for "barbershop quartet in Paris, Texas" landed them here.

Someone else was searching for "how to use amazing grace in a communion service" and landed here.

Today, though, I find myself wondering about the searcher in Clearwater, FL, searching in the same week as the searcher in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, UK, for the words to an old-school hymn of hope.

What they each found was this post I wrote about how my grandmother's act of choosing hopeful songs for her own funeral became a comfort to me not only at the time of her funeral but years later as I was in mourning for my father. That she could comfort me across time and eternity was an incredible testament of the loving Spirit of God to me. So, I'm grateful to these searchers in Clearwater and in Nottinghamshire for taking me back to that place. My hope, my prayer for them is that they found the comfort and hope they needed.

I'm searching for my own whispering hope this week. The sadness I hold this Good Friday is that the United Methodist Church preaches grace so beautifully and has a theology of grace that is both comforting and hopeful. But the denomination does not practice the grace it preaches. Too often, the implied message in their action toward their own clergy is this: "Yes, we preach and teach grace -- but it doesn't apply to you." I know this isn't true. I claim the grace of Christ, the grace of God, the comfort and guidance of the Spirit. And I cry for the church that somehow thinks it can stand as judge of who truly is deserving of God's grace. All are welcome in my understanding of grace. May it be so. Amen.

This is how nerdy I am

2008-03-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton will be releasing records of her time as First Lady. Literal records of her time -- the kind of detail that only journalists (and apparently right-wing conspiracy theorists) actually sue for. So tomorrow, the Clinton library (the other Clinton's library) will release details of her calendar.

In 1997, we invited the then-First Lady to speak at a conference The San Diego Union-Tribune sponsored about preventing youth violence. It was a cool conference -- one of the highlights of my time as Solutions Editor. We had lots of great how-to panels from groups who had had success engaging kids and educating parents and offering mentoring.

She declined. However, she offered to send a video welcome message. So, somewhere on her calender in 1997 there will be a time blocked off to tape said message -- and, I assume, several others for other organizations -- and I'm just nerdy enough that I'm going to go look.

And, this is not exactly how I had hoped to blog about this, but,

it was amazing to me what a thrill it was to be in the voting booth and actually finally have the option to vote for a viable woman as a candidate for president. That said, Hillary's my candidate.

Opening Day

2008-03-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

Fan advisory warning: In the world of youth baseball, the teams are assigned. Hence, a child who has attended Padres games since he was in utero can end up wearing a uniform for a dreaded rival. And, despite myself, I find myself yelling: Go Dodgers!

A brief rant

2008-02-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

Imagine my surprise when I logged on to Washington Mutual's digital banking site and saw one of my favorite celebration phrases. Usually when I look into my checking account this time of month, I'm trying to see whether the mastercard payment is going to overdraft the account, so Woohoo! is never at the forefront of my mind. So, I took it as a modest but ignorable affront until, UNTIL I saw that the WAMU folks felt a need to TRADEMARK "Whoohoo!"

Now I'm really going to go broke. I can't possibly pay them everytime I use "their" phrase. As an act of civil disobedience, I'm tempted to print a T-shirt today with "their" phrase on it...

Whoohoo! Whoohoo! Whoohoo!

Midwife to the Spirit

2008-01-29T04:57:00.000-08:00

Theology of Ministry

(If you're already thinking, hey, this looks more like a seminary assignment than a blog, you're right. Read on at your own peril. But, if you make it to the end, I'd welcome your thoughts. And a shout-out to Molly who first shared the ministry image of midwifing the Spirit.)

Personal Mission Statement: To be a willing midwife to the Spirit in worship and in the world, making space for infinite possibilities of experience of God and grace.

In my ministry and my life, some of the most fulfilling and significant moments have come when I am able to help others realize their own worth and potential and experience a sense of wholeness and value as they are and as they will be.

At their best, worship and fellowship offer an invitation to that wholeness. My hope as a minister is to share that invitation to wholeness that I experience most often through the welcoming, nurturing and loving presence of the Spirit of God by journeying with others who seek that sense of wholeness.

My own theology strongly embraces pluralism and has since childhood, when my parents and the children’s education teachers at the Unitarian-Universalist Church we attended taught me that all life is of value and all humanity has worth. For me, pluralism is the world’s invitation to wholeness.

I am no longer a Unitarian-Universalist, but the foundational message of the worth of all people remains with me. As a United Methodist in seminary at Claremont School of Theology, I have learned how to theologically test my belief that all humanity, all creation, is connected and in meaningful relation together – and working together with an ongoing and infinite Spirit of Life that many call “God.” In seminary, I have learned to stretch my sense of pluralism to something called “radical inclusion,” and when I feel myself beginning to exclude someone or some faith, I try instead to see how to view them as part of a whole – an ever-changing and expanding whole, like the universe itself.

As a minister within a Christian denomination, my core commitment to pluralism brings both challenges and opportunities. Within the United Methodist Church, there are members and leaders who believe as I do that all people and all religions are of value, and there are also members and leaders who understand Christianity to be “the one true way.” My sense of “radical inclusion” would call me to minister to all of them while still professing my faith in the all-encompassing grace of God.

For me, that grace is best represented at the welcome table of communion. We celebrate communion weekly in the contemporary congregation I help serve. It is a joy each week to witness to the wonder of God, to the call to follow Jesus, to the assurance of the ever-present Spirit, and then to invite those in worship to the open table of communion. My favorite words in the liturgy of communion are the epiclesis, “Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here…,” and my favorite words in our invitation to the table are, “Our communion is an open communion. You don’t need to be a member of this church or any church…”

I take personal comfort in the concept of the Holy Spirit working through each of us, with us at baptism, with us at communion, with us at every moment in our days. For me, that Spirit unites humanity and celebrates our infinite diversities. And I rejoice that the invitation is open. While the United Methodist Church battles over many differences – from how to fund new-church starts and where to put them to whether all humanity is welcome to seek to answer a call to ministry within the denomination – I celebrate that each of our two sacraments are open.

Communion grounds my ministry and it grounds me in a faith that celebrates worthiness and wholeness through grace. And my response to that grace is to want to live in the church and the world in ways that invite others to that experience of value and worth.

The epiclesis continues by asking the Spirit to help us be the body of Christ in the world. For me, ministry that remains within the walls of the church is limited. When we come together in worship, we renew our spirits and feed our minds and souls and hearts. This is not simply as a refueling until the next worship experience but a renewal to live beyond the church in ways that celebrate the worth and value of others. I see this not just as a call for clergy but as a call for all.

My theology, then, drives my mission. I want to minister in such a way that people see and feel and experience their own value and worth and then are able to affirm the value and worth of others beyond the church.

Because pluralism is so central to my faith, I explored it in my culminating theological paper in my systematic theology class, and that offered an opportunity to delve much deeper into my own beliefs. I have embraced the concept that we each carry divinity within ourselves – that we see God in one another and throughout Creation. I believe that we are all in relation together and I see that relation as part of a creative spirit, a life force, an energy that is present for all to experience. In listening to others, I hear that some experience this energy as associated with God, directing, leading, guiding – and, for some, interceding. I hear, too, that some experience this energy as natural force, changing like the seasons, yet fixed in a continuing cycle of life like the seasons. That is why I embrace pluralism. Radical inclusion is not radical if anyone is left out.

My challenge in seminary has been to learn to express this theology in a way that I can be authentic and true to my beliefs in the practice of ministry. I have sometimes wondered if my beliefs set me outside of my faith tradition. And I am grateful for those doubts. They help me better understand how to define myself to myself, and that helps me be more authentic in ministry.

My doubts have enriched my faith journey and my faith practice. I think mainstream protestant churches would be more vibrant if we welcomed doubts and doubters. My experience has been that we do not make enough space for doubt and questioning and movement within faith. We sometimes express the faith journey as a one-way path that can be strayed from rather than a continuum or infinite circle on which we travel back and forth through a lifetime of seeking to understand.

The scriptures, then, that best inform my ministry are the how-to scriptures, the scriptures that offer instruction for that journey. From Hebrew scriptures, Micah 6:8, which addresses foundational requirements: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. From the Christian testament, Luke 10:27, which addresses a wholeness of love asking us to: Love God with all our being – heart, soul, mind, strength – and love our neighbors.

Infinite possibilities exist to fulfill each of these scriptures. In ministry, my hope is to follow the leadings of the Spirit of God so that I may help others open themselves to that same Spirit. And, open to the Spirit and assured of our wholeness through grace, we can live together in a way that celebrates the worth and value of all humanity in a world that is just and kind and humbly aware of the gift of life and love.

May it be so.

Time travel

2008-01-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

About six years ago, probably around two in the morning, I was holding this infant boy in my arms, nursing him and rocking him gently back to sleep. And I felt this surge of contentment. I had this wish that I could travel back in time to some much less contented times and say: Hey look at this. You're not going to believe it, but look at this. See, it getters better. See. I wanted to travel back in time and tell myself that everything was going to be okay.

It was a beautiful moment.

It is also the moment that Melody Maxwell was born.

Melody is middle school girl who loves math and science. She accidentally discovers that she can time travel and spends an entire book trying to figure out how. She travels backward and a bit forward in time. She goes all the way back to the moon landing of 1969, sitting on a porch swing with her grandfather and gazing up at the moon. She does try to communicate with herself across time. And she has some misadventures -- like trapping her best friend in 2003 -- think I Love Lucy meets Contact.

I wrote a children's novel -- aimed for advanced grade school readers -- about Melody. I even spent some time trying to get an agent for it and talking to a few publishers. But I put the project on the shelf when I decided to go to seminary.

A few months ago, it came up with conversation with Ryan and he sat on my lap at the computer and I read him a few pages, but he got bored. This morning it came up again because he told me he's learning about dialogue in school. I told him that was the part I had the most fun writing in my book. He had forgotten about it and his eyes lit up. He wanted to know if it existed as a real book. I told him it still needed some work -- didn't go into any tedious publishing details with him. I told him about the first time she time travels and what happens. And I told him how she tries to use her new-found time travel powers to save the Space Shuttle Columbia. I told him about the porch swing talks in the past with her grandfather and a scene I love that involves her grandmother. And he wanted a copy. I don't really have one. I did a substantial rewrite on the first four chapters but I haven't really married that to the remainder of the book. But he still wanted to see it. So, I printed the first four chapters -- 37 typed pages -- put a paper clip on it and handed it to him. A bit later, I saw him absorbed on the sofa with something -- then I realized it was Melody's story. He took the pages with him to school.

And, I'm nervous.

It never really dawned on me that some day that little infant that inspired Melody's story would be eager to read it.

Perhaps he will also inspire a completed rewrite.

But first, I have a 20-page theology paper to write -- my last serious theology paper of seminary. And it's not nearly as fun as Melody's adventures. Though it is a bit like Contact.

A Christmas Story

2007-12-16T19:39:00.000-08:00

Wrapping up treasures

2007-12-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know many people who honestly enjoy wrapping presents at Christmas, and of those I can think of who might challenge this statement, none are men.

I sometimes delight in wrapping a solo gift for someone's birthday, but most of the time my own wrapping is utilitarian. I would not win any honors from Martha Stewart for packaging.

For my father, wrapping packages was a chore. But he came to cherish his Christmas giving tradition. After years of leaving all the gift getting and wrapping to my mother -- except, of course, her own, my father decided one year to shop and wrap.

I wish I knew what prompted him to decide to shop that first year or how he chose Junk Lady Antiques as his destination. I suspect he went there to shop for Mom and decided to get something for us all. Maybe the Junk Lady herself suggested it. Dad liked doing business with the Junk Lady because her establishment was out on Loop 286, no where near the crowded shops on the town square of Paris, Texas.

Most of the time, the women he bought for -- me, my brother's wife, my mother -- got old costume jewelry -- just antique enough to wear as a retro fashion statement. In my opinion, the gifts for men -- my brother, my husband -- were often more intriguing. Children on his list -- my nieces and much later my son -- got odd little toys. One year, my nieces graduated to costume jewelry -- a sure sign my Dad was noting the maturity of his granddaughters. Not all in the same year, but each in our time, all the women got a costume jewelry Christmas tree pin. It was a tradition within a tradition.

I treasure all my gifts from Dad, but my favorite ever is a brass letter opener with a round magnifying glass in one end and the words: Metatone Reconstructive Tonic stamped into one side. I also treasure his last gift to Ryan, and so did Dad.

Two years ago, when Dad's surgery had been delayed a few days and I was staying with my parents, Dad and I were both in the living room wrapping presents. I had done some shopping for Ryan's Michigan and Illinois cousins and was wrapping them to mail. Dad was wrapping his "junk lady" gifts. Dad hadn't shopped with the original junk lady since he moved away from Paris in the early 1990s, but he always found an antique store to patronize and we persisted in calling these gifts "junk lady" gifts.

He showed me the gift he had gotten for Ryan. It was a true antique -- a metal alligator mechanical toy that walks and snaps its jaw. Dad was delighting in it. "Tell Ryan this is just like a toy I played with when I was his age," Dad said.

Dad put up the artificial tree for my mother that day, too. And he put his presents for all of us beneath it.

It was early December, but Dad had done his shopping even earlier, knowing he wouldn't feel up to shopping after his surgery, and knowing, too, that there was a risk he wouldn't be around to shop.

Earlier today, I was thinking about wrapping presents with Dad and thinking what a gift it had been, as we all felt the fresh pains of his loss, to have some unopened token -- treasure really -- of his love, his care, his attentiveness.

How wonderful that he had the foresight to wrap those presents before his surgery, I thought.

Then I realized he hadn't. Dad had not wrapped those presents before his surgery. He had wrapped them after it had been delayed. He had already left home for Houston, thinking he was headed to surgery. Instead they sent him home for five days. That's when he wrapped the presents.

In that split-second of realization, I smiled. In an odd way, I take some comfort in the timing. It tells me that Dad was actually pretty optimistic about his surgery. He hadn't wrapped these presents ahead of time "just in case", he wrapped them after the first scheduled surgery date had passed, in those five days when he had some extra time on his hands.

I'll always be grateful for that extra time, and I'll always be grateful, too, to the Junk Lady.

Dec. 7 -- A journey in time

2007-12-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

Tis the season...
...and it always will be.

The season when memories of Dad's diagnosis, surgery, death and memorial, blend into the early weeks of Advent. Last year, I kept a journal marking the fortnight between Dec. 5, 2005, when I prepared to leave for Texas and Dad's surgery, and Dec. 19, the day of his memorial service. It was a challenge to myself to enter into an act of creativity in response to whatever came up for me each day.
This year, I did not feel a need to mark the fortnight in its entirety. (Though I am rereading last year's journal.)

But Dec. 7 will forever be a day that lives in memory, transformed for me from that Day of Infamy much of the rest of the world remembers into a day of wonderful memory of a car drive across Texas and time that drew my family together in appreciation of life and one another. I wrote about it here. Dad was a member of the Texas Folklore Society, published in their publications and sometimes presenting papers at their annual gathering. This year, the subject of their publication is death and dying, and my mother encouraged me to offer this essay to them. She maintains that she did not call Paul Simon a dork. We disagree. But otherwise, we both remember this day as magical, supernatural, a gift of time.

This Dec. 7, I have better clarity about who I am and what that means for my future, this is a result of lots of work in seminary and ministry, in friendship and in prayer. And I am grateful, though I still wish I could run some of it by Dad. I miss his wisdom.

My own parental wisdom had a minor moment of triumph today. Sent to the bookstore on the task of finding a specific book for a friend of Ryan's, I knew exactly where to find the Pokemon books at Barnes & Noble. Turns out Ryan had actually promised his friend that this would be his birthday gift. I hope my parental wisdom can always serve Ryan as well as my Dad's served me.

Time Travel

Two years ago we drove across Texas,
Celebrating or lives, our family,
Delighting in laughter and fried okra,
Knowing that time and life were short,
But not realizing just how short for you.

Just for Sista Krista

2007-11-29T11:04:00.000-08:00

I mentioned Eddie Izzard this week, because he was truly relevant, during a discussion in my systematic theology class. Those who knew Eddie and his act immediately got the connection and laughed.

Spreading the laughter here, Krista, and hoping you are enjoying spreading it in Germany.

Happy Turkey Day!

2007-11-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

TURKEY PANCAKES
I admit it's an odd tradition, one some of us may grow out of, but every year near Turkey day the freehand art pancakes that have been trains and planes and pokemon and race cars and -- admittedly on lazy days sometimes simply "planets" -- throughout the rest of the year transform themselves into Turkeys!

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

In great gratitude,
KC

Some people say...

2007-11-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

It has both amazed and alarmed me througout the verbal life of my son to hear my words come out of his mouth, to hear my husband's words come out of his mouth.

Recently, Ryan has been saying, "What the heck?!" a lot as an exclamation of surprise. He picked this up from Jeff who says, simply, "What the..." It's possible that in the years BB (before Boy), Jeff actually completed the sentence with a word that does not rhyme with heck. But Jeff had dutifully modified his words, if not his exlamatory outbursts, since the boy's birth. Ryan, however, has developed a wide range of verbal and lectionary resources including chapter books, tv shows and classmates. So, recently, Ryan added "heck" to "what the" and this alarmed Jeff.

My alarm this week was to hear an interaction between Jeff and Ryan where I heard myself in a less-than-flattering way. Ryan had come downstairs while Jeff was putting him to bed to ask me to fill a water bottle with cold water. Jeff was shouting down for Ryan to come back upstairs. Ryan had not yet made his request of me, he had just made it to the door of the kitchen. Mom, he began in a gentle voice. And Jeff shouted down again. Ryan, in an impatient and louder but not quite angry voice, shouted back up that he was simply asking me for some water. He then turned immediately back to me and resumed his previous request of me in his previous quiet, gentle tone. In the same moment that his sweet tone touched my heart, it terrified me. Where had he learned to make such agile tonal transitions? And I realized I was hearing myself.

But tonight -- no really this morning, but I had to tell Ryan it was night to get him back to bed -- tonight, I was working at the computer on a sermon for school. In almost three years of seminary, I have never had much luck getting up early to work on school work because Ryan has some innate Mommy Radar that alerts his body whenever I am awake. He almost always toddles downstairs to see if he can be up with me, too. This morning, he came down wearing his glasses, which made me realize he thought 4:45 a.m. was a fine time to wake up for the day. This semester, I have begun to explain to Ryan that I try to get up early to do work while he's still asleep so that I'm not doing as much work when he's awake and we could do other things together. I persuaded him to go back upstairs while I held him in the gliding rocking chair. I told him that I was working on a sermon for school that would be about communion and that I was doing research to see what I could find out about that very first communion -- the one Jesus shared. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said:

"Some people say that first one was a gift to God from Jesus to say thanks."

I listened with earnest interest while we talked about communion as a gift to God, but what really struck me were the words he used to introduce the concept: "Some people say..."

Those are my words. Almost every time Ryan asks a question about faith or religion, where I believe there are not concrete answers or where there are differing opinions, I almost always begin my explaination with: "Some people say." This often occurs when Ryan is asking me about a concept he has learned from Sunday School or elsewhere. A couple of years ago, the conversation went like this:

Ryan: If Jesus is still alive, where does he live?
Karen: Some people say he's alive in our hearts.

More recently, the conversation went like this:

Ryan: I wish I could really see God.
Karen: Some people say we see God when we see people do good things for each other...

So now we've moved from the living Jesus and the visibility of an invisible God to the theology of the eucharist. And it's Ryan doing the explaining.

Some people say...

This I Know

2007-10-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

Read this:

Holy Trouble -- living beautifully up to her blogger name

View this:

Consider this: Seeing the film or saying a prayer that some day all God's children will be loved unconditionally as God loves.

Merlin Louise -- A Eulogy of 9 Lives

2007-09-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

For almost a month, we have known that my cat of 18.5 years was dying.

Friday night, held in Jeff's lap, she breathed her last breath.

I was out of town, but I knew she was failing and would likely not live until I returned. So one of the last nights I was home, when Merlin ventured into the dining area, I picked her up and held her and stroked her soft fur until she purred. I told Ryan that Merlin would die soon but that she had had a very good and very long life.

Nine lives, he corrected.

We had a living memorial for Merlin right there at the dining table, remembering all of the things we liked about her, stroking her, telling her she was a good kitty -- somehow we never stopped calling our cats kitties.

Ryan suggested I pray, so I prayed for a peaceful passing and in thanksgiving for her long life. Amen.

Nine lives, Ryan corrected again.

Merlin's first life began in 1989 somewhere in Dallas, Texas, where her pregnant, stray mother was tended to by a Dallas Times Herald sports editor and his neighbor until the kittens' birth.

Merlin's second life began when I went to that editor's home, eager to add a pet to my lonely home and lonely heart. I immediately gravitated toward Merlin and then I saw her sister cowering under a table and decided to adopt her, too. I got them sometime shortly after my 29th birthday. I remember this because I had birthday balloons that were slowly losing their helium and nearing the floor. Merlin, truly a kitty then, would grab the balloon's ribbon and tear through the house with the balloon trailing behind her. Her sister would join in the chase, which sometimes took them directly across my bed while I was trying to sleep in after getting home from work on the night desk at 1 a.m.

Merlin's third life began with a move to San Diego. She and her sister were still in their first year and had grown into a gangly teenage stage. I had to find an apartment that would take cats. It had a balcony that was directly over the entrance to the apartments' parking garage. I left the sliding glass door open when I was home so they could come in and out. Soon, my cats knew more of my neighbors than I did, and I would hear some of them roll down their windows and greet my cats as they waited for the garage door to open. Merlin and her sister grew quite large, prompting me to contact the editor and ask what size their mother had been. Turns out that even in a non-pregnant state she was plus-size, just like her girls.

Merlin's fourth life began (and almost ended, or so I thought) with a move a year later to a little 1948 post-war house with a big yard in La Mesa. Her sister, as was her life posture, cowered under furniture, but Merlin explored. I don't recall whether I let her out to explore the backyard or whether she found her own way out, but, at the end of the day, I couldn't find her. I looked everywhere; I waited hours. I called my mother who shared my concern and was sympathetic. The house had a rather large deck off the back door. I had looked under it several times, but, at dusk, I took a flashlight out and looked under it again. Disturbed by the light, Merlin crawled out from under the deck, took a long, luxurious stretch, looked at me as if to wonder why I had disturbed her rest and followed me inside for dinner.

Merlin, her sister Mathilde and I shared that house for six years. Shortly into that time, I decided to install a small cat door in a door leading to the garage, which then led to an exterior door that already had a pet door. This was the beginning of Merlin's true freedom. Though, it took longer than it should have for her to realize it. The door had been in three or four days, with me escorting her through it more than once before she realized she could go through it all by herself. Early one morning -- about the same time of day as those earlier balloon races -- I heard the distinctive flap of the door and Merlin had found her freedom. This was the beginning of Merlin's fifth life. And it was the beginning, too, of her generous gift-giving. She brought mice, mostly dead, but one still very much alive, through that door. She sometimes brought tasty bits from neighborhood trash bins through the door and once she brought a live but stunned mourning dove, which I took to an animal rescue group and gave them a donation in Merlin's name. She now patrolled not just the backyard but the neighborhood. Once again, my neighbors knew her better than they knew me.

After Jeff and I married in 1996, he and his cat, Lyle, moved in. That was the beginning of Merlin's sixth life. We closed the cat door because Lyle had always been an indoor cat and our vet had been telling me that Merlin's longevity would increase if she, too, were an indoor dweller. Lyle quickly attempted to establish himself as the alpha male. Mathilde simply agreed and left it to Merlin to defend their turf. We knew we were having a good and relaxing evening when both humans and all three cats were on the sofa.

In 1998, the same Labor Day weekend as the death of Princess Diana, the princess of our household, Mathilde, died. She had been beset much of her life with kidney trouble and had come very close to death six months earlier. Merlin was distraught while Mathilde was dying, so Jeff closed Merlin off in the office. Lyle came close to Mathilde and noted that she was no longer really there. It spooked him a bit, but he got the message. We didn't think to let Merlin out to have the same encounter, so she spent days walking around the house crying for her sister. That was the beginning of Merlin's seventh life.

Later that same year, we all moved uneventfully into a new home. It was large enough that territory wasn't really an issue. Then one day, six Septembers ago, following all the rules of all of the books -- cuz that's what we did back then -- we brought a crying baby into the house in a carrier and set it down on the floor for the cats to contemplate. After holding and nurturing and nursing a six pound baby for three days in the hospital, those 10-plus pound cats seemed huge to me as Lyle and Merlin drew ever closer to the baby in the carrier. Jeff was recording the encounter on video as the cats drew near the crying babe. Finally, as Merlin came close and began to lift a paw, I rushed in to intervene. I also realized that that's the day the cats became just cats. Friendly, comforting, curious, but just cats. That was the beginning of Merlin's eighth life.

The boy crew, as boys do, and went through several years of not knowing how, exactly, to interact with the cats, almost always choosing the wrong way. In the beginning we needed to protect him from the cats, but it didn't take long to need to protect the cats from him. Neither Jeff nor I can remember exactly when Lyle died, also from kidney troubles. It was sometime in 2004. I remember that it was a night when we were having real troubles getting Ryan to sleep, he had already been up once or twice and was in a phase of being afraid to go to sleep for fear of bad dreams. Jeff had been tending to Ryan when I noticed that Lyle was in the hallway outside our bedroom door, looking very lethargic. I told Jeff and then went to bed. Because Lyle was still young, we weren't expecting death as we were with Merlin, so when he still was lethargic the next morning, I took him to the animal emergency hospital. He was far closer to death than we knew, and he died soon after we got there. Again, Merlin searched the house looking for her friend. That was the beginning of Merlin's ninth life, the first time in her life that she had lived as the only cat.

In recent years, Merlin had lost a bit of weight and had been slowed by arthritis. She could no longer climb stairs, so remained on the lower floor of the house. She had lots of little corners that were hers, but her favorite place to be was wherever I was. If I was at the computer, she was in the room with me, often at my feet. I kept wondering why she hadn't padded up while I was writing this, and then I remembered. She was still able to get agitated when she sensed that her territory was being invaded. One night recently, I came home to encounter a skunk on the porch, carefully startled it away and went in to find Merlin in the entry way moving toward the window nearest where the skunk had scampered outside. Ever on patrol.

Merlin had two names because the first one was not the best fit. As a kitten Merlin loved to go up things and over things (recall the story of her running up and over my bed). She liked to go up and over, her sister liked to be down under things. So my down under cat was named Mathilde and her sister my up and over cat was named Louise for Louise Ritter, a Dallas athlete who had dramatically won the gold medal in women's high jump in the most recent summer Olympics. So Louise it was, but it didn't fit and it didn't last. One night, though, I had gone to visit my parents and my cats were in the back of my hatchback. A thunderstorm was nearing and Mathilde was crouched down under somewhere, but Merlin was watching the lightening flashes reflected on the window of the hatchback and began to paw at them, trying to catch them. So, I named my cat who would catch lightening if she could, Merlin, keeping the Louise. Merlin stuck and was an apt description of this kitty whose curiosity stayed with her until near her last breath.

As I drove Ryan to school yesterday, I decided to check in to see how he was doing with Merlin's death. He told me he was sad and we talked again about what a good life she had had, what a good pet friend she had been, and how 18 and a half years is a long time for a cat. She had a really long life, I said.

Nine lives, Ryan said.

Jeff had a little phrase about Merlin that we repeated many times over the years, and I hadn't realized that someday it would be her epitaph:

Everybody loves Merlin, Merlin Louise.

Embodying the Word...

2007-09-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

In our preaching and worship classes we are instructe that part of our call is to embody the Word.

That will be easy tonight in vespers.

As a fitting beginning to the new semester, as a fitting end to two of the hardest years of my life, as a fitting celebration to passing today's District Committee on Ordained Ministry interview, I get to read Psalm 30 from the Message translation.

Those who have journeyed with me in this time know just how fitting these words are:

I give you all the credit, God --
you got me out of that mess,
you didn't let my foes gloat.

God, my God, I yelled for help
and you put me together.
God, you pulled me out of the grave,
gave me another chance at life
when I was down and out.

All you saints! Sing your hearts out to God!
Thank God to God's face!
God gets angry once in a while, but across
a lifetime there is only love.
The nights of crying your eyes out
give way to days of laughter.

When things were going great
I crowed: "I've got it made.
I'm God's favorite.
God made me king of the mountain."
The you looked the other way
and I fell to pieces.

I called out to you, God;
I laid my case before you:
"Can you sell me for a profit when I'm dead?
auction me off at a cemetery yard sale?
When I'm 'dust to dust' my songs
and stories of you won't sell.
So listen! and be kind!
Help me out of this!

You did it: you changed wild lament
into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black mourning band
and decked me with wildflowers.
I'm about to burst with song;
I can't keep quiet about you.
God, my God,
I can't thank you enough.

That's me, whirling in dance with wildflowers in my hair. But, my favorite verse is this: "across a lifetime, there is only love."

Thanks be to God.

Going out on a limb -- anyone have a saw?

2007-09-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have seven questions to answer in writing in preparation for my next interview with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. The final question asks me to read paragraph 164.B of The Book of Discipline and discuss how this principle informs my ministry in the church. That paragaph is only one among hundreds contained in the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church. That particular paragraph reads: "Political Responsibility -- The strength of a political system depends upon the full and willing participation of its citizens. The chruch should continually exert a strong ethical influence upon the state, supporting policies and programs deemed to be just and opposing policies and programs that are unjust."

It was difficult for me to limit my answer to that one paragraph when the Social Principles represent so much more than that and call the church to so much more than that. It was also difficult for me to answer a question about the church looking OUT to hold others ethically accountable to just policies and programs without also addressing the need for the church to be equally vigilant in its scrutiny of itself.

So, here's my answer, do I keep it as it is or do I narrow it to say yes, I think it's right and proper and, well, simply swell for the church to hold government accountable? Pass the apple pie.

7. Political responsibility
Read paragraph 164.B of the Discipline, and discuss how this principle informs your ministry in the church.

This paragraph on political responsibility is found within the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church. The denomination defines these principles as “a prayerful and thoughtful effort … to speak to the human issues in the contemporary world from a sound biblical and theological foundation … They are a call to faithfulness and are intended to be instructive and persuasive in the best of the prophetic spirit…”

The Social Principles, collectively, inform my ministry through exactly this prayerful approach to social awareness and, when needed, social action. Applying faith to seek justice seems to me to be rooted in the Sermon on the Mount as well as in the admonition of Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our Social Principles help focus our faith and, often, describe an ideal that – if achieved – would bring us closer to the kingdom of God.

When the foundation for the Social Principles that we have today was first presented at General Conference in 1972, the chairman of the Legislative Committee on Christian Social Concerns, explained the significance of the document in this way:

"This statement, coming at a most opportune time in the history of our United Methodist Church and of our troubled world, expresses the earnest desire of the church to speak with a clear and a direct voice to those issues which command the attention of all of us and which impinge with increasing gravity upon our common life. It signals an important and necessary reaffirmation of United Methodism’s sense of its call to servant ministries amidst the pains and the fears and the injustices which confound and oppress all conditions of the human family. … this Statement of Social Principles does suggest the strong conviction among us that the church is most faithful when it incarnates the Spirit of its Lord…"

I see these Social Principles as very much a part of my call to ministry. It would be a part of my sense of call to service as a layperson even if I were not hoping to become an ordained minister. While there are some statements within our Social Principles that I am not in full agreement with and hope and pray to see changed, I wholeheartedly embrace the vision and intent of the Social Principles and would strive to employ them to help congregations become more socially aware and more active in their pursuit of social justice.

The paragraph on political responsibility on which this question seeks discussion calls on the church to “continually exert” a strong ethical influence on the state, supporting just policies and programs and opposing policies and programs that are unjust. In embracing the broader overall concept of the Social Principles, I embrace this call to hold governments accountable to justice. And I would do all in my power to urge the church to also “continually exert” ethical scrutiny prayerfully and thoughtfully on its own policies and programs to ensure that justice thrives within the church as well.

Now We Are Six -- The Party

2007-09-02T16:45:00.000-07:00

Tagged, again, I'm it.

2007-08-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

Breakfast Items That Are Critical To My Happiness:
It took years for me to buy into the claim that I needed to eat breakfast. It is a maintenance meal for me. Given leisure to enjoy it -- and someone else to cook it -- I love a good breakfast. At Harry's Coffee Shop in La Jolla, I order: Two Eggs Folded with Spinach, Grilled Tomatoes, 9 Grain Toast and usually hot tea. They make a great homemade salsa that is good on the eggs, and I love the blackberry jam. I also love a good omelette, and can make those my ownself. I'm thinking now that they would be really tasty with some of the bounty from Molly's garden. ;) But I have bought into the notion that I can't have eggs every day. So everyday breakfast is often boring, but, essential to my happiness any day is some caffeine, and, while I'm addicted, my body is not set to miss caffeine until afternoon. So, if I haven't had a good cuppa joe by lunchtime, I love a tall glass of iced tea.
People I Would Most Like to Share a Table With On a Cruise:
The last person I shared a table on a cruise with was my grandmother, who died in 1990. I would love to share a table with her again and see her delight at the food and the service and the other travelers. To join us, well, I'd want her to meet Ryan and Jeff. And, as long as we're at it, let's make it a family affair. Mom and Dad. And how about Mamie and Grandpa Hanna, my grandmother's parents, then Grandpa Hanna could tell us all the story of the Kiowa Maiden in the moon and Ryan and I could hear it first hand.
Rudest Thing Said To Me This Week:
It's been a good week, I can't recall a thing. Now last week...
Rudest Thing Done To Me This Week:
Again, it's been a good week, but last week, my longtime auto dealership's service department decided to give me new spark plugs six months after they had done it before, even though I haven't traveled 100,000 miles in that period. I thought that was rude, and their attitude even more rude. So those Toyota hybrids are looking pretty good for my next car Honda!
Jobs That Have Made Me Go, "Huh?"
It's not so much the jobs that make me go, "huh?" as the people who look down on folks in jobs they wouldn't do or don't respect. I'd like them to consider that all work can be noble and, in this economy, good work is a good thing. Now the people who don't pay a living wage, they make me go "huh?".
Jobs I Have Had That Concerned and/or Confused My Mother:
It's more my hairstyles that have periodically concerned my mother, I'm pretty sure she's supported every job I've ever had. Wildly supported! Thanks, Mom.
Favorite Curse Words That I Can Use In Front of Children Without Too Much Fear of Repercussion:
Drat! Darn it! And, best of all, I have learned to simply say ouch when I hurt myself rather than drawing from a wide variety of other possibilities.
Curse Word That I Use Most Frequently After Leaving the Children:
I call these "journalism words", some folks call them "golf words", and I know a bunch of them. In fact, when one of my first references for ministry candidacy asked about my flaws, I said: I swear. And, like Erika who tagged me for this exercise, I like variety.
Most Honest Bumper Sticker I've Ever Seen:
Cheney in 2008. It gave me chills, but it seemed blatantly honest.
Changes I Would Make If Money Were No Object:
Life-giving work, good love, plentiful food, and time for leisure for all the world, which I'm pretty sure would mean we'd see a bunch of swords turned to ploughshares.
Favorite Piece of Technology:
This one's easy. The printing press!

Erika tagged me, now I'm tagging Mom, Jeri and Courtney (I know you're lurking out there somewhere in Boston, girl!)

Now We Are Six Fishing Edition

2007-08-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

Now We Are Six

2007-08-30T11:49:00.001-07:00

Sharing some birthday photos with the Texas grandma who funded the new wheels...

Has it really been 2 years?

2007-08-13T22:31:00.001-07:00

Two years ago tonight, I left my desk at The San Diego Union-Tribune for the last time.

The two years since then have been an incredible journey.

So much life, so much depth, so much art, so much connection, so much communion has filled those years.

I would not have begun to be able to predict or even imagine that night where I would be today.

I still have trouble saying it out loud, but I'll try in writing...

...I would not have begun to have predicted that I would already be a pastor. (That's the part I still have trouble saying outloud. I have demurred twice in the past 24 hours, saying I'm "on staff" at FUMC.)

and I would not have begun to predict that I would be almost finished with seminary. (I had thought I was on a four-year plan that might stretch to five.)

But my realization this past week has been that ministry is at least as fun as journalism and, for me, more meaningful, more relevant, maybe even more urgent.

And, much more importantly, I really feel like I get to be much more my authentic self in ministry than I ever did in journalism.

There was a time in the past two years when I made an attempt to run back to the newspaper, more because life -- grief -- had gotten so hard that I craved the familiar.

But now ministry has become familiar, and I look forward to many more years of growth and challenge and communion.

In gratitude for the teachings and example of Jesus.
In appreciation and awe of the sustaining presence of the Holy Spirit.
Thanks be to God.

my thoughts this time last year

my proudest creation in journalism

where I hang now with the Spirit and a bunch of good folks in worship and fellowship

Time twisting...

2007-08-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

Have you ever felt like time was standing still?
Or moving too rapidly?
Or slowing down so much you could count the time between seconds?
I think I've found the time bandits.
It's these guys.

An early indication of call?

2007-08-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

We let Ryan watch a "movie" on the Cartoon Network tonight. It was the first time he got to stay up and watch a "movie" at night. It was "Ben 10: Secret of the Omnitrix."

Even though we were all on the sofa -- Simpsons style -- I have no clue what the movie was about. I chose to organize my CPE papers in preparation for writing my final exam.

I had come into the computer room to print some missing papers just as the movie was ending. Ryan came in and jumped in my lap.

M: Did you have fun watching your movie?
R: Yes.
M: What was it about?
R: (enthusiastically) Battle!
M: (Pouting with my lip stuck out.) Why do you like battle so much?
R: Maybe I was born knowing some day I would be in the military.
M: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!
R: Just kidding. (and it sounds like he really was just kidding)
M: I don't want you to be in the military. (Pulling him closer and looking him in the eyes.) I hope you become someone who works for peace.
R: I will. (Said reassuringly.)

He scrambles down, about to head upstairs to get ready for bed. Then he turns back and looks at me.

R: Maybe I might even become a pastor. (And it's clear not only that he means it but that he's thought about it before this moment.)

(CPE not only has taken away most of my writing time this summer, now even my blogs read like verbatims!)

July 20, 1969

2007-07-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

It is the night of that long-ago moon walk.
A night that was filled with hope for the future 38 years ago for me.
At nine, I couldn't know that I was seeing what likely would be the greatest space achievement of my lifetime. I thought it was the beginning, not the end.
At nine, I couldn't know how symbolic that moon would become for me.
Symbolic of my father, with a connection back to his grandfather, with a connection back to his grandfather's grandfather.
Symbolic of my faith. Sometimes I shiver, tremble even, at the thought that I can see the same moon that Jesus did, that David did, that first man and first woman did.
At nine, I couldn't know that I would gaze upon that moon when I wanted connection with distant loved ones. I couldn't know the moon would become a comfort.
There was so much I couldn't know at nine, but I am grateful to know it now.
And I await what other wonders the moon may bring.

Vespers...

2007-07-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

unnerves me.

Unnerves me, yet, sustains me.

Tonight, I was the communion celebrant at Vespers for the first time since I became a local pastor with sacramental privileges.

And I was solo.

Molly is at junior high camp this week.

And I was nervous.

Which is as it should be. I was nervous preparing for Water's Edge this past Sunday. I was at the computer attending to a few worship order details and reflecting on the upcoming service and my sermon and communion, realizing I hadn't reviewed THE WORDS, and I thought to myself: "I don't know if I can do this." And then, I answered myself: I think I'll be more worried about the day when I say with confidence: I can do this. I'd rather always hear the question in my head as: Can I do this? And answer myself, not alone, but with God's help I will.

My Arizona pastor friend Jeri told me that one of her mentor pastors told her that she worried more about the people doing worship who weren't a little nervous, or at least in awe.

So, when I realized tonight that I was nervous again, I took that as a good sign.

I did a good bit of preparation, reading tonight's scripture, reviewing the service, reading over the liturgy.

And then it was time to "robe up." I had tried on some robes at the Cokesbury exhibit and Annual Conference, but this was different. It was startling to see myself in a robe. I actually think I did a double take.

I've been trying to decide whether to wear a stole. Most of the probationary elders I know -- who are technically local pastors -- wear stoles. But, I know one who does not, prefering to wait until ordination. I'm still not sure what I will do, but tonight I decided not to wear one. Seeing my head emerging from the neck of a white robe was dramatic enough for me.

I entered the sanctuary, greeted our sacristans and walked down the side aisle to my seat on the front row. Usually Molly is there, too. Sitting there alone it began to sink in on me that I was the minister present, but I didn't have too much time to wonder or worry about that because Ryan's grinning face peeked over the pew at me and gave me a kiss when I turned to greet him. Jeff was right behind him. Jeff asked where they should sit, but Ryan didn't hesitate, he crawled up beside me, grinning still. Are you excited about doing your first Vespers? He touched the robe and smiled.

After Stan's beautiful prelude of four Bach pieces, I stood to greet the congregation. Several familiar faces were smiling at me, wishing me well. I welcomed the gathering and then I ran out of things to say. I made some silly comment about the beauty of the summer day and then stopped cold. Finally I thanked them for being patient with me while I "do this for the first time."

The opening hymn was not a familiar one to me, but it was singable. I shared a hymnal with Ryan and Jeff, but neither of them was really singing. When the song ended, I walked to the lectern as I do every week at Vespers, catching the hem of the robe under my foot twice. Once at the lectern, I felt more comfortable. It was familiar, it was something I do every week. The first reading was Psalm 146: Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, O my soul. And the congregational response was "Holy Spirit, Truth divine," a hymn of both truth and comfort for me:

Holy Spirit, Truth divine, dawn upon this soul of mine;
Word of God and inward light, wake my spirit, clear my sight.
Holy Spirit, Love divine, glow within this heart of mine;
kindle every high desire; perish self to Thy pure fire.

The Gospel was from Mark, where Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed. After that, came the hymn of mediation, which was a retelling of that parable. As I sat struggling with the words and tune of "The Kingdom of God," I realized I was too nervous to concentrate. My next steps would be into new territory. Usually I move into the chancel choir pews at this point and get to relax for the rest of worship because my work is done. The distance from the chair near the lectern to the altar seemed vast, yet, when the song ended, I don't even remember covering that ground. Suddenly I was behind the altar and it was time to pray. My prayer was extemporaneous and it was not very long, and I really don't recall much at all of what I prayed. I weaved in some of the kingdom and creation concepts that had been in the two scriptures and then offered a brief prayer of confession on behalf of us all, first for the things we have done or said that we regretted and that were not pleasing to God -- with a long pause for personal reflection -- and then for the times when we had failed to speak up or act -- also with a pause for reflection. I know I then prayed in thanksgiving for grace, and while I recall the passion of the words, I do not recall their content.

Then it was time to chant.

Stan played the note, and I chanted acapello:The Lord be with you.
And listened to the congregation's response: And also with you.
And then I raised my hands and chanted: Lift up your hearts.
And listened to the congregation's response:
We lift them up unto the Lord.
And then, I did what I do every week, I began to sing:
"It is right to give...
ooops, that's the people's response.
I laughed at myself and then corrected:
Let us give thanks unto the Lord.
And the people responded: It is right to give thanks and praise.

At Water's Edge, we do not use a formal communion liturgy prayer. We focus on the words of institution and the invoking of the Holy Spirit. At Vespers, we do follow a formal liturgy, so I decided to draw on the communion prayer I had written for worship class. It begins:

With boundless joy we give thanks to you, O God of our Creation.
From that first spark of life and Spirit you set the cosmos in motion, you breathed life
into humanity, you brought light into the world.
Your love amazes us, for even when our love turns to doubt or fear, your love is
constant and immense.
You delivered our ancestors in faith from captivity and you deliver us daily from the
bonds that keep us from living into our promise as people created in your image. You
freed your people and made a covenant to always be with us.
You have spoken to us through prophets and you speak truth to us through one
another.

And then it was time to join in the unending hymn of praise: Holy, holy, holy...
And I left the altar, walked down the chancel steps and waited and watched as Joann approached me with the cup and plate. I took the elements from her hand and returned to set them on the altar and continue the prayer:

Nurturing God, your greatest gift to us is the grace we know through Jesus Christ.
Your Spirit descended on him and was ever-apparent in his ministry.
Through his teachings and example you showed us how
to be in meaningful relationship with the poor,
to care for those who seek release from burdens,
to free the souls of the weary and anxious
and to proclaim the Good News of grace and abundant love.
In an act of unimaginable love, you delivered us from hopelessness to grace through
Jesus, and made a new covenant with us through water and the Spirit.
When Jesus died and rose again into eternity, he promised to abide with us always
in your Word and Holy Spirit.

Always.

The word -- my own word from a prayer written last November -- leapt out at me. Jesus abides with us always in Word and through Spirit.

And suddenly it was time for the words of institution that remember that very Truth. And as I lifted the large wafer and broke it, my hands shook. And as I lifted the cup I felt that connection I have imagined before -- that link across two millenia that connects each of us every time we partake in communion to that first communion table.

And just as suddenly, we were singing The Lord's Prayer and I was offering an invitation to our open communion table.

I took the cup and plate to the back altar, where it felt odd to be back there alone, and even more odd not to have someone to share communion with before serving. I moved to my place near the altar rail and joined in the remaining notes of "Bread of Life from Heaven" and felt myself in communion not only with everyone there but with some of my dearest friends.

Serving communion, like reading scripture, felt familiar again. I moved down the rail offering the bread and cup with the words: "The body and blood of Christ, given in love for you." And then I saw Ryan, kneeling at the rail, and beside him Jeff. My heart began pounding at the thought that I might get to serve communion to Jeff. But first, Ryan: The bread of life and the cup of blessing, given in love for you. He took the wafer and then hesitated over "the blood," but he was beaming up at me. The cup of blessing, I repeated, and he dipped the wafer in. Jeff now crossed his arm in front of himself and said: None for me, thanks. And I moved down the rail.

As communion concluded, I moved back to the altar to lead the concluding prayer, sing the nunc dimittis, the congregation's sending forth hymn, and offer a benediction. As the Amens were being sung, I moved back to the front pew, where Ryan stepped out in front of me and gave me a big thumb's up, smiling broadly. I sat down to listen to the postlude, and Ryan crawled into my lap and hugged me tightly.

Afterward, a woman who was one of the very first women I met when I joined this congregation, a woman who was one of the first to discover Ryan's love of music as a VBS choir teacher, a woman whose husband, when he was alive, knew me as "Ryan's mom", a woman who Ryan and I had seen and sat with just last night in a different kind of communion during a free concert at Balboa Park...
...a woman came up to me and said I loved that first prayer, did you write that.
The Holy Spirit did, I said. But did you write it? I prayed it, I said, pointing to my head, but I realize now I should have pointed to my heart.

I knew it, she said. I knew you were experiencing something very powerful.

And I was.

Vespers sustains me.

Thanks be to God.

Who's My Neighbor? A Quiz.

2007-07-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Samaritan Sunday. Where this lawyer comes up to Jesus and wants to know how to secure eternal life -- he wants the iron-clad contract. No loopholes. So he asks Jesus. And Jesus says, you're a lawyer, you tell me. So the lawyer says: Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind. And, love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus, being at least as smart as a lawyer, recognizes these bits of law from Deuteronomy and Leviticus and says: You are correct, sir. I can almost see the lawyer turning to leave, hesitating, and then turning back and saying: And who, exactly, is my neighbor? Heaven forbid he love the wrong person and NOT secure eternal life.

I thought about a bunch of serious stuff, I promise, but I also couldn't help thinking about the challenges that even our nearest and dearest neighbors can pose.

So, here's a quiz. Name these neighbors from TV LAND. And, if you can, name the better known TV LAND residents who were their neighbors.

Neighbors and landlords

Neighbors, as well as dentist and director

How do we possibly love her? If ever there was a person for whom the term "Mind your own beeswax" was coined, it was her.

Struggled to find images of neighbors from 70s TV Land, but this one was pretty obvious. He's everybody's neighbor. Won't you be my neighbor?

Gotta love him.

Dennis had a neighbor by this name, too.

Heidely-ho, neighbor.

And, your nominations?

Tagged, I'm it...

2007-06-29T08:27:00.001-07:00

If my friend Erika could take time away from her prophetic quest to see the church into a healthy and vibrant future to answer these questions and then tag me, I suppose it's the least I can do to take time away from CPE and house cleaning to play along.

FOUR JOBS I'VE HAD
Lifeguard -- the only summer I ever had a tan.
Photography teacher at a boy's camp in North Carolina -- the only time I ever had a summer love (the odds were in my favor).
Solutions Editor -- my favorite job title and perhaps my favorite job in my 22 years in journalism.
Pastor -- starting this Sunday!

FOUR MOVIES I CAN WATCH OVER AND OVER
Groundhog Day -- It's a fun way to think about new life.
Casablanca -- For multivalent reasons, not the least of which is Bogie. Another fun way to think about making life-giving choices.
Back to the Future -- If you know me, you know why. (And it's not just Michael J. Fox -- that crush was a fleeting Family Ties thing.)
The Music Man -- because the ending always made my Dad cry -- because of that and the pick a little talk a little ladies and the City Council barbershop quartet and a very young Ron Howard and the Trouble in River City song and, and, and...

FOUR PLACES I'VE LIVED
Paris, Texas -- of all the Texas places I've lived, it's the coolest to say out loud, and I lived there the longest. Though, soon, I will have lived in California longer than Texas!
Tuxedo, North Carolina -- see jobs, above.
San Diego -- California, not Texas.
Claremont, Calif. -- Commuter housing at Claremont School of Theology, a place and a group of people I'll never forget!

FOUR PLACES I'VE VACATIONED
Yosemite National Park -- Got married there, too.
Wales -- on a bus tour of Great Britain with my grandmother. My favorite stop was Tintern Abbey
Creede, Colo. -- a favorite vacation destination of my Dad's. Our family first traveled there in 1979. And Dad wrote a play about the place that was produced there.
Route 66 -- Took my first detour onto the old road on an early vacation with Jeff, including a stop in Valentine, but my favorite stretch is through magical New Mexico and my favorite place to stay is The El Rancho in Gallup, NM.

FOUR OF MY FAVORITE DISHES
Jeff's chocolate chip cookies
Anything Ryan concocts in the kitchen
Jeri's stuffed shells
Erika's enchiladas with an assist from Krista and Molly.
My grandmother's "light bread" and pecan pie and canned green beans.
My other grandmother's red beans and rice.
My mother's chicken-fried steak.
In short anything cooked in love by loved ones.

Four sites I visit daily:
Yahoo email -- keep those emails coming
blogger -- though you couldn't tell by recent posts
favorite blogs -- though I'm not rewarded daily for such loyalty
Yahoo headlines -- it's the way I get my news now, isn't that sad?

Four places I'd rather be right now:
The Grand Canyon at either sunset or moonrise, whichever comes first.
Snuggling with Ryan on the sofa.
Hiking to the top of Yosemite Falls again with Jeff -- and in the shape to do so!
Grounded in reality -- though that sometimes limits my creativity.

FOUR PEOPLE I'M TAGGING:
Marian
Jeri
And any of my lurking readers brave enough to play. Jan? Alaina? I'll even post it as a comment if you want to send it by email and avoid the hassle of creating a blog.

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO MADE IT TO THE END, HERE'S SOME BONUS TIME TRAVEL FROM SUMMER 1977 -- THIRTY YEARS AGO.

Hey, my hair still looks like that, and I still like ice cream.

Maybe this is why the career as a photographer didn't take off!

What was it with horizontal stripes and the '70s?

AND FINALLY, A FUNNY WEBSITE I FOUND IN THE MAKING OF THIS BLOG POST

Biff

Living (and praying) into the doubt

2007-06-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

Bear with me God, and family and friends.
A few of you have been on this ride with me before.
As July 1 approaches, that official day when I will be a pastor, I find myself wondering if I am up to it.
How can I be a pastor? I'm vulnerable. I'm flawed. And, as I've admitted from the beginning, I swear.
I'm human. I fail. I sometimes even fail and hurt other people.
How can I be a pastor?
Since there was no ceremony for local pastors, it's not like I had an official or ceremonious time to accept this role and receive the Spirit anew that will be with me always but especially when I consecrate communion.
So, here I am on the threshold of July 1 wondering if there's an exit, feeling a bit like a bride with cold feet. And this is different from the running I was considering when I was in so much personal pain last year. This is me wondering how I can possibly deliver.
I'm self aware -- aware of my strengths and weaknesses, aware of my gifts and my flaws.
So, I take comfort in the fact that scripture assures us that God works with us where we are, as we are.
Still, I wonder, how can I be a pastor?
May the grace and peace of the loving Spirit of God lead and guide me into this new role. AMEN.

Graduation Day

2007-06-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Graduate

The Graduating Class

Fidgeting

Ryan's portrait of his Mom and Dad.

Yuliana and Zico

Big Finish

Dead Sea Scrolls

2007-06-07T19:55:00.000-07:00

So many post-worthy things have happened of late, but I've been consumed with a three-week, intensive summer class on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I thought I was beyond this, but, at some point, Hebrew Bible papers always remind me of Dad's last days. Not really in a bad way, but always in a profound way.

My Hebrew Bible take-home final was written at Mom and Dad's while we abided together in the time between a minor procedure to determine his fitness for major surgery and the actual surgery four days later.

It was on this computer. This red laptop. I was in a spare room that had once been their study. I would come out and talk to Dad, who was in his easy chair -- the most common place to find Dad in all my memory of him. When I was 5, his easy chair was red faux leather, maybe it wasn't even trying to pretend to be leather, maybe it was just vinyl. He had two easy chairs in the time we lived in Paris, Texas, a 70s orange and brown plaid, followed by one in more subdued 80s brown. At some point, he got a nice real leather one, maybe two. That December, I would come out and talk to him during study breaks. When I had enough written for him to edit, he put his editing and grading skills to work and we talked about the content of the paper. I finished that paper before his surgery and delighted that he had gotten to share in some of the academia of seminary. That we got to share it together.

The exegesis for that class was written on this computer, too. In "the writing center," Molly's condo at her lovely wooden dining table -- I think she was at the opera while I wrote. It was the beginning of my emerging from the initial numbness and shock of Dad's death and into the depth of the pain of grief. But I managed to get the paper written first, before succumbing. I drove to CST on Epiphany to turn the paper in and then fell apart.

This fall, I had a paper similar to that first one I wrote with Dad's editing guidance that was due for the same professor. Even though I was -- finally -- coming out of the grief and depression, the paper sent me back to memories of the nights I wrote that first paper and those precious final days with Dad, where I knew -- thank God -- to drink him in. His love, his Spirit, his gentleness, his humor, his love of my mother, his devotion to his dog, his addiction to sports on tv, his place as my sounding board for all of life's joys and challenges. This fall, I just wanted to get that paper done and over. I didn't even ask to get it back and I don't know how I did on it. It was just too familiar but absent Dad.

And now the Dead Sea Scrolls and Micah. Not until tonight did I have the Dad flashbacks. Perhaps it's the red laptop. Perhaps it's knowing that Dad would have loved to talk to me about this class. I remember that he had a fascination with the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1970s when the first bits had been published but the progress of the project was stalled to the point of conspiracy theories. He would have marveled at all there is to know about this desert community and their caves full of scrolls that confirm and expand and call into question the canon of the Bible. It's been fun talking some to my brother about it.

And now I hear Dad's voice in the back of my head: Just get it done, Neen. Don't waste time or tears on me. You've done the research, you've put some good thought into this. Don't stop now. And I hear his signature advice: "Just do your best then say to Hell with it."

So here goes...

Shavuot

2007-05-23T00:54:00.001-07:00

But Ruth said,
“Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well, if even death parts me from you!”
Ruth 1:16-17

I only learned of the Jewish Holy Day Shavuot last fall in a class on Judaism. But tonight, I got to experience a taste of it.

The Holy Day celebrates the giving of Torah at Mt. Sinai and also the harvest of the first fruits. The custom is to stay up all night on the first night of the festival reading and studying and discussing sacred texts.

I am a guest during my summer course in the home of my friend Michele whose other guest, Miriam, is Jewish. She led us in a study and discussion of the first chapter of the Book of Ruth. There was a beauty in the reading of scripture, followed by the reading of commentary, followed by discussion and reading from midrash or secondary texts.

In recent years, I have come to love the connection of these two women, Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi. The love they share that transcends custom. The devotion they have for one another that comes through YHWH. The grief they share over the death of both of their husbands, one of whom was also Naomi's son. The hope they share about their future together. And the verses where Ruth declares her lifelong commitment to Naomi form one of my favorite biblical poems. I asked Miriam if she would read it in Hebrew after we had read and discussed it in English. She did and then she sang it as she had at her Bat Mitzvah.

Though we had committed to study for only about an hour, once we had started it was hard to stop. But fatigue and responsbility prevailed, so we ushered Naomi and Ruth into the court of Boaz and then headed for bed, secure in the knowledge that the end of the story ultimately results in the birth of David, who would become king of all of Israel.

This was a gift that Miriam gave to us on her birthday.

Prayers of Thanksgiving and Hope

2007-05-22T06:41:00.001-07:00

Prayers of thanksgiving that no one was injured in a fire at First United Methodist Church yesterday. Prayers of thanksgiving that sprinklers and firefighters worked well to contain the fire to the room where it started. Prayers of thanksgiving that all of the children at the daycare center on campus were evacuated safely. Prayers of thanksgiving that we know in our hearts and souls that God and faith and worship are not confined to a building, no matter how beautiful, no matter how inspiring, no matter how Spirit-filled.

Prayers of hope for all who might have reason for concern or even despair:

Prayers for Kurth, whose beautiful woodwork case that holds the Christ Window was burned, consuming the Cross and Flame that reminds us always, but especially this week near the anniversary of John Wesley's Aldersgate experience, of the way our hearts are warmed by the experience of the presence of God and the grace of Christ.

Prayers for the brides who are to be married in our sanctuary this weekend. May they feel relief not worry and may they realize that this misfortune is minor and just adds a good tale to their wedding story.

Prayers for a person or persons unknown who will likely learn today that their accident of leaving a burner on under a pot appears to have caused the fire. May they experience an immediate sense of grace and an overwhelming experience of the presence of the loving Spirit of God.

Prayers for Jim and Tom and all at the church whose time and energy will be spent in repair and reconstruction. May this come to be seen as a minor misfortune that may lead to unimagined possibilities.

Prayers for the children's choir director whose newly created music room is a mess. May she and all involved in children's music know that this cannot begin to silence the Spirit that sings through those choirs.

May the Spirit sing through us all as we move forward in faith and commitment to be a welcoming House of God both structurally and throughout our lives and witness in the world.

As God told David, no house can contain God.

Amen.

Disney pics

2007-05-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

From the archives

2007-05-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out the files of my laptop this morning, looking for any sign of the journal I need to turn in/create for one of my classes while also sitting by the boy while he watches Pokemon -- which I notice doesn't even claim to be educational...

And I found this poem, written a little over a year ago. It seemed appropriate for the end of the semester for me and maybe for whatever you are finishing or resting from.

What Sabbath Is Not

Sabbath is not escape.
Sabbath is not running away to some place of quiet or beauty or adventure.
That is vacation or contemplation or meditation.
And each could fill a Sabbath but not define one.

Sabbath is not prayer.
Sabbath is not seeking God’s presence for others or ourselves or the world.
That is litany or petition or intercession.
And each could fill a Sabbath but not define one.

Sabbath is not solving.
Sabbath is not puzzling out remedies for social ills or life’s daily details or vocation.
That is discernment or balance or creative justice.
And each could fill a Sabbath but not define one.

Sabbath is stopping.
Sabbath is quieting the churning of our restless minds and anxious hearts
To listen openly and honestly to our souls and to God.
And that can fill a Sabbath but still not define one.

Current market value: $89

2007-04-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

Bat Masterson's Creede
by Tony Clark

I'm missing Dad today.

It's a different kind of grief than I've experienced before.
Healthier, I think.

I'm not even sure what brought it to the surface. I think it may have started with the need to talk about Dad -- his faith and his death -- in my paper to the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. But the writing itself didn't trouble me.

There have been a few things lately that have given me that "I wish I could call Dad" feeling. I know Dad would actually delight in the fact that Ryan is still genuinely ticked (a journalism word came to mind here first) that Dad died without taking him fishing again. I've got to get that boy fishing soon. Dad would like that Ryan is so passionate about fishing that he's ticked. I can hear Dad laughing even as I write this.

And the fact that Ryan is an independent reader now and the fact that we all discovered it accidentally during Holy Week would be a story Dad would love, too. It brought Mom to tears.

But what triggered my tears today was an odd little combination of things, or maybe just an accumulation of all of the above. I was driving home from breakfast with a congregation member -- I'd call it coffee but she had Diet Coke and I had iced tea. I was driving home switching radio stations and hit a country station in the middle of Phil Vassar's "Last Day of My Life." Now the way my brain works, I actually thought it was the song "Live Like You Were Dying" and I didn't know the actual title of Vassar's until just now when I looked it up. And I didn't hear the rest of the words to know that it wasn't "Live Like You Were Dying" because I went to a Dad place in my head.

And it was a good place. I thought of all the things I would tell him if I could. (I realized recently that Dad would have really gotten a kick out of knowing that I was going to attempt to play God in our medieval play at school.) In the few seconds that memories can flood past more rapidly than you could write or speak them, I thought of how much I've been through since Dad's death. I thought about the words I had written in the DCOM paper about experiencing personal resurrection as a result of this time of grief and recovery. And I thought that the one thing I wish I could let Dad know is just how happy I am.

I shed a few tears, but just a few, and I started thinking about Dad's play. Just yesterday I had been telling a woman I visit once a month about the play, because she's from Colorado originally, and she knew where Creede was. I had also been thinking that I had never shared the play with some of my seminary friends and needed to remember where my extra copies are. Then, I began to wonder if Dad's play was still available on Amazon.

So, when I got home, I looked it up. And there were two, both through third-party sellers, both listed for $89. One of them was listed as a collectible because it was signed. I couldn't figure out how to reach the seller of the signed copy, but the other copy, not signed but also listed at $89, was a bookstore in Santa Clara. So I called and asked if their copy was signed. It wasn't. So I asked why $89. The woman explained that it was a hard to find book. "That's the current market value."

Dad would have loved that. A book he self-published and mostly gave away, has a current market value of $89. Me, I think the signed copy should be worth more. If I really wanted to boost his ego, I'd tell him I also found a site where the going rate was $147.

If any kc's kaleidoscope readers would like a copy, I'm happy to give it to you for the price I paid. (Or, maybe I should start listing them online one at a time in order to raise a little tuition money!)

And, just for fun, here's a site with seven reviews of the Old Man's literary gifts .

I'll always miss my Dad. Some days more than others. But I am thankful for his continuing presence in my life in so many ways.

Today I am thankful for his presence in words. And for sharing a love of the written word with me that lives now, too, in his grandson.

An Oldie but Goodie 3

2007-04-14T23:56:00.000-07:00

Call it procrastination or call it research, I've been reading through some BTB* writings as I try to write my first paper for the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. *Before the Blog

Vespers, June 1, 2005 – Anyone can serve Methodist communion. Anyone can serve Catholic communion. As long as a minister or priest has consecrated the bread and wine, any willing soul can serve.

But I never had.

During my youth in the Methodist Church, I had sat around a circle of peers as we passed communion to one another during Watch Night services on New Year’s Eve. And, while I remember elements of each of those services some 30 years later, I really had no awareness of the significance of serving communion to my neighbor. Passing communion on was just that, like passing the salt and pepper or the mashed potatoes.

In my last years in the Catholic Church, I regularly took communion from lay ministers because they were the ones who served the choir. We were served first, so we could proclaim in song that “We are the Body of Christ” as the rest of the congregation came forward for communion.

In earlier years, when choosing a lay ministry, I always chose to lector. In the Catholic Church, women can stand in the pulpit and proclaim the Word of God, but they cannot stand in the same pulpit minutes later and interpret that Word. The first time I chose to lector, I did so because I was more comfortable with public speaking than being responsible for not dropping the body and blood of Jesus all over the sanctuary floor. Ever after, though, I chose to lector because of the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit I experienced each time I read scripture aloud in worship. I suppose it is possible the communion servers felt the same powerful presence of the Holy Spirit, but I never was tempted to switch ministries to find out.

On reflection now, I recognize that another reason I never felt tempted by the prospect of serving Catholic communion was because, deep within my soul, I knew I did not believe as the Catholics taught that those wafers and wine literally became the body and blood of Christ. Transformed by the Holy Spirit? Yes, that I believed and still do. A moving representation of Christ’s sacrifice? I believe that, too.

Yet, while I accept a multitude of mysteries of faith, I did not believe I was literally consuming Christ’s flesh and blood, and I knew I could not in good conscience serve Catholic communion.

When I returned to the Methodist Church, I was moved to the point of tears the first time I took communion kneeling at the altar rail as I had in my youth. In good faith, in full communion, without hesitation or doubt, I consumed the wafer dipped in juice and felt grace anew.

There was no need to parse my beliefs or deal with dissonance.

At the contemporary worship I often attend, communion is served every week. The community of faith approaches the altar standing. Each person tears off a piece of King’s Hawaiian sweet bread and dips it in a cup of grape juice – both elements transformed by the Holy Spirit into a remembrance of Jesus.

While the minister’s invocation of the Holy Spirit and the remembrance of Jesus are sacrosanct, much else about this service is ad hoc. So the communion servers are usually rounded up as they enter the worship gathering and asked to serve. The simplicity of that act has a metaphoric beauty all its own. At any time, any of us could be asked to serve. At any time, any of us should be prepared to serve.

Nevertheless, when it came to communion, I never had.

Rev. Djalma had once asked me if I would sit near the front of our church’s weekly vespers service to assist him if the gathering grew too large for him to handle alone. He told me he would gesture for me to join him if he needed me. I went prepared to serve, because he had asked, but I prayed I wouldn’t have to. I’m not sure why I was so reluctant, but it didn’t feel real, it didn’t feel right, I didn’t feel ready.

It was two months before he asked again.

This time my reluctance stemmed from a scheduling conflict. For more than a week, my husband had been trying to go see Star Wars, but something kept coming up in his life or mine or ours to keep him from getting out of the house on time. This was, finally, to be his night. I needed to talk to him, and, when I reached him, he absolutely understood the significance of my request.

But the need to call him provided me time to ponder. I did feel ready this time, but I still wondered if it was right. Vespers is the most formal setting in which our church serves communion. The majority of the liturgy focuses on the communion sacrament.

And the altar rail, where communion is served, adds to that formality.

I wondered if it would be proper for me to stand on the service side of the altar rail. Even though anyone can serve communion, I worried that I would appear to be attempting to assume ministerial duties prematurely.

While not specifically stating my concern, I asked Rev. Jim and Rev. Molly what they thought. We were returning to the church from a wonderfully light lunch – the conversation, not the Rubio’s burritos. We had laughed and told stories and enjoyed each other’s company and humanity. Without hesitation, they both encouraged me to assist Djalma at vespers and the healing service that followed.

As soon as Djalma learned that I was willing and able to serve, he walked me mentally through the service. He handed me the scripture readings and took me to the sanctuary, where he walked me literally through the service, too.

Like a rehearsal for a wedding, Djalma gently took me through each step. We walked down the side aisle together to our seats on the front pew. He told me how he would open the service and the hymn that would follow, and then he walked with me to the lectern from which I would read the scripture. He showed me where I would sit in the choir pews while he consecrated communion. He walked to the communion table and showed me how he would signal for me when it was time to join him. We walked to the altar, where he showed me in which hand to hold the bread and in which to hold the cup. He told me what to say as I served. And he walked me back to the communion table, where he would conclude the communion service and bless the oils for the healing service.

And then he left me alone with my nervousness.

After practicing the scriptures from the lectern, I went back to the church office to try to get some work done at the computer, but I was too nervous to concentrate. Demmie noticed, so I told her that I was going to assist Djalma at vespers. Phyllis joined the conversation, and, in her no-holds-barred Missouri way, she asked Demmie – not me even though I was right there – “Why is she nervous?” Demmie answered with the words on my heart: “Because she takes it so seriously.”

I went into the sanctuary much earlier than Djalma had suggested, and I sat in a back pew and prayed. I prayed and I reflected on the week just past and how significant it had been to this ministry journey.

Just a week before, I had sat on a sofa in Molly’s home wondering whether I would still be a ministry candidate when I arose or whether I would simply be a journalist who once considered ministry.

Like many people, I have moments in my life I am not proud of. I don’t like to relive them in my own mind, and I certainly don’t want to relive them in public.

Yet, while I am embarrassed by some of my past actions, I am not ashamed of the person I am becoming through God’s grace. At the point in my life when I felt most broken, God’s grace made me whole. My faith overcame my faults.

And that is a truth I do not fear.

There are many ways I experience that grace – that restoration, but one place I experience it, always, is at the communion rail.

And that is why I take communion so seriously. Communion, for me, is a remembrance of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. In one sacrament it celebrates the past, present and future of all humanity. It represents the infinite possibilities of the power of God’s grace in the world for each person.

The sacrifice of Jesus, the presence of God, the comfort of the Holy Spirit, make this sacrament both solemn and joyous.

And so I prayed.

I prayed in thanksgiving that I could face my fears and embrace anew my call to ministry. I prayed in thanksgiving for God’s loving grace. And I prayed in earnest that I would not spill the body and blood of Jesus all over the sanctuary floor.

Djalma arrived and we walked together down a side aisle, a man who had served thousands of communions and a woman who had served none. A nervous novice and a gentle mentor.

We sat in the front pew and listened as Bob rang the carillon bells – bells my son later told me he could hear from the playground. Bob then moved to the piano and played four piano reflections that transported me to an even deeper place within myself. I felt peace and calm and joy.

As he opened worship, Djalma introduced me as one of the church’s visitation ministers and said I would be assisting him in the service. Together we all sang the opening hymn, and as it ended, I ascended the steps to the lectern.

The scriptures were both about the healing power and presence of God.

Each time I looked up to connect with the congregation, I saw a familiar face. I saw strangers, too, all listening not to me, but to the Word of the Lord.

At the end of the Lamb of God, Djalma signaled for me to join him. We walked together toward the altar, where he served me communion and I served him.

And then I walked to the communion rail.

What I felt in those first moments was an astonishing unburdening.

I felt joy and release.

The nervousness I had felt at the lectern, the nervousness I always feel at the lectern, was gone. So, too, was my nervousness about serving communion. This was not something to be feared. It was something to be celebrated.

I also felt an immense sense of service – the very same sense of service I feel called toward in ministry.

And so I served, joyously.

Again, I saw familiar faces.

The kindest woman I met in my earliest encounters with this church was there.

The church’s lay leader, with whom I had earlier had a moving conversation about the challenges she faces with her elderly mother, was there, too.

And Molly was there.

It was Rev. Molly who had served me my first communion at the altar rail on my return to the Methodist church. And now, through God’s grace and transformation in my life, I stood here to serve her.

I was struck later by how different my perspective was on the serving side of the rail. I had often, erroneously, thought of communion as an individual act between God and me. But that is only the beginning of communion. Communion is a shared sacrament – the word itself reveals that truth.

We each come forward in both brokenness and joy, each with a unique experience of faith and grace as only our own lives can know it. But, in communion, we bring those individual perspectives together and share the same grace.

In communion, we know that we can rise from the altar rail and serve and live anew in grace and peace and joy.

An Oldie but Goodie 2

2007-04-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

Call it procrastination or call it research, I've been reading through some BTB* writings as I try to write my first paper for the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. *Before the Blog

Ash Wednesday, 2004 – At a vespers service tonight at the Methodist church, I had a heart-warming experience in the truest sense of those words.

The organ prelude was calming and should have made it easy to be reflective, but my mind kept wandering to outside responsibilities and to continuing curiosities about another new experience in this church of my Christian beginnings.

As the service started, I was immediately struck by how very much the words and lyrics of the prayers were like a Catholic liturgy. I lost myself in the sameness and in the comfort of finding something so familiar in this new church home I am coming to love.

Communion was served at the altar rail. We – the congregation – formed a long line up to the altar extending down the aisle and waited for our turn to receive communion. Again I reflected on the similarities.

If it is possible to have a slip of the tongue during an internal dialogue with God, I did. I meant to say, “This is so much like the Catholic Church.” What I really said was, “This is so much like Your church.” The immediate response in my mind was “This is my church.”

I like my internal dialogues. They give me an opportunity to ponder, sometimes prayerfully, sometimes not. During the best reflections, I puzzle out a remedy, a response or a way to move forward in the face of some obstacle or concern. And even during the mediocre reflections, at least I’m reflecting. At least I am attempting to face some issue that stands between the person I am and the person I could become.

In recent years, I have come to accept that God knows my heart – all of it. The darkness and the light. If I start to contemplate things better left unthought, I no longer try to pretend I wasn’t. I no longer try to change the subject, because, God only knows, God knows. On good days, I turn those thoughts into prayers: God, you know I feel this way, because you know me. Help me deal with these trials and temptations. Help me transform them from something negative into something positive.

There was nothing negative about my reflections tonight. I was preparing to receive Christ in my life anew. I realized that, ideally, I would be this reflective each time I take communion, pondering my shortcomings and standing in wonder at the patience and grace available to me through Christ and represented in that gift of sustenance.

Approaching the altar rail, watching others kneel and wait to receive this sacrament, I remembered the anticipation I experienced long ago, kneeling at the altar of First United Methodist Church in Paris, Texas, praying for God’s blessing and waiting.

I heard the low murmur of Gary Regan’s voice as he walked along the altar offering an intimate communion to each guest at the table. The murmur was like a comforting chant, a truth repeated. As he neared where I knelt, I could hear a distinct word or two within the murmur. “Christ.” “Body” “Given.” “You.” Until he stood before me and the words came together in focused clarity: “This is Christ’s body given for you.” And as I kneeled in prayer, communion dissolving into my body, the murmur resumed.

I don’t remember the first time I took communion in the Methodist Church, which would have been my first communion ever, but I clearly recall the first time I did not take communion.

It was the first Sunday I attended a Methodist church. My mother had arranged for me to go with the daughter of a friend of hers, someone I knew from junior high school. Several of my friends were there.

As four or five rows of pews filled with teens, sitting together in youthful solidarity, someone noticed that it was Communion Sunday. I was petrified, mortified, filled with all forms or teenage angst. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked my friend. She told me not to worry; she said anyone could take communion. My friends encouraged me to join them. They were offering me the easy way out – just follow along with us, no one cares.

But I cared.

I didn’t yet know if I believed what I needed to believe to take communion in anyone’s church – no matter how open the communion was.

As the rows in front of us began to empty, my heart pounded. It is against most teenagers’ sense of social survival to self-ostracize. But that’s what I chose that morning.

I chose to sit in that pew alone.

I waited for my friends to return, and as I did, I had what may have been my first internal conversation with God. “Why did this have to happen on my first Sunday?” I asked. I don’t recall that there was an answer.

Sitting alone in that empty pew was hard – much harder than taking communion would have been. I felt exposed and vulnerable. But I did not feel like an imposter – that’s how I would have felt if I had pretended I was comfortable taking communion.

For people brought up in faith, this may not seem like such an agonizing decision. They, too, might have encouraged me to take communion that day. Children often receive communion alongside their parents before they are fully ready.

I have no memory of my first communion. I have no recollection of coming to awareness that I was ready. Perhaps I waited until a year or so later when I was baptized at age 14. Perhaps I began to feel more comfortable with my nascent faith, and communion became a natural extension.

By some measure, I suppose I could count that day sitting alone in the pew as my first communion. It certainly was my first communion experience. And there is no doubt it was the day I made a conscious decision to take communion seriously, to hold it in reverence, to await it.

Tonight, until I approached the communion rail, I had not known how much I missed kneeling to receive communion, how much I missed the gentle murmur of a caring pastor reaching out to invite me to share in this wondrous love.
As the minister presented the bread and cup to me, my heart pounded rapidly within me. I took a wafer and dipped it into the cup and consumed this life force, this love, this eternal promise. My heart pounded in anticipation and in nervousness in the presence of the Lord.

And then I was calm, my nervousness quelled by communion, comforted by the realization, once again, of God’s amazing gift of grace.

I remember thinking as a youth that there was never really enough time for prayer after communion. Others were waiting to take my place.

Tonight, I felt that familiar pang of wanting to linger at the altar. I realized, though, that it wasn’t so much a lack of time to pray I was experiencing as a complete loss for words. There will never be enough time to come up with the right words to express my eternal gratefulness except to say to God – you know my heart.

Reflecting later, I reached an emotional awareness that communion is more than just taking Christ’s body and receiving God’s grace. I come to the altar to give myself to God. To say: “I am here. You made me. You know me. I am yours. I accept this gift of your life and, in a much less cataclysmic yet heart-felt way, I return my life to you.”

When my heart began pounding tonight, I accepted it as another unspoken exchange between me and God – a quickening, a deepening of my immeasurable, inexpressible gratitude for this imperfect life redeemed by love.

Words do not begin to capture what I felt – but God knows.

An Oldie But Goodie 1

2007-04-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Call it procrastination or call it research, I've been reading through some BTB* writings as I try to write my first paper for the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. *Before the Blog

February, 2004 -- Having reached a point where I felt comfortable with the concept that I could be a Methodist who still found comfort in saying the rosary, having realized I could still travel the stations of the cross as a meditative reminder of Christ’s selfless sacrifice, only one other Catholic consideration remained.

Communion.

Not a small consideration.

Perhaps the greatest defining difference between the Catholic Mass, which is centered on the sacrament of communion, and the Protestant communion celebration involves what transpires when the priest or minister invokes the Holy Spirit to descend on the bread and cup.

For one thing, Catholic priests pause much longer. Either the Holy Spirit moves more slowly in the Catholic Church, or the priest just wants to make sure the congregation gets it – the Holy Spirit just descended, you didn’t miss it, did you?

In the Catholic Mass, the circular wafers and sacramental wine are believed to be transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ.

In the Protestant celebration, the tiny squares of pressed flour and the grape juice serve as a symbolic reminder of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and his ever-present love.

How curious that it should come down to this.

While my search within myself for a sense of fulfillment in where and how I worship has been going on for almost five years, its most recent awakening came with an Easter message from Pope John Paul II. He delivered a finger-wagging, tongue lashing to Catholics who take communion outside The Church.

I hadn’t had occasion in more than a decade to do so, but I immediately saw myself sitting in the pew of the Jacksboro Church of Christ beside my grandmother. When she turned to me with that silver-plated tray of unleavened bread, I was not about to refuse it. Here was my beloved grandmother sharing a symbol of God’s loving sacrifice with me. And, in passing that communion tray on to me, she was also sharing a symbolic representation of the deep faith she hoped to pass on to me, too.

I took communion joyfully that day, and I never questioned my decision again, always gratefully accepting, until my grandmother’s death, the flattened bread and the quivering tray of small plastic cups filled with grape juice.

The grape juice.

I had forgotten about that shockingly sweet taste of redemption.

I’ve never known or even questioned why most Protestant churches serve grape juice at the communion table.

I did learn some time ago that every morsel consumed in Catholic communion is painstakingly baked or fermented, often by men and women in religious orders who spend their lives pressing the wafers and grapes according to strict rule.

I would come to realize that Protestants have much more latitude in the communion meal.

Seeking further guidance in my ongoing search, I attended a women’s retreat offered by the Methodist Church but held at Catholic retreat center. It was just the transition I needed. The theme for the weekend was women’s spiritual journeys, and I went determined to fully explore mine.

To my pleasant surprise, I even witnessed the moment of my transition.

I was an unfamiliar face to everyone at the retreat, which frequently prompted questions about how long I had attended San Diego’s First United Methodist Church. “I’m a Catholic,” I told them, explaining that I was considering a return to my Methodist beginnings and had been sampling their church for a few weeks. I repeated this explanation many times during the weekend.

On Sunday morning, sitting at breakfast with some women who didn’t know my background, someone asked how long I had attended First UMC. I almost launched into my Catholic explorer litany but stopped myself. I realized it was no longer the correct answer. So I answered a direct question, directly: “I’ve been going to First Methodist about six weeks.”

That was the moment I fully reclaimed my Methodist roots.

A communion service followed breakfast. Frankly, the entire weekend had felt like communion, but at this service, the elements of communion would be served. The altar presentation was lovely: A stack of four or five circles of unleavened bread, a colorful goblet of juice, both draped in cloth on a table covered with a patchwork quilt.

As a finale to a rich and spiritually provocative weekend, the service was beautiful. As communion began, a voice within me said: “I am here as a full participant. I am not an interloper at this communion table. I believe that I will draw as much strength and grace from this communion as from any I have ever shared anywhere. I am welcome here, and I belong.”

The bread and cup were passed around the circle with each woman serving the woman next to her.

It was simple, grace-filled and solemn. And I was fulfilled.

After the service ended, I stayed to help clean the room we had inhabited all weekend for our retreat activities and the communion service.

At one point, I was alone at a side table, packing a box of things to return to the church. I secured the altar flowers and candles and reached down to retrieve the beautiful communion goblet – wrapping it carefully. Then, someone placed the leftover communion bread next to me on the table.

Now, in the Catholic Church, there aren’t leftovers. Any wafers consecrated during Mass are considered to still be the living body of Christ. And you don’t put Christ away in Tupperware for later. The priest or Eucharistic ministers either consume any remaining communion elements at the altar, or they place them in a tabernacle until time for the next holy meal.

I found myself momentarily taken slightly aback to realize I was packing away Christ’s symbolic body. I had just recovered from that little shiver of sacramental difference, when the wrapper surrounding the communion bread caught my eye.

“Mr. Pita” it read, a product of Sara Lee.

I couldn’t help myself, I laughed out loud.

“Mr. Pita!”

I had partaken of “Mr. Pita” in that simple, grace-filled and solemn communion service.

And I had been fulfilled.

The postscript to this story is that, as I always have, I feel comfortable receiving Protestant communion. What troubles me is that I now have a better understanding than I ever did of what Catholics profess to believe about communion. I have read about priestly divinity and transubstantiation. Some of what Catholics believe about communion, I had never known. But, in my heart of hearts, I know I knew I was supposed to believe those wafers were literally transformed into Christ’s body and blood, and, just as fervently, I know I never did.

Is Christ present in the Catholic Mass?

Absolutely.

But he is also present in the Protestant communion.

He is ever-present.

And, for me, communion is as much about the fellowship of the community and Christ’s presence in every human as it is about the symbols used to remind me of his loving and ongoing sacrifice.

Do I believe Christ is present in the Catholic communion?

Yes.

But I also believe He is present in Mr. Pita.

Three weeks, three semesters

2007-04-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

Three (very busy) weeks remain of this semester.

Then, three semesters remain of seminary.

It seems a miracle.

Just three years ago, I couldn't imagine how seminary could become a reality.

Now I can't imagine what my life would be like without it.

The next little miracle will be to plow through all the reading and papers due in the next three weeks, with some of the biggest assignments due on my birthday, which comes the day after my first appearance before the District Committee on Ordained Ministry!

Three weeks and three semesters.

Who set the time machine on fast forward?

I keep coming back to the wisteria...

2007-04-05T12:05:00.001-07:00

The wisteria that overflows a wall on the church's plaza continues to delight me, as does the song bird who frequently sits among its brilliant blossoms.

At CST, the campus is alive with amazing natural signs of new life in almost every hue.

I have been enjoying the emergence of spring for weeks, savoring simple details.

This morning, thinking again of the wisteria, I had to ask myself, was it not in bloom last year? And campus, did it also not burst forth with spring a year ago, when all I noticed was the aloe vera and later the bearded iris?

Thus, this is a prayer of thanksgiving not just for wisteria but for the healing and wholeness that has opened my eyes to the goodness in the world and in my life.

May I always see the wisteria.

Amen.

Me and Julio and Palm Sunday

2007-04-01T23:53:00.000-07:00

Molly and I had been meeting in my office after the Water's Edge service today, wrestling with both pesky details and big vision for our Easter Vigil Prayer Pilgramage. Outside, the band was rehearsing next week's Easter songs. Molly left and I kept working, scarcely noticing the background music of the band.

And then, the unmistakable sound of Paul Simon's "Me and Julio" got my attention. I ran from my office onto the stage and joined our music leader, two vocalists and our bass player in almost an hour of singing. Mostly we sang John Denver, I could only get two Peter Paul and Mary songs out of them. The first was Leavin' on a Jet Plane, which, come to think of it, is also a John Denver song. I have never heard those lyrics quite the way that I did today. When I first heard that song as a child -- and this dates me, I know -- it was often associated with Vietnam. I don't think that was Denver's association, but several of my friends with older brothers said they associated that song with their loved ones leaving for that monstrous war. Even learning to sing and play it on my guitar several years later, it still had that lonesome longing sound of a war lament. I don't think I truly heard it as a love song until today. "So kiss me and smile for me, Tell me that you'll wait for me, Hold me like you'll never let me go..." How could I have missed that? Of course, at 17, I only had a theoretical sense of that longing! But I digress. We sang and sang and sang. In between the old folkies we sang three beautiful worship songs by Chris Durrand, our music team leader.

It was a nice bridge between our Palm Sunday service and the hospital calls that were to come.

Palm Sunday holds special significance for me because it was on Palm Sunday three years ago that I felt a renewed call to ministry -- the call I acted on, the call too strong to ignore.

And as wonderful and life-giving as our Palm Sunday service was today, it was that hour of impromptu singing for singing's sake that blessed my day and touched my heart and revived my soul.

Too personal to post -- but it's my life story

2007-03-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

For my CPE application, I was asked to write "a reasonable account of your life," including significant people and events and a description of my family of origin, current family and important and supportive social relationships. Read on at the risk of knowing me better, or at least knowing how I know me...

My life

I was born to Tony and Linda Clark on April 26, 1960. I spent my childhood years in Fort Worth, Texas, where my father worked for a newspaper and my mother worked as education coordinator for an art museum until my brother was born in 1966. My Fort Worth childhood was filled with simple but rich experiences taking in the arts community. I went to children’s plays at Casa Manana and frequently toured the Museum of Science and History. I sang one year in the Texas Girl’s Choir, took drama classes, and was active in Girl Scouts. During that time, my family attended a Unitarian-Universalist Church that my parents helped found.

We moved to Paris, Texas, when I was 11 because my father had gotten a job as an English teacher at Paris Junior College. This transition was exciting for me but also challenging, especially coming on the advent of adolescence. Middle school was hard, but I loved my high school years. I was active in speech and drama as well as journalism. In academics, I loved making connections between my classes, seeing places where history and literature and science intersected. I graduated as valedictorian. I spent one year at Paris Junior College, where my father still taught. I continued to study drama and journalism. My first big discernment decision came when I needed to choose whether to pursue studies in journalism or drama. I chose journalism and graduated from the University of North Texas in 1981.

In early 1982, I married one of my journalism classmates and we moved to Northern California, where he had secured a job working in the corporate office of a family-owned franchise business. I began my newspaper career at the Hayward Daily Review, writing about city politics and education in Oakland and later statewide education issues. Our marriage ended after four years over a variety of issues, but my chief concern was what appeared to be a change in his opinion about whether to have children. I moved back to Texas and worked for two years as an editor at the Dallas Times Herald. It had been my dream to work for a major metropolitan newspaper and this newspaper was the one I admired when I had been in journalism school. The greatest joy during those two years, though, was getting to spend more time with my paternal grandmother. She was a cherished person in my life throughout my life, and I know she cherished me.

I was recruited back to California in late 1989 to work as an editor at The San Diego Tribune (now The San Diego Union-Tribune). About a year later, my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia and died two months later. I flew to Texas to be with her when her doctor gave her the diagnosis, and I was able to be with her again in the last two days of her life. My father and I were with her in her hospital room when she died. As hard as this was, I count it now as one of the most significant experiences of my life. It was the first and only time I have been present at the time of death, and it was beautiful even as it was breaking my heart. (In my pastoral care role, I have been present with others just hours before the death of loved ones, and it almost always sends me back to my grandmother’s bedside. I pray a prayer of hope that they will know the grace and peace I finally came to know in the aftermath of her death.)

In 1996, I married a man I had met working together at the newspaper. In 2001, we had a son. Becoming a parent was a life-transforming experience. There is such joy in motherhood, and such an awesome responsibility for another life. My husband and I have struggled to adjust to the changes that parenthood requires of a marriage. We have no family nearby, so we are mostly on our own. We celebrate our son and our family.

I worked in various capacities as an editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune for 16 years. I still loved my job and journalism when I left the paper in 2005 to enroll in seminary. I now work as pastoral care coordinator at First United Methodist Church in San Diego and attend Claremont School of Theology. My seminary experience opened up a wonderful world to me of caring, thoughtful and socially committed people. I know that some of the friends I have made in seminary will be dear friends for life and an important and essential part of my support system in ministry.
In my first semester of seminary, my father was diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm and had surgery two months later. He survived the surgery but died during his recovery. This was a shock to all of us as we had been told he was fine and recovering well and rapidly. My grief was profound. I am grateful to have come through that first year of grief with patience from my family, support from my senior pastor, seminary friends and professors, and good grief counseling.

I have been blessed to have a series of good mentor/friends throughout my life. A family friend and artist, a junior high English teacher, my high school speech and drama teacher, a church youth leader, a more-experienced journalist at my first job, trusted colleagues throughout my career. In my two years in a ministry setting, my mentors have included a 94-year-old retired pastor and a 30-year-old ordained United Methodist elder, who is my mentor, my coworker and friend. I am coming to count some of the parents of my son’s classmates as friends and mentors, too. They seem to have a handle on this parenting/working/marriage juggling and are happy to share wisdom or laughter or simply understanding.

From my mother, I learned a love of the arts and beauty. From my father, I learned a love of words and thought and faith. From my grandmother, I learned unconditional love. From my son, I learn to treasure life and live more in the moment. From and with my husband, I learn how to grow in love and relationship even in the face of life’s challenges. From my friends, I am learning to be my authentic self, and through that authenticity with myself and before my friends I am learning a depth of love outside romantic love or familial love that I have not previously known.

Small connections

2007-03-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

In recent days, I have learned to celebrate small connections.

My wish, my hope, my dream is really for great big, lifelong, solid and secure, deep and meaningful connections.

Lately, though, I've had small moments of meaningful connection, and not unlike an attentiveness practice of taking notice of small details, my awareness makes me realize that these modest connections, added together, can equal great contentment.

Rather than wait for the one or two big connections, I can enjoy and savor many, many, many small ones.

Like standing on the stairway landing today and talking with the kindergarten moms.

Like talking to a friend, ever so briefly, about dear and beloved grandmothers whose memories and love guide us still, years after their deaths.

Like having a friend at school tell me that our friendship is easy and my not only agreeing but realizing what a gift that ease is.

Like an email exchange with a respected mentor.

Like roaming the aisles of a fabric shop with a friend, surrounded by intriguing textures and colors and creative possibilities and simultaneously sharing equally rich conversation.

And it reminds me of my experience over the past few weeks at school. Each week, something new is in bloom. These exotic purple flowers I cannot name. A tree with brilliant yellow blossoms. A shurb with tiny white clusters of flower. Each week, I have celebrated a new vision and new life. Perhaps next week the bearded iris will be in bloom.

There are times when the campus smells like Texas. When I arrived late last Wednesday night, I felt like I had stepped back in time to a late spring night in my hometown of Paris. The air smelled identical. The biblical garden, too, at certain times of day, smells like Texas, sometimes like summer camp, sometimes like my grandmother's backyard. It is this unimaginable gift. And it sustains me.

Several times a day when I am at school, I walk by the aloe vera plant that was my salve last spring, but there are no blossoms. And I wonder why, since I know it was already in bloom this time last year. And, while I miss the blossom, I also feel great gratitude that I no longer need it.

I'd live this day again

2007-02-28T22:23:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, more frequently of late, I have a day I call an "Our Town" day. In that Thornton Wilder play, the main character has died but gets the opportunity to relive one day, but the stipulation is that it has to be an ordinary day, not a wedding day, not the day a child was born, an ordinary day.

Today began as a very ordinary day but, by day's end, was extraordinary in the richness of the texture and connection and depth of how I lived and moved and breathed through it.

It began with my son trying to find the words to express the depth of his love for me. Mom, what's 60 times 100,000? Six million. That's how much I love you.

We celebrated this silly little milestone of Ryan turning 5 1/2 with pancakes in the shape of a five and a fraction and an airplane to sop up the remaining syrup.

I had second breakfast with a woman who has been my unofficial mentor since my first inklings of a call to ministry. It was delightful and affirming and painfully candid and very, very life-giving. For both of us, I think.

And then, I got to make good on a promise of more than two years to give a bedroom set that had belonged to my grandmother to a woman who lost her home in the Cedar Fire. I promised it to her at a women's retreat two years ago, but she hasn't had anywhere to put it until now. She and her husband came to get it today and were amazed by its beauty. It was so nice for me to see it through the eyes of someone who not only needed it but appreciated it. She hesitated, remembering I had said it had been my grandmother's, but she finally agreed to take it if I would simply consider it on loan to her. I didn't tell her it was the bed where I spent many a very early morning nursing Ryan in his infancy. I knew if I did she wouldn't take it.
It was a joy to see something I value so valued by someone else. And now, the room can become a play room for Ryan.

Each movement of the day just added to the richness and beauty.

I had a brief but deeply engaged email exchange with a friend that fed my hope that I am not alone in some of my defining values and concerns. Among them, truth, beauty, freedom, but most of all love. (Though, with me truth sometimes ties with love.)

I had my weekly field education meeting with Jim today. It was a debrief of Sunday's sermon in which, among other things, I felt abandoned by the Spirit for only the second time. But it was a good learning experience and our conversation was rich and deep. And then we talked about my case study for field ed, which is about a very painful and personal experience I had recently that has altered how I behave at "work", though not in ministry. And both were candid and direct and beautiful conversations that made me thankful again to be working at First Church.

And then there was Vespers, which sustains me. Preparing for Vespers, I read the scriptures and realized that I would get to stand in the same lectern from which my words were a bit squishy and confusing on Sunday and redeem the error both by reading the Gospel, which was anything but squishy and participate in communion. And I remembered what Molly always says about the redemptive values of communion on any mistakes we make, knowingly or not, in worship.

And the beauty of Vespers, which sustains me, was that I felt the palabable presence of the Spirit. I felt overcome by the Spirit and I welcomed her in. As I stood to read the Gospel, my heart was pounding in my chest. And I was thankful.

And a suprising joy tonight of Vespers, which sustains me, was getting to watch the youngest member of the St. Paul Cathedral Men and Boy's Choir wriggle, yawn, squirm and fidget through their performance in ways that could have been scripted by Frank Capra. It was this unimaginable gift of humanity of laughter of appreciating a moment in time that could not be captured with a camera or even words. But the memory movie will play in my mind for some time.

And serving communion is also a gift and a pleasure and a grace beyond words.

As I was leaving Vespers, a woman whose father is dying came up to me in tears so intense my first assumption was that her father had died. But she was simply letting me know that he was now at a hospice. I asked her if I could go with her to visit her father after dinner. (Dinner was with Jeff and Ryan on the occasion of his unbirthday. He picked the restaurant -- TGIFridays -- and neither Jeff nor I remembered where the one in Mission Valley was, but Ryan gave us directions!)

At the hospice, the father awakened and was alert and glad to see us both. We planned to sing his favorite hymns to him, but, as we were not too far into Amazing Grace when the daughter began crying and came to me for a hug. I comforted her and kept singing and her father joined me, singing the second verse of Amazing Grace in his own beautiful attempt to comfort his daughter. We shared communion and more songs but that second verse of Amazing Grace was the true sacrament.

And then, as has become my habit, I called my mother on my drive to school and we had a wonderful talk and in it she told me about a dream she had where Dad kissed her and it felt so real to her that she just accepted it as his love.

An amazing day of depth and grace and love and Spirit and connection, wonderful, wonderful connection.

I'd live this day again in a heartbeat.

A prayer in celebration of Rev. Earl Kernahan

2007-02-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

O Gracious God, God of Comfort and Unending Love,

We come today with hearts filled with both gladness and sorrow to joyously celebrate the life of Earl Kernahan.

We pray that your loving Holy Spirit will provide all who mourn with comfort in their time of grief.

We thank you for the beauty of the love we have known through Earl in friendship and in family and in fellowship. A love we know is from you.

We celebrate a man who could recite Shakespeare to his wife while driving on vacation and who could surprise an entire Christmas Eve congregation by reciting from the Gospel of John in Greek.

We celebrate a man who loved poetry and politics.

A man who loved the Gospel and those who live it.

A man who made his love known and clear to each person in his family and in his life.

We celebrate, too, the life and memory of Betty Kernahan, and we celebrate the love she and Earl shared.

We celebrate their children Karen, Carol, Candy, and Colleen.

We celebrate all of Earl’s family, especially Jace who made Earl great.

We pray now for some of the greatest concerns of Earl’s life and ministry.

We pray for greater awareness of our own racism, sexism and other prejudices. And we pray for an end to all prejudice. Help us to know as Earl did that all of your children are precious to you.

We pray for freedom for all people – freedom from war, freedom from poverty, freedom from addiction, freedom from anxiety.

We pray, too, that our places of worship can be open to all -- as Earl opened wider the doors of churches in Chula Vista and Honolulu.

We pray for the empty chair Earl leaves in this congregation and the empty vestments he leaves in this conference. We pray with confidence that you will send many others to follow in his path.

Help us always to remember, dear God, the scripture from first John that Earl knew by heart: Theos ein agape God is love.

We celebrate the time we had with Earl as he moved, in his own words, slowly, very slowly on to perfection.

We rejoice too, dear God, that Earl has now moved on to perfection, but for those of us who remain it was not nearly slowly enough.

Join us together in that one great fellowship of love as we, too, press on to perfection, perfection in love, perfection in you.

O God, who gave us birth,
Help us to live as those who are prepared to die
And when our days here are accomplished,
enable us to die as those who go forth to live,
so that living or dying, our life may be in you.
and that nothing in life or in death
will be able to separate us
from your great love. (UM Book of Worship)

We pray this in thanksgiving for the grace that comes to us through Jesus, the love we know from you, O God, and the abiding comfort of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Astonishing notions

2007-02-23T23:24:00.000-08:00

I learned three remarkable things today, and none was in a class.

English poet William Blake always capitalized the word "Imagination" because, to him, Imagination was the Holy Spirit. (Apparently the role of Imagination was an overarching theme of his, counter-cultural to the rationalism of his day. Perhaps I would have known this if I had had more and better exposure to British lit.)

I learned that during an appearance by Eugene Peterson, author and translator of the Bible into The Message. Peterson said many wonderful things about words, particularly those in the Bible. The most joyous part for me was hearing him tell how the translation work was influenced by his ministry with real people dealing with real struggles and how, therefore, he can read a given word or phrase from a passage in The Message and see and name the person whose life influenced the words. Amazing. And amazingly beautiful. (In my own self-interest, I also enjoyed his emphatic assertion that "The Church should ordain writers.")

And, through my own stumbling attempts to write a manuscript sermon to preach in Big Church on Sunday on Luke 4:1-13, I discovered something that I'm surprised I'd never seen before. Staring at the page with unfocused eyes, trying to find meaning or at least clarity among the sans-serif text, I saw the word "devil" and what jumped out at me was "evil". I had never noticed that the word "devil" contains the word "evil". I have yet to do either the exegetical or etymological work that might shed more light on this. I'm just delighting that my own notion of the devil is defined within the word.

Evil is the devil.

Imagination is Holy Spirit.

The Word is God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Thanks be to God.

Ash Wednesday gratitude

2007-02-22T06:01:00.000-08:00

I have never before experienced Ash Wednesday as a day of thanks giving, but this year was overflowing with a sense of great gratitude.

I often take the measure of my life at odd little milestones, not just at true anniveraries or birthdays. And Ash Wednesday is a "holiday" that offers nothing if not opportunity for reflection and recollection.

As Bob Plimptom played the prelude to our Ash Wednesday service, and after a more rowdy than usual collection of clergy and us clergy wannabes had settled down on the front row, I entered into a quiet place with myself and -- dare I say it -- the Divine and I knew a peace that was true. And the truth of my peace was this: I am in such a better place, personally, this Ash Wednesday than last. I was in an agonizingly horrible place last year as Ash Wednesday and Lent commenced, and, though I didn't know it then, I know on reflection that, as bad as I was last year on Ash Wednesday, I would be worse. And now I'm better. Much better. Taking the measure of the year, I felt deep gratitude, immense gratitude for being in such a better place. And I said one of Anne Lamott's two most frequent prayers to God: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

At that moment I was grateful for my life.

From start to finish, though, the day was filled with joy and gratitude. It began in the chaos and love that combined in my morning routine at home with Jeff and Ryan and ended in a lively conversation about ministry, theology and drama with my friend Jeri when she and I both arrived late into the commuter dorm.

My sense of thanks giving yesterday was so great that to list each moment might truly take an entire day. So I offer this litany of the things for which my heart is filled with deep gratitude.

Words. Words of a sermon not yet polished. The Word, this day from Luke, that promises a perpetual presence of God's Spirit. Tentative words of encouragement from my husband. Wise, wise words from my son that could be an essay all their own. Combining words with Jim and creating more in the hope of sharing a word of God -- Trust. Words of humor and truth from Anne Lamott. Words of both depth and laughter with Molly. Prophetic words from Erika, even the expletives. Words of guidance, reflection, consecration and prayer from the Ash Wednesday service. Honest words about hope from Ellen Ott Marshall. Words that filled both my head and my soul as I drove up to school. Words of love, both spoken and not, especially the ones I could literally feel. The words of John 1 that I will always hear now in the voice of Earl Kernahan (in both Greek and English). The Word that was in the beginning. Logos.

And this morning, I am grateful for the ash that remains under my thumbnail, reminding me of my first opportunity to administer ashes -- clumsy as it was -- and reminding me that we all are from dust and to dust we will return.

What a long and wonderful road I have traveled since Ash Wednesday three years ago when I took my questions about returning to Methodism to a warm and welcoming pastor and then went to Ash Wednesday worship to receive sacramental ashes reminding me of my humanity and my place among all humanity.

I feel richly alive and richly blessed and deeply grateful.

Thanks, thanks, thanks be to God.

Lost and found

2007-02-16T13:38:00.000-08:00

Through a set of very odd circumstances, a pair of earrings that I treasure returned to me today.

I had missed them months ago and given them up for lost over the holidays when some cleaning revealed they were nowhere on the bureau where my modest jewelry box resides among the equally precious "jewels" from the playground that my boy bestows on me with some frequency. The church lost and found turned up the missing half of each of two other pair of earrings. But not these.

The earrings in question are small, squarish silver crosses. I bought them at annual conference in 2004 from the booth of a group that supports ministries in Africa. I was there that year to see Molly ordained. That's also the year that, walking with Karen Peter among the booths, I hesitated at the CST table. I wasn't really ready to tell anyone that I was thinking about seminary -- I hadn't told Jim or Molly yet. But I stopped and picked up a catalogue and other information and told Karen about my impossible dream of entering seminary.

So these earrings are embued with lots of meaning, not to mention that they are a significant symbol of my faith.

Having already established that I had given them up for lost, here's how I found them:

I've been on campus this week with no cash and without much desire to spend using plastic or by withdrawing from my anemic checking account. I have some food here, soup, cereal, oatmeal and coffee. So, I'm not going hungry. But, I didn't have time for lunch because I wrote a paper during the lunch hour. The snack bar sells stuff cheap that is more portable than soup, so I counted my change. I had less than a dollar. I remembered that someone who uses commuter housing routinely throws pennies away into a desk drawer. So, I opened the drawer and fished out about 20 cents. Still not quite enough for a bagel and a drink. So, I decided to see if there was any spare change in the drawers of the other desk in the room. There was not. Instead, I found my earrings.

What an odd little adventure of trying to live within my means and having treasures restored!

Directing is to ministry...

2007-02-15T23:40:00.000-08:00

"An artist is someone who draws attention to what is praiseworthy in the universe."
-- William Ball, stage director

Betty Bernhard, acting and directing professor at Pomona College, shared that quote with us tonight during a lively guest lecture on directing in our medieval drama class.

Her talk was practical and philosophical, and, truly without belaboring the point, she kept drawing parallels between directing and ministry and, at one point, between the director and God.

Much of her advice for directors would also be good advice for ministers. Rather than belabor that point myself, I'm going to capture some of her advice for directors and invite myself and anyone else who reads this simply to insert the word "minister" for "director" and consider the similarities.

For example, the director should tell the stage manager never to run from Point A to Point B during the dress rehearsal because it alarms the actors. The director, too, must maintain a presence of calm no matter what disaster may be unfolding.

"You have to be very calm even if it's killing you."

Actors need praise. They thrive on it. They live for it. As a director, Bernhard said, "you must discipline yourself to give praise."

The director serves as the host of the play much the way a minister extends hospitality to a congregation, she said.

And, with some excellent vocational discernment advice, she said: "Don't do a play that you don't really love."

The same principle applies to the people in the production: "Don't talk anyone into doing anything on your show that they don't really want to."

The director needs to make sure that the play and the players speak with and to the audience, not through it.

Directors have moral, ethical, spiritual and financial responsibilities for the show.

Directors have to be very enthusiastic.
Don't be a director if you don't have great stamina.

I asked her who chooses to be a director, who feels drawn to directing: "People who are good at seeing the big picture. People who are good with deadlines."

Bernhard cautioned us against a scarcity mentality telling us not to feel limited by what we do and don't have. "Follow God's example and create a universe out of what's lying around."

On a more personal note, I continue to be surprised by how excited I am to be doing a play again after decades of not. It has been very telling to realize anew that theatre is, indeed, one of my loves.

I recently heard someone describe a bright young woman who changed her major from psychology to engineering, gave engineering a noble try and then decided to switch back to psychology. Those who knew her well said that when she talked about sociological situations, particularly in work settings where a psychology degree might help in a human relations job, she would light up in ways she rarely did when she talked about engineering. That's good discernment.

I light up these days in this class. And, I light up when I talk about it. But, I'm not changing my major, because I also light up when I talk about ministry, and I light up when I talk about worship, and I light up when I struggle with theological issues in scripture. And, I no longer light up nearly as much when I talk about journalism.

My hope is that as a minister, I, too, can be someone who draws attention to what is praiseworthy in the universe.

Hearts 2U

2007-02-14T08:17:00.000-08:00

Amazing Grace

2007-02-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

I added another communion story today to a growing string of communion experiences that are as meaningful to me as each chapter in my continuing call story. And the beauty of today's communion story is that it is an embodiment of grace that I could never have imagined and certianly would never have sought.

Among my duties as worship coordinator for our Water's Edge contemporary service is to set up the room for worship. I make sure the mic has a fresh battery, I finalize the worship order, I fill candles with oil and replace dwindling votives, I put a loaf of Hawaiian bread on a plate and fill two chalices with juice, I print the scriptures for the day and recruit readers, I make sure we have enough people to serve communion, and I tend to other little behind-the-scenes tasks. Just before the service, I visually survey the room to make sure all the details have been taken care of and the room is ready for worship. During the service, I make the announcements (my least favorite assignment) and read scripture, usually the Gospel lesson. Otherwise, I worship and watch for things that may need to be tended to quietly from the back of the room.

Today, I did all that, but I also had promised to visit a Sunday school classroom. I hated to leave worship, but the classes only meet during our worship time. I stayed through the sermon and I'm glad I did because it was not only good it was also a good lesson/example of sermon creation. But I left during the sermon talk back time, assuming I would miss that and communion.

When I returned from the Sunday school class, I could tell our service was still going, and when I walked into the worship space, I could see that communion was still being served. I was delighted because I also hated to miss the sacrament. I waited in line, tore off a piece of bread, dipped it into the cup, said my amen in gratitude for this grace, put the elements in my mouth and was shocked by how cold the juice was. In that split second of sensation, I knew without a doubt that I had forgotten to put juice in the chalices.

And, horrified, I tried to imagine the moment in which Molly lifted the chalice and discovered there was nothing there to consecrate. As it turns out, I imagined it pretty accurately. The worst part for me, or so I thought, was that I had not been there at the back of the room to remedy my own error. But even worse was hearing from a half dozen people that the first thing Molly did when she noticed the empty chalice was call out my name. But grace is amazing and someone volunteered to go to the kitchen nearby and get the juice. And that's how it came to be ice-cold in the chalice for me to receive.

The grace continued in the fact that after worship everyone was laughing about this, laughing in a good way, enjoying both the humanity of the moment and Molly's recovery, her saving grace!

After worship, I was getting ready to go to a meeting with some youth leaders and Molly to begin planning for some Holy Week activities, when Linda Neel entered the room with an urgent look on her face. My first thought was that she must have some urgent pastoral care issue to convey, because she was looking right at me. What she told me was that people were in the chapel waiting for the 10:40 communion service and no one had showed up to lead it. It was 10:45.

I went to our altar, grabbed one of the chalices still filled with chilled juice, looked at Molly and said: I've managed to mess up a second communion service today. And hurried toward the chapel. Linda walked with me and we gathered the consecrated wafers and communion worship order from the office. We placed the elements on the chapel's altar and moved behind it, and I began the service with a confession.

I apologized to the 16 people gathered there and confessed that I was supposed to sub for Greg LaDue today, and I had forgotten. I told them that Molly had assured me that communion is all about grace and I thanked God for that grace and hoped they, too, would extend some. To a one, they all smiled.

In my haste to get to the chapel, I had not picked up by pocket book of worship, I knew I'd have to recall the communion story without benefit of the official words. And so I did. I lifted the bread and told of Jesus offering it to his disciples and to us, I lifted the chalice of chilled Welch's and told how Jesus gave thanks to God and told us of our new covenant, I asked God to pour out God's Spirit on all of us gathered and I thanked God for already pouring out God's Spirit on the consecrated elements. I told the communion story as if I knew it by heart. I told the communion story as if I knew it by heart, because I do know it by heart. And it is at the heart of my faith journey. The communion story will be forever intertwined with my own faith story and with my call story.

And I find tremendous grace in the fact that not even I, coming close twice in one day, can truly mess up communion. Communion redeems all. Communion graces all.

Amazing.

Poetry and virgin births

2007-02-07T08:41:00.001-08:00

I read this poem a year ago, sent out by Writer's Alamanc, and I still find it captivating. I love the way the poet takes the objective facts grounded in a given year and then transcends time and reality and individual experience. I don't know anything about the poet other than this poem. She doesn't name the year. Can you?

Reading History a Year at a Time
by Joan McIntosh from Greatest Hits: 1975-2000.
© Pudding House Publications

Lord Byron died the very year
that sperm were proved,
beyond all doubt, to be
essential to fertilization.
No more virgin births. That year
Beethoven's Choral Symphony
astounded the air. He was guided
gently to face the audience
that rose in an ovation
he couldn't hear. Tears
were everywhere. Who remembers
J.L. Prevost or J.B. Dumasor knows how they unraveled
the mystery of sperm? That same year
workers finished the Erie Canal
and Simon Bolivar was proclaimed
Emperor of Peru. The canal workers
didn't know or care about Peru
nor did they hear the "Ode to Joy."
My great-great grandmother was born
that year, to later travel the length
of the canal. Three hundred million
sperm swim up the birth canal.
A few thousand reach the oviduct.
The ovum chooses one (on rare
occasions more). Then, as usual,
life went on. Joseph Aspdin developed
Portland Cement while the U.S.
House elected John Quincy Adams when
The voters couldn't make up their minds.

We've been talking about bodily resurrection in worship, which raises (pardon the awkward verb) the question of whether we believe in it and whether whether we believe in it alters our faith. Virgin birth tends to fall into the same puzzling category. Yet, with virgin birth, there is really only one we're asked to believe in, with bodily resurrection we're asked to imagine that it could happen for everyone. Sperm are essential to fertilization, and breath is essential to life.
I was captivated yesterday by a verse of the song "Happy Ending" by Sugarland. Most of the song is predictable, but this verse seemed profound -- at least in the moment:

"We've come here with nothing
And take it with us the day we leave
The first and last breath don't matter
It's all the ones that are in-between"

Maybe it doesn't matter how we get here -- virgin birth, natural (or artificial) insemination.
And maybe it doesn't matter how we leave -- ashes to ashes, spirits within the Spirit, or reconstituted and risen molecules.
Maybe what matters is all that we do in between, whether we write symphonies or dig ditches, maybe what matters is what we create and how we live and love as we breathe.

Train songs and the Spirit

2007-02-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to write about an experience of the Spirit for more than a week, but the words of my own spirit make sense within my being but keep looking empty on the virtual page.

So, I've decided to disguise the experience by writing about train songs.

Growing up, I loved train songs. I loved train songs because my Dad loved train songs. We had two favorites:

Life is Like a Mountain Railway, which no one but us seems to know

and

Wabash Cannonball

We liked City of New Orleans, too, but felt that it was best sung by Arlo Guthrie.

We loved to sing the other two ourselves.

Ryan loves train songs now, too. Recently, he asked me to sing every train song I knew, and I realized I had never sung Wabash Cannonball.

Within a few nights, he could sing it himself, including the odd third verse about "Daddy Claxton" and his earthly race being over.

Ryan knows a lot about trains. So, the first time he heard the song he surmised that a train called "cannonball" must be tons faster than the fastest train he knew of -- the bullet train. This prompted an odd little lesson in ammunition followed by an explanation that the Wabash Cannonball was a long ago train and the name was meant to imply that it was fast, maybe the fastest of its time, but not as fast as the bullet train.

Tonight, I had needed to rest after dinner and fell asleep, waking up to the sounds of Ryan being readied for bed. After a time, I heard him say: I wish Mom could finish putting me to bed so she could sing songs to me, she knows lots of songs. I took that as my cue (and permission) to enter into the bedtime routine.

He was very sleepy, yet not ready to turn out the lights. I told him that I promised to sing him as many songs as he wanted, assuring him that he didn't need to see the lack of light as a limit on our time together. He jumped at that offer and he told me to sing every song I know, starting with Wabash Cannonball.

He was asleep by the last chorus.

So, about the Spirit...

As long as I have been reading scripture in church, beginning as a lector in the Catholic Church and continuing to my present role in our Water's Edge worship service and as a liturgist in our Vespers service, I have always prayed in acknowledgement of the presence of the Spirit and seeking the Spirit to speak through me.

I do this because otherwise it would just feel like public speaking or public reading, and I want it to be more than that. And, I want it to be not about me but about these holy, though sometimes challenging, words.

It always seems to make a difference.

Several times, of late, that presence of the Spirit in the Word has seemed palbable to me. I have felt a true in-dwelling that really is beyond words.

This happened last Sunday when I read 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 during worship. I had not had time to review the text but read them with confidence yet heard them as if I was hearing them for the first time.

Sometimes I finish reading and feel as if I have come out of a trance. Twice in the past week I have felt as if I was emerging back into my own time from the time and place of the story.

In Vespers on Wednesday, I read the story of Ruth and Naomi and felt -- and this is where words fail me -- felt as if I felt their story as if their words and longing and compassion were speaking through me.

And, in worship today, I read the story from Luke of Jesus calling some of his disciples, and, again, I felt as if I were there, as if I had stepped into the text to tell the story. When I was through, I felt as if I had been there beside the lake.

This is something beyond me. It's not something I try to do. Though, I do welcome it. I just pray to/through/with the Spirit in the hope that my voice will give authentic voice to these scriptures in the hope that the Spirit can use me to reach others with these often beautiful, though sometimes challenging, words.

And I thank the loving Spirit of God for the richness of these experiences for me and I hope that beauty and wonder I feel extends to others.

The soundtrack of my life

2007-02-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

If I could choose a soundtrack for my life, it would be cello music.

I came to this notion in December, when a young cellist was among the musicians for our 11 p.m. Christmas Eve service.

Just as one rehearsal was about to begin, EMTS had to be called to help someone in the sanctuary who was in medical distress. This delayed our rehearsal, but the cellist kept playing. His music seemed to cover the circumstances in calm and even provided a hopeful note.

That's when I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cello as the soundtrack of life. Bringing resonance and vibrance and beauty as the background to all our existence.

I was reminded of this again at Vespers last night when a cellist with the San Diego Symphony added her musical gifts to worship.

I don't have a cello as the soundtrack to my life, but the thought of having one does help me remember that it is possible to find resonance and vibrance and beauty in all of life.

I don't have a cello as the sountrack to my life, but I do have a friend who can burst into a song as the backdrop for almost any occasion. Last night it was Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Symphony cello and Queen all in the same night -- now that's a soundtrack!

Last night's epiphany

2007-01-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

I don't necessarily come by this naturally, but 22 years in journalism teaches you to test the veracity of almost everything. Seek information or observe life and then ask questions.

My natural wiring is quite different. I absorb information, experience, emotions, stimuli of the six senses (five plus intuition). Then, without my doing much at all, my brain or my gut or my heart synthesizes the information in sometimes surprising ways and I just know things. It's how I could know the answers to geometry questions in high school without necessarily knowing how to provide the required proofs. Sometimes an experience or even a smell from decades ago can combine with an emotion or sound from today and make unexpected connections.

I have been exploring the reality of my call to and experience of ministry using my journalism model rather than my natural wiring. And that became clear to me last night.

For the past year, I have been experiencing some of the reality of ministry in the local church working in pastoral care and worship. I have experienced many joys, but I have also experienced some difficult realities.

So, over the past year, I have observed or experienced those difficult realities and then presented them in conversation with a variety of mentors and peers. To a one, they have confirmed my observations and often provided even more difficult examples than those I bring.

Often, in conversations with other professionals, you can present a downside and expect to get the response: It's really not that bad. That didn't happen with these pastors. I might have hoped I would present my concerns and they would dismiss or diminish them. Instead they affirmed my observations and said: It can be that difficult and worse.

Me: Ministry can be isolating and lonely.
Them: Yes, absolutely. I got no denials.

Me: The church world is small, so minor problems or problem people can loom large.
Them: Again, confirmation.

Me (whining): And there is so much a minister must deal with alone.
Them: Yes, again. Though covenant groups, friends from seminary, friends outside the denomination, and professional counselors or spiritual directors can all help.

Me: Many pastors are gifted leaders but fewer are good managers, so minor problems can grow larger than they merit.
Them: I've really only talked about this with three pastors with lots of experience, but, to a one, they concur again (one actually took notes from me on a troublesome office situation s/he faced).

Me: Pastors are vulnerable. And that vulnerability carries both joy and risk.
Them: No argument.

Each one was able, in differing categories, to add to my view of the difficult reality by describing experiences they had endured (and survived). One even referred to her two worst experiences as bringing on, for a time, the death of her soul.

My epiphany, once I let go of all the information-gathering and let the bits of information and experience and emotion ping around in my brain and gut and heart and soul was this:

Each of these ministers confirmed that what I had experienced and felt was true. They did not try to suggest it was isolated to my situation or my limited experience. They acknowledged that all of these observations and experiences were part of the reality of ministering -- though rarely all on the same day.

I was marveling in the consistency of that message, realizing that no one had tried to sugar-coat the truth.

And then the epiphany: They all still minister. They know these realities to be true, yet they all still minister. Many of them joyously.

The undiminished reality does not deter their call whether it is to service, to preaching, to worship, to kingdom building.

They all still minister in the name of God by the grace of Jesus through the glorious movements of the Holy Spirit. They all still minister.

May I have that courage. May I have that faith.

May it be so for me.

Amen

Vespers

2007-01-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

Sustains me.

Dangerous discovery. Beware!

2007-01-22T23:55:00.001-08:00

Tonight, while looking for something else entirely -- and isn't that always how it happens? -- I found an odd treasure trove of very early writings including class writing assignments, two or three brief attempts at journals -- something I've never kept consistently until bloggin' -- and a couple of prayer journals.

You might call it my blog from the 1970s.

I also found my first driver's license, a church bulletin from the day I preached on Youth Sunday at First United Methodist Church in Paris, Texas, a brochure from Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, with pictures of my family at the new church's dedication, my emcee script from half-time at homecoming, some really bad poetry, some not as bad folk songs, a "novel" of intrigue I began and abandoned in seventh grade and a letter to myself from 1976 that included this line: Most important of all, don't worry about things.

In one journal, I found what probably amounts to my first serious discernment list, written just after high school graduation in 1978 (italic commentary added):

Questions:
1) What should I do this summer?
Write?
Read?
excellent options even now and I did both this summer!

2) Should I go to Syracuse?
this was probably about visiting friends I met at a summer journalism workshop the year before

3) Should I try to go to Columbia?
this was probably about checking out the journalism school in Columbia, Mo.
I did neither

4) Should I invest in a zoom lens?
of course! and I did.

5) Where should I go to college in 79-80 and afterward?
by decree of my father, I was to attend Paris Junior College, where he taught, for my freshman year, even though I had a full-tuition scholarship to ANY state school
6) What career should I pursue?
back then I was trying to choose between drama and journalism

Funny how that last question lingers still!

Anyway, beware, this blog might really start time traveling bringing vintage kc to the 21st century!

Comfortable shoes

2007-01-20T20:48:00.000-08:00

Five pairs of comfortable shoes returned to me this week after a five-week absence.

In truth, they had been gone longer because even in my possession they were unwearable. Though that didn't always stop me from wearing the most comfortable black ones even though the toe of the left shoe was flapping open.

I found a cobbler in Claremont who could repair five pairs of shoes I loved to death for the price of two new pair.

But they weren't ready when I left school in early December at the end of the fall semester.

For five weeks, I have been wearing dress shoes with higher heels than I care to wear for more than a couple of hours at a time. I have been wearing them 8, 9 and 10 hours at a time.

Wednesday, I picked up all five pair and immediately kicked off some black dress shoes and slipped joyfully into my black, comfy flats.

Pretty mundane post, but it can be summed up in one word: Contentment.

Does bloggin' prepare you for prayer?

2007-01-15T00:15:00.001-08:00

I had a prayer-writing experience Saturday night that was not unlike blogging.

Just as when I blog, I sat down at the computer thinking I had a sense of what I wanted to say. (Usually I let things dwell in my head and heart for a few days before I sit to write, which is how I come to the keyboard thinking I have anything to say at all.)

And, just as when I blog, I had been contemplating recent events in my world and in the larger world and (because this was a pastoral prayer) in the congregation's world.

And, just as when I blog, I got lost in the writing, looking up when I finished to realize almost two hours had past.

Unlike when I blog, I realized within just a few sentences that I needed and wanted to pray for the prayer creation and a collaboration with the Spirit before I went further. I prayed to dance a Spirit dance together not only as I wrote but for when I would pray in church.

As I continued, I contemplated all the hopes and concerns I wanted to voice on behalf of the congregation.

I would be praying on a baptism Sunday, so I knew I wanted to acknowledge that sacrament, but I was surprised by how the theology and beauty and grace of baptism overtook the prayer, almost as if it (or the Spirit) was the muse.

I knew, too, that I wanted to acknowledge, though not by name, the death of a woman the pastor called "a matriarch of our congregation." Her favorite hymn was "God of Grace and God of Glory," which we had sung together more than once. She told me that it was especially helpful when her children were teenagers for its chorus: Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour.

I also tried to consider the news, something, ironically, that I sometimes forget to consider in church work. I had been moved in the past week by the transition in our government and the hope/concern that brings, depending on how you feel politically about the change. And, more recently, I had been incensed by the decision to send MORE troops to Iraq.

I was also more aware than I might have been about the ice storms that had cut power and, therefore, heat in Oklahoma and the Midwest because my mother had worked by phone to get someone to take my grandmother out of her home when her power failed. And then, as I was writing the prayer, I saw a headline that said at least seven people had died in the storms.

I had been at church on Saturday to observe the meeting with the parents of the children to be baptized and I was struck by all the activity on campus that day and the hope and excitement each gathered group held for the future.

As always, I wanted to acknowledge those who are grieving or ill. I always pray for those who are hurting, whether their pain is physical, mental or spiritual. This is standard language for me in prayer, but even it had more significant meaning this week because I had experienced directly the pain of someone whose strong exterior belies some deep and long-fought internal frailties, someone for whom all I can really do is pray.

I always contemplate the lectionary scripture almost as a prayer of preparation but also for images that seem to call out to be shared in prayer, they, too, seem to insert themselves without much guidance from me. (This week it was Simeon's story from Luke 2:25-35.)

And, I read a draft of Jim's sermon to see how the prayer could be both in conversation with and in affirmation of his message. His title was "New Eyes" and his central theme was the need to be forward-looking. And, as always this was a complex challenge both to deeper faith and a more deliberate faith walk in the world. And, it was from Jim's text that I remembered that it was MLK's birthday weekend.

Then there was the little matter of the Chargers. I could have left them out of the prayer without incident, but they, too, or at least the community's enthusiasm for them kept insisting their way into the prayer -- though not in the same way the Spirit insists. (And, thank goodness I don't believe my prayer could affect the outcome, otherwise it really would be time to return to journalism.)

I had so much emotion -- all of it blissfully in normal ranges -- around the beauty of the sacrament of baptism, the death of this woman who -- on my last visit to her in the hospital -- had prayed for me when I finished praying with her, the chaos and arrogance and, especially the senseless dying, associated with Iraq, and the sad reality that winter storms kill some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

So Saturday I wrote as I prayed and Sunday I prayed what I wrote. And I felt more vulnerable than I have felt before in the pastoral prayer role, and it was the same vulnerability I felt while preaching last week at Water's Edge. I think I feel the vulnerability because I am putting more of my authentic self into the public parts of ministry. I'm letting go more, which frees both me and the Spirit. Nevertheless, it's still a bit unsettling.

The four times I have prayed a pastoral prayer in the main sanctuary, I have left room and time to combine elements of the service or the spirit of the day into the prayer. Today, it was the choir's anthem based on Isaiah 43:1-4 and an unscripted line from Jim's sermon about the necessity of goodness and godliness that asked to be included.

Here then, is my fourth pastoral prayer, including the last-minute revisions as I recall them:

God of Grace and God of Glory,

Today we celebrate life. We celebrate the life of the infants we welcomed into God’s church in the sacrament of baptism. We celebrate the life of Jesus, who even as an infant was a sign of salvation to Simeon. We celebrate the life and vision and hope and grace we know as children of God and disciples of Jesus Christ. And we celebrate baptism as a sign of your grace.

Loving God, your baptismal covenant to us is your promise to love us and to always be present to us through your Spirit. This place is filled with your Spirit today, in the gathered fellowship, in your words of assurance sounding through the harmonies and melodies of the choir and organ, in the cries and coos of infants and the joy in the eyes of parents and grandparents.

But this place was filled with your Spirit yesterday, too, as dozens of singers gathered to begin the challenge of learning Bach, as new mentors gathered for training to help others, as leaders in the United Methodist Women from throughout our district gathered here to learn how to guide and inspire the women of their home congregations and as parents gathered to prepare for today’s baptisms. We thank you for the gifts they all bring and we pray that you will lead each of us to find ways to share our gifts.

We pray, especially, that you help us to fulfill the promise we made to these children when we welcomed them into the life of our church. Our promise to live according to the teaching and example of Christ so that we may help these children and all the children of our church family grow and thrive as faithful disciples of Jesus.

Even as we celebrate these joys, we are also aware that life is both fragile and precious. We celebrate new life even as we mourn the death of cherished others who are now home with you and held eternally in your love. We pray that your presence would be apparent and comforting to all those who grieve.

We pray too for those who are nearing their last breaths and for all those who are ill or injured, whether their pain is physical, mental or spiritual. We pray your healing presence for them and those who love and care for them.

We pray for the families of all those who have died as a result of this week’s harsh weather. We pray relief and warmth and sustenance for those who are without power. Lead friends, neighbors or caring strangers to help those stranded in homes without heat.

Guiding God, at a time of transition in our country, we are grateful to live in a democracy where changes in government occur in peace. We pray now for all of our leaders. Give them the wisdom and courage they need to make good decisions. We pray for all who are serving in our military in Iraq and throughout the world. We pray for their safety as well as the safety of all people who live in lands in turmoil, in countries at war. We pray, too, for peace.

This weekend, we remember the strides that Dr. Martin Luther King made for freedom and justice, leading hundreds of thousands of followers and inspiring generation after generation to strive for his freedom dream. We remember, too, Coretta Scott King, who carried on her husband’s legacy for almost four decades until her own death last year. We thank you for their forward-looking courage and we pray that you will lead others to continue their work for justice.

Fair and equitable God, we are aware that there is a competition near here today that is of very little consequence to you, but we pray that those who do care can enjoy the game and perhaps even see the results they hope for.

Guiding God, keep us all always forward looking. Grant us new vision. Let us see as Simeon saw and feel as Simeon felt the satisfaction of knowing that we are in the presence, even now, of the Lord of our salvation. And grant us the courage to face our future in goodness and godliness. Dismiss us in peace to realize your dream for all creation. And as we join together in that familiar prayer that Jesus taught us, help us to see with new eyes what it means in our lives when we pray:

Our Father,
Who art in heaven.
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen.

Magnificats

2007-01-12T21:35:00.000-08:00

It's bedtime and Jeff has finished reading two chapters of Charlotte's Web to Ryan and I come in as the closer, ready to turn out the lights and sing this boy to sleep.

Earlier in the evening, we had been talking about baptism, because I will get to assist with some on Sunday. Ryan wants to know what words I would say and what words Rev. Jim would say. I don't remember them exactly and my paraphrasings are not sufficient to satisfy Ryan. I tell him I'll look it up in the morning and tell him.

Now it's bedtime, and Ryan is talking about baptism again, but this time he says: What words did Rev. Jim say over me? And I think it's sweet that he feels so at home in our church and so METHODIST that he assumes Rev. Jim baptized him there. You were baptized at a different church, I tell Ryan. By who? I struggle to remember the monsingnor's name at Our Mother of Confidence Catholic Church, and I fail. I don't remember his name, I say. Only he's can baptize, right, Ryan asks. No, I say, women can baptize. Rev. Molly can baptize. And Ryan wants to know the names of the babies Rev. Molly has baptized. And Ryan asks again about the words. I'll look them up in my hymnal tomorrow, I tell him. And that leads to a discussion of what a hymnal is, which leads to a discussion of what a hymn is, which leads to the observation that hymn and him are homonyms -- something they're studying in his class. And that leads us to talk about hymns.

Sometimes at night, Ryan will ask for a "stranger song", by which he means a song he's never heard. I'm running out of songs I know by heart that he has never heard, so sometimes I draw on my hymn memory to sing something new. This night, he seems to be searching, instead, for a familiar song and he asks me to name all the hymns I have ever sung to him.

Sing the one where the lady talks about all the things she can do, he says.

I'm stumped, but I'm also pretty sure that he is not thinking of a hymn.

What kind of things can she do, I ask.

He thinks for a moment and says: things like drive a speed boat to an island.

I'm really stumped now.

But this turns out to be a red herring. In his near-sleep stupor he is melding together memories and this, as it turns out, is something he has remembered from an IMAX movie about Greece, which he pronounces Grace and proceeds to tell me about the volcano that erupted and covered the city so that the whole city was covered in lava rock. And he's right, that movie did have a speed boat going toward an island.

And then he thinks he has remembered the name of the song. It's called "Between My Daughters and I," he says.

And I cannot think of any song I know about a mother singing about her daughters and talking about all the things she can do. But it sounds like a good one, maybe someone should write it.

Ryan is now frustrated with me. You used to sing it to me all the time, he says, adding: Maybe your memory is not as good as mine.

So I ask what else the woman can do.

Again, his voice carries the sound of certain memory as he says: it's the one that says, "I'd sing about danger."

And, finally, I know which song he wants.

"If I Had a Hammer," you know the one, the one where the woman talks about hammering out JUSTICE, ringing out DANGER, and singing about the LOVE between her brothers and her sisters.

So I sing it, proud that a song I have always loved and simply thought I was subjecting my son to has made such an impression that he would go to such lengths to draw it from our collective memories.

And then I remember Christmas Eve morning and a moment of wonder. Ryan had insisted that he wanted to stay in Water's Edge for worship rather than go to children's church and Sunday school. And, after getting him to promise that he would not talk when Molly started talking -- during the sermon -- I let him stay. And, while he found several ways to misbehave before the sermon, true to his word he sits quietly in my lap while Molly preaches. She's talking about the Magnificat, Mary's song of wonder and joy after she has learned of the divinity of the child she will carry. Molly is noting that Mary speaks with confidence and certainty and in past tense. She knows and accepts the great things that God will do through her son. Mary sings of being part of something far larger than herself. Molly asks the congregation if we have ever felt that way. Have we ever had a sense of ourselves as part of something beyond ourselves, bigger than ourselves, part of God. One of her examples is of watching people come forward one night at Vespers for communion. Then, she asks us to share our own such moments. No one does. That's rare with sermon talk-back time, but it's both a challenging question and, perhaps, a difficult answer to put into words. So, she says, you don't have to tell me, but tell each other. She gives us some time to talk among ourselves. I quickly realize that the way folks around me are seated and have already turned, it's just me and Ryan. So I try to ask him Molly's question and he doesn't understand. So, I try to put it in words he might better understand. Finally, I have boiled the Magnifcat down to this: Has there ever been a time when you felt really close to God? Ryan doesn't answer. So I tell him that sometimes when I am singing hymns at the bedside of someone I'm visiting in a hospital, I feel closer to God. Do you ever feel closer to God, I ask. His answer melts my heart: I feel that way when you sing to me at night.

And that was just one of many gifts of the four Christmas Eve worships I attended or served in. One of the many gifts of a season of spiritual gifts all through Advent.

One of many Magnificats.

Regifting grace

2007-01-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

I have begun to attach four distinct verbs to the four Sundays of Advent, and those are haunting me now as I consider what to preach on Epiphany.

Those themes seem to be: Reflect, Repent, Respond, Rejoice

The first week of Advent asks us to consider the cosmic possibilities of our lives and our futures, especially in light (pun intended) of the coming brilliance of Christ. We reflect.

The second week, that crazy Baptist John comes out of the wilderness (or in some gospels folks go out to him) and he tells us to repent -- repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. We repent.

The third week, JTB is back telling us to share a coat or share a meal with someone less fortunate. We respond.

The fourth week, Mary and Elizabeth celebrate their blessings and their responsibilities. Mary's soul magnifies the Lord. She rejoices. We rejoice.

And then it's Christmas and we rejoice anew, celebrating that gift in the manger of God come among us not as a great king but as a vulnerable infant, trusting humanity to hold and comfort and care for God. We not only receive the gift of grace, we nurture it.

Now come those kings. Not numbered in the Bible, but three by tradition. Not named in the Bible, but named by tradition. They bring gifts of the most precious elements of their world -- gold, frankincense and myrrh -- to honor this God-child.

Having already asked myself (and our congregation) in the days between Christmas and Epiphany to consider what a personal response to that gift of grace would be, I now ask myself (and will ask our congregation) what gifts do we bring? If we were the Magi following the star to Christ's nativity, what gifts would we bring? More importantly, what gifts can we bring in our own day.

There are a multitude of ways (not unlike that multitude of heavenly hosts, perhaps) to consider this, but two are resonating with me this week.

The first is to consider the gifts I have been given, the gifts I have that I can share with others. This offers a time for positive self-reflection. Unlike those New Year's resolutions where we focus on our shortcomings, thinking about our gifts allows us to think about our strengths and how we might best share them in the coming year. And it also offers a time for gratitude for the presence of those gifts and, perhaps, a resolution to put them to use more frequently.

The second is to apply the contemporary concept of "re-gifting" to the first-century gift of grace. God through Christ has given us not only grace in the abstract but grace by example through the teachings and actions of Jesus. Another way we can give as the Magi gave would be to take that gift of grace and give it to someone else. This is far harder than simply applying gifts that are strengths. One of the hardest things I did in the past year was to deliberately extend grace in circumstances where I was still hurting from the actions or inactions of others, in circumstances where I wanted (my sense of) unresolved wrongs righted, in circumstances where deception seemed (at least for a time)to trump truth. And it was hard. And I wasn't very good at it at all. But the beauty has been that I have a better concept than ever of the splendor of God's grace. In my feeble attempts at granting grace, I sometimes revisit the pain or my sense of the wrongs later only to remind myself of the grace I granted, and therefore, the need to move beyond my hurt feelings. I know I can no longer dwell on my sense of injustice. And I almost always immediately then think of how grand, how awesome, how unimaginable, how immense it is that God grants grace so freely. What a gift! The other beauty of granting grace is that it's not a gift that you wrap and give. It's a gift that you live. And, given properly, it certainly is not a gift that is announced. The recipient may never know it was granted. And yet, sometimes the recipient will be aware of the grace and, if we live it just right, see a living example of God's grace in human practice. I doubt I've lived my grace granting that well, but it is my goal, it is my hope, it is both my resolution and my gift as I follow that star alongside the Magi. And as I follow Jesus. May it be so. Amen.

There goes the Silent Night

2006-12-25T10:17:00.000-08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Kids, play nicely or we're leaving the park

2006-12-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

Chartreuseova wins the caption contest!

Thanks to all for playing.

Kudos also to reverikag for creative use of the photo for evangelism and to the reverend mommy for tying her caption into the lectionary lesson of the week!

A new way to subject folks to the xmas newsletter!

2006-12-19T01:33:00.000-08:00

Every year for at least the past 10, I've written an essay as the front page of a holiday newsletter. My husband merely tolerates this (though he always serves as a good editor). Sometimes he even helps me fold it, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't go in the cards he send to his friends. Now I realize that blogging expands my reach, I can subject more folks to the Christmas newsletter. And I realize that these annual essays were really just an analog blog.

Here's this year's essay:

Christmas gifts

It was the Monday a week before Christmas and I had just finished leading a Bible study at the San Diego Rescue Mission. From the opposite end of a long hallway, another volunteer greeted me with this question, almost shouting:
“Are you ready for Christmas?”

I immediately shook my head, drooped my shoulders and shouted back down the hallway: “No,” thinking of the packages still not wrapped and sent to Michigan, Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas, thinking of the Christmas cards not addressed, thinking that I still had no clue what my husband might like for Christmas, knowing I had run out of time already to do many of the little things I had imagined doing with and for family and friends.

And then, sustained by a spirit within me, I tapped my chest with my finger, smiling broadly, and shouted back: “Well, yes, in my heart.”

I have already enjoyed so many experiences of Christmas this Advent season, that the holiday already feels rich with love and joy and gifts.

One of the earliest gifts was the experience of serving communion to families at an evening Advent event in early December. It was joyful serving families kneeling at the altar, some sharing communion together for the first time. The love of God was embodied for me in those families.

Later that week, with my mother in town to share this joy, we watched Ryan’s last Christmas show at the preschool where he now attends kindergarten. He was Joseph (depicted on our Christmas card with a classmate as Mary). The gifts of that evening included a costume lovingly created by a woman who is both my friend and Ryan’s.

More recently, that Rescue Mission Monday, I experienced the joy of sharing in lessons and carols with the women who live at the mission. It was a simple but glorious time of sharing in the scripture story of Christmas and singing the carols. It was bare in comparison to the lessons and carols we’ll hear at our Christmas Eve services, but it was just as beautiful. During prayer time, many of the women requested prayers for the holiday season, but one woman asked, instead, for prayers that her daughter have a good birthday. I asked when her daughter’s birthday was. Christmas, she said, adding, “That was the best Christmas gift I ever got. She’s 24 and every year I remember that wonderful gift.” I asked her daughter’s name. It is Noel.

I have already experienced God’s presence in many ways this Christmas. My hope is that you, too, share many moments of Emmanuel – God with us. May the gifts of the season be yours.

And in the blogging world, I could go on and on, listing many more Emmanuel moments. But I won't. I still have to write page 2 of the newsletter, but I won't subject you to that -- unless, of course, you're on my mailing list.

Noel.

What Christmas is All About

2006-12-17T06:31:00.000-08:00

With thanks to Luke and Linus

"And there were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them! And they were sore afraid ... And the angel said unto them, "Fear not! For, behold, I bring you tidings o great joy, which shall be to all my people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ, the Lord."

"And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger." And suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the Heavenly Host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the Highest, and on Earth peace, and good will toward men."

"That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown." - Linus Van Pelt

Fate 1 Mile (In Memoriam)

2006-12-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

Fate 1 Mile
by Tony Clark
(Nov. 15, 1936 - Dec. 15, 2005)

The concrete fails along Interstate 30
In the blacklands between Dallas and Greenville
Where a standard emerald highway sign
Suggests a seam in the scheme of things.
The sign rises innocently enough
Out of sunflowers and roadside scrabble:
It's no different from those that chart
The exits to such palpable towns
As Royse City, Mesquite and Rockwall --
Yet its legend blurs the edges of the real
With pale block letters:
FATE 1 MILE.

How often, leaving or returning home,
I've felt an urge to take that turn,
To curve headlong into beckoning destiny
So near at hand. But up to now
I've held the wheel straight,
Roared on past the critical ramp,
Always deciding in the last inch of time
That the transit is not mine to make --
That fate must wait at some unmarked crossroad
And close with me like sudden thunder.