A Thin, Thick Place

Posted on April 12, 2015 by admin

A sermon on Acts 4: 32-35, John 20: 19-31, and Psalm 133, preached at Wesley Memorial UMC on April 12, 2015, during weekend festivities for the Wesley Foundation at UVA’s 50-year Celebration and Groundbreaking.

woman holding freshly baked Communion loaf

One of the Wesley bakers, with dairy-free, gluten-free bread fresh from the oven.

In my twenties I often concocted dream visions of communal living. Visiting with Wesley Foundation friends or Appalachia Service Project friends, we would revel in our reunion weekends, drink up the goodness of being together again, and plot our Someday dreams…a retreat center and intentional community in a big farmhouse with a huge kitchen table, a garden, and a writing shed for me, a little removed from the bustle….a self-sufficient community where we could grow our own food, make our own furniture, create all the pottery for our kitchen… These were dreams born from tight communities of faith formed at pivotal times in our lives, and that remained touchstones for all of us, no matter the time or distance. Whenever we got together we just wanted more. Not to go “back” exactly, but to create again that sort of Spirit-infused, life-defining, deeply communal expression of faith and love.

In none of these scenarios was I thinking explicitly of today’s passage from Acts. In all of these times I was remembering how good and full a community I had left, how lovely it was to dwell together in unity (to quote the psalmist). We had come together in a thin place – what Celtic spirituality calls those spaces where heaven and earth seem to be closer and more permeable to one another than usual – and in that thin place, we’d made thick, substantial, meaty community. We had seen glimpses and flickers of God’s kingdom made manifest and those were enough to sustain visions and lives.

When I think of the book of Acts, this is the passage I most often think of, though, we have to acknowledge, this idyllic time didn’t last that long. This time when no one held private possessions and no one was needy didn’t last. But it was thick and real while it lasted. It was important enough to describe and include in scripture so no one would think Did that really happen? Was I merely dreaming?

There are many thin places in the world but we are often too busy to notice them.

There are fewer thick communities and they can be so rare that we’re tempted to think we dreamt them.

We’re celebrating 50 years of ministry at the Wesley Foundation this weekend. It isn’t 50 years total but 50 in our current building, which we’re renovating and showing some TLC this year. Thanks to Ed for inviting me to preach here in the midst of this weekend as part of the celebration – how fitting, since Wesley Memorial has been our partner in campus ministry since the beginning. We had 200 people worshipping and celebrating here yesterday, alumni from at least as far back as 1963, “Wesley legacy” families with parents and children who’ve all made Wesley home, the Bishop, our district superintendent, students, and tons of friends.

Those of us celebrating yesterday and many of you here know the Wesley Foundation as a thin place. It’s holy ground, a thin place that’s home to a thick community with permeable boundaries, always being re-formed as people graduate and matriculate.

A couple of weeks ago the Wesley Foundation’s Student Coordinating Council (SCC) met for its “changeover” meeting, our peaceful transfer of power from one group of student leaders to the next. One of our practices at that meeting is to offer words of gratitude for those rotating off the SCC. At one point, in the midst of a long list of wonderful attributes and things she would miss about departing a student, one student stopped herself and blurted out, “How are you real?”

In some ways this is what Thomas needed to know and see and feel for himself, when he met the resurrected Jesus. How is any of this real? Do you remember what Jesus does? He does not refer to Thomas as a doubter or chastise him in any way. He simply offers up the most visibly wounded part of his body and invites Thomas to stick his hand all the way in and get a good, tactile feel for it. Thomas doesn’t even have to ask; he just has to reach out in the direction of the living, very real Christ.

How are you real? Here, see for yourself.

At its best, this is what campus ministry is: an invitation to see for yourself, in the midst of a community thick with the Spirit of the living Christ. It’s the kind of place where people are transformed, where they become more fully who God is calling them to be and, though it may only last 4 years, it’s enough to sustain a vision for the future.

Let me hasten to add, about that early Christian community in Acts and about the Wesley Foundation, that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the people involved. Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Wesleyanos! But what I mean is, those early Christians weren’t somehow the cream of the crop, and though UVA students are the cream of the crop in many ways, Wesley folks aren’t the cream of the cream. That’s not what makes the community faithful or memorable or life-transforming. What makes both the Acts community and the Wesley community thick communities is the presence of the living Christ. It’s not the prefect storm of personalities and skills, dreamers and engineers. It’s Jesus.

How are you real? Jesus. The “thickening agent” in this recipe of love is the risen Christ.

The point of highlighting this long-ago and short-lived community from Acts isn’t to show what exceptional people they were. It’s to show what’s possible when the center of your life and community is the living Christ. The point is not that they were particularly un-needy people but rather that living with Christ at the center meant they prioritized the needs of others, they treated one another like family.

As I read our scripture passages this week I was struck by how physical and tangible the images are in each one. The risen Christ offers the wound in his side to Thomas. Surely the Acts community prays and worships together but we hear how they “bear powerful witness to the resurrection” (v. 33) by sharing things, the tangible goods they owned; they sold houses and properties and gave the proceeds to the group, to be used to purchase what they needed; people were housed and fed and clothed. And Psalm 133 offers us the messy but luxurious image of Aaron’s long, thick, bushy beard, claiming that living together as one is like expensive oil poured over his head and running through that big beard, soaking it through. Like I said, it’s messy, but it’s hard to read that and then think that spiritual things are separate and apart from physical things.

It’s also hard to read these passages and think that being faithful, being Christian is merely “between me and God.” Part of what is real and tangible about God in these stories is that God is made manifest in Christian community….in living together as family…in making sure no one among us is needy…in offering breath, touch, forgiveness, sharing our vulnerable and wounded selves with one another…

The reason we had 200 people here yesterday is because this is a place and a people who have embodied life with the risen Christ. People from across the decades are still savoring the thin place and space of their time at Wesley. Students are fed here, literally, every Thursday night. They stay up late together in Study Camp, offer rides home in the dark. They take each other to the hospital, offer hugs on hard days, and water on hot mission trips. Some meet their future mates here. We welcome strangers – every fall when new students arrive, and many other times when someone comes in crisis, or when other religious groups fall short and they are looking for a faith community where they can be and become all of who God made them to be.

One of the clearest recent examples of “no needy persons among us” is our Communion bread. At the 5pm worship service we celebrate Communion every week, gathered around the Table, offering the elements to one another around the circle. It’s a highlight and an orienting moment in each week.

But in the past few years we noticed we were meeting more and more students with gluten sensitivities, celiac disease, and some folks who both gluten-free and dairy-free. We struggled along for a while, using a little side plate on the Table to feed those who needed special bread at Communion. It seemed like the best we could do.

Until a student asked if she could try making a loaf we could all eat. There are two very important things to say about this endeavor: 1) It took her and a few other dedicated bakers experimenting for several weeks before we settled on the recipe we now use. Those early loaves were not all pretty or as tasty as what we have now. So, it wasn’t “perfect” from the start. And 2) The second thing to say is the one who offered to bake was not one of the students who had food allergies. She herself didn’t need the bread to change for her own health – she wanted to do this so that there would be no needy persons among us.

These are the moments I hear students and alumni recount decades after their years here. Deep spiritual moments expressed in physical ways, in the context of community…She remembered my name, he gave me a ride, they listened when I vented about my roommate, they didn’t laugh when I said I was thinking of going to seminary, they made bread I could eat, too…

Real, tangible bread, offered so that all could eat. That’s what a community thick with Christ looks like – that’s what it tastes like! That’s how love ends up looking like a round loaf of bread glistening with coconut oil on its crust. That’s the simple but extravagantly grace-filled type of thing that keeps this a thin place thick with the love of Christ. That’s why four years is a short time but long enough to send us out into the world and the rest of our lives, with the beacon of this community to orient us and the taste of heaven on our tongues.

Thanks be to God!

There’s a woman in the pulpit…and her book’s on the bookshelf

Posted on March 28, 2015 by admin

I’m excited to announce the publication in April of There’s a Woman in the Pulpit: Christian Clergywomen Share Their Hard Days, Holy Moments & the Healing Power of Humor (SkyLight Paths Publishing).

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

#WomaninthePulpit

It is a joy to be included in this collection of stories and prayers written by more than 50 of my colleagues who are members of RevGalBlogPals and who represent 14 denominations, 5 countries, and more than a dozen seminaries.

“In ministry, we constantly balance the sacred and the ordinary, juggling the two as expertly as we manage a chalice and a [baby] bottle. Even as we do things as simple as light the candles, set the table, break the bread and pour the wine, we invite people into a holy moment…. The women [in this book] not only have a wellspring of deep wisdom, but they also have the ability to dish out their knowledge with side-aching humor…. I am thrilled that their great wisdom and intelligence will be bound into the pages that I can turn to, lend and appreciate for years to come.” —from the Foreword by Rev. Carol Howard Merritt

Intended for laypeople, women hearing a call to ministry and clergy of all denominations, these stories and prayers will resonate with, challenge, encourage and amuse anyone who has a passion for their work and faith. A group reading guide will be available on the SkyLight Paths Publishing website – consider choosing it for your book group!

Working and Resting Revisited

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

resting hotel door hanger

I’ll admit this woman looks like she’s having fun. But I was almost as dismayed with this hotel door hanger as I was with the all-working version we encountered in October. I’m sure she’s working up a sweat with all that jumping. I might even be willing to call it “rejuvenating,” but restful?

Why can’t she be taking a nap? Or be snuggled beneath a blanket reading a book? Why can’t she be listening to music with her feet propped up?

It seems one of the many causalities of our overworking is our resting. When we deign to rest it now looks like a competitive sport rather than an afternoon spent dozing or meandering through a music collection.

Yeah, I know, it’s just a door hanger. It’s some hotel marketing department’s creative answer to standard equipment. I get that I’m allowed to rest how I want to no matter what the picture shows. I just think we deserve work that looks less like a constant war and rest that looks a lot less like work. We deserve cycles of work and rest rather than one-speed-fits-all living with the labels changed every now and then.

Final Kiln at Nan’s

Posted on February 24, 2015 by admin

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I walked into Nan’s pottery studio the day before Easter four years ago. Woody and I were eating lunch nearby, saw her brochure in the restaurant, and decided to follow the directions to her studio. It was a lovely, rare, ambling afternoon, a little adventure of meandering the unfamiliar back roads leading to her long, sloping gravel driveway.

I knew I’d like her pots. She had some on display in the restaurant, where I’d picked them up one by one and seen the same ”NR” stamp on the bottoms. Even though we arrived as she was shooting a demo video she cheerfully stopped and gave us a tour. I wandered through her cottage-like studio and showroom admiring the glazes and forms and bashfully saying, “No, I’m not a potter, but I’ve collected pottery for a long time.”

“I teach classes here. I usually have a long waiting list but right now I happen to have an open spot, if you’re interested.”

That’s when things changed. All the way home in the car Woody and I talked money and timing and how long the drive to class would take, but it was already a done deal. I was doing it.

Becoming not just a potter, but Nan Rothwell’s student, has been one of the unexpected blessings of these past few years. Pottery is a grounding and spiritual practice that gets me out of my head and back into my body, fully in the present moment. I’ve written a few things about it here but this probably sums it up best. I always knew, even before I held my first lump of clay, that I’d love working with it. What I didn’t know until I became Nan’s student, was how much I needed a teacher. Those of us in her classes said all the time how lucky we were. We counted our blessings out loud, regularly.

Life keeps changing and one of those changes this past year was that Nan and her husband decided to try city living for the first time in decades. In October, Nan closed her teaching studio and we fired the final kiln there. Here are the last pots I made at Nan’s.

Nan’s teaching at a new place and I look forward to taking classes with her there. It will all be different, but no matter how many places I sit down at a wheel and no matter how many teachers I learn from, Nan will always be my pottery teacher. She’s the one who said completely obvious things that came from deep wisdom and forty years of throwing pots, but which were not obvious enough to me before she said and demonstrated them – things like, “Just because the wheel’s moving fast, doesn’t mean you have to.” Nan has helped me move more slowly and deliberately at the wheel and in life. She’s the one who let me become a student again and walked me over the threshold from admirer to potter.

What we talk about when we talk about sex

Posted on February 13, 2015 by admin

When I told the group of students in this semester’s Sabbath study that Sabbath is meant to be a time to explore and revel in what delights us that was OK. When I said the Jewish tradition explicitly includes sex in the list of delights – that it’s actually prescribed as a Sabbath activity – that was OK, too. When I made sure to say that, of course, the understanding is that these activities take place within a marriage, that was entirely expected and by the book, but it was not OK with me.

That’s what I am supposed to say. It matches our common United Methodist understanding as expressed in the Book of Discipline. I’m not sure how well it matches our lived experience as Christians in North America in 2015. And I’m certain it’s not enough for most young adults to go on. In this particular year of ministry at the University of Virginia I am increasingly uncomfortable with our church conversations about sexuality. I wonder a lot about my role and responsibility as an ordained elder. Is it merely to communicate current stances accurately?

I have known college students who have not yet experienced their first kiss and I have known others who’ve experienced sexual violence. I’ve known students who are desperate to date and find someone and I’ve known others who don’t have time for that because they’re hyper-focused on the next academic and career steps. I’ve known many students who date and have relationships while they are in school and many of them are sexually active. What they all have in common is an appalling lack of religious language and imagery for full-bodied healthy sexuality. Whether they adhere to it or not, they all know that in church circles sex is for marriage. They know it’s a gift from God but it’s a pretty strange gift because it stays wrapped up in Christianese gift language without much exploration of how to use the gift. “When you get married” is not enough of an exploration. Leaving aside for now the huge problem that only certain people in certain places have the option for marriage, this is still a wholly unsatisfactory exploration.

As we discussed rape culture at the Wesley Foundation last semester, it became painfully apparent that unexamined, unexplored gift language can be a further assault to someone who has been sexually violated. If, as some versions of the gift conversation go, this is the best most important gift God gives us and that’s why we need to save it for The One, then what is a raped woman supposed to do with all that? What comfort and what level of conversation is available to her then, in a church community that has only ever said this one thing about sex? For that matter, what theological conversation is available to someone who is sexually active in consenting relationships, as many young adults (and older adults) are? By our narrow focus and our silence are we communicating this is a “leave it at the door” kind of thing?

Our sacred scriptures contain extreme sexual violence (Judges 19 as just one example). They also contain some of the most beautiful poetry, absolutely reveling and delighting in sexual exploration with one’s (unmarried) beloved (Song of Solomon). Our central Christian story starts with an unmarried pregnant teenager and no matter how we understand those events and the notion of being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit as Mary was, those facts remain (Luke 1: 26-38). What do these stories tell us about greed, betrayal, violence, and power? About perseverance? About resourcefulness? About mistakes and punishment? What do they tell us about delight and the powerful connection to another person and that person’s body? About the soaring wonder that we experience skin to skin? What do they tell us about unexplained circumstances? About loyalty? About redemption and the holiness of embodied life and love?

These are just the tip of the iceberg, the first questions that come to mind when I read our community stories involving sex. Notice how much more is going on than mere description of body parts or edicts about right behavior. Notice how little we tend to say about the rest of it.

Saying only “save it for marriage” is not enough and it’s not a fair reflection of our own tradition. In the case of someone who’s been sexually assaulted, if our sexuality conversation is so stilted, euphemistic, and childish that she can’t come (back) to church with the worst thing that’s happened to her, what are we here for anyway? In the case of a restless experimenting teenager who already hasn’t “saved it,” where can she rejoin the church community conversation if she’s already out of bounds?

Ruth Everhart has posted several good pieces this week, asking preachers how we intend to deal with Valentine’s Day and sex. Her posts are a good reminder that we need real, earthy, God-inclusive conversations about sexuality – and not just at Valentine’s Day. The Atlantic published a thoughtful article last fall called “When ‘Do Unto Others’ Meets Hookup Culture” and we used it in our recent Wesley conversations. The author points out that our basic ethic of treating others as we would like to be treated serves as a great starting place for conversations about sexuality. This standard is more than mere consent and it requires attentiveness to the other person, the situation you are in, the relationship or lack thereof…It requires active engagement and moral reflection on an ongoing basis.

What if we in the church shifted focus from the before and after marriage conversation – what if instead of focusing on when to start having sex, we talk together about how we go about it, whenever it is we start? What if we start from the supposition that God’s good gift of sexuality can be expressed in a variety of ways? What if we admit it might be possible to have good, healthy, Christian sex for various reasons and in various forms of relationships, possibly even no relationship? What if we start there because this opens our conversation up to the largest breadth of people and experiences?

When I hold “Ask Your Campus Minister” nights and students can put any questions they want to in a hat, I always pull one out that asks about sex. Whether they’ve read it or not, they already know what our Book of Discipline says. They don’t want to hear “Marriage. Next question?” They want something real that they can use. They want something meaty and nuanced enough to carry them through the complexities of sexuality in its beautiful, surprising, confusing, God-given varieties. Nothing less is OK.

If you had told me

Posted on January 14, 2015 by admin

welcome sign sullivans island

If you had told me I’d be writing poetry in a movie-set house

on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina,

on a grey rainy day in the middle of the week,

– as part of my job –

I might have believed it,

depending on when you’d told me.

The me who drank café crèmes in French cafés,

camped for the afternoon sipping

and pouring words into journals too myopic and lovesick to read now,

that me would have believed it. No hesitation.

Of course, I’ll be a writer one day. The set sounds perfect.

Twentysomething me, writer of the Bermuda short story

I showed every friend I had because, well, I was proud of it

and because I didn’t know what else to do with it,

she would have sheepishly asked, What kind of poetry?

Heartbroken me, would have sniffed, nodded,

looked up with red-rimmed eyes, knowingly.

What’s his name?

Newly-minted seminarian me, the lonely one

still uncertain of her call after three years and a degree

who cried when the priest rubbed ashes on her forehead one Wednesday,

would have wanted to know What happened to ministry?

The oldest me

girl in a lavender bedroom

following the Ingalls family out west for the first time

would have – if you could have gotten her to look up from the book –

smiled

the unabashed smile of delight.

Do Not Disturb

Posted on October 16, 2014 by admin

Come to think of it, “working” is more prominent than “do not disturb.” Pretty disturbing.

We went to the beach in October to rest, just the two of us. We ate an amazing meal, got our feet wet in the ocean, walked in the sand, watched and listened to the surf from our beachside balcony, took naps, watched baseball, and slept all night with the sliding glass door open to the cool air and the constant rumble of waves. Aaaaah.

So imagine my surprise to find no resting option on the “do not disturb” door-hanger at our hotel. Both sides said “do not disturb” but they also both offered the explanation “working,” accompanied by a picture of a very frazzled, business-suited man standing on his head, tie like a floppy noose, in front of a stack of papers and his cell phone. The only way to ask folks not to disturb you at this hotel was to claim the excuse of working. Not sleeping or resting or enjoying passionate sex. Nope. Working was the only acceptable way to claim undisturbed time and space.

This makes me so sad because I’m sure it wasn’t a printing error. Though I flipped the door-hanger back and forth several times to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I’m sure they didn’t mean to put a different message on the opposite side. Why bother asserting my right to some down time when I’m just in the room reading email on my phone? Why bother claiming to sleep when that seems so much more disturb-worthy than working?

This is what it’s come to, folks. Choosing work all the time means eventually it’s the only choice left.

This sad revelation made our pre-vacation decision to stay off email even more meaningful. For me, it was a total offline weekend, no email and no social media. Woody stayed away from email but checked into Facebook here and there. That’s what worked for us on this trip. The point is, we thought about it and talked about it in advance. We set up our perimeter so we could enjoy the pace and place and each other.

If you don’t set and practice your own boundaries, no one else will do it. Even in a beachfront hotel room on a day off.

Who Wants to Pray?

Posted on August 27, 2014 by admin

People in my profession get asked to pray a lot. Many times, there isn’t even any asking going on – it’s simply assumed the pastor is the one who prays. When one of us pastor types goes off script and cheerfully offers for one of the other Christians in the group to have the honor, uncomfortable silence ensues. “Who feels called to offer a blessing for this meal?” Crickets.

I can’t blame the non-pastor types. It can be intimidating to be The One who announces through prayer – through what gets prayed for and what does not – where our collective focus lies and where we especially hope for the signs and wonders of God’s presence. Since, in many faith communities, pastors are the only ones who ever have the opportunity to pray, it can send the message that you need special training or voice intonation or secret knowledge about the “right” things to say.

A couple of weekends ago I got to be one of the listeners as a group prayed together. We took my stepson to a wonderful surf camp offered by Surfer’s Healing. I’ve written about them before and the overwhelming nature of standing on a beach together watching our children go out to sea without us. This year I was teary and moved again. I found myself standing at the shoreline with gripped hands at my chest – almost in a prayer position – holding my breath, watching him work on trusting the surfers enough to go where they led.

It was breathtaking and comforting again to move through this “one perfect day” together, rehearsing the hard letting go of parents. But what struck me this time was the ritual of beginning the day.

Once the surfboards are unpacked and lined up at the shore, the beach area roped off, and the registration tables up and running, the event organizers gather everyone. Logistical announcements and thank you’s are issued and then Izzy Paskowitz, the founder of Surfer’s Healing (along with his wife, Danielle), says a few words.

He and the other surfers all wear wetsuits and stand together in a line at the front of the gathering. Izzy talks about the “club none of us wanted to be in” as parents of autistic children and he talks about the generosity of sponsors and volunteers. Then he calls on one of the other surfers to come offer the first of several prayers before embarking on the day. We hear a prayer in English then a second surfer takes the mic and offers one in Spanish. Then a third surfer comes forward and sings a traditional Hawaiian prayer to the tune of the doxology.

When we first got to the beach I saw the surfers in wetsuits and felt some competing combination of being a geeky teenager around the cool kids and being an old mom. Each of them is young, many are tattooed, and they look sleek and muscular in their second skins. If I let my own high school experiences or movies clichés take over my thinking, they appear to me as a group of untouchably cool dudes.

But I look at them as we are praying. Every last one of them is holding hands with the surfers next to him, heads bowed. No one looks impatient, bored, or uncomfortable. I don’t get the feeling from any of them or from the crowd at large that this part of the day is imposed or strange or old-fashioned or constricting.

They do this every day of camp all season long. Before heading into rough waters with autistic children they’ve never seen before this moment, they pause and pray. As they gather their strength, stamina, patience, and hopes for a rough and rewarding day, they recognize their intentions and ask for God’s blessings on the camp. There was nothing showy about any of the prayers or the fact of praying together before beginning. I only consciously understood the words of the English prayer but I’ll go out on a limb and say none of the prayers were self-conscious or full of buzzwords. They were simple, short, in and of the moment, heartfelt.

I was completely taken aback and had to wipe tears from my eyes during the prayers. The sight of the cool dudes, long hair flying in the wind, holding hands and praying on the beach got me choked up. It was the opposite of what many of us experience in church – or what we are afraid will happen when we pray together in church, especially if one of the “non-professionals” offers the prayer.

That day on the beach, I began wondering about how we are teaching people to pray in context. For those of us who are asked/assumed to pray, how can we model praying so it’s an invitation to others to do the same? It seems to me that many times in the church we gather to offer prayers and ask God’s blessings on a meal or a service trip but our humility is hidden under slick phrasing or a tone-of-voice assumption that the prayer is a “lock on it” rather than the start of it.

What I experienced on the beach was a group of consummate professionals vulnerable enough to hold hands and remember the One who makes all days gifts. How can we professional pray-ers model this spirit and invite the non-professionals to the mic? What would this look like at tax time in an accountant’s office? In a writer’s room? Before surgery in an operating room?

I need to hear more prayers from the trenches, raised up from wherever by whomever, stating the simple but obvious truth and need of our lives. This matters and we give it to you – the success and the difficulty of it – and ask your blessing. We know you’re here. Thank God.

Gone Fishin’ (and great news)

Posted on July 23, 2014 by admin

There comes a time in every woman’s summer when she has to step away. Out of the routine, off the treadmill, away from work, offline. That time is now for me.

I thought about loading up the Kindle for ease of packing and lightweight luxuriousness during my travels and time out. Then I thought again.

I want to feel the heft of a book in my hands and hear the crinkly plastic covering of a library book. I want to smell the pages and feel them turn between my fingers. Most of all, I simply want to be attentive to my physical surroundings rather than being distracted by pings and messages and stories from other far away places while I’m trying to read. I anticipate the pleasures of lingering over a page wondering where that town is without the incessant invitation to open a browser window and look it up on a map.

Far away stories will have to come through the portal of my imagination, mingling with a writer’s words, put down in black and white on paper. No hypertext (or email or Facebook) for this vacation.

So I made a trip to the library, like we did every week when I was growing up. Since I don’t do this much any more, maybe part of this book-in-the-hand longing is nostalgia. So be it. In the week leading into our vacation, we’ve buried a family member and will toast a longtime family friend at her wedding. If a stack of library books and a little nostalgia is the result of this swirl of events and emotions, I’m good with that.

As I make room in the car for the giant stack of books, I am making room in my spirit for the people and stories right in front of me. Here’s my gone fishin’ sign. I’ll see you again back here in a few weeks.

And now for the news…

I’m so pleased to announce Snow Day has been accepted into the CCblogs network. You’ll see the bright and shiny new logo on the home page and you can click on it to head over to the CCblogs site at The Christian Century, where you can peruse other network sites and see selected posts highlighted by The Christian Century editors.

When the kiln opens

Posted on July 14, 2014 by admin

pottery tumbler

When the kiln opens in June, reuniting me with objects that began in February as moist and malleable lumps of clay, there are always surprises. Even when I’ve used a particular glaze combination many times before, this kiln firing may have produced a different effect. Though I’ve been following these now-finished pots through each stage in the process — wet clay, leather hard, dry-and-fragile, bisqued, glazed, and now fired — I’m always surprised. A piece I thought was inelegant has undergone its final transformation, the glaze smoothing over the least graceful spots to make a pleasing whole. Sometimes it’s a surprise in another direction: the form I loved in one piece now seems a bit marred by the glazes I chose and how they fired.

But the long process isn’t really finished the day the kiln opens, no matter how elated or deflated I am with certain pots. All these pots end up somewhere, part of someone’s daily life, holding flowers or fruit or coffee or pasta. That’s the abiding surprise: something I made and tended over months and seasons now graces someone’s table and holds the things that sustain life.

Here are the latest pieces, wonderfully photographed by my husband, Woody Sherman.

Friday Five for Summer

Posted on July 11, 2014 by admin

On Fridays the RevGals play a little writing game together. Today’s the summer edition and I’m playing…

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1. What makes you happy in your happy hour? (kicking off shoes, reading a book, a cocktail, lemonade~~essentially, what do you do to relax at the end of your week…)

The most refreshing indulgence lately is this coconut yumminess from Smitten Kitchen. Combine it with a long, light-filled evening of baseball.

2. I have a pair of shorts that I jump into the minute I get home for the evening–every day in the summer. What’s your favorite summer “garment”?

At any time of year: Bra removal promptly upon arrival home and pj’s.

3. I have discovered, after living here in New England for 7 years, Ipswich fried clams. Oh. my. OH MY! Do you have a summer food you might splurge on once or twice in the summer?

I wait all year for ripe homegrown local tomatoes. I dream of them in the winter and start salivating by May. In late July through August (and sometimes into September) I eat them at least once a day. Tomato sandwiches, BLT’s, Greek salads, ratatouille, sliced on a plate with salt and pepper… You can not go wrong with a tomato in the height of its season, one of the simplest reminders of God’s enduring providence.

4. Do you have a specific fond memory of summers of your childhood?

At my grandparents’ house in the country, we helped hang laundry on the clothesline, slinging clothes up and over, using the wet weight to help pull the line near enough for our short arms to use the pins. We went back out to take down the scratchy, stiff-dried, wind-scented clothes, yanking on the now-higher lines until the clothes came down in our hands and the pins popped off and landed in the grass. Like baseball players with the sun in our eyes, it was hard to follow the flying pins against the lit sky.

5. Use these words in a sentence: snail, baby duck, camper, ice cream, surfboard, cherries.

The camper indulges in the simple extravagance of cherries for breakfast, fished from the bottom of the cooler and cold as ice cream, accompanied by the small progress of a snail moving across the picnic table, a baby duck learning to glide in the nearby lake, and the promise embodied in the surfboard waiting atop the car.

When the Words Sink In

Posted on June 29, 2014 by admin

Today we closed the church building where my dad attended growing up and where I visited throughout my childhood on summer Sundays at my grandparents’. They are buried in the cemetery out back now, along with two sets of my great-grandparents. It was bittersweet to worship at Rocky Run UMC one last time with second cousins and longtime country neighbors, helping celebrate Communion in one of the places that helped form me as a person and a pastor.

For years now, whenever I serve small children during Communion, I offer them the elements by saying, “This means God loves you very much.” I can’t claim credit for this idea since I copied it from my colleague Alex. But I love its simple restating of the point of the Eucharist and what all those other words mean. Boiled down and essential good news: God loves you very much.

Today, during the last Communion we’ll share in that place, a small blond boy of about 5 came up. I offered him the bread and the simple words. He took them and took a step towards the other minister, who was holding the cup. Then he did a double-take. He looked back at me as if the words had sunk in and he realized after a beat what they meant. He was radiant, with a smile of surprise and delight on his open face.

Yes! That is good news. Yes! It is for you, little one. Yes! Even on a day when the doors will close and lock behind us, this is still God’s Word for you. Yes, yes, yes!

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Category Archives: Feast