Author Archives: admin

Dakota Cranberries

Posted on by
2

I come from Southern pie folk.  Pecan, chocolate meringue, lemon meringue, coconut.  Pumpkin.  Chess.  Apple.  Cherry.  When I see my family this week I will be making a chocolate meringue pie.   That was a specialty of my paternal grandmother, who always had one waiting when my dad visited – or she’d whip one up on the spot once he arrived.  I’m in charge of keeping my dad in chocolate meringue now.  handwritten recipe for cranberries

But he requests other things, too.  He likes the way I do mashed potatoes.  Skins on, lumps of butter, plenty of salt and pepper.  He’ll even have a generous helping of my vegetable-nut roast, my go-to vegetarian feast day main course.

And he asks for cranberries.  These cranberries were a late addition to our family feasts but they are as anticipated and expected now as the longstanding pies.

The cranberries came by way of South Dakota.  My maternal grandfather married a woman many years after my grandmother’s death, when I was a young teenager.  She came from Scandinavian Midwestern stock and she brought with her to our family’s Virginia tables Norwegian Krumkaka and the cranberries.  Before this, I thought canned gelatinous, ridges-still-imprinted cranberry “sauce” was normal.  I always loved cranberries, the tartness and the pucker.  I was entertained by the comic wiggle from the can onto the serving dish.  But I didn’t know what else cranberries could be.

The first time I had Sylvia’s cranberries, the world became wider.  When everyone else went back late in the day for an extra piece of pie, I would choose a bowl of her cranberries instead.  She used real cranberries, oranges, and walnuts, chopped but still recognizable and formed into a decorative mold.  For many years, I eagerly anticipated this new staple of our Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.  I’m sure I complimented the cranberries each and every time – probably each and every serving.

One year in early January following a Christmas visit, I received a note in the mail from Sylvia, offering me her cranberry recipe.  I don’t know why she decided to give it to me that year.  I don’t remember if I ever asked for it.  Our relationship with her always bore the markers of a tense politeness, as it seemed to us that though she loved my grandfather, she wasn’t ever really sure about the rest of us.

So it was a little surprising to receive the recipe.  And strange to think something so universally beloved and expected on our feast tables came from my step-grandmother.  But it’s our recipe now, too, given and received with her blessing, made (mostly) according to her instructions, which I still read in her handwriting on a worn and yellowed piece of stationary. 

Virginia pecan pie meets Dakotan cranberries.  Strangers become family.  The table is wide enough for us all.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Sylvia’s Cranberries

Sylvia called this “cranberry salad.”  One taste has convinced former cranberry-haters that they do, indeed, like them.  We make this at Thanksgiving and Christmas and look forward to it the rest of the year.  Enjoy!

2, 12 oz. packages of fresh cranberries, ground

2 oranges, ground

2 cups sugar (I sometimes use less – adjust to your desired sweetness or tartness.)

1 cup boiling water

1 cup walnuts, ground

Optional:  2 packages plain gelatin mixed with ¼ cup boiling water.  I used to substitute agar (a vegetarian alternative to gelatin) but realized a couple of years ago it doesn’t really need the gelling agent.  I usually pour this into a serving bowl to chill.  If you are using a decorative mold and will be flipping it out later onto a plate, you may want the gelling agent.

Rinse cranberries and discard any that are mushy or bad.  Chop them into a small-medium dice in the food processor.  Dump them into a pot. 

Remove orange rind, seeds, and thick pith then pulverize the oranges in the food processor.  Add them to the pot with the cranberries.

Add the sugar and the water and mix well.  Boil for 2 minutes then remove from heat.  When cool, add the ground walnuts.  Pour into either a greased mold or a serving bowl and refrigerate overnight or for at least 3-4 hours.

This is a breeze with a food processor but I have also made it several times, chopping it all by hand.  It’s worth it either way.

Thanksgiving in 272 Words

Posted on by
Reply

(An introduction and a sermon preached at the Wesley Foundation at UVA during today’s Thanksgiving  celebration.  Our scripture was Psalm 100.)

Lincoln Memorial statue

Four score and seventy years ago President Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.  It’s one of the most remembered and quoted speeches.  Clocking in at a concise 272 words, it’s also one of the shortest.  Lincoln was half wrong when he said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”  We remember his powerful words at least as well as we do the event of the battlefield at which he spoke. 

For the 150th anniversary of his monumental and brief speech, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation issued a challenge to write something to remember Lincoln or merely in the spirit of his Address, by writing it in 272 words.  Internet pastor circles picked this up and took it as a challenge to write sermons the same length.  This is why tonight I bring you the 272-word sermon…

Giving thanks is the first prayer most of us learn.  I’m so glad these are my parents…I love going to the park, thank you for this place…God is great, God is good, Let us thank God for our food.  Giving thanks is a gateway prayer for all others.

Some days we forget, too busy for thank you.  Some days our hearts are too broken to recognize what’s worth our gratitude. 

That first prayer, so easily arrived on our lips, takes more work as we age.   

So we gather at this table each week and pray together The Great Thanksgiving, reminding ourselves of the taste and texture of God’s good gifts.  With open outstretched hands, we receive.  We come as thankful guests, nourished by what we cannot provide for ourselves. 

This is the context for all other gifts, tables, feasts.  Jesus gathered with friends, took bread and wine, gave thanks to God, and fed them.  Do this in remembrance of me, he said.

At this table and the one on Thursday.  But also at O-Hill and even when there is no table.  What we do here helps us to recognize where, when, and how to do it other places. 

Until our thanksgiving is closer to those spontaneous childhood prayers – joyful, immediate, unedited.

I hope your feast is tasty and your family offers prayers and words of thanks together this week.  I hope you recognize at that table, an image of this one.  And I hope our feasting here helps you in every day to practice forming the words on your lips and in the deepest part of your heart:  Thanks be to God!

*

photo credit:  © 2008 Tony Fischer, CC BY 2.0

Fence-sitting and Pastoral Boundaries

Posted on by
10

Our church is fighting in public.  Again.  This month – this week in particular – it’s a church trial in Pennsylvania.  Rev. Frank Schaefer is on trial for officiating at the wedding of his son, who is gay.  public domain image_black and white picture of throngs of Dartmouth students sitting on a fence

Currently our United Methodist Book of Discipline, in a feat of fence-sitting “balance,” considers every human regardless of sexuality to be an individual of “sacred worth” but maintains that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”  We do not allow people to be clergy if they are “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” but we hold fast to (most) civil rights for LGBT people and unequivocally condemn violence against them . Our churches are not permitted to host weddings for same-sex couples, neither are our pastors permitted to officiate at these weddings. 

It’s an uncomfortable fence and we have been straddling it for a while.

The basic details in the Schaefer trial are this:  His son asked him to officiate at his wedding and Schaefer agreed.  The pastor told his district superintendent but not his congregation.  Life and ministry went on.  Over 5 years later – in the month when the statute of limitations would have expired for this “offense” – a member of Schaefer’s church filed a complaint.  The member, Jon Boger, was by this point living in another state and not involved in any church congregation but his membership was still on record at Schaefer’s church.  Boger’s mother worked at the church and had recently been fired.

Many have noticed the unusual timing of Boger’s complaint (many years after the wedding but just in time to cause trouble) and his own anger and presumed retaliation over his mother’s job loss.  It certainly explains a lot. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why we went ahead with a trial clearly forged out of anger and vengeance but that just happened to have an actual complaint wrapped up in the middle.  If the Council of Bishops has “discretion as the chief pastors of the church over the manner, purpose, and conduct of any supervisory response and just resolution under ‘fair process’” then they have missed a golden opportunity to exercise that discretion – especially given the retaliatory nature of the so-called complaint.  To make it even plainer:  If Boger had expressed his true complaint (i.e.,” You fired my mom!”) and this wouldn’t have gone to trial, why did it proceed?  A genuinely contentious and heartbreaking issue has been hijacked to serve another purpose and the Council sat by while it played out.

Something else bothering me throughout conversations about this trial is the well-meaning but theologically insubstantial point that Schaefer did this wedding for his own son.  This line of reasoning seems to posit that since it was a family matter, charges, punishments, and what’s at state theologically and pastorally are different.  Indeed, Schaefer may be speaking in a mixed way about both his duty as a father and his duty as a pastor – and who could blame him?

But for those of us observing and praying and talking about this from a few steps back, I find it dangerous to talk about pastoral-priestly actions clergy take within their own families as somehow separate from their vocation and ordination “to the rest of us.”  I am a pastor all the time but it is dangerous to think of myself as a pastor to my husband, for example.  That is not my role in that relationship.  This doesn’t mean we never officiate at funerals or weddings or baptisms within our own families, but it does require greater clarity on the part of the pastor as to her motivations and role in those moments. 

In the terms I hear Jesus using (“Woman here is your son”; “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”), he more often points us outside of our intimate and familial circles to those unrelated by blood, even those we don’t yet know or like or understand.  In theological terms, “he was doing it for his own son” seems to hold less water than “he did it for a church member” or “he did it for a person from the neighborhood who he didn’t know previously.” 

I say this not to diminish Schaefer’s actions but to ask all of us to consider the terrain more closely.  The argument that the church should go easy on him because he “just” did this for his son is a weak argument and not theologically sound.  The body of Christ forms us into a new family, creating brothers and sisters where before there were strangers.  The body of Christ does not call us to close ranks and minister to those closest to us but rather to extend the good news of Christ’s gospel to people and places where we are uncomfortable, challenged, or even afraid to go.

It seems clear to me Schaefer was acting both as a loving father and a minister of the gospel when he agreed to officiate at his son’s wedding.  He has said, “I did not want to make this a protest about the doctrine of the church. I wasn’t trying to be an advocate.  I just wanted this to be a beautiful family affair, and it was that.”  His ongoing concern for where his congregation is on these issues, even as he sought to minister to his son and respond to the call of the gospel, strikes me as pastoral (not cowardly or culpable as Boger and others might imply).  Schaefer has also said, “I love the United Methodist Church. I’ve been a minister for almost 20 years and there are so many good things about the United Methodist Church except for that one rule.” 

I support what Schaefer did, along with the actions of Bishops Swenson and Talbert and the group effort of solidarity earlier this month elsewhere in Pennsylvania.  I want our church to get off the fence and I want us to match our actions and our Discipline to the radically inclusive and norm-breaking love of Christ.  Of course, I want us to get off the fence in one particular direction:  full inclusion of all people in the full life of the church. 

I have no idea if this will happen or when.  But I write about it and I pray for it.  And I pray we United Methodists will remember both Jesus and John Wesley, who said, “As to all opinions which do not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think.”  The sexuality issues we are fighting about are not at the root of Christianity.  But to refuse full inclusion in the body of Christ to our brothers and sisters chops right into the root and threatens to sever it.  It’s a refusal to see Jesus for who he is (Matthew 25: 31-46).

*

photo credit:  public domain

In Which I Dream of George Bernard Shaw’s Rotating Garden Shed Writing Studio

Posted on by
Reply

George Bernard Shaw's writing hut in the garden

Shaw’s writing hut, at Shaw’s Corner near Welwyn, England

In seminary I showed my dad a sermon I wrote and he said, “If I could, I would buy you a little house where you could just write.”  Besides the huge “amen” that was to the sermon in question, it was also welcome affirmation from my engineer dad.  I don’t know if every writer wants a little writing studio/shack/loft/house/garden shed but I do.  I can’t remember a time before wanting it.  So to hear my dad buy into that dreamy scenario and wish he could help make it happen was a blessing.

My version of the writing studio fantasy also involves “doing nothing else but writing.”  Or at least it used to.  I’ve had that notion for so long I don’t actually know what I’d do if it were suddenly possible.  Recently I’ve been making the shift from dreaming about how it could be to working it out like it is now.  I started this blog earlier in the year as a place for regular writing.  I’ve been pushing myself to submit more pieces elsewhere.  I spent a week at the Collegeville Institute and made another writing retreat with a pastor-writer friend. 

None of this has brought fortune or fame.  I purposely don’t spend much time on Google Analytics checking my blog traffic because I already know how to waste time that could be writing time.  What it has brought is another inch of confidence and the pleasure of practice.  I’m not waiting it out until conditions are “perfect.”  I’m not pitting my “day job” (to which I am also called and which overlaps and interweaves with my writing) against my writing, real or fantasized.

With unlimited time and money, maybe I would write novels.  Who knows?  But in the time and space I have and can set aside, I’m writing something.  I’m spending less time concocting the seductive fantasy and much more time in the unsexy but solid routine of putting words together.  I take it back.  That is actually kind of sexy.  As Annie Dillard says, you have to give yourself over to “your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you” (“Living Like Weasels” in Teaching a Stone to Talk).  That’s about as sexy as it gets.  And spiritual.

When I have a designated writing studio it may have another wing for my pottery studio.  It will have a cozy chair and a clean desk.  There will be natural light.  Maybe it will be on a giant Lazy Susan like George Bernard Shaw’s, so it can rotate with the sun throughout the day.  (I still fantasize a little.)

But mostly it will be what it already is now:  me writing regularly, without fanfare, taking pleasure in long-term obedience to the practice, wherever it takes me.

*

photo credit: © 2006 Paul Skin, CC BY 2.0

5 Old-fashioned Things Everyone Should Know How to Do

Posted on by
5

I read Nick Offerman’s Paddle Your Own Canoe last week and when he got to the chapter on maps I knew I needed to say something about that.  That lengthy chapter goes on about the horrors of navigating by GPS and I agree with much of what he writes, though I’m not here to chastise you for liking your GPS.  Or to chastise you at all.  grand lake, colorado

But it got me to thinking about the markers of progress that aren’t always what they seem and the things we leave behind in a hurry and then wish we knew how to do.   I work with students, fledgling adults still trying a lot of things on for size, so I see first-hand how narrow and confining a technology-will-solve-it world view can be and also how empowering it is for a 20-year-old to learn to bake a loaf of bread from scratch.

I can be just as much of a nostalgia-waxer as the next person but this isn’t about looking back longingly for a bygone era.  This is about handling your life like a grown up.

Without further ado, I bring you 5 old-fashioned things everyone should know how to do:

  1. Use a map.  Paper, hard to fold – yes, that one.  This is about context.  If all you do is plug in an address to your GPS you have no context for assessing its directions.  Even when it is 100% right, if you make a mistake you don’t have the greater context to see what you’ve done and how to fix it.  I have been on many spring break trips with students to remote areas where cell phones and GPS gadgets don’t receive their lifeblood signals.  Then what?  Even if you prefer to use the GPS (and it works and its signal is strong), if you take the time to review your plans on an actual map so that you can see more than just the step you are on – that you are going east and the river should be on your right until that last turn – then when the river shows up on your left you will know something is amiss.  You don’t have to love maps or frame them as art in your house or purchase a sextant or be able to find north by the moss on a tree.  But learn how to see the bigger picture.
  2. Follow a recipe.  “I don’t cook” is not acceptable.  If, after following this step, you choose not to cook because your personal chef would be out a job or you like spending all your money at restaurants, fine.  But make one thing from scratch with a recipe.  See that it is not magic and that if you can read you can do it.  Know that if you had to or started wanting to, you could make meals for yourself and others.  Know you are not helpless and you have seen at least one thing become something edible and nourishing, assembled from raw ingredients and the work of your hands.  (Get started.)
  3. Place a phone call to someone you do not know.  Though some would argue this is becoming less necessary, there are still occasions when you will need voice-to-voice interaction and help from someone you have never met.  You will not be able to text it or just call and hang up and wait for them to notice the missed call and return it.  It’s likely you will need to do this at the least optimal time for learning an uncomfortable new skill, like after the death of a grandparent when you are trying to call the insurance company or the funeral home.  Practice before you need it.  Role play it with a friend and some tin cans connected by string.  Whatever it takes.
  4. Make a budget.  I know it’s not sexy.  I know you may not follow it to the last cent.  But know how to do it.  There is no mystery to this at all.  You don’t have to be a “math person” (I’m not).  This is a skill enhanced by computer software like Quicken or websites like Mint – you don’t even have to do the math yourself, but you do have to sit down and think about it and get it all in one place.  You write down your sources of income (How much do you get paid?  Any other side gigs or family inheritance income?).  Then make a list of your routine expenses for each month (rent/mortgage, utilities, cell phone, groceries, gas, loans, retirement and savings) and more occasional expenses (insurance, property tax on your car, Christmas gifts, clothes).  The total of the things you listed for income should match or be greater than the total of all expenses.  If it’s not, you need to make more money or spend less.  It’s simple but hard.  Not knowing how to make a budget while wondering every month why you don’t have enough money to cover your bills is silly.
  5. Make something – anything – with your hands.  You can run full-on into a new artistic endeavor like caning your own chairs or throwing pots or painting with watercolor.  Those are fine pursuits bringing pleasure and relief and the inspiration of creation to your life.  But you can also create a centerpiece for your Thanksgiving table out of construction paper and fall leaves.  Make a card for someone who’s been ill or grieving.  We spend more and more of our life – like me typing this and you reading it – on screens with only our brains and fingertips doing the work of creating and receiving.  Keep the rest of you alive with tangible projects that beautify your life and the lives of those you love.  You don’t have to think of it as “art” if that makes you squirm.  Think of it as the gift of your time and attention – a gift to you and to those who will share it.  Watch what happens to you as you pour yourself into it.  Appreciate how it’s still there when the power goes out.

Halloween. Boo.

Posted on by
2

smiling jack o lantern with lit candle

I considered doing something anti-community this week.  Rather, I considered not doing something.  I was seriously thinking about keeping the lights off and not buying any candy and stopping by a bar for a while on the way home tomorrow night.  I was going to skip the whole trick-or-treating thing.

I have my reasons.  Our house is up a steep hill and I have actually stood at the door on previous Halloween evenings while filling little buckets with candy and heard other children down at the bottom of the driveway say It’s not worth it when they see the climb.  We also don’t want the temptation of the candy in the house, even for one night.  I don’t believe in giving crappy candy so we get the good stuff – Reese’s, Snickers, York Peppermints, Twix – things I will eat when they are just sitting there and I have to keep expending all that energy to get up and walk to the door with the huge bowl of them.  Also, I work on Thursday nights and won’t get home until it’s almost over, so why bother?

Aren’t they good reasons?

We don’t have small children and we don’t know many of those in our neighborhood.  It would be so easy to just opt out.  It’s not up to us.  We’ve done our time on that circuit.  Even though I’ll spend time Facebook-liking the many pictures of my friends’ kids in their costumes in faraway cities, who wants to keep interrupting the World Series or Parks and Recreation for all these unknown neighborhood kids?  Some of the older ones seem to think they’re doing me a favor as they jut out their pillowcase-bags while checking their phones and avoiding eye contact. 

That’s the temptation.  It’s not the candy’s siren call.  It’s the allure of proclaiming ourselves done, moved on, past all that.  It’s the easy answer thinking:  But I don’t even know them or It’s not like when we were kids.  The thing is, it probably isn’t like it was when we were kids.  I really did know many more of my neighbors then than I do now – I even knew the ones who were old and retired or who didn’t have kids.  It was a different time.  But I suspect this wasn’t different:  Those families I knew then didn’t want to keep getting up to answer the door either.  They had also worked long days.  They were tired and didn’t really care if I was dressed as a Gypsy – again.  But they stocked up on candy and turned the lights on and answered the door and were appropriately impressed with my scarves.

Community requires participation.  Not knowing the neighbors is not an excuse to keep not knowing them, especially while lamenting the way it used to be.  It’s a call to try harder – or just plain try.  I may be far from my Goddaughter and the other cute children whose pictures I’ll peruse, but these are the kids right in front of me and they want some candy and attention.  Maybe that’s all it will be but they deserve at least this modicum of engagement by the adults in their neighborhood.   

The lights will be on at our house Thursday.  The good candy will be in the bowl by the door and I may even holler down the hill to encourage the kids to make the trek up.  It is, quite honestly, the least I can do.  It’s better than nothing and it’s better than being the dark house with the old people who don’t like kids.  Boo to that.

*

photo credit:  “Friendly Pumpkin,” © 2009 Anders Lagerås, CC BY-SA 3.0

Study Abroad, “Before Sunrise,” and the Beauty of Snow Days

Posted on by
Reply

snowday flavor beer

It’s not even time to “fall back” but I’m already dreaming of our first snow day in Virginia.  I revel in the permission a snow day grants.  Permission to stop adhering to the schedule, to take a pass, to stay home and off the roads, to make cookies in the middle of the day and nap just because I feel like it and I can.  I could give myself this kind of permission more often, but it’s harder when there’s nothing external forcing my hand.  This is the beauty of a snow day, when permission to be takes precedence over the obligation to do. 

These days I sometimes go online during a snow day, if we still have power.  It’s fun to see what other people are doing with the unexpected time and space.  But in some respects, staying offline (imposed or by choice) is better.  It helps me stay present in the day itself, with however I am filling it or emptying it.  I have to rely on my own resources.

Back when I did it, studying abroad was like this, too.  It was 1989 and I had barely heard of a fax machine.  I was only able to call my parents three or four times the whole semester.  My main mode of communication with friends and family back home was through letters squeezed onto every inch of the blue, striped aerogram paper which folded up into its own envelope.  I was homesick and spent copious amounts of time in coffee shops writing home while gazing out the window and sipping a café crème.  I’m sure if we’d had email or cell phones or Facebook I would have checked in incessantly and in real time, as today’s study abroad students do.  I often have trouble remembering these students are gone when they’re away for the semester, since I spend just as much time liking status updates from Zurich as I do from across the campus. 

Before Sunrise came out six years after my semester in France and, like a band you stick with over the decades, I’ve been growing up with this story, told now over three movies and decades.  When I re-watched Before Sunrise a few years back, I was struck by the certainty this movie couldn’t be made now.  Both of the young and footloose characters would have cell phones now, through which they would stay tethered to conversations and posts and people time zones away, no matter what ancient city they were in.  When the characters in that first movie meet on a train there’s a long, quiet shot of Ethan Hawke looking out the window at Europe blurring past.  I remember doing that through France, Italy, Sweden, Ireland.  The movement of the train lulling me deeper in thought.  Fabulous plans for the future were hatched on the train and in journals when I was alone and out of touch in Europe.  The whole adventure of that film began out of un-tethered solo travel and that slim, delicious bubble of time before sunrise.  Today, the characters might be so immersed in updating their Twitter accounts they’d never meet – and, if they did somehow strike up a conversation, surely the cell phones would ring and interrupt that lovely lingering night in Vienna.  What was out-of-time but deeply grounded in one place and another person would surely be dissolved, jerked back into splintered time and attention with the ring of a far-off call or the beep of a text.

I know today’s parents and students would never consider a semester abroad without the availability of constant contact.  But some of what was hard and strange and scary and wonderful about the time I studied abroad was precisely how out of touch it felt.  The connections were largely distant and time-lagged.  Letters I wrote took time to make their way into the hands of my friends and family.  My observations were considered and honed before they were shared – or they were forgotten.  The night my train hit and killed someone in Sweden and I missed the next train and had to rely on the kindness of a Danish woman who helped me find a hotel in Copenhagen for the night – that night was experienced without Google Maps or Trip Advisor or Facebook.  I had to be where I was and trust a stranger and try to get a good night’s sleep anyway. 

A lot of my time in Europe I felt small and inexperienced.  Sometimes I felt scared.  And, though I relied on my parents (and asked them to wire money – more than once), I also spent a lot of time relying on my own resources.  By the time I came home I felt changed.

If I’m honest, I wouldn’t recommend students plan study abroad trips without cell phones.  But I do recommend taking technology breaks on purpose – here and abroad.  There are times and places better absorbed without the rest of the world watching.  Like an all-night stroll through Vienna, standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, the birth of a baby, a walk through the woods, or a snow day.  And when one’s not forthcoming, you can always declare one for yourself.  You might even call it Sabbath.

When the Bishop Tells You to Take It, You Take It

Posted on by
Reply

Take thou authority, he said through the phone.  I was nervous.  I called my friend and colleague because I’d been asked to celebrate Communion at a large gathering of other clergy.  As a commissioned but not yet ordained clergyperson (United Methodists have a long and confusing process), I still looked for a lot of help, clarification, and feedback.  I was the new kid, still practicing, and yet to have hands placed on my head by the bishop… 

Click here for the rest of the story at the catapult magazine website.  Thanks for reading!

ordination

Holy Spirit red stoles. I’m laying hands on a former student, kneeling at his ordination.

*

Photo credit:  © 2012 Aaron Stiles, Used with permission.

October Song

Posted on by
Reply

When I lived in Appalachia and took daily walks to the church up the road, I noticed the slow, steady changes that come in the fall.  I would circle the church with its two huge maples, ablaze in October color, and drink it in – the bright orange-red, the crispness in the air, the sinking sun reflecting into the clouds.  It was glorious.  One day I couldn’t contain the beauty of my walk so I wrote a poem called “October Song.”  For a long time I loved this poem.  I still love the title.  october trees and field with cloudy blue sky

Today I discovered it really wasn’t a very good poem.  After searching my many old journals and computer files, I finally came across it.  I thought I was going to set it out here, proudly, for the first day of October, my favorite month.  There were still some phrases I loved.  I described the moon rising before the sun had set:  “so huge and almost surreal, superimposed onto this landscape of Appalachian homes attached to tendrils of smoke.”  That’s not bad but I’m not writing in the line breaks because they were, in a word, ridiculous.  I also still liked this phrase:  “gold-dipped trees, shimmering with light and a beauty that comes only at the height of maturity.”  But I realized that I mainly remembered and loved the experience of those daily walks and the exuberance and delight I felt in writing about it. 

October is a song, one last eloquence before the quiet of winter, and worthy of a poem.  Just not the one I wrote back then. 

So I’m keeping the title and offering up a couple more recent and – I hope – better poems to celebrate this first day of this lovely month.  I hope you like them but if you don’t, the best poem of all is outside.

You Take It Ripe

You take it ripe
that tardy epiphany
like the pear already falling from the tree
when you reach for it
giving itself over to juice
as you bite.
You had given up on hunger
but you remember
watching, staring,
when all you saw
were hard green orbs
stubbornly
clinging to their branches.
The taste is sweet
and
reminds you
why you persist in waiting
attending to hope
ready for grace.

No Snow Fell

In Appalachia I observed snowfall in a secluded wood

and wrote about the one I craved.

Like the place where I was sitting,

no snow fell

where he was present in my life.

I loved the metaphor and him.

Two decades later

in the gentler Blue Ridge

in the heat of summer

where I began to love my husband,

I realized I had known snow in every season

but this one,

my heart transformed by his presence.

Who’s in the Market for a Field?

Posted on by
1

birch tree with leaves and peeling bark

A sermon on Jeremiah 31: 1-3a, 6-15 preached at Wesley Memorial UMC during Family Weekend at UVA.

 I sit through a lot of meetings and read a lot of articles about The State of the Church.  As you may have heard, we are older, we are smaller, our buildings are in need of repair, and we aren’t as flush as we used to be.  I’m not seeking out these meetings and articles – they are hard to escape.  A vocal and vigilant group of church Chicken Littles wants to make sure everyone else knows the sky is falling. 

In a lot of the church we have decided the way to “fix” our problems is to frantically recruit young people, to become less building-focused, and to count everything.  Most of the angst and worry seems to be backward-looking – how can we have church like we did in 1958 when, if you wanted to fit in to polite society church is just what you did and there were fewer distractions like Netflix or Sunday soccer, and people had more time since only 1 person in the couple worked (guess which one? and everyone was in a couple)? 

             What if, instead of the articles and hand-wringing conferences about the dearth of young people in church, we the church took that missing group seriously enough to find out where they are instead?  What’s Sunday like for them?  Weekends?  Family life?  Why?  What’s spirituality like for them?  Tell me more about it.  Help me understand you.  And, what if we didn’t do this as a ploy to pull them “back” into church, but because it’s the kind of thing Jesus would do – seeking out the people overlooked or despised by the religious authorities and treating them as children of God, brothers and sisters…

            I can hear the Chicken Littles now.  But we don’t have time for that!  We need someone to lead the youth group now.  We need to build a better budget and those young folks are the workers now.  We don’t have time to sit around and listen to their lives – we were young once, we remember what it was like – and, besides, the sky is falling!

            Have you noticed how the most faithful, God-oriented moments in life are often the ones that, on the surface, make no sense?  Do you have some of those in your life?  In my own life, I once drove several hundred miles out of my way to see a guy I’d had only two dates with – and who ended up becoming my husband.  God calls to us across the strange terrain of long road trips and unexpected random acts of kindness and the seemingly strange last-minute switches of your major or you career.  Often these moments and decisions don’t seem like wise choices to the onlookers in our lives.

They can even seem foolhardy or wasteful.  Like trying to stretch 7 loaves and 2 fish to feed 5000.  Like leaving 99 sheep on their own in order to go find the one who’s lost.  Like standing on a hillside proclaiming that the meek will inherit the earth.

            Or, like buying real estate in the middle of a war zone.

            In a city under siege at that very moment, with the Babylonians pounding at the gates and about to conquer Jerusalem and capture its people, God instructs Jeremiah to buy a plot of land.  If ever there was Chicken Little territory this was it.  The sky may not have been falling but the walls were crumbling, the gates were giving way, and armies were on the move.  Jeremiah himself has been warning the people for 31 chapters by this point – warning them to turn from their idolatry and come back to the one true God.  Then, at the moment when all he’s been saying is in the process of coming true, God tells him to buy a field right in the middle of all that turmoil, chaos, and heartbreak. 

And God tells Jeremiah to put the deed in a jar so it will “last for a long time…  [because] Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (32: 15).  It’s a bet on the future, grounded in the hope of God’s promise that even this sad and forlorn day is not the end of the story.  It’s also a metaphor for our hearts, upon which this promise has been written.  The fertile soil of our hearts will be purchased, developed, and rebuilt by God.

I think this is one of the most radical, hope-filled moments in the entire Bible….  To purchase a piece of land that’s already been captured, as you are about to be captured next – while proclaiming God is up to something good.  If we were to set it today’s world, it might look like a prisoner who studies for her GED and works on her resume even though she has 20 more years to go on her sentence.  It might look like a Syrian teenager applying to college with rockets overhead and gunmen on the corners.  It might look like a small church with a shrinking budget investing in people who aren’t members.

What a flimsy-seeming sign of hope – a slip of paper bought in a war zone.  Flimsy and vulnerable, like a baby born in a stable. 

This is the way God works:  with what seems small or meaningless or not quite enough – and with the long view.  Jeremiah had a deed but there was a long way to go before the houses and vineyards would sprout up on that land.  Mary had a baby but it was a long time before the world could see it had a savior.

This is the way hope works:  It’s about choosing to believe that God makes good on God’s promises and that we will never be left to our own devices. 

            The Chicken Littles may think the church has the deed to a worthless plot of decaying buildings and rundown property.  No matter what it looks like from here, the truth is God’s given us a field and a promise.  We don’t have to just wait for the vineyards to appear – we can help plant them.       

We can live in bold hope during uncertain times.  Hope is not the same thing as wishing.  Wishing takes us backward to the way things used to be or into our own imagination, where we concoct what we think would be a better future.  Hope, on the other hand, takes us into God’s imagination, offering a glimpse so we’ll recognize it when it gets here…a taste so we are hungry for it.  Hope means behaving now as if what God promises is already happening – because it is.

The vineyards and new houses are waiting for us.  Do you see them?  We can reacquaint ourselves with our neighbors, simply because they are our neighbors.  We can go, like Jesus, to where the people are and consider that perhaps we are the ones who need to change in order for the church to work.  We may be called on to spend the last dollar we have on a field in this war zone.  Or on taking a student to coffee when there is no time to waste and no line item in the budget for that kind of thing. 

I happen to work in part of the church where we are flush with young people.  I also happen to work in part of the church that relies on the rest of the church for support.  So, believe me, I understand the dilemma and I feel the pinch.  But I need to point out this obvious fact:  we do have some young people.  Excellent, passionate, faithful disciples who happen to be under 25. So while I do think we need to pay attention to who isn’t here and go out to them and learn about them and figure out how to be better neighbors to them….I also think we need to pay better attention to those who are already here. 

A few years back I was talking with our Wesley Foundation student president at the time.  She had been involved and in leadership at Wesley her entire time in college.  Because she came from one our district churches, that church was even involved in helping to bring food for Thursday night dinners – so they saw firsthand what she was up to here at UVA and they obviously supported campus ministry.  But she told me once that what she loved most about the Wesley Foundation was she could actually do things and lead things here.  She said, “At my home church they would never let me lead anything.”  They had a young, faithful, creative person who’d honed her leadership here in college but who wouldn’t have been asked to join the Trustees at her own church.  She hadn’t served her time to work up to that position.  She needed to pay her dues and listen to her elders a while longer.  That right there is a failure of imagination on the part of her church.  That’s a church that would rather believe in their own abilities to raise a few sour grapes in captivity than believe that God had already purchased a piece of land for a bountiful vineyard.

Let me be clear here:  we are all in this together.  We are all called to become better neighbors to those in our midst – not just to those in our pews.  Students and young people, you are not off the hook when the church’s imagination is impoverished and they don’t listen to your ideas or make you head of something the moment you arrive.  You are also called to invest in this strange war-torn piece of land, to seek out new neighbors.  Who do you see without seeing in your daily rounds of Grounds?  Whose name do you need to learn at the social hour after church?  Where will you invest with hope?

If I wanted to be crankier than I already am, I could spend a lot of time shooting down student ideas and telling them how we tried that once 20 years ago.  Or I could worry more about whether the church will continue to fund campus ministry. 

But I choose hope. 

The church will not look like it did 50 years ago 50 years from now – or even in 5.  And I think that’s a good thing.  God is doing a new thing.  God has a slip of paper with our names written on it and it’s more important and valuable than all that pounding at the gate and chunks of sky falling to the ground.  There is more to come.  God is not done with the church or young people or any one of us yet.  Just you wait for the next chapter!   And, while you’re waiting, how about asking the Starbucks barista what his life is like?  How about taking a student to coffee?

Thanks be to God!