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!

Winter Afternoon Haiku. No Snow.

Posted on February 16, 2015 by admin

bird footprints in winter sand

I wrote these a few weeks back one afternoon, enjoying the late light but wishing for snow. Looks like we might be getting some today, at last. As I burrow in on the ultimate snow day – retreat! – here are two slightly different takes on winter hibernation.

Afternoon light slants

Winter’s long shadows stretching

Golden sun descends

Netflix beckons me

Siren song of temptation

Ten seasons of Friends

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.

Holy Scarcity, Batman

Posted on July 17, 2014 by admin

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Last Sunday I preached in a church that has three different worship services in three different locations within the church. One is a moderately sized chapel, one is a voluminous fellowship hall with a stage at one end, and the last one is the original sanctuary of the old downtown church. The variations in space accompanied the differences in worship style. The one thing all three had in common: a clock easily seen from the pulpit.

I know all the practical reasons for this. As someone who doesn’t wear a watch and doesn’t carry my cell phone into worship, I can appreciate the orientation the clocks give, especially in that church where pastors rush from service to service to make it in time for all three. Still, I was a bit sad and wistful thinking of those clocks and the importance we place — even in a weekly set aside time to worship — on adhering to the schedule.

I’ve been longing for less scheduled time in my life. I’ve been wanting to roam freely through at least some of my days or seasons, without the constant constraint of being pre-scheduled for the next appointment or task. I’ve realized lately that my great skill in organizing and scheduling is both help and hindrance, both a survival mechanism and something that might be slowly killing my spirit.

Along with several of my sister writer-pastors from last summer’s Collegeville retreat, I’m now part of a cohort awarded a grant through Austin Seminary’s College of Pastoral Leaders. We wrote the bulk of the grant together but we each had to write individual responses to certain questions. Every one of us commented on the swirl of demands on our time and attention and how we need to establish more balance and pace in our lives. We didn’t discuss this as a theme but reading through our responses it was the one, glaring thing we all had in common.

This summer, re-reading MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s Sabbath in the Suburbs, I came across this already-highlighted passage (p.150): “I have found it much more liberating spiritually to embrace the idea of holy scarcity. There isn’t ever enough time. Even when we strip away all the inessentials — even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time. But our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.”

I keep trying to believe the myth that I can reallocate time and rework the schedule so there will be enough time, as if there is a secret key to this I haven’t stumbled upon but I’m oh-so-close to finding. When I’m honest I see how even when the options are all deemed good, I can’t say “yes” to everything. Making friends with time, as McKibben Dana calls it, means embracing “no.”

I have known days so full they seemed out of time, perfectly paced, lingering just so. They are rare. I’ve known many more that were crammed full, often with amazing things and people, but so packed it was hard to take it all in or to “come down” enough to go to sleep at the end of them.

“Our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.” At least half of our biblical stories are about this very thing: wanting to be God instead of ourselves. Guilty as charged. Through my amazing organizational skills, I want to command time to obey me, find the elusive formula to the perfectly balanced day, and sleep satisfied in my own powers of management and discernment. This hasn’t been working out so far.

When I look more closely, I see those few full timeless-seeming days in context. There were dishes in the sink while we sat outside churning the homemade ice cream, watching the sky turn black and star-pricked. There were emails left untouched and – gasp! – unseen when we hiked by the waterfalls and rested in a meadow for as long as we felt like it.

Perfection is always illusion. Mastery is misguided.

“Even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world — there is still not enough time.” My choices aren’t usually between horrible, bad, soul-denying things and beautiful, transporting, soul-enriching things. Many, many times I have the wonderful choice in this time-limited life between two very good things.

That’s the rub. That’s what I’m trying to make sense of these days and make a little peace with as I go forward. Saying “no” is, painfully, often a “no” to something or someone I’d really like to spend time with, too. But I’m tired of this torn-ness and never-ending calendar calculation. I’m ready for more imperfection and the grace that orients better than any clock.

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.

On Generosity

Posted on May 26, 2014 by admin

mary pickford at writing desk_loc_public domain

Every other year in April I attend the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s the best continuing education I do. Three days full of panels, Q&A, plenary speakers, poetry, prose, screenwriting, and (usually) tulips, the bright, ordered heralds of spring. The first year I went, I had to take a break midway through the second day to write poetry. This is not normal behavior for me but I was so full I had to pour something back out.

There are usually some bigger name presenters (Mary Karr, Marilynne Robinson, Eugene Peterson) from the fuzzy-edged worlds of faith and writing. Often, though, my favorite Festival writer happens to be someone I’d never heard of before but who captures my attention. This year that person was Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work, who lured me in with a talk on writing about a community while being part of it.

Anne Lamott was one of the big name speakers this year. I’ve read a lot of her books. I preached a sermon series on Help, Thanks, Wow, I read her strangely long and beautiful Facebook posts, and everyone in the past 20 years who’s interested in writing has read or heard of Bird by Bird. So she wasn’t an unknown person or writer I stumbled across at the Festival. I was looking forward to hearing her speak, but I had a sense I’d probably heard most of it before. Like many faithful and writerly folks, she tends to circle around some of the same themes from varying angles.

That’s what she did. But what captured my attention was her generosity. In her particular Lamott-I-packed-the-wrong-too-tight-pants way, she stood in an arena in front of thousands of us, informal, human, full of mistakes and longing. She has published at least 15 books but she focused on the torturous, determined ritual of writing. In great detail, she walked us through how long it took her to write a Facebook post the previous weekend and how many times she got up from the task and sat back down again. She told us it never gets easier, describing all the time-wasting ways she could avoid writing once she made it back home to California. She told us how she’d spend her weekend, making herself get up for church on Sunday morning even though everyone would understand she’d had a long week and was freshly home from a long flight. Come Monday, she would sit at the computer again to write. Anne Lamott, big name author, pulled the curtain wide and said This is how it’s done. She didn’t say this in a superior, hero, famous person way. She said it writer to writer. No bones about it: writing is hard work and you will want to get up about 50 times an hour and do anything else.

If you’ve read Lamott or heard her speak, you know there was a lot more detail than this. She tells seemingly roundabout stories that loop and loop until you’ve lost yourself a little bit. But they come around with a wallop.

The thing about admiring someone or wanting to emulate something she’s done is the admiration and emulation keep you distant. What Anne Lamott did was invite us in. She could have delivered a speech that left us all thinking I want to be like that. Instead, she left us with the sure sense we already have what we need.

It was a generous act. She didn’t hide behind the accomplishments of her library shelf. She offered to show us in intimate, messy, daily, routine, non-glamorous detail how she works with herself to get some writing done. She didn’t offer any platitudes about the amazing things she’s learned in all these years of publishing. She said It never gets easier. You just do it. She didn’t display a perfect writing environment with expensive tools and an ideal time of day. She revealed a real life and her own real struggle to wake up every day and write in the midst of it. She said, Come Monday, this is what I will do. Again. I will hate it and I will try to avoid it. But I will make myself start again. How about you?

photo credit: Mary Pickford by Hartsook Photo, 1918. Public domain image.

Snow, Spring, Haiku

Posted on March 21, 2014 by admin

I realize almost everyone in the US is ready for spring that acts like spring. I know most folks have had more than enough snow this year. But I won’t complain next week if we get more, as they are beginning to predict. It will eventually stop and, God help me, it will be Virginia-humid and 90 degrees. Count on it.

snow piled in front of cars ready to shovel

I have loved the snow this winter, even with this driveway and all the shoveling. (And, no, we do not have helpful neighborhood kids who come over and offer to shovel with us – it’s all us.) For someone with a blog called Snow Day I didn’t pause often or long enough this winter. Ready-made excuses drifted up to my door but I barreled through most of the called snow days sitting at the computer, as usual.

There was one early morning storm that caught my attention for about 40 minutes as I drank coffee and wrote haiku by hand on the legal pad. I stopped long enough to simply watch what was happening.

At the edge of spring I’m pausing to remember that morning and breathe it in one last time. Whether we’ve seen the last of the snow or not, I give thanks for the beauty of what’s been and for the traces it leaves behind.

Gentle rain of snow

Awakens me before dawn

Stills my attention

* *

Grey sky, bluish light

White fuzz muffle flaking down

Quiet streets outside

* *

Sound of heat blowing

Feel of fleece robe on my skin

Sight of world in white

* *

Snow, awaken me

Show me a new world outside

Absorb our noise now

* *

Thank you, God, for this

Day of snowflakes and stillness

Gift of present time

A Year of Snow. Sort of.

Posted on January 20, 2014 by admin

Last week marked a year here at Snow Day. As I said in my very first post, “I decided to invest more of my days with that snow day feel – space and pace…A walk through the snow makes it easy to taste and see what’s holy. But there is holiness everywhere, every day. I’m trying to leave enough room to notice that.”

greenhouse in snow

I’m not all the way there yet. I caught myself in a tizzy in December, fretting aloud to my husband about the craziness of my schedule that week and the domino-effect of changing one teeny thing in the line-up. In full-out rant, I stumbled upon a deep truth as I blurted out, “I do this to myself!”

Then again, we took a Snow Day Weekend before students returned in January and it was the deepest relaxation I’ve experienced in a long time. The fact that there was no actual snow involved should probably count as significant progress.

Relevant Magazine recently ran a piece about what to ask yourself before posting to social media. The whole thing is good, thoughtful advice, but the question that has stuck with me is this one: Is this a moment to protect? The author talks about our cultural tendencies to interrupt ourselves in the midst of intimate, important moments in order to “share” those online.

But the question hangs there for me, implicating other tendencies. Is this a moment to protect?

I’m not picturing a smothering “protection” based in fear or controlling behavior. I’m picturing the way tented plastic protects fragile plants from an early frost. Just enough cover to allow them to grow and thrive, to assist in what they are already trying to do.

seedlings in plastic cups

A year in, I’m still looking for more internal snow days. I’m not holding out for real snow days to do the work for me (though I’m ready any time, Mother Nature!) and I’m trying to rely less on permission from others. This little plastic tent of a blog has afforded me a few protected moments and I hope it has for you. Thank you for being part of the journey.

Words for a Rainy Writer Friday

Posted on December 6, 2013 by admin

“I’m a teacher at Syracuse University, I write short stories, and that’s pretty much it.”

It’s a refreshing statement from writer George Saunders, made to sound simple because of its brevity, but wider and deeper than it appears at first. Teaching and writing are more than enough for a full, deep, wide, soul-satisfying life. Regardless of the standing-in-front-of-a-class-of-students aspect of teaching, neither of these occupations is showy. But they are both lifelong practices that will take you where you need to go – all you have to give over is time, consistent effort, and a willingness to be taken somewhere.

What would your deceptively simple sentence be? What’s the practice carrying you through life, deeper into life?

The whole video is charming but here’s another winner of a quote: “But actually, the deeper goal is to be more loving, more courageous, more accepting, more patient. But also less full of shit. So, in other words, to be able to really step up to the beauties of life and the horrors of it, without any kind of flinching…If some of that could get into your work, that would be a plus.”

Here it is at The New Yorker.

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

Posted on November 18, 2013 by admin

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.

October Song

Posted on October 1, 2013 by admin

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.

Typos and Daily Barn Chores

Posted on August 19, 2013 by admin

barn 001

I transposed a letter and told them I’d been “writing in dairies.”

I wonder what it would be like to set up shop among the stalls, between milking times. Swollen udders and pregnant thoughts snuggled in a barn together. What does lowing sound like and is it a good soundtrack for writing? Do cows recognize contemplation or would they be annoyed with my non-utilitarian presence, wondering why I was taking so long to start milking them?

My dad grew up with cows and used to describe to us the rolling rhythm of milking. First you grab the teat up close to the udder with your thumb and forefinger. Then you roll down one by one until each finger is grasping it. Pull down and squeeze.

It sounded more intimate than I was interested in being with a cow. When I understood how uncomfortable a full udder is for the cow it sounded compassionate.

Writers need this: to be our own farmers, committed to the chore. Farmers don’t stray from the farm or the routine. The rest of life is built around it or adapted to it. Vacations, trips to the city, the timing of dinner. The worn paths to the barn – the ones that seem like just part of the scenery – are created over decades, in all weather and seasons, whether the farmer feels like it or not.

When it’s time, it’s time.

And then there is the milk. Cream. Butter. Ice cream. The sweetness and savor of life, from the rhythm of two times a day.

Snow Day

Space to play, rest, create, feast.

Category Archives: Writing