Metanoia

Prayer - 2

2012-01-30T20:11:00.000-05:00

Several years (decades?) ago, George Gallup, Jr. presented one of the Chautauuqa Institution morning lectures. Sounds fascinating, huh? A lecture on statistics?

It was fascinating! If you read his Times obituary, you'll discover that he had a lifelong fascination with religion, and religion was the topic he addressed on that long-ago morning.

What stuck with me was his announcement that 96% of Americans say that they believe in God; only 4% claim to be agnostic or atheist. (I suppose those percentages may have changed somewhat in the past fifteen to twenty years.)

I was astonished. Had you grown up in my family, you would have concluded the numbers to be somewhat the opposite.

After I wrote the previous post, I tried to think of an example of someone praying, discussing prayer, or teaching prayer, in my family, immediate and extended.

I have been unable to come up with a single one.

Perhaps prayer happened, but not in any way that was communicated to me.

Prayer - 1

2012-01-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

I've been pondering, here on my little sabbatical, the following question: about what might I like to blog for the next while? Is there something I'd like to explore with some consistency in this context?

And then, out of some conversations with a whole wide variety of folks over the past few days, waltzed my topic of choice: Prayer. Something those of us who hang out here from time to time might focus upon in a more or less concentrated way for a number of weeks.

And because this is a blog, and the blogs I enjoy most and those I have written myself focus on explorations of personal experience, I'll approach this topic through the same lens.

I took the image above one morning three summers ago, having rolled out of bed early enough to catch the sunrise over the Blue Ridge Parkway. I like it as an illustration of prayer. Light and dark, mountains and valleys, trees right before us and vistas inviting us into a distant unknown. A vast landscape for a vast topic.

But I'm going to start at the beginning. And lest you think that I have a lifetime of experience upon which to draw, let me say, right at the outset, that the following represents my interest in and attentiveness to prayer for about the first forty years of my life:

How about you? Was prayer a feature of your childhood or young adulthood? Or not so much?

Sabbatical

2012-01-23T21:59:00.001-05:00

It's not much fun to blog when so many people are prevented from leaving comments by some Blogger glitch.

I'm going to take that as a sign that it's time for a break. I'm working on a number of other writing projects right now, so maybe this lull is just the nudge I need to focus elsewhere for awhile.

This photograph is captioned in my files as Last Sunrise. I know that it's from St. Augustine; I'm guessing that the year was 2008, when none of the kids were available and The Quiet Husband and I went down for a week on our own.

Enjoy!

Fire After Death

2012-01-21T22:41:00.000-05:00

I went to a funeral this morning.

And tonight I read this, which I think might be the very best piece of writing I've ever read on the subject matter in question~ and I've read a lot of them, and written some, too: carrying out our immediate responsibilities and trying to honor our most beloved people in body and spirit after they've died.

Brahms

2012-01-20T08:58:00.002-05:00

Bleak midwinter outside. Temperature in the teens and pale gray skies. Our rug samples arrived ten days ago and are supposed to be returned in four more. We haven't yet been able to see how the colors look in sunlight. The furnace guy is here for what must be our 27th annual inspection ~ of the TWO furnaces we now run in our updated system.

We moved into this house 28 years ago this week-end. It was 16 degrees out that day as well; by the time we finished, having opened and closed the front door all day, the thermostat in the front hall had settled in at 55. I was pregnant and, although I did not yet know that we would be having twins, I was already suffering from the all-day-all-night morning (?) sickness that would mark most of that pregnancy and all of the next one. My husband set up the bed, and I crawled into it, pulled some sleeping bags over my head, and got up again in about March.

Now I sleep in the living room, since my present condition precludes lying down on a bed. I woke up about 4:00 this morning and remained curled up in my recliner, wide awake, for a couple of hours. A friend's husband died yesterday, and there will be a funeral mass next week. Tomorrow is the church service for the young pastor who was killed earlier this week. I prayed for both families and wondered, Do they know the love of God this morning? My own experience of God during such times is consistently one of absence, but rumor has it that mine is not the universal one.

This living room was the site of such energy and joy during the years in which our children were small. We struggled so to keep this old house warm, but they ran around gleefully in their bare feet, sipped hot chocolate in front of the fire, and curled up on the couch with the cat for hours of reading aloud.

Tonight my son and I are going to hear the Cleveland Orchestra; his ordination gift to me. When we selected the concert weeks ago, we hoped that I would be physically healed enough to enjoy it, and I am. The other things, the memories and the losses, all swirl around us. We are, as Richard Rohr describes it, "falling upward." And Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 is the exact right piece of music.

The Journey Through the Looking Glass Continues (Breast Cancer)

2012-01-19T19:46:00.000-05:00

My visit with the plastic surgeon today was transformed from a procedure into a consultation, and ended with the decision that we were far enough along to schedule the next surgery. Ideally in six weeks, though my church schedule for Lent may push it past Easter.

My surgeon seemed genuinely pensive and regretful as it finally became clear to him how painful this process has been for me. "This is definitely unusual," he said. I have no way of judging. But he went on to say, "I have a patient who comes in here at lunchtime and returns to teaching yoga all afternoon, and you're telling me that you basically cancel Thursday and Friday?"

"Every week, " I said, "on Saturday I start yoga and walking again, and by Wednesday I'm doing pretty well, and then I come here on Thursday, drive home, and creep into my recliner to stay for at least a day."

Now, though, some hope. Six weeks to stretch, walk, lose some weight ~ and then I plan to take four to six full days off to recover from what should be a fairly easy surgical procedure.

In the meantime, I have some reading and discernment to do to decide how much a match matters to me. I'm inclined to leave my real side alone till I've had some time to see how they both look and how I feel about them. And to explore alternative methods of pain relief. Western medicine has completely failed me in that regard, so I'm more than ready to look elsewhere.

Image: Nina Hope Pfanstiehl, Through the Looking Glass, here.

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

2012-01-19T09:02:00.001-05:00

Two nights ago a young pastor in our Presbytery was killed in a head-on collision as she was driving to a church meeting.

I had just met her a couple of weeks ago, at our initial gathering of a cohort of first-call pastors brought together for monthly discussions. Last week our little group led worship for our Presbytery and she celebrated the Eucharist.

She was graduated from my seminary the spring before I arrived there in the fall, and her mother graduated a few years earlier, so we have many friends and acquaintances in common.

Her church had been without a permanent pastor for years, and was thrilled to call her last fall.

Last night, the news still fresh, I was thinking about her parents and trying to remember the first couple of nights after Josh died. I don't recall much ~ just some bits and pieces, such as giving up all pretense of sleep and getting up at 5:00 am the first morning, the blur of people coming and going, that feeling of an impossible weight crushing my chest. And that sense that life had shattered into millions of irretrievable fragments.

And of course, I am remembering my mother's death in the same way as this young woman's, at about the same age.

And I am pondering the great gifts of ministry that will not be shared and, most of all, the parents left without the son and grandchildren she might have brought into their lives, without the companionship she might have provided as they aged, without the sound of her laughter or the steadiness of her gaze, without the touch of her hand, without the softness of her hair.

This morning, I woke up with the words "Blessed are those who mourn" floating through my head.

I will tell you the honest truth, and that is that I cannot reconcile the first and last words of that sentence. I could probably write an exegetical paper about them, dwelling on the meaning of the Greek and the reversals of expectation that Jesus insists upon. I could probably write a sermon about how the emptiness of loss makes space for the compassion of God, both the receiving and the sharing of it.

But, oh God, that emptiness. It is so vast and wide and the wind howls through it.

Guys and Breast Cancer

2012-01-17T13:00:00.001-05:00

Something else I'm grateful for: the guys who step up to the plate.

In my family, that would be The Quiet Husband and 27-year-old Gregarious Son. My husband doesn't say much, but he takes care of almost everything, without fanfare or expectation. My son does say much, but he's become a pretty good listener where breast cancer is concerned, and has been a big help to me in sorting out options.

Online, I think immediately of Mike Farely and Stratoz. I'm not sure that this is the most comfortable sequence of posts for them to read, so I want them to know how welcome their comments are. In my household, we have a whole new vocabulary and comfort level in speaking of body parts (or lack thereof), but I realize that those things aren't universal.

Among friends, there's that group of Jesuits who've been attending to my spiritual life in various ways over the years. When I first got started in spiritual direction, some of my friends asked: Why a man? A Catholic priest? What can I say? These guys are just spectacular human beings. I will admit that during the first year, when I was making the Spiritual Exercises, there were a few things I left out that I might have shared with a woman director ~ I wasn't sure about elaborating on certain details with a 75-year-old priest. But I have long since abandoned any such apprehensiveness. I just consider them spiritual fathers and brothers and converse with them accordingly.

And then there are the surprises. Last week I called the woman who runs the local Suicide Prevention support group and got her husband instead. Turns out that he is the first cousin of a prominent columnist in town who has written extensively about breast cancer, as both she and her daughter and other women in their family carry the BRCA1 gene. For him personally, that means that breast cancer is a possibility and that prostate cancer is almost a given ~ and, of course, that he has all those aunts and cousins who have had either breast cancer or prophylactic mastectomies.

It's kind of interesting (to me) to read this and to see how life events and friends overlap and intersect. And, wow! - The guys, from 81-year-old Jesuit to 27-year-old law student and all of those in between, are great.

Gratitude

2012-01-16T19:30:00.001-05:00

I have been in a real funk lately. I blame the snowballing of events over the past few months:

The call process, which was extremely stressful from about June to September, the period in which: my new church and I embarked upon serious conversation, the church decided to extend a call to me, and I was approved for ordination within 24 hours of . . .

My breast cancer diagnosis, which launched my family and I on a ~ so far ~ four months and counting medical ordeal ~

A new life in a new church, this time as the pastor, which would have been a challenge all by its lonesome self ~

My ordination and second surgery, which occurred within three weeks of one another ~

Our first attempt at Christmas at home since Josh's death, which brought both its joys and its deep challenges ~

And that's only the big stuff.

And yet . . . I am well aware that that sense of being completely overwhelmed by Way Too Much is fertile ground for the work of the one whom Ignatius calls the enemy of our human nature. You can call and visualize him, her, or it whatever and however you want. I, for one, am convinced, after the events of three-plus years ago, that there is indeed a force of evil abroad in this universe.

I am also well aware that the best antidote to that particular power is an insistent response of gratitude. I'm not good at it, but I'm aware of it. And lest anyone think that I am completely and utterly hopeless in this regard, I offer, herewith, five things for which I am grateful at this very moment:

1. The breakfast I shared with The Lovely Daughter and Friend this morning, which includes gratefulness for the fact that our community can support a marvelous new bakery, gratefulness for a Nutella and banana crepe, and gratefulness for the girls' friendship of eighteen years.

2. The many safe, long drives I have made to and from my church, my home, and various medical facilities around here, which includes especially gratitude that there have been no deer-vehicle encounters.

3. The fact that there are two world-class medical facilities within walking distance of my house, which includes gratitude for [most of] the care I have received there, and for some of the extraordinarily gifted and skilled people who work there.

4. A church that has invited me into a loving community and offered me big challenges, both of them just right for me right now.

5. Young adult children who are thoughtful, analytical, insightful, and ambitious for their futures, and eager to discuss all kinds of discernment issues and also Somali pirates (another post).

There's no question that a lot of crappy and unfair and devastating things have happened in my life in the past few years.

And so the gratitude I feel is both hard-won and genuine, stacked up as it always is against a wall of anguish that threatens to crush me every day.

I am, truly, very grateful for all that I have written about here.

Image: Young Woman at Window by Jay Miller, here.

Astonishing (in Retrospect) Things Said to Me (Breast Cancer)

2012-01-16T10:32:00.001-05:00

"I can do a mastectomy next Thursday and you'll be all done."

~ Surgeon number one (not for long).

I suppose that one might generously say that our definitions of "all done" differ.

"That's highly unusual."

~ Surgeon number two, in response to my reaction (ask Maggie about that one) to a procedure I was told wouldn't hurt.

(A 25 on a 1-10 pain scale.)

"We have women come in here on their lunch hour and go right back to work."

~ Plastic surgeon's nurse, explaining ramifications of those weekly visits.

Those must be extremely long lunch hours involving multiple margaritas.

"Sometimes we all have to do things we don't want to do."

~ Plastic surgeon, in response to my comment about the length and difficulty of treatment.

Really? You just said that to me? You think I am a spoiled child who has never been challenged by life?

"Just a pinch."

~ Multiple people, said en route to inflicting serious pain.

I just don't even bother anymore. Like Stevie Nicks, I keep my visions to myself.

**********

My husband asked me this morning whether the plastic surgeon hadn't said that this would probably be the last week.

"Well, yes," I sad. "But he says a lot of things."

Rejection

2012-01-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

It's Sunday morning and I should be focused in another direction. Perhaps that's why I'm writing, to get the sadness out of my system, at least temporarily. I don't know that I'll leave this post up.

On the surface, I have little reason to feel as dejected as I do. I am about to lead worship for a congregation that expresses its gratitude for my presence in countless ways. I have been the beneficiary of an endless stream of support and encouragement in the latest glitch in my life. My surviving children are doing extremely well.

It's suicide, I think. I'm not sure that even I can imagine a more profound and complete rejection than that of a child who takes his own life. Even though I am sure that he didn't mean to, in the sense that he had lost the capacity to comprehend what he was doing.

But lately I've been thinking a lot about our life as a family, which was pretty damn wonderful, and with each memory I think, "How could he have forgotten that? How could he have let that go? How could he have turned his back on that?"

And then I am reminded of how completely disoriented he must have been, which only makes me feel worse.

Among the consequences of Josh's death have been many other losses, many things I would have surely done and that our family would have shared, had life been otherwise. Opportunities in ministry that disappeared. The travel we had looked forward to, once the three kids and I were all released from our conflicting school schedules and and our finances were on an even keel again.

It's as if life as a whole rejected us and spit us out.

I've realized in the last few days that this sense of rejection is why breast cancer is, in fact, a big deal. Yes, a mastectomy and months of reconstruction procedures are pretty major: a big loss, week after week of pain and inconvenience, way too much time spent with medical professionals.

But overall, what it feels like is: rejection. I feel as if my body has rejected a rather significant part of myself. I feel as if God has rejected my body. Not good enough to stay basically healthy. Not good enough to remain intact.

It's really hard, some days.

Friday Five Recommendation Edition

2012-01-13T08:33:00.004-05:00

I love the Friday Fives where the RevGals make recommendations: books, liturgies, music, whatever ~ the lists are always well worth saving and referencing. So I'm looking forward to reading all the links to revljarla's FF today:

So, it's the time of year I get inundated with requests for recommendations for students that are looking to be camp counselors. So in honor of camp counselors everywhere, today's Friday Five is the Recommendation edition (which has nothing to do with camp or summer or anything--work with me, it's late....)

1. Recommend a favorite worship resource or devotional book.

Right now, thanks to my friend Wayne who wrote about it here, I am reading Jim Manney's book about the daily examen. St. Ignatius says that if you can manage nothing else in the way of prayer, you should do the examen every day but, like so many people, I struggle with that ten-minute practice. This book is delightfully readable, has already been a great help to me, and both Jim Manney and his more famous predecessor are right: You can always find something to pray about when you look for God in the daily stuff of your life.

2. Recommend a blog that you like to read that you think others might find enjoyable.

I'm finding Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer to be an excellent read and terrific source of insight these days.

3. Recommend a fiction book that you think people might like.

My friend Quotidian Grace introduced me to Sharon Kay Penman's historical fiction. I am only about halfway through my first (and the first of a trilogy), Here Be Dragons because, let me tell you, these are l-o-n-g books ~ but it's outstanding. As a long-ago English major and a former teacher of world history, I am thoroughly enjoying her focus on the Plantagenet family of medieval England and her attentiveness to the details of royalty, politics, romance, and social custom alike. I am stymied, however, by the plethora of Welsh names.

4. Recommend a favorite recipe website. O.k., if you aren't into cooking or food, then just recommend a random website that you find useful, hilarious, mind numbing or thought provoking.

Out of my league here!

5. And for the last recommendation--it's bloggers' choice! Make a recommendation for anything!

In the spirit of the introduction to this topic, I recommend my daughter, a camp counselor many times over, for a job out there in international development. She's finishing up her MSSA with a focus on community development and she's ready to see the world! Or ~ my preference ~ places closer to home. (I'm serious. If any of you have any connections or know of any organizations in your own locales, send me a heads-up.) That said, I also recommend retreats here!

Getting Dressed (Breast Cancer)

2012-01-12T08:46:00.003-05:00

I wish that I could write something wry and humorous about this.

I suppose that I could if I wanted to but, actually, I don't. My sense of humor is very much intact, but sometimes . . .

I don't think much about having been diagnosed with breast cancer. No chemo, no radiation. I think about my frustrations: needing to watch my energy as I recover from two surgeries and prepare for more, weekly plastic surgeon appointments, my health insurance in a mess at the moment. But I'm not "fighting for my life" or anything like that.

(I actually despise the battle metaphors we use with respect to cancer, but that's another whole post.)

When I do think about it is when I get dressed in the morning.

Because what I have does not match.

And finding ways to disguise the reality takes way too much energy and creativity early in the day. Or any time of day.

I am extremely bored with the limitations of my wardrobe at present.

I would like to be able to wear a v-neck sweater during this warm and pleasant winter.

I am a little surprised that I have so quickly become accustomed to what I see in the mirror each morning. But I don't let anyone else see it, for fear that they would pass out cold and get a concussion, and then I would have to make yet another trip to the hospital.

I have not for one second become accustomed to Josh being gone, and it's been three years. four months, and nearly two weeks.

And I suppose that's what I hate, every morning: That my disaster of a body reminds me, in case I had forgotten, which I haven't, that so much worse has already happened.

Update: I posted a little before 9:00 this morning. I then went out for a wonderful morning of breakfast and conversation with a good friend, came home and wrote most of my non-manuscript sermon, and then went to the doctor's. I'm now in considerable pain, and am grateful that I have no work-related requirements this afternoon. Not that I could accomplish anything at all anyway .

It interests me that so few people comment on my breast cancer posts. I make no apologies for my whining, trivia, or explicit exposition. I'm just documenting it as I experience it.

More tv time ahead. Sigh.

Where Do You Encounter God in Church?

2012-01-09T19:23:00.002-05:00

Yes, I am genuinely interested in answers to this question. (And don't worry - the next one will ask about outside of church.) (And ~ perhaps this is a worry ~ I'm focused on churches here, and not on houses of worship across the board.)

I've spending a lot of time these days thinking and daydreaming and wondering about what church is. There is, for example, church as my congregation remembers it: a 1950s full house, the multi-generational Sunday focus of everyone in town. (It's a very small town.) There's our church as it is right now: maybe one-third full on a Sunday, with most folks well over sixty. There's our church as it might be ~ but I have no idea what that is.

For most of my congregants, the word church immediately conjures up a companion word: community. And one of the things that I've been musing about is that, for me, it doesn't. Not at first, anyway.

An odd acknowledgment for a pastor to make? But I didn't grow up in a church community. I found my way into the rich life of the church via theology, and architecture, and music, and communion, and a deep sense of mystery. I eventually became part of a wonderfully energetic mainline church community, and then another, and now I lead a third, a group of loving, capable, and committed people who long for their church to blossom again.

But what will that entail, exactly?

Longtime readers may recall that after Josh died, I started attending church in a Catholic parish ~ where no one spoke to me, at all, ever. It's a huge, vibrant parish, with lots going on, but I have no idea how one would become a participant. I was looking for solitude, for God in music and ritual and prayer, and so the experience worked well for me, but had I been looking for God in community, I would have been lost.

And lest I be accused of singling out Catholics, let me add that when my husband and I, in our late twenties, first joined a large United Methodist church, it was at least a year before we had a conversation with anyone other than the senior pastor. I had no idea what a church community was, so I was not dissatisifed but, looking back, I find it rather odd that no one at all approached us. We were eager to become involved with the mission and justice activities of the church, but had no idea how to go about doing so. And in the meantime, the ethereal music and the challenging preaching were enough.

At any rate, I'm wondering. I think that if I were in a position to look for a new church for myself, I would slip into a worship service and watch for mystery made manifest. It would probably be some weeks before I paid attention to the bulletin and its lists of activities and groups. But I have the feeling that I'm in a distinct minority.

What about you? If you were to walk into a new church next Sunday, what would convince you that God was present there?

Image: Prince Edward Island, August 2005

Without Notes (Preaching)

2012-01-08T19:09:00.003-05:00

When I took the required basic class in homiletics (preaching) at seminary, I ended up with a professor whose highest priority was that we memorize our sermons. So much to talk about in homiletics: choice of text, exegetical work, theology, congregational demographics and circumstances, delivery . . . and what we talked about, endlessly, were techniques for memorization.

For me, a person whose ability to memorize anything was almost completely depleted decades ago, that approach meant that I wrote my two assigned sermons as fast as I could so that I would have as many days as possible available in which to memorize them, and that my delivery was uninspired at best, heartily sick and tired as I was of what I'd come up with.

Unlike most of my classmates, I completed my field ed assignment during my third year of seminary, after my homiletics class was behind me. My supervising pastor has a doctorate in homiletics and, while our styles differ considerably, he offered me some excellent advice. He was generous in his compliments about my writing, but he said that it was more appropriate to the page or computer screen, and sought to convince me that a sermon is an oral rather than a written event.

I knew that he was right, but I didn't know what to do about it. His style is energetic and exhortative; mine is quieter and more reflective. How would I turn the latter into an occasion of oral communication?

I can't say that I've made much effort in that direction, but it's certainly come to my attention that many of my favorite preachers preach without notes ~ including at least one person who always writes out his more academic presentations and more or less reads those.

And, very gradually, I've found myself less and less entranced by my own sermon writing, and more interested in connecting on a deeper level of communication with the congregation.

The final nudge came when I talked to someone at the Presbyterian church my brother and his wife have been attending. It's grown dramatically in the past few years, and I asked the lady in question what she thought the reasons were.

"Oh, it's Pastor K," she exclaimed. "He's so charismatic, and he remembers every single name." Well, that leaves me out, on both counts, I thought. "And he preaches without notes; it's as if he's having a conversation with you," she said. Hmmmmm, I thought.

So I'm giving it a try. It turns out to have nothing much to do with memorization, at which I am very bad, and quite a bit to do with conceptualization, at which I'm more or less ok.

I used to research and think quite a bit about my weekly sermon in big chunks of time until Thursday, at which point I would sit down and write most, if not all, of it down. I might tweak it a bit over the next couple of days, but on the whole it was a finished product by Thursday afternoon. And while I certainly didn't read it from the pulpit, I placed a lot of reliance on that manuscript placed securely in front of me.

Now I'm trying a new approach. I start to write in my head as soon as I start to read. All week long, I re-think, re-read, re-study, re-illustrate, and re-organize in my head. On Thursday I write an abbreviated version, and then I proceed with what's going on in my head and heart.

There's nothing much to memorize, because it's more of an internal dialogue with myself, and I'm keeping track of the conversation all week. I don't need any cool techniques oriented to brain-functioning; I'm using the same skills we all use to remember our conversations and ruminations in general.

Now . . . I've only tried this for real a couple of times, and chickened out a couple of times more. But the response is so gratifying that I'm feeling motivated to keep working at it. I think that if I counted the hours, this approach probably takes a lot more time ~ but when Sunday rolls around, I feel as if I am immersed in an ongoing experience of the text rather than producing a frozen-in-time explication. I have to let go of my attachment to the perfectly worded phrase wrung from hours of consideration and revision. But I feel much more free to make alterations as I go, whether based on things that have come up in the congregation during the week, or on thoughts that occur to me as I'm speaking. And . . . when I speak without notes, I'm able to leave the pulpit behind!

I used to wonder what pastors meant when they referred to the Spirit at work in their preaching. I'm thinking that this new engagement with the spoken word might be what they're talking about.

Check back in six months, and we'll see how it's going.

Image: None of the above means that I am immune to the allure of a pulpit in the sky. This one is from Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg.

A Journey Begins with a Name (Sermon)

2012-01-07T23:06:00.005-05:00

For the second time in the past few weeks, I'm preaching tomorrow without notes. The following constitutes the bits and pieces I've written down ~ the illustrations that flesh it out are mostly in my head. I hope.

------------------------------------------

One verse in the Gospel of Luke tells us: After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Where did your name or names come from? I have a project for you: I want you to get together with one or two other people and tell one another: What are the stories of your names? Where did they come from? What do they mean? Have they turned out to reflect the life you’ve lived?

**********

Anyone want to share a story or two with the rest of us?

**********

Names are important, aren’t they? The process of naming is important. Young parents-to-be pour over baby names books – the top names for 2011 were Sophie and Aiden. (Comment) The fashions change – my own kids grew up in a world of Matthews and Emilys. In my generation, the names Brenda and Tom were popular. Older generations include Harolds and Ednas.

Names represent, first of all, the love parents lavish upon their children. Time – research – family histories – even family arguments.

God told Joseph what Jesus’ name would be in a dream.

They represent a child’s heritage – who and what matters to the parents. Favorite relatives. Best friends. Characters in books. (My stepsister Thea, named for a character in a Willa Cather novel.) Joshua: God saves. Jesus's heritage as a Jew.

Identity – who claims you, before you know who you are, or even that you are.

Jesus – Son of God, belonged to all.

We like to imagine that we choose who we are. We make a lot of important decisions in furtherance of our claim to self-identiy: who we marry, what work we undertake. But long before we are able to make such decisions, God is at work, naming and claiming us. In baptism: Our real last name = child of God. Beloved child of God.

When Jesus is brought to the temple, Anna and Simeon recognize him. They know he is the long-awaited Messiah. They know that we can all claim him as our own.

Something to live into.

At the end of his life, Jesus lives into his name: He saves us all, by dying and rising again.

How do you live into your name, the one your family gave you?

How do you live into the name God gives you: God’s child? God’s beloved child?

Jesus’ journey, the one that ends not with death but with life, begins with a name. The name the angel whispers to his earthly father in a dream. The name he is called during the ceremony of circumcision. The name that represents love, that represents all that is important, that identifies him and that offers him something into which to live. Love. God saves. Because God loves.

What about your name? As your journey begins anew this year, do you know that God claimed you as God’s own beloved son or daughter? Do you know that God has invited you into the great journey toward ultimate love?

Remember your name – your beginning. Remember that it marks you as a pilgrim on a journey.

Your name, God’s beloved, has been yours since you were born. It’s the name which God whispers in your ear: You are my beloved. It’s the name into which you live, as you go forth to share the love of God. Amen.

An Altar in the World (Book Review)

2012-01-07T00:34:00.029-05:00

When I read books ~ or articles, or blogs, for that matter ~ these days, I am looking, with some urgency, for answers to questions about how to live. The cumulative effect of the past three and one-half years is that I don't live at all the way I used to. Well, any one of the things that have happened would have accomplished that result, but all together?

The suicidal death of a child, ordination, and breast cancer. Seriously? Am I a woman who longs for a child she will not see again, at least not in this life; or a woman who celebrates the Eucharist; or a woman whose body has been rather significantly deformed as a consequence of cancer? Oh, wait ~ I'm all three.

No wonder I read with an eye toward how to live. I'm looking for ways of leaning into that word I chose for the year: Patience. And its friends: Sight. Hearing. Waiting. Watching. Absorbing.

I like Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World because she offers some clues, without insisting that her clues are necessarily yours. I've heard her preach during the summer "season" at the Chautauqua Institution countless times and so, as I read, I hear the gentle southern lilt of her voice flowing out of the Ampitheatre, over the trees and across the lake, under the blue summer sky and across the brick walk. She sounds like the friend who might have an idea, a non-obtrusive idea, about those how-to-live questions, as you walk and talk across the Chautauqua grounds early in the morning en route to yoga class, or late at night after the orchestra concert.

If you're not familiar with the book already, it consists of a series of short chapters focusing on a number of spiritual practices. But these are not spiritual practices as you may have come to know them if you are a Christian churchgoer. These are not practices like "reading the Bible" or "fasting." These are practices like "Walking on the Earth" or "Feeling Pain" or "Carrying Water."

I should probably admit that I had a practical reason for re-reading this book over the past couple of weeks: I am planning a Lenten sermon series on spiritual practices and I want to step away from the traditional ones on at least a couple of Sundays. I haven't been feeling terribly original lately, though, and I thought that BBT might give me a jump start.

But in the end, it all comes back to: How shall I then live? A couple of suggestions:

"This is how faith looks sometimes:a blunt refusal to stop speaking into the divine silence" (from "The Practice of Feeling Pain"), and

"My hope is that if I can practice saying thank you now, when I still approve of most of what is happening to me, then perhaps that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me" (from "The Practice of Being Present to God"),

I think that if you are trying to revive or renew your spiritual life, it might be possible to travel a good long way by glancing at a sentence of two in this book each evening and letting those words become your prayer for the next day.

Time, Time, Time (Breast Cancer Recovery)

2012-01-05T15:17:00.003-05:00

I've been a morning person for a long time, for my entire adult life, with the exception of the first many months after Josh died.

One of my frequent quandaries has been how to spend the best few hours of the day, those beginning at about 6:00 a.m. If I have something major to accomplish, that's been the time for me to do it. A lot of my writing and planning have taken place in those early hours, when my concentration and efficiency have been at their peak. I can probably accomplish three or four times as much during the morning hours as I can during their evening counterpart, and so I've often completed a sermon or a paper by 9:00, and only then gotten up for a shower and breakfast.

The dilemma has been that the early morning hours are also my favorite time to walk. Gym or outdoors; it doesn't matter. It would make more sense for me to walk late in the afternoon, to take a break and clear my head, but I've loved the sense of clarity and energy that those first hours bring.

Notice that I've been using the perfect present tense. I have completed . . . I have loved . . .

There's been a change.

I know it's been only seven weeks, but that surgery has depleted me of my morning energy. I am exhausted until 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 ~ a shadow of my previous self finally appears sometime late in the morning. Those days on which I've been required to get up and get going much earlier have been a major challenge, as have my efforts to conceal my weariness from others. And, as a consequence of my late mornings, I am often up very late at night and into the next morning, which furthers the cycle.

I don't think it's entirely a matter of physical energy. When I wake up these days, I am often discouraged before I am anything else. Uncomfortable, knowing that the simple tasks of showering and dressing are going to demand a noticeable amount of energy, having to exert some imagination to dress ~ day after day after day. It's hardly anything at all ~ nothing like having to endure chemo, or the loss of a child ~ but it takes its toll.

I dream of waking before sunrise, tossing on a t-shirt, and going for a long walk. Still at least three months away.

In the meantime, as I write this, I realize that I need to begin to build a late afternoon walk into my schedule and start working up to my old three miles. If physical pain or a snowstorm causes me to miss a day or two, so be it. I know perfectly well that I need to expend some energy in order to develop some more of it.

I think that herein lies some advice I could have stood to hear before my surgery: To know that even as my physical healing continues, my life has been altered in ways that discourage and depress me, and that I need to plan ways of circumventing my inclination to lie down and wallow in self-pity.

Suicide Prevention Activism

2012-01-04T20:08:00.001-05:00

I am so not an activist. Other than a few walks for peace and hunger in my high school years, I've been more focused on small arenas of activity: family, friends, church, the kids' schools.

And yet, here I am: a volunteer advocate for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. It's not a big deal, and I have no illusions of grandeur. Mostly it means that I introduce myself to our representatives and senators, which I've done via email, and keep in touch with them when issues warrant. There's a local chapter forming, and perhaps I'll become more involved with education and public speaking as opportunities arise. We'll see.

As I've already said, I haven't been much interested in suicide prevention activism. I've seen suicide primarily as a personal and family tragedy and, even if there were more to it, I haven't had the inclination to do more about it than write in my little blogs, and make the occasional presentation on care for grieving parents.

But my breast cancer experience has changed my attitude. I've experienced firsthand what the publicity and funding efforts of the past few decades have accomplished. When I was a girl, furtively reading my grandmother's women's magazines, I understood that breast cancer was a matter of such embarrassment, and the usual surgical treatment so extreme, that many women ignored their symptoms until their survival was unlikely. And if they were treated and survived, they seldom discussed what had been done to their bodies.

How times have changed! The world as we know it in October is PINK. No secrecy, no hesitation. We are far from a cure, but the research has come a long way, and treatment is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago.

And then there's suicide prevention. Little money, little publicity. Little knowledge. Great stigma.

My great-grandmother Robin Anderson, the woman for whom both I and my son Josh were named ~ Josh's middle name is Anderson ~ suffered from bipolar disorder, and attempted suicide at least once. (I learned the latter piece of information only recently, although it was no surprise to me.) Her daughter and only child, the beloved grandmother who played a huge role in my life until her death a few years ago, almost never mentioned her mother, and never described her challenges except to refer on occasion to her frequent hospitalizations at Johns Hopkins, where she was cared for by a college classmate of my grandmother's who had become a psychiatrist.

I am certain that Josh suffered from what was, to us, completely disguised severe clinical depression. And it killed him.

What if my grandmother had been more open? What if bipolar disorder had been discussed as freely then as breast cancer is today? What if mental health self-examination cards had been available to hang in the shower? What if colleges and clinics offered routine mental health screenings?

Would we have known what we were seeing? Would Josh have known what he was experiencing? Would someone among us all have known to seek help? Would there have been effective help?

Those left behind after a suicide face a lifetime of "What ifs?"

Maybe we could eliminate some of them.

I don't think that breast cancer activism has much need of me. And frankly, breast cancer has had little effect on our family, relatively speaking. But suicide has left a deep and terrible gash across our lives, one that will persist and will affect my grandchildren and then their children.

Maybe I could do my small part to stop it from doing worse.

New Year's Sermon: A Time to Seek

2012-01-03T12:10:00.001-05:00

I don’t know whether any of you have seen the film The Way?—it’s mostly appeared in small theatres, but it was directed and produced by Martin Sheen’s son, Emilio Estavez and Martin Sheen has the starring role. He plays a man named Tom – a successful doctor who works hard and plays a lot of golf. He’s frustrated by his adult son’s lack of direction, and irritated by his son’s decision to take off for Spain to hike the Camino de Santiago.

The Camino de Santiago, which translates to The Road of St. James, is a route of about 500 miles that winds across Spain and ends at the Cathedral of St. James, which marks the place where, according to legend, the bones of St. James the Apostle rests. In medieval times, the idea of a pilgrimage, a long journey toward a sacred spot, such as the final resting place of a saint, was a popular one, and it’s a concept that’s been resurrected in the last few decades. A pilgrim’s journey is not that of a tourist – it’s not about seeing the sights, about observing from a distance – it’s about some kind of personal engagement with the matter at hand. The son in the movie is on a journey to figure out who he is and what he wants from life – a not uncommon situation for many of the thousands of pilgrims who walk the Camino these days.

Martin Sheen’s character Tom is on the golf course when he receives the telephone call with the voice on the other end telling him that his son has died, killed in a freak storm on his first day on the Camino. Tom decides to cross the ocean to retrieve his son’s remains and then decides to walk the Camino himself, making the journey in memory of his son and scattering his son’s ashes along the way. The movie tells the story of that pilgrimage – of the people Tom befriends, and who befriend him; of the deeper understanding of his son that comes to him as he travels; and, in a very subtle way, of his reconnection with his long lost sense of faith.

It’s an age-old story, this narrative of journey, of pilgrimage. The ancients of all cultures tell stories of pilgrimage in which someone seeks a sense of self, a knowledge of the world, an encounter with God. When the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that “there is a time to seek,” he is affirming the persistent longing found within human beings, the longing for something beyond ourselves, and the persistent determination of human beings to get up and get going in search of that ineffable something.

Certainly we see it today – in the books of all kinds that line the “spirituality” shelves in the few big bookstores that are left, in the television talk show interviews with gurus of various kinds; people are out there, or in their living rooms on their computers – seeking. As we go back through the centuries, we find the pilgrimage paths of old, many of them newly popular. Not just the Camino de Santiago, but the roads to the great cathedrals in France. In high school or college, you may have studied The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1200s and based on a then-common pilgrimage made to Canterbury Cathedral in England, where a great saint praying at the altar was murdered by a king. The Holy Land itself – certainly a desirable destination for Christian travelers for nearly 2,000 years – and the missionary routes of the Apostle Paul. What are all these people seeking?

Go back a little further and we come to St. Augustine, the great church father and bishop of the 4^th and 5^th centuries whose writings influence all that we believe. Augustine is famous for having said, in addressing God, that “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We seek, don’t we, an encounter with the Living God? We are made for that encounter; we are made by God to seek God’s presence. Today, people often speak of a “God-shaped hole” in the human heart, another way in which many writers have reflected upon Augustine’s words.

Go back even a little further, and we come to the magi. “There is a time to seek,” and the magi were seekers. There are a number of hypotheses about who they were. Maybe they were Persian priests – which means, in present day geographical terms that they came from Iran. Maybe they were Babylonian astrologers – which puts their origin in today’s Iraq. There is a Chinese belief that at least one of them was Chinese. It is becoming something of a tradition today to portray them as coming from different continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. And a scholar has recently suggested that at least one of them may have been a woman – not because he’s trying to be politically correct, but because there are indeed other Scriptural references to feminine travelers and wisdom figures.

Whoever they were, the beloved figures of the three magi have come to personify the concept of seeker for us. Pilgrims on a journey. And not just pilgrims who set out because they had some kind of idea that they should take a trip – but pilgrims who were called. Pilgrims who were responding to God’s initiation of relationship. Pilgrims made restless by God – just as Augustine tells us, people whose hearts are restless until they rest in God – in their case made restless by a star. And they were not just any old pilgrims – but pilgrims who represent the world far beyond Bethlehem. We may not know exactly who they were, but the story is clear that they were not Jews, they were not Romans, they were not locals. God calls every kind of person; God reaches out to people the world over – including magi from afar.

The journey of the magi, those who knew and responded to their time to seek, is something of a prototype for pilgrimage. Theirs is not an easy tourist passage – just as the Baby Jesus’s parents found no Holiday Inn in which to stay, the magi found no resorts along the way. All you have to do is take a look at a map to know that a winter’s journey across the Near East 2,000 years ago with nothing but a small company of people and a few camels would have been no picnic. But the terrain was not the only challenge.

First, those travelers encountered turbulence – turbulence in the form of King Herod. Herod was a king of Judea, the land of the Jews, put and kept in place by the Roman Empire. He did not count as good news the word that a king had been born to the Jews – such a king, were he destined to be a political ruler, would have threatened Herod’s role, his power – his very life. And so he creates a situation, cross-examining the travelers about the child they seek, lying to them about his own intentions, and trying to make them his allies in his quest to retain his power. “Come back and tell me where this baby is,” he demands of them. Suddenly their journey contains a new element of danger. And the reality is that when we set off on a journey, on a pilgrimage, things don’t always go as planned. And sometimes our hopes, our longings, are threatened. A pilgrimage is not a Caribbean cruise; it’s not all lolling by the pool and dining on exotic foods. As Tom discovers in the movie The Way and as we discover in our own lives, the journey can be rough going.

Secondly, though, that first bit of turbulence at least temporarily behind them, the magi encounter delight. The Bible tells us that they were “overwhelmed with joy” at the sight of the newborn king. Think about how surprising their response is! They are usually depicted as kings themselves – kings with fine robes and dazzling jewels – even having traversed the desert, they are always portrayed as wealthy royalty. And they were going to visit a newborn ruler – don’t you think that they were expecting something a bit different from a simple manger and simple, peasant parents? At least a little palace and some ladies-and-knights-in-waiting, don’t you think? And yet they were filled with – even overwhelmed by – joy and delight. A pilgrimage should bring us into such moments. No matter the difficulty of the journey, or the animosity of some of those encountered – a pilgrimage offers insight into the sacred, into an understanding of God’s kingdom, a kingdom far more expansive and loving than any earthly one.

And finally, the magi return “home by another road.” Even the end of their journey is unexpected: they are warned to avoid Herod, and so instead of retracing their steps, they find a new route. Isn’t that the likely outcome of a true pilgrimage? We are changed by the journey, and can no longer do things exactly as we did them before. In The Way, Tom, the father, is changed by his 500-mile walk, by his experience of God through his companions, through the lands and villages he wanders, through his encounter with his son and his son’s dreams and questions. We don’t see the consequences of his pilgrimage, but we can be fairly certain that he does not return to life as it was. The magi are changed – by their encounter with the hostile Herod, by their experience of God through the infant Jesus, by their own dreams. And while we don’t know the specifics of their return, that their story has come down to us at all is a hint of the first big change in thinking and in hope: that Jesus, the long-awaited messiah, was for everyone. For all people. For people from far as well as near. For wealthy as well as for poor. For those in power and those with none at all.

How are we changed?

When God beckons, when God invites us on pilgrimage, when God seeks relationship with us –

Do we in turn seek God?

Do we encounter turbulence? Most likely.

Do we encounter delight? Overwhelming joy in the God who has come to rescue us? Most certainly!

A new road? A new journey? An invitation to share? Surely we find those things as well.

This year, 2012, my hope is to weave the underlying themes of journey and pilgrimage throughout my Sunday sermons. It’s a powerful metaphor, the idea of a journey. It underlies the whole history of the people of God. It’s a way of looking at all kinds of things: who we are, what we learn from, what we give, what traditions we follow – and who our most important companion is. So you may hear these words – journey, pilgrimage, traveler – from time to time, or even somewhat frequently. If our hearts are restless until they rest in God, if God has created a space in us which only God can fill – then we are on a journey. It doesn’t require a 2000-year-old 500 mile road in Spain; it simply requires a heart which God can enter. It doesn’t require a star, or a literal journey at all. What it requires is what we have already been given: a God who has created a time to seek.

Amen.

Image: Martin Sheen in The Way.

Ever Considered a Silent Retreat? (Wernersville)

2012-01-01T18:55:00.002-05:00

I know I'm the last person online to supply the link, but the Wernersville Jesuit Center made the New York Times Travel Section last Thursday. For my friends who aren't Catholic, or Christian, or "anything in particular," as the author describes herself, the piece may alleviate some of the sense of mystery that surrounds a silent retreat.

My favorite part of the article is the portion in which the writer describes the manner in which her spiritual director for her five-day sojourn addresses her quandry, using words of the life of the spirit rather than those of modern-day psychology, suggesting that she feels "forsaken," rather than that she has "abandonment issues."

We westerners are all accustomed to the language of the therapeutic community, and I doubt that any reputable spiritual director would resist a directee's engagement in therapy. But many of our challenges are more spiritual than psychological in origin, especially where great trauma is concerned. Perhaps, now that I think of it, also especially where the utterly trivial is concerned. There are few people to whom we can turn in order to say, "God has completely forsaken me," and be assured of a hearing, whether the source of our conviction is the violent death of a child or a series of endless days of seeming meaninglessness at work or home. And even fewer who, instead of offering concrete solutions or emphatic exhortations, will send us off with instructions and time to sit with God in the silence.

It is, quite simply, the thing to which I most look forward when it comes to finishing my cancer treatment: my return to Wernersville. The sooner, the better.

(And like my friend Michelle, I picked up a new word from the article: adytum. At least, it was new to me. So I'm using the connected photo ~ the Wernersville Chapel, 2010.)

Wild Geese

2011-12-31T09:41:00.002-05:00

Many, many years ago ~ I am sure that it was October, 1979, so: 32+ years ago ~ I crawled through our small tent opening into the cold air of Isle Royale as skein after skein of geese rose into the sky above Lake Superior. That I remember that moment with the clarity with which the tangerine colors of the sunrise pierced the darkness of the early morning sky is a testament to one of the few natural gifts with which I was born: a capacity to notice and appreciate that which I saw around me.

It's no wonder that, when the time was right, it was the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola, with his emphasis on words like repetition and savor, that called out to me.

When my children were growing up, my approach to mothering was: Notice and Appreciate. From what they tell me, I was not entirely successful in communicating that dimension of my interior life. Their memories seem rather fixated on some of the daily expectations that were, in truth, the least significant things to me. I suppose that the daily cycle of school, homework, soccer, and lessons did seem as if it were what life was made of, but what I was constantly aware of was the sunlight on blond hair, the giggles and meows in the hallway as cats fled to safety, the small bodies crouched over projects on kitchen tables and in creeks and lakes, the gleeful triumph when something was assembled or, much better, completely deconstructed. I was never in any hurry for them to grow up, for school vacations to end, or for any of them to get on to the next phase, whatever that might have been.

The loss of that capacity, that ability to notice and appreciate, was the biggest consequence of the loss of Josh himself. The entire universe, with its galaxies and colors and creative and loving people, went dim and flat three years ago. There have been moments, and even hours, of re-connection with hope and joy ~ but the registry is at a level far below that at which I once lived.

This past week, in connection with the New Year, I've been thinking that I might like to recover some of my lost gift for awareness and gratitude. Or, perhaps more realistically, find a new version. One of my friends just posted on FB that she loves New Year's and the way it makes her feel that anything is possible. An entirely foreign thought to me.

But maybe small things are possible.

St. Therese of Lisieux, the French Carmelite nun of the late 19th century, spoke of doing small things with great love rather than attempting great miracles.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th century French Jesuit, focused upon The Sacrament of the Present Moment.

Franciscan Richard Rohr's words have been making the rounds the past couple of days: "Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, praising God until we ourselves are a constant act of praise" (Radical Grace: Daily Meditations).

And Mary Oliver, of course, in her poem "Wild Geese," reminds us that

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Last night I dreamed that I was at camp in North Carolina, visiting The Lovely Daughter during one of her stints as a counselor. I was supposed to meet Josh later for a river tubing trip, but in the meantime I was helping LD with her laundry. She had lost a t-shirt she really liked, and I was going through pile after file of folded towels and clothing, peeling each item away from the others, one by one, in search of the missing t-shirt.

I didn't find it before I woke up.

Awareness. Gratitude. Small things. Wild things. This moment. A willingness to sift through the laundry, piece by piece, for something (or someone) not recoverable.

My word for this year, you may recall, is patience.

I think that perhaps I will say a lot less and photograph a lot more.

Image: Isle Royale Sunset, found here.

Nearly New Friday Five

2011-12-30T19:35:00.002-05:00

Over at RevGals, Sally writes:

A simple Friday Five for a busy part of the year; indulge me by sharing two fives:

As you look back over 2011 share 5 blessings; they can be as grand or as simple as you like; if your year has been like mine, they are probably a mixture!

As you look towards 2012 share 5 hopes- again, anything goes!

(Yeah, I went on to six.)

B-L-E-S-S-I-N-G-S

1. Ordination on October 30,

2. A congregation which stuck with me despite my diagnosis of breast cancer just as I was called ("It never occurred to us to do otherwise," one of the call committee members told me a couple of weeks ago),

3. A husband, children, friends, and readers who have stuck with me through the good, the bad, and the ugly (and there have been a lot of the last two!),

4. A son and a daughter whose resilience and strength are getting them through law school and grad school in excellent shape,

5. Their studies in Russia and Guatemala and our family trips to Florida and North Carolina, all of them signs of the slow healing we are experiencing where we can, and

6. My week on retreat at Wernersville!

H-O-P-E-S

1. Mostly, I hope that all the members of my family who are alive today will be alive a year from now. But also,

2. I hope that my daughter graduates and finds employment,

3. I hope that my son hangs onto his scholarship for his third year of law school,

4. I hope that my mother-in-law recovers quickly and fully from her holiday heart surgery,

5. I hope that my congregation thrives, and, oh yeah . . .

6. I so hope that the day comes soon when I never have to see the inside of a hospital as a patient again!

Image: Our Nightly Cedar Key (FL) Sunset a year ago.

2011 Highlight: Tiffany Gardens

2011-12-28T21:44:00.001-05:00

My friend Wayne posted some images today of mosaics based on Tiffany designs. At least I think that's what he posted ~ it's a Wordless Wednesday over at his blog.

His post reminded me of some wonderful artwork I never got around to sharing this past year.

When we visited the Biltmore Estate during our summer vacation in western North Carolina, we discovered that the gardens had all been planted to reflect Tiffany designs.

The photos don't do them justice; they were a delight!

(If you enlarge the bottom image, you will see a dragonfly spread across the diamond-shaped garden.)

Breast Cancer: Vulnerability

2011-12-27T12:11:00.002-05:00

I'm experiencing what is, for me, an odd consequence of cancer: a deep sense of vulnerability.

I doubt that it's an odd consequence of cancer itself ~ but for me, it's highly unusual to feel this exposed to danger. I think that my mother's death and the resultant series of stepmothers taught me one overarching lesson, beginning with a seven-year-old version: You'd better learn to take care of yourself.

I've come to recognize this new reality, this new sense of fearfulness, over the past couple of weeks, as I've become increasingly reluctant to travel to my new congregation for overnights in the manse next door to the church. Neither the the distance nor the time away from home seemed daunting back in early September as I prepared to accept the call. The situation wasn't ideal, but at an hour-and-one-half's drive, it was an hour closer than seminary had been for three years. After my surgery, however, that trip might as well have been to the west coast 2,500 miles away. Even now that I can do it on my own, the drive is too tiring for a round trip in one day, and the overnights are lonely.

I looked the word up, of course. www.dictionary.com tells me that vulnerable means "capable of or susceptible to being wounded or hurt . . . open to assault; difficult to defend."

Well, my body has been wounded and hurt, my experience of medical care is always one of assault, and it is difficult to defend oneself against a series of procedures when one's body's response each week is completely unpredictable.

Still, this is a new feeling for me. I am generally an adaptable person; in fact, one of my faults is that I am too much so ~ too willing to accommodate, to make room, to abandon my own positions ~ sometimes at the potential expense of my own integrity. But on the whole, I am adaptable in positive ways: able to move forward in the most impossible of situations; able to tunnel under, around, or through setbacks; resistant to surrender.

But this, this experience of cancer has been different. I was unable to make decisions about my treatment with confidence. I have been in some degree of physical discomfort or, more frequently, genuine pain for three months running (one week off back in early November). I often feel that I am not at all up to the task at hand where my family and work are concerned. My energy is repeatedly sapped; I work up to a mile's walk over the course of a few days and then, without warning, I can't leave the house for the next one.

This is nothing at all like the devastation I felt after Josh died. Then, and for months afterward, I felt as if I weren't even alive, unless you consider the sense of wandering in an endless and empty universe and having been utterly abandoned by God as a form of life.

These days, I am plenty alive. But I am, as it turns out, unable to protect myself from even small, hidden harms.

This feeling of vulnerability is not one that I recommend. I'm not at all confident about how to navigate this one.

I hoping that I will be surprised ~ in good ways ~ by the journey.

Image: Wernersville Jesuit Center (July 2011)

Christmas

2011-12-26T10:27:00.000-05:00

Before we headed down to my Small Church on Christmas Eve, my husband suggested that we surprise the congregation with luminarias on the walks. His idea; the kids' execution, as he took off to see his mother, re-hospitalized for complications of her heart surgery two weeks earlier. (She's expected home again tomorrow.)

I was very grateful that he made it back and that my family was with me for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. The people at church loved the lights and responded with enthusiasm to both services. I know that I'm still in my honeymoon period as their pastor, but it's wonderful to serve a congregation that expresses its appreciation at every opportunity.

We spent Christmas evening at the dinner hosted by the family who took over our 20-year tradition after Josh died. We haven't been here for the past three years, but the combination of cancer and calendar conspired to keep us in town this year. The evening was beautiful: the house, the tables, the food, and the friendship. I came home pretty early, exhausted by the previous two days, but everyone else was there for hours more.

It was hard ~ all the other young men were there, those who live here and those who live in Boston and Portland, and the one who brought his wife and baby home from Chicago, which I see as the future that was intended for us ~ but I guess that I'm getting used to it. Christmas will never really seem like Christmas again, but then, neither will anything else.

And so . . . a blend of melancholy and gratitude, missing my boy and yet grateful that I have been given work that forces me out of myself to think of others and their longings. I am well aware that I'm not alone. My husband's brother is confronting both his family's grief over his mother-in-law's death a week ago and his own mother's medical situation, two women in my congregation are making their way through their first Christmas as widows, and several others as fairly recent widows, and a friend from my home church stopped me in the grocery a couple of days ago to say that she wished that the Blue Christmas service had been held again this year.

I have to admit that I am grateful that next year's calendar will permit an immediate post-Christmas Eve escape!

Christmas Morning Sermon

2011-12-25T15:25:00.004-05:00

For Christmas morning, we gathered in our fellowship hall for a light breakfast, followed by a service of alternating readings from Luke and traditional carols. Bits and pieces of the short message from the pastor went something like this:

As I put today’s bulletin together, I found myself thinking about my girlhood ~

Growing up in a household that was neither religious nor musical ~

But we did have a piano and a book of carols ~

And I used to play through them, every single verse, in an order of my own liking, making up a Christmas pageant in my head

What I didn’t realize was that ~

In learning those songs ~

I was learning Scripture ~

A week or so ago, several of us were engaged in a couple of discussions on the internet ~

About our favorite Christmas songs ~

And about seldom heard verses ~

Which often contain the densest Scriptural and theological allusions ~

Look at some of this morning’s lines:

Not just O little town of Bethlehem ~

But God imparts to human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven ~

God delivers straight into the core of our beings the gift of God’s kingdom

Not just While shepherds watched their flocks ~

But Good will henceforth from heaven to us begin and never cease ~

History has been interrupted and has begun anew; God’s kingdom will never end

And my favorite from childhood:

Not just It came upon the midnight clear ~

But The new heaven and earth shall own the Prince of Peace their King ~

I didn’t know it when I was ten, but those words are from the Book of Revelation and from the prophet Isaiah

These songs?

We sing them every year. We hear bits and pieces of them on the radio and in the malls and stores. If we’re really lucky, we participate in choir concerts and get to rehearse them for weeks ~

But even then, do we know that in listening to them, and singing them,

We are learning the story in the first words in which it was told.

We are learning the Scriptural version of Jesus’ birth.

And we are learning, perhaps without any awareness at all, of the great hope those words express.

I personally happen to think that music is the best part of worship.

In music we find our Scriptural texts

We find our sermons

And we find our hearts and minds raised and filled

With the hope of a new heaven and a new earth

And most especially at Christmas, when that hope comes in the form of the baby whose birth became The First Noel. Which we are about to sing ~

And which, by the way, tells us that the star shone both day and night. Imagine a star – other than the sun around which we orbit -- that you can see in broad daylight!

That would be the other Son, the Son of God. Amen!

Room at the Inn (Christmas Eve Sermon)

2011-12-24T12:38:00.001-05:00

It's a monologue, spoken in the voice of Mahala, the midwife and innkeeper, and here's the end of it, more or less:

Where is your inn? Where is your life crowded, and noisy, and ordinary?

In your home? At your job? On your farm?

At your school? Where you volunteer?

A friend once told me that she had realized that, if Jesus came to dinner, she would be so busy with the preparations and the serving and the cleanup that she would never sit down to talk with him.

What about if he came as an infant?

Would you overlook him, in order to get on with more adult preoccupations?

Would you get busy with diapers and formula and forget to gaze upon the newborn?

Or would you realize that you have a manger somewhere?

That you do have room? In unexpected places?

I had room out back.

Maybe you make room in those places in which you help friends who need rides and household help. Maybe you have room in those times when you volunteer for the homeless or give to the community center. Maybe you find room when you welcome new folks to church. Maybe you have room in the busiest parts of your life, when you stop whatever it is you’re doing to pay attention to what someone else is saying. Maybe you have room in the darkest, loneliest, saddest places – the places out back.

I think – I think that we’re all innkeepers in one way or another.

But we may not realize just where we need to make room.

My stable turned out to be the most important part of my inn.

What about in your life? Where is the light glowing? Where is your manger?

Thanks be to God for the one who is here to make it shine!

Image from The Nativity Story (2006)

King's College Choir, Cambridge

2011-12-24T02:19:00.001-05:00

Blog-etiquette?

2011-12-21T15:36:00.003-05:00

This afternoon I discovered via Statcounter that someone had visited my blog from the National Catholic Register.

That was kind of an interesting turn of events.

The National Catholic Reporter I might understand, but the Register?

The world is such an interesting place.

This person showed up because I made a comment ~ about the previously discussed matter of remembering the grieving during the holidays~ on a blog post of Jennifer Fulwiler's, and she quoted me (and also my friend Mary) at some length in an article for the Register.

Jennifer's blog is mostly about her conversion to Roman Catholicism and her joyfully chaotic brood of five children. I enjoy it because I'm fascinated by all kinds of discovery-of-and-adherence-to-faith stories. And I quoted her once in a sermon, requesting her permission in advance and giving her as much credit as would make sense to the (older) congregation in question. (As one of my online friends said recently, "I would tell my mother that you said such-and-such if I could figure out any way in which our relationship might make sense to her.")

Well, Jennifer did link to my post, which is maybe as much credit as one gets in this day and age.

I'm not always exactly perfect in my blogging credits, especially of images I pick up here and there.

But I kind of think that if you're publishing other people's words in a national article for which (guessing here) you are paid, you should identify them.

The last time this happened to me (that I know about), a spiritual direction website printed an entire piece I wrote under my old pseudonym, Gannet Girl. They didn't ask, either, and I don't think they linked. I was kind of stunned to find an entire essay of mine just ~ well . . . lifted.

I made my students rewrite papers two weeks ago because of exactly this issue.

Just sayin'.

Now ~ back to our much more interesting discussion of words for 2012 (previous post). I hope you'll add yours!

PS: Yeah, OK, I had no idea how to spell etiquette.

Patience

2011-12-20T21:46:00.055-05:00

Over at Abbey of the Arts, the annual search for a word for the coming year is on.

Last year, I eagerly reached for the word frontier. And then, sucked into the quicksand of the Presbyterian ordination process, I forgot all about it.

In retrospect, nevertheless, this past year was one of frontiers for me:

Preaching in all kinds of churches.

Interfaith work.

Invitations to make presentations on parental grief for nursing students and on discernment for pastors.

A graduation speech for brand-new spiritual directors and their guests.

A call to ministry.

Breast cancer.

Ordination.

All pretty much frontiers for me.

And all leading me to my word for 2012:

Patience.

It's not nearly as sexy a word as frontier.

At first I toyed with some words that promised more drama. Words like generosity and magnanimity and creativity. And maybe 2013 will be the year for one of them. But even to wander in their vicinity requires a foundational year in patience.

Patience with my body, with its slow processes of healing ~ physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually ~ and the reality that in some ways it will never be close to what it was six weeks ago.

Patience with the reality of my work and the hours of driving it requires ~ hours that can be used for listening to books and presentations and for prayer, if I am gentle with myself rather than hurried and irritated and frustrated.

Patience with my new congregation, which as a whole has an experience of church and a view of the world much different from mine ~ working on what I have to learn rather than on what I have to teach.

Patience with technology ~ figuring out what will really work for me and making the effort to learn it. This includes things like laptops and ipads and kindles and cameras and all the associated software.

Patience with the people I love and like best ~ my affection for them does not make them me, or mind-readers of me.

Patience with how long things take ~ I am not required to do five things at once at breakneck speed.

Patience with grief, and with how it changes.

It seems that there is rather a lot to patience.

Now that I think of it, it might be way too big a project for me.

Or it might be a synonym for gratitude.

It might be a frontier all of its own.

Image: Presque Isle (PA), 2011

Blue Christmas

2011-12-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

There is no question in my mind; it's my friend Karen East who should be the pastor. I don't know many people who can hold a candle to her compassion, eloquence, and faith. She's written the best piece I've read this year about the experience of the holiday season for those of us who live on the far side of jolly.

Four-Plus Weeks and a Book Review: The Christmas Cantata

2011-12-19T20:54:00.001-05:00

I've had a string of really good days. Week-ends at my church, preaching (albeit recyled sermons) and doing other worship and pastoral things, then home for the week to rest, teach a little, and grade a lot. My brain seems to have cleared (four hours of anesthesia = four weeks of fog; the rule of thumb seems to be accurate).

It's an up-and-down process, though. After a couple of easy weeks, today's medical procedure has produced hours of relentless pain. X-S Tylenol and narcotics have made barely a dent. If I sleep tonight, it will be the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

I have triumphed in one regard this week, however: I've made it from the beginning to the end of a book! A very small book, but a book nevertheless.

Now, the book is The Christmas Cantata by Mark Schweizer, and I don't quite share my friend Quotidian Grace's enthusiasm for it. It's not a gem of written expression, a lot of both the plot and the character development seem to be missing, and it's pretty sappy. But the truth is, I was laughing so hard that my eyes teared up when the woodpeckers invaded St. Barnabas Church to feast upon the beetles lodging in the styrofoam ornaments. The woodpeckers are responsible for the best lines in the book, including the "doctrinal schism prevented in 1378 when a woodpecker killed the anti-pope and saved the church."

The book is short and entertaining and, truth to tell, would make an excellent Advent gift for anyone in need of some light reading, such as the recently hospitalized. That may not sound like a ringing endorsement, but I'm actually quite grateful to this book for making it possible for me to read again!

O Lord - Or Not?

2011-12-19T02:00:00.004-05:00

I've tried without success to recall anything of significance about the Advent or Christmas seasons of my twenties. The Quiet Husband and I were married, and in graduate and law school, and then we embarked upon our careers, working in large downtown firms and returning to our first suburban home in the evenings. We decorated Christmas trees in our apartments and in our first house, and we spent time with family over the holidays ~ but I'm not sure that we darkened the doors of a church or discussed God in any way until the end of that decade of our lives. It wasn't that we were materialistic or culture-bound ~ we simply were not people of faith.

Yesterday's O Antiphon calls Jesus Lord. It seems odd to me, now, that there should have been a decade of my life in which the idea of calling and following someone as Lord was entirely foreign to me. Not surprising ~ most of my closest family and friends are in the same boat today. But odd, in that, slowly but persistently, Jesus Christ has become so the center and focus of my life that it is difficult for me to imagine it otherwise.

Everything back then was about work. Clothes, house, friends, vacations ~ everything revolved around work.

If I look back at that decade with a view toward God in all things, I would say that, insofar as my own life was concerned, God was providing me with many opportunities to prepare intellectually for the call that would become mine three decades later.

I wish that I had been able to notice, back then, and prepare in other ways as well. I wish that work had not been Lord. I wish that those years had not been so barren of any knowledge of the God who sustains the universe.

I find that I am envious of those several of my college students who have written papers and emails stating that their introduction-to-religion course has challenged their complacency about their faith, caused them to realize they do not know nearly as much as they once they thought they did, generated an appreciation for other faith traditions and, in some cases, sent them scurrying off to make appointments with ministers and priests for further exploration.

I was nothing at all like they are. And I am much the poorer for it.

O Wisdom! Teenage Christmases

2011-12-18T02:00:00.003-05:00

Yesterday's O Antiphon hailed Christ as Wisdom.

As I was rummaging back through Christmases past, it occurred to me that the teenage years are not themselves generally viewed as a period of wisdom, at least not in contemporary western culture. And yet, isn't much of the foundation for what will, one hopes, become a mature understanding laid in those chaotic years?

When I think of Advent seasons during those years, I discover that I was, indeed, becoming more aware of the world around me and of the reality that I was not ~ surprise! ~ at its center.

The Ursuline nuns who ran the boarding school I attended during my middle school years endeavored to ensure that we understand we were responsible for more than our own little world in part by taking us deeper into the Appalachian countryside to deliver Christmas packages. One house in particular still stands out in my memory: nestled into gentle hills, its interior walls were entirely covered in newspaper. I was baffled at the time; now, I suppose it was a matter of insulation.

We all (yes, even I) sang a Christmas concert each year just before our vacation began. One year when several of us were behaving rather badly, the imposing Sister Miriam, who was in charge of our musical efforts, waved her finger magisterially in the air. "For many in our audience, this is the one respite of music and cheer that they will experience all winter! Now pull yourselves together!"

Music flowed through my life in those years, all of it an invitation to something far grandeur than anything I could imagine on my own. My second boarding school boasted an impressive music program. Possessing limited abilities, I participated only on the fringes, but two nights, both from December of my senior year, stand out in my memory even today.

The first was an all-school Messiah sing. I had no idea what Handel's Messiah was, but a friend dragged me out to the event. Despite my six boarding school years of religious classes and observances, I had no interest in the God whom I perceived to be an imaginary figure. The music that poured out of the old auditorium building that evening, into the dark and across the snow, was the first intimation that I might be wrong.

We, too, presented a Christmas concert the night before we all departed for our homes. That particular year, as the magnificent choruses were concluded and we all burst out of the chapel into a snowstorm, one of my best friends, a girl from Arizona, cried out, "I'm so glad that I go to boarding school in New England!"

Most of the time, neither of us were glad of any such thing. But there is something about the music of the season, something in the generosity of those who share their traditions of service and song with a new generation, something transcendent that hints at the potential for wisdom to emerge . . . someday.

Online Images: 1983 Christmas Vespers at Northfield School's Sage Chapel

Childhood Christmas

2011-12-17T02:00:00.002-05:00

It was about 6:00 a.m. on Christmas morning and my father, sleepy in his pajamas, was most unhappy.

"GO! OUTSIDE!" he exclaimed, and retreated to his bedroom.

We were a blended family before such a term existed. My widowed father and divorced stepmother had joined forces the preceding winter, and combined us into a household that included 10-year-old me and 10-year old stepbrother, almost 8-year-old-brother, and 5-year-old-stepbrother.

We were not destined to become a well-orchestrated unit. As Tolstoy tells us, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and in that regard, I suppose, we are all alike. The details don't seem to matter anymore, but there were difficult and hateful moments, even on our first attempt at a Christmas Day in 1963.

But at 6:00 a.m.? We were a group of kids, a tad bedraggled and unwieldy in our losses of parents and siblings to death and divorce, but kids, nevertheless: exuberant, energetic, and wide-awake to the four glistening snow saucers and four shiny sleds under the tree.

Boots and hats and mittens went flying and so did we, down the hillside on which our house was perched, over and over again in the dark of Christmas morning. Mr. Shivers, our basset hound, bounded up and down the hill, delighted by the snow and the shrieks of laughter, and for a few minutes at the crisp and cold break of day, we were

Just Kids.

Last Week of Advent: Resources

2011-12-16T13:55:00.000-05:00

We finally got the tree decorated. Because life is nothing if not ironic, it would have to be this year, the first in four in which I have had the slightest interest in Christmas, and the one in which, since I am sleeping on a recliner in the living room, I would have much enjoyed the lights, that we could barely pull it off. The demands of the Quiet Husband's work, his mother's heart surgery, and my own recovery, combined with the kids' exam periods, have all conspired to keep Christmas, and even Advent, at bay.

But the tree is up and with a week to go ~ the week of the O Antiphons! ~ I have some wonderful sites to share.

Advent Reflections from the faculty at my seminary.

Instructions for an Advent Daily Examen: Longing for the Lord.

Advent Examen Meditations combined with the O Antiphons; as with the above, an offering of the Missouri Province Jesuits.

Artwork for the O Antiphons and Advent in general from The Virtual Abbey; HT to Meredith Gould, who also provides all the Scriptural references for the O Antiphons.

And it looks like there will also be reflections for this final week on Dating God as well.

Hmmmm . . . Maybe I'll write some, too.

Advent: Yes, It's Hard

2011-12-15T11:11:00.000-05:00

I haven't written anything at all about Advent this year.

I don't know whether I will or not.

For three years, I keep a bog entitled Praying Advent Through Darkness. This year, I find that I feel more neutral, and more capable of self-restraint. A few nights ago Musical Friend and I went to a Taize service, and then we spent an hour sitting in the car discussing our experiences of loss, of her husband and my son. At this point, three and one-half years having passed, we see that few other people are interested in hearing about the deepest realities of our lives.

I do notice that, among my blogging friends, some of the bereaved moms are letting some of the sadness seep out. And for one, a new loss in her closest circle of friends has rocked her world, while another marks the second anniversary of her beautiful daughter's death in a few days.

Maybe I'll have more to say; maybe not. In the meantime, what follows is something that I wrote three years ago, three months after Josh died. It still applies.

**********

I have, as a consequence of my son's death, received what I think must be some of the most extraordinary missives ever written. Emails, cards, letters -- the form of transmission doesn't matter. The words do. Some are about my son, some about those of us left behind, some about God. There is apparently something about magnitude of loss that drives ordinary people to eloquence.

I literally carry some of this writing around with me. There are moments, many of them, when I think that I will not make it to the next one, and then I read what people have sent me. I read them as prayers, regardless of how they were intended. I look for what God might be saying, in a phrase or a paragraph, and sometimes I see them, small clues to the mystery that binds us together, whether the people who articulated them knew what they were doing or not.

If you have a friend who is longing for someone else this Advent, especially someone who died in the last year or two, sit down this week-end and write a note, or send an email. It might be the most important thing you do this month.

Made My Day

2011-12-13T10:35:00.000-05:00

I've had a lot more energy in the just the past couple of days, and I've been able to give much more focused attention to my work in the last week ~ which has made me painfully aware of how spacey I was for most of the fall. My poor religious studies students! I did the best I could, but the ordination and church call would have spread me a bit thin all on their own. Add a cancer diagnosis and at least one and up to four doctor visits pretty much every week, and then a mailbox that filled up and closed down and spewed student papers into the hinterlands while I was completely out of it ~ well, I was just hoping that they learned something. Anything.

And then this arrived via email after today's final, from a thoughtful older student who is at a place in life where he is making decisions about his education with great care:

"Thank you for a wonderful class! This class was one of the main reasons I choose to transfer to this school, and it surpassed my expectations."

Phew!

The Other Side: Prayer (Not Whining At All)

2011-12-12T21:37:00.000-05:00

It is really difficult to know how to help someone from a practical standpoint. As I engaged in my little tantrum this morning (and really, it mostly had to do with the lights, and the fact that I finally had to go to Walmart), I was reminded, more than anything else, of how little I have done for others at critical junctures in their lives. Because, honestly, I did not know.

I did not know that when a child dies, a mother simply stops getting out of bed and that, when she does have to go out into the world, if no laundry has been done in weeks, then she just puts on whatever she finds lying on the floor.

I did not know that when surgeries across two generations happen during the holidays, the holidays, perhaps, don't. At least not as once intended.

But I don't want to belabor the point. I want to say something else entirely.

I have felt, for the past month, completely enveloped by the prayer of others.

Completely.

It started with the Caring Bridge site and all those candles, and then there were all the cards, and the emails, and the surprising gifts that began to arrive.

I've been awake at all hours of the night over the past few weeks, Always, I wake to the feeling that I am being held in prayer by someone, somewhere.

And all that prayer, what did it do?

It didn't alleviate my anxiety, it didn't eradicate the trauma to my psyche and my body, it didn't eliminate the pain. It definitely didn't "fix" things, and it didn't make me all cheerful and positive. It didn't make me brave, or witty, or a paragon of virtue. (Too late for that, I'm afraid.)

What did it do?

It made me feel cared for.

It gave me the certainly that God was laboring on my behalf.

And it was fun! I found myself imagining the chapel at Wernersville, and Lake Superior, and a labyrinth in Tallahassee, and Dahlgren Chapel at Georgetown, and a synagogue in St. Louis where I've never been, and Ursuline chapels in northern and southern Ohio, and candles in windows overlooking both oceans, and the sanctuary of the church I now serve, and offices at John Carroll University and at two Presbyteries and some of their churches, and . . . and . . .

Those were good thoughts to which to awaken, even at 4:00 a.m.

Image: Duluth Harbor, taken by a friend of Shelly Robbie's. I don't want to BE there ~ too cold ~ but it's a beautiful place to imagine.

Just Call If You Need Anything (Whine!)

2011-12-12T13:36:00.001-05:00

One of my dear friends once wrote about her gratitude for the friends who were still showing up, months into her chemo, long after everyone else had forgotten.

Last night a friend called and mentioned a Taize service this week and a Blue Christmas service next. "I'll go!" I said.

I am three weeks and three days post-surgery, no longer on the brink of collapse, but watching my expenditures of energy of all kinds very carefully. My mother-in-law is three days post open-heart surgery, one and one-half hours away. My husband is, we hope, at the end of a major and chaotic project at work that has required 60-80 hour weeks for months. (Literally. On Saturday morning he went to see his mother. On Saturday night he went to work at midnight and came home early Sunday afternoon.) The kids are in law and graduate school finals.

Here's what to substitute for the "just call if you need anything" line:

1. I'm on my way to the grocery. What could I pick up for you?"

2. I'm going to the drugstore, Do you need any prescriptions picked up?

3. Could I come over and bring your lights and ornaments upstairs? (Or down, as the case may be?)

4. Would you like me to come over and untangle the old lights?

5. Could I pick up some new lights so that you don't have to go to five different stores because you were supposed to buy them over Thanksgiving when you were high on morphine-based pharmaceuticals?

6. Would you like me to put the lights on the tree?

7. Dinner is on the way!

8. Doctors' appointments every week? Want some company?

9. I'm coming over to change your beds.

10. I'm coming over to clean your bathroom.

11. (Bonus - wins you a go-straight-to-Boardwalk and it's yours for free) There's a hole in the bathroom sink porcelain? Tell me what you want and I will get a new sink delivered and installed. (This only works for people like me, who are not product-obsessed or even interested.)

Obviously we have some lighting issues around here.

And as enlightening as this has been for me with respect to my own past failures where family and friends are concerned, it has also been enlightening to me where The Quiet Husband is concerned. He has been making the money (at considerable personal cost for many months), providing the health insurance, taking care of me, and now visiting his mom.

And, completely unlike me in any way, he does all of this without complaint or even commentary.

(Don't worry; I have no plans to emulate him with respect to the latter. I know my limitations.)

Focused Fox

2011-12-11T19:39:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I read a quick blog post about theologian Karl Barth's being a hedgehog, as opposed to being a fox.

There are a lot of things about Karl Barth that I really like, and some I don't, but in any case my immediate guess was that if he's a hedgehog, then I'm a fox. Sure enough. There's an explanation here; philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay with a title referencing Greek philosopher Archilocus: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

One of my seminary professors remarked that Karl Barth once said that it all boils down to, "Jesus loves me; this I know." That statement would be consistent with his hedgehog-ness.

As for me, I've long been aware that my thinking is more diffuse than focused. I know many things, and I've forgotten lots more. As I embarked upon my first call, I began to realize that I need to find a way of organizing all that material that appeals to me, so that I can actually retrieve it when it might be useful. And I as practically drowned in the events of the past few weeks and lost all capacity to focus on anything at all (Imagine! Three weeks of recovery time and I have read not one single book!), I started to feel a sense of urgency in response to the sense that everything I read or hear is floating away from me.

So I've started a new notebook on my computer. I'm calling it my Resource Book, and I'm going to try to toss all kinds of things in there, cross-referenced by topic and author or artist and church calendar. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up, but I love this shiny new (and unusual) feeling of being organized.

Image: Lakeview Cemetery, Spring 2006

Girl Talk

2011-12-09T22:51:00.007-05:00

If you're a guy, you might want to skip this one. Unless you're with a woman who's dealing with all this.

So . . you know what?

I'm thinking seriously about calling a halt to this whole reconstruction thing.

I hate it. I'm sore. It's going to get worse, not better. I haven't seen my own bedroom in three weeks. It will probably be at least three months.

It would be one thing if this were medically necessary; fine, ok. But it's not.

I want to feel healthy and strong and not tired. I want to be able to do yoga. I want to be able to take a very long walk. I want to go nowhere near any kind of medical facility for months at a time. I don't see any of that in my near future if I continue with this.

My breast is gone. It was sort of a big deal, but in the end, not very much of one.

It wasn't Josh.

This isn't Josh either, but it's a bigger deal than the mastectomy. Weeks of "expansion." An implant finally inserted. Two more "minor" procedures to make my fake breast look like a real one. Another fairly major surgery to make my real one look more like my fake one.

Really?

Is it possible that I have completely lost my mind?

A law school classmate of mine wore one of the most gorgeous strapless dresses I have ever seen to her son's wedding this past summer. I was practically drooling over the FB pictures. Her toned body, her handsome son, her incredible dress. Oh, and her great haircut, too.

Well, the son whose wedding I was looking forward to is gone. Do I really care at all that I will never be able to wear a dress like that?

Nope.

I'm going to talk to the plastic surgeon next week about what he can do to make what's left look sort of, well, not awful.

I want to have a yoga instructor, not a plastic surgeon.

Christmas: Fragmentation and Wholeness

2011-12-08T20:44:00.003-05:00

I've been thinking about Advent and Christmas for awhile, but the thoughts below finally crystallized as my own version, or response, to this post in Blue Eyed Ennis. One of the things I enjoy about blogging is the ways in which unexpected conversations take place across time and geography ~ Blue Eyed Ennis quotes Dating God ( a recent and favorite discovery of mine), which quotes Thomas Merton, who says,

"The certainty of Christian hope lies beyond passion and beyond knowledge. Therefore we must sometimes expect our hope to come in conflict with darkness, desperation and ignorance." (See Blue Eyed Ennis for the entire and quite wonderful essay.)

My contribution to the conversation:

I could just - not. I could just not do religion. I could have left seminary. I could have finished my degree and decided to take on only work in which Christmas was not a feature. Something academic, perhaps. I could revert to the stance of my family of origin, which has generally been that life without faith is much easier than life with.

I did some bizarre things during the sleepless nights that became my lot after Josh died. One evening, I spent hours and hours online reading everything I could find about the response by people of religious faith to death from suicide.

In one sense, it didn't matter. Had I found nothing but condemnations of suicide victims to hell, I would have walked away from the church with nary a second glance.

In another sense, it did matter. I heard nothing other than words of comfort from those in my life connected with both Jewish and Christian religions, and I was well aware of mental illness as a factor in suicide, but I had been teaching history, and studying world religions and religious history, for years. I wanted to trace the history of the religious response; how had it changed since the Middle Ages so that rabbis and priests alike could offer words of reassurance to me? What was going to make it possible for my own pastor to preach a funeral sermon affirming the resurrection of the dead?

When our children were young, and then older, Christmas was a magical time. Family magic, as we created and followed a plethora of traditions that filled our lives with humor and joy. Friend magic, as we participated in the events others hosted and opened our own doors to a dinner for as many as ten or twelve families celebrating both Christmas and Hanukah. And yes, a sense of religious magic, in Services of Lessons and Carols and watching Amahl and the Night Visitors and helping to produce The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Christmas Eves filled with music and candles and a sense of the Holy among us.

All gone. Just.like.that.

Like so many families whose children have died, we turned our backs on all that we had known and created and treasured, unable to bear the associated anguish, and traded snow for palm trees without a glance backward.

Each year, the ground shifts a bit, and the path widens. Or changes.

This year, we'll be at home. Worship services for me to lead on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and today we decided that in the afternoon we will join our friends for the annual dinner that migrated elsewhere when we headed for Key West. I expect it to be a fairly difficult couple of days, with my own feelings somewhat mitigated by the requirement that I put many others ahead of myself.

But something else is changing as well.

It seems that when the beloved traditions are no longer tenable, when they become cherished memories no longer manageable, there are two choices. I could turn my back on all of it. (That first year, we came up with Baghdad and Pakistan as potential destinations, so eager were we to escape Christmas.)

Or . . .

I could focus more deeply than ever on the reality behind the traditions. As wonderful as they are, or were ~ the lights, the gingerbread, the candles, the crafts, the trees, the baking, the presents, the music, the togetherness ~ they all serve as a front for the reality:

The embodied presence among us of a God who comes to save us, a God whose love is so great that it sweeps all of us into one great embrace, a God who sends a son to live and suffer as we do to ensure that, in the end, we will live but suffer no more.

Advent is a time in which it seems that my personal experience of loss knows no bounds. For me, personally, the cultural holiday glitz is the equivalent of 40 days in the wilderness. But if Christmas is, indeed, the first step toward Easter, then it is also the day on which we should register our desperate, agonizing losses as those of perishable bodies that will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. We will be changed, because death will be swallowed up in the victory of the small and vulnerable Christmas infant.

Christmas seems very possible when I look at it that way.

Image: Mary in the Storm by Patricia Brintle, a friend of a friend and my favorite artist tonight.

Organ Donation - and Me?

2011-12-07T19:21:00.000-05:00

I just learned the most extraordinary thing:

I am a beneficiary of organ donation.

Now that I think about it, I have a vague ~ extremely vague ~ memory of the plastic surgeon talking about the source of Alloderm, which he uses in breast reconstruction. And I remember him mentioning it again when I stopped by his office to sign a stack of consent forms.

But when you are facing a mastectomy, you cannot possibly absorb all the information thrown at you in a few intense, emotion-laden weeks.

Yesterday, during my post-op visit, the breast surgeon explained what she has seen her colleague do with Alloderm, in response to a question I had about some residual pain that has finally dissipated.

And so a few minutes ago I googled, "What is Alloderm?"

It's donated human tissue.

I am stunned.

This whole episode in my life has been quite difficult.

But this knowledge offers a whole new perspective.

This N' That

2011-12-07T16:09:00.000-05:00

The living room finally looks a little like Christmas ~ greens and lights and manger scene figures here and there. This is the first of the last four years in which I have had the slightest interest in a tree ~ and it would be cheering, late at night, since I'm sleeping in the living room ~ but with the kids' finals and The Quiet Husband's insane work project (he worked a literal 24 hours last Sunday) and, well, me ~ no tree yet. We have scheduled tomorrow afternoon as tree purchase time. We'll see.

**********

I've learned to make no commentary to the plastic surgeon's nurse. The last two weeks, when she asked how I was, I sort of told the truth about my challenges, and was immediately treated to a firm lecture on what I should and should not be doing. I guess she takes her role as an educator seriously, but all I was looking for were a couple of words of affirmation and commiseration. I forget that there are people with no listening skills whatever. Henceforth, I'm limiting my responses to "Fine."

**********

I'm pondering Christmas. Years 1 and 3, we simply swept out of town. Year 2, I was doing my student pastor gig, and found myself reading the Lucan narrative to hundreds of people at the midnight service. Numb, practically catatonic. Relief came with a 6:00 am flight south. Now we have arrived at Year 4, I have a congregation to consider, and my situation will keep us in town. I guess it's a Just Do It situation. I don't feel the despair that I have in the past, but I'd still prefer to skip the entire month.

**********

I am genuinely stunned by how tired I still am. I suppose that I'm healing so well because my body is directing about 99% of its energy to that task. Doesn't leave me a lot for anything else.

**********

Ignatius of Loyola is an outstanding companion for the physically incapacitated.

Still Got It?

2011-12-05T20:00:00.000-05:00

I met with my student today, was convinced that the plagiarism was unintentional, and offered another chance, along with some hefty instruction on the citation of sources.

"I see that this is what is expected," he concluded.

"Believe me; I didn't make it up," I said.

As I was leaving, I stopped to chat with one of the graduate assistants. "I guess I'm the biggest pushover on the planet," I remarked.

"Oh, no," she said. "I thought you handled it really well. In fact, I was thinking that what you said to him, about how and why it matters, was really good ~ I should remember it."

I've been in quite a bit of pain today. Nice to know that I can still pull off an unpleasant meeting, regardless of my own situation.

But I am still angry at my students' high school teachers, as I have been all semester. These young people are so woefully unprepared for college. How did it become my job to teach them sixth grade writing expectations?

Ups and Downs

2011-12-04T19:52:00.001-05:00

Last night The Lovely Daughter drove me to my church-town, and this morning I preached. A superb evening of conversation with the best woman in my life, and a welcoming congregation that seemed willing to overlook a few inevitable glitches. I'm back home for the week, soaking up every opportunity to rest, as if I were a sponge soaking up water. Now that I am pretty much pain-free (still sleeping in a recliner, though), my body seems determined to sleep and sleep and sleep. I stand up and it says, "Sit." So I do.

On the downside, after seeking some advice from colleagues over the week-end, I had to email a student tonight to explain the consequences of page-after-page plagiarism of a paper. I am well aware, from my own experiences and those of my closest friends, that parents can withstand bad news over the holidays, but I still hate to be the one who sends the damning missive. I'm by no mean an easy grader, but I believe that in most circumstances, if a student shows up and turns in some semblance of all required work, no matter how dismal, he or she should get credit for the course. It's difficult for a student to earn an A in one of my classes, and equally difficult to come up with an F ~ unfortunately this young person figured out one of the few ways to achieve the latter.

Wikipedia. Sigh.

P.S. There are still many of you to whom I owe much more desirable missives. I appreciate your patience ~ I'm working on this most pleasant of tasks!

Two Weeks Post Surgery

2011-12-02T15:37:00.004-05:00

Two weeks ago right now I was beginning to emerge from the fog of anesthesia.

I haven't felt inclined to write about the details of my procedures; they are readily available elsewhere and probably no one is interested unless they are about to undergo the same things. I will say that I am grateful to the courageous women who have documented their experiences in blogs and on youtube, especially to those who've posted photos and videos, and to the surgeons who have done the same where their specialties are concerned. Most women probably wouldn't want to watch a mastectomy before undergoing one, but I did, and I was starving for reconstruction information from those who've been there/here.

Today, though, I thought I'd write a little about what a good recovery is like. Many women have had very rough post-op experiences and, as they often comment, they are the ones online, seeking advice and help. I think my experience has been pretty unremarkable, so if anyone wants to know, for their own or a friend's encouragment:

Overall most significant thing at this point: I'm very, very tired. After that two-mile walk yesterday, today's appointment, errand, and two visitors = too much. Manageable, though. A week ago, impossible. I am going to lead worship and preach (a recyled sermon) on Sunday, but only because I can take Saturday and Monday as days of complete rest.

Pain: Very little. There are a couple of tender spots, interior stitches, I think, but that's about it. I'm not comfortable, but I wouldn't say that I'm in pain.

Sleep: Still a problem. I am sick and tired of the recliner in the living room, but I can't lie down in comfort. I'm experimenting with different OTCs to try to find a way to stay asleep for 3-4 consecutive hours.

Vision: I think the anesthesia did a number on me, and I am going to have to go in for a new Rx.

Mental clarity: I can read now, a little at a time. Unfortunately, my main project involves wading through 31 freshmen papers analyzing the Documentary Hypothesis, myth, and symbol in the Torah. One of the papers is outstanding. The rest ? Sigh . . . . . . . .

Appearance: I actually wrote to Peace Bang, she of Beauty Tips for Ministers, asking for suggestions. She sent back a sympathetic note, but that was it. However ~ it doesn't matter! It's really not that difficult, especially if you frequently wear jackets and/or scarves (the latter being The Lovely Daughter's idea). I have some fake, uh, accessories, and some new undergarments which, while not my choice for comfort or support, do the job. No one who encounters me in public will ever know, even when my top has a normal v-neckline. (At home, I wear PJs with tank tops. We all do know.)

Driving: First time out today on my own! My kids are taking me to my church for the first couple of times; I think that drives of 1.5 hours would be way too tiring. And I'm scared of being out in the country. Around here, there are lots of houses and friends ~ help if I suddenly came to a complete stop. Out there, I feel more like I'm on Laura Ingalls' South Dakota prairie. Also, I look at that airbag sign with great trepidation, imaging the work of the past two weeks being completely undone. Hence my willingness to be very careful.

Emotional: I'm not sure how much what I have to say applies to anyone else. I think that for all of us, this is the most personal and most unpredictable aspect of recovery. My cancer was stage 0; I wasn't going to die from it. The surgery and subsequent procedures are a big deal, physically and emotionally, but compared to the loss of our Josh, they are barely entitled to a mark on the scale. I am seeing a therapist for awhile; I am quite willing to admit that the combination of growing up without a mother + dead child + mastectomy, all of them losses involving mothering, coalesce into a set of experiences for which I would counsel anyone to seek help, especially during the ever-difficult holiday season. It's a surprising thing, though; you think that your heart cannot possibly expand to absorb one more big loss, and yet it does.

So that's it, two weeks out. A big improvement over the blinking and beeping PACU!

Money and Medical Care - Exhibit A

2011-12-02T12:44:00.002-05:00

I was going to take a look at the Friday Five, but I stopped by my health insurance website first. The bills have started coming in.

Plastic surgeon, first procedure (there will be many more over the next several months):

About $7,000, with the insurance-negotiated fee about a third of that.

Breast surgeon:

$40,0000.

Let me say that again.

$40,000.

It's in process, so I have no idea what the insurance payment will be.

The OR, anesthesiologists, and hospital haven't checked in yet.

I am feeling extremely grateful for the excellent insurance provided by my husband's employer. We have a high out-of-pocket total, but we've long since reached it, so we have no obligations for the above. One of the main reasons for scheduling this year and not next, sine we start at Zero again on 1/1. A bizarre effect of The System: One of the surgeons told me they could have been out on the street looking for patients a few months earlier, but as the year winds to a close, there's a stampede.

I am also feeling horrified, in ways I cannot even pinpoint, about the general state of health care and how we pay for it in this country.

I suppose if we had no insurance, I would have gone to the county hospital for a mastectomy and there would have been no thought of reconstruction.

If we had an 80-20 plan with no cap, we might have done the same thing. I am guessing that the total bill, come next April or May, will be way over the $100,000 I had guessed several weeks ago. Even if the negotiated costs were half that, I'm not sure that I would have wanted to invest $10,000 that we don't have in reconstructive surgery.

Now - I think I'll check out the Friday Five.

Walk!

2011-12-01T19:01:00.000-05:00

It was a beautifully clear and crisp day today, so I went out for a walk of about two miles.

It was wonderful!

And tonight, for the first time since my surgery (two weeks ago tomorrow), I feel tired in the sense of having engaged in some overall physical exertion. Not the confused, anxiety-ridden, inability to focus with which I've been dealing.

Just plain tired!

It feels great.

A New Blog

2011-11-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

My friend Karen has gotten much in the way of spiritual sustenance from Richard Rohr, who has just started a blog.

Karen's 12-year-old daughter Katie died of cancer four-plus years ago, and since then Karen has been a whirlwind of activity, raising money for pediatric cancer research, working on educational projects designed to enhance family-centered medical care, and chairing Katie's Comforters Guild, which provides quilts to hospitalized children (in case you need a destination for your holiday donation dollars).

I'm finding that many of my "bereaved mom" (oh, now there's a great circle in which to be) friends are writing and speaking, very quietly, about the tremendous challenge of the second, third, fourth, fifth holiday season now upon us. Some things get easier, and some more difficult.

So I just thought I'd provide these links.

Hello God; It's Me, Gannet

2011-11-29T12:06:00.001-05:00

When I was sixteen and in the 11th grade, I did not believe in God. Five years of VERY religious Catholic and Protestant boarding schools, and the result was that I considered religion to be a ludicrous invention of a desperate humanity. (I have a college student who sees things in the same way. He has no idea how much consideration I give to him.)

Nevertheless, I do recall one winter night in western Massachusetts, when I stood in the snow on a hillside under a sky filled with stars and asked, "God, who are you and what are you doing?"

In some ways, I am still that girl. Without the long, long brown hair.

**********

This ~ breast cancer: surgeries and all the other unpleasantness it entails, months and then the rest of my life being attuned to the possibility of disaster ~ is turning out to be, in terms of my experience of God, nothing at all like that of three years ago, after Josh died.

I don't understand what happened three years ago, and went on for months and months ~ in the expletive deleted middle of seminary ~ but I do see now that it was a dramatic and deep break from anything that I might have thought or imagined about God. Even in my most cynical 16-year-oldness. It was a place so hugely empty, so very dark, so completely lonely, so desperately sad ~ no wonder no one seemed to understand what I was talking about. And no wonder I was so agitated and angered by some of the nonsensically pious words people tossed my way. Parallel experiences that intersected nowhere.

Now, looking back, I believe that I got to know God a little better. At least one small, and very silent, dimension of God. I have a deep sense of God's presence and labor in places where it seems evident that God is not.

I also think that there was some considerable grace there in that I survived to tell the story. Literally.

**********
A situation is brewing in my little church. The timing is most unfortunate: Advent, and a pastor learning to navigate post-cancer treatment. Aren't those enough? I am supposed to be the leader, the wisdom figure to whom people will turn. I have no idea whether they will do that or not. I am surprisingly calm. Anesthesia brain or a genuine confidence in God at work?

Who are you and what are you doing?

**********

Humor persists. I have an appointment with my plastic surgeon this afternoon. That phrase, "my plastic surgeon" ~ it would completely crack me up if I weren't so exhausted. (He's very cute, and smart, and funny. I hope he is as skilled as his reputation indicates). I am going to have a plastic surgeon in my entourage for a long time.

Life is bizarre.

**********

Image: There are some kids at church who want to know what God looks like. The Helix Nebula, I think.

Nine Days Post-Surgery

2011-11-27T14:26:00.000-05:00

I don't look like this today, but I did last night.

Positives:

I went out twice yesterday. The Lovely Daughter took me shopping for a couple of things and later, The Quiet Husband dropped me off at church. It takes me a l-o-n-g time to get going in the morning, so I figured that my only hope for an Advent I service was a Catholic Vigil Mass. It was beautiful, a few new liturgy (effective last night) bloopers notwithstanding.

Pain mostly gone; no more meds since a couple of days ago. The evil drain has been out since last Wednesday.

Family: They are GREAT. It must be like living with a blob in the living room, but they put up with me most generously.

Casualties:

One iron. I don't know what I was thinking, but I forgot, the first couple of days, that my arm movement was limited. Small crash.

Focus. I can't concentrate enough to read for more than a few paragraphs, and I can't follow a phone conversation; I need the visual cues of face-to-face contact. I assume this is part of the post-anesthesia fog, but it's quite disconcerting. The headache (four days) and vision problems (a week) have resolved themselves, so presumably this will as well.

Energy. I just read something about post-surgery fatigue and it was pretty scary. I barely move (yesterday was a huge exception), and I am completely exhausted.

Emotional Life: Wow, is that on a roller coaster. Use your imagination.

There once was a man . . . (Ignatius)

2011-11-26T11:10:00.002-05:00

There once was a man named Inigo. A poorly-educated youngest of many children who turned to a military career as a likely source of fortune and fame. A man inclined to the pursuit of women and wine. A headstrong and impulsive leader who was badly injured after a most unfortunate decision to charge forward where retreat would have been warranted.

And THIS is one of my heroes in faith? A failed Basque soldier of the early 16th century?

Why not Martin Luther, ardently nailing his 95 Theses to the door? I do, after all, believe in the possibility and hope of always reforming and always being reformed. Why not John Calvin, with lawyerly and scholarly precision writing and re-writing his Institues? I am a lawyer, and a little bit of a scholar, with two advanced degrees in hand. Why a man at all, for that matter? Why not St. Brigid, or Julian of Norwich, both of whom brought healing and learning to others in difficult times?

Oh, each one of them has his or her place. But Ignatius, as he came to call himself . . .

Ignatius spent those long months of bedridden recovery learning to pray. He learned to meld two stories, that of the Biblical narrative and that of each individual's, into a form of prayer that emphasizes human experience and emotion, that recognizes God laboring in all things that we encounter, that seeks the companionship of Jesus Christ, and that embraces the Spirit's activity in all that we do, and say, and ponder, and hope.

It's not surprising, I think, that as I recover from this wretched surgery and anticipate months more of treatment, I would re-connect with Ignatius.

After he got out of bed, Ignatius had some rather dramatic experiences and did a few weird things. He made some mistakes, and he returned to school to remedy his academic weaknesses. He formed a small band of followers during his studies in Paris, and the Jesuit order was born. He transferred his own passion and desire for mission and travel to his men, sending them around the world (and yes, we studied Jesuit missions extensively in my Presbyterian seminary!) while accepting that his own role called for him to remain in Rome, drafting documents, organizing Jesuit activities, and writing ~ more letters than anyone else in the 16th century.

And how did Ignatius become a hero of mine? Because one person ~ one elderly, wise, and wickedly funny Jesuit ~ took the time to share his deep love of his spirituality with me. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are, at their very best, a matter of oral tradition, handed from one person to another. I am often awed by the fact that they made their way from Ignatius to his first followers, to others across the oceans and down the centuries, to a Jesuit who became a key figure in their renewal in recent decades and who gave them to me, and now are passed from me to others.

One-on-one. There are other Jesuit companions in my life now, and in them I have seen the same generosity, the same intense desire and commitment to share in the prayer and lives of others. The same willingness to recognize the presence of Jesus in the lives of others. The same gift of the spirituality of contemplation in action that made it possible for me to move forward, with much help, after the death of my son.

And so, as I emerge from the haze in which I've spent the past week, that's who and what I'm thinking about. I'm disappointed that I won't be spending the first Sunday of Advent with my congregation, but perhaps this little respite is exactly what is called for, a transition from the self-absorption of illness back to openness to others.

I would rather be spending my retreat time in a state of good health at Wernersville than in recovery in on the recliner in the living room ~ but then, Ignatius would have preferred India to Rome.

Image: Ignatius the Pilgrim at Guelph (ONT) Retreat Center

Thanksgiving Melancholy

2011-11-25T14:04:00.003-05:00

Just so you know, an explicit post follows. I am actually feeling quite neutral today (Friday, one week post-surgery), but one of aspect of having become a regular writer, even in blog form, is that one feels compelled to leave notes lying around. A record of sorts.

Herewith, from last night:

Late Thursday afternoon, and I pick up the camera to take some pictures of the Thanksgiving table.

First, though, I scroll back to the images I took a week ago. Late at night, after everyone else was asleep, I went into the bathroom and took some of myself.

I have looked at thousands of images of the female breast over the past two months. Most of them have been medical diagrams, demonstrating the complexity of breast tissue and various methods of excising and replacing it.

I never gave much thought to the magnificent detail of my anatomy. My breasts were 58 years old and they spent those years doing pretty much what a woman's breasts do. They caused me some consternation in my youth, were a source of pleasure later on, and easily nourished three children, including my twin boys. They looked ordinary and, as fashions became more revealing, they demanded some effort to cover with a degree of modesty.

Now one is badly bruised, a spray of black, purple and yellow, and the other is ~ the same color scheme, but not geography I want to describe. I can already disguise the reality, and I am told that by next summer I will be able to wear a t-shirt with no one the wiser.

One of my friends emailed me yesterday to say that the holidays have increasingly become days on which we mark the losses. Hers have been staggering, and so have mine. And while I am exceedingly grateful for the family that shelters me and the friends who support me, for my work and for my usual energy and for the health I was able to take for granted until recently, I miss my boy with a missing so wide and deep that there are moments on these days of celebration, moments through which I can barely breathe.

And so tonight, before I take the photos of the table, I look at the ones of myself. Those ordinary, well-used, seldom visible breasts.

They were very beautiful.

Thanksgiving Prayer

2011-11-24T14:00:00.001-05:00

I like this one, by James Martin, S.J., from the Huff Post Thanksgiving Bloggers:

Dear God,

Sometimes my life is so rushed that
I have a hard time remembering to be grateful.
And even when I do remember I don't pause to say thanks.

So help me to remember all the things for which I'm thankful.

For my friends, who make me laugh and keep me laughing at myself.
For my family, who you chose to be with me -- sometimes for reasons I can't quite see!
For my religious community, which invites me to connect with you in new ways.
For my job, which helps me put food on the table and clothes on my back.

And if I have no family or friends, or don't have a job, let me be still be grateful.

For my country, which gives me the freedom to be the person I hope to become.
For my health, which helps me to praise you, and enables me to help others in need.
For the world itself, which you crown with your beauty.
And if I'm still not feeling grateful, increase my gratitude for little things.
For seeing a tree slowly turn red in the fall.
For the surprising cold of the first snowflake on my face.
For hearing a child's laughter on a sad day.
For seeing a beautiful sunset after a tough week.

And if I'm still not grateful,
or am too rushed to savor all you have given me,
Please increase my openness to gratitude.
Magnify my ability to appreciate life.
And help me grow in thankfulness.
For that alone I would thank you,
Dear God.

Image: Sandhill Cranes at Jesper-Pulaski NWR, Thanksgiving 2005

Fear and Courage

2011-11-23T08:02:00.000-05:00

I woke up awhile ago to the thought that I should delete all posts from the last few days ~ all the posts which show me at my worst and are little more than a self-indulgent dip here and there into the fears and sadnesses that accompany breast cancer and its treatment.

I've decided to leave them up, for the time being anyway, as a reminder to me, even if to no one else, of how easy it is to slide into a state of fearfulness and to let anxiety about myself and my well-being control my decision-making and, ultimately, define who I am.

One of the things about Joel Osteen and his ilk that sends me into a paroxysm of sarcasm is his constant emphasis on "I" ~ that "I" who is, indeed, filled with fear and pain, who feels alone and terrified and unheard ~ as the solution to my own anxiety, as if my own anxiety were, indeed, the problem.

The reality is that my anxiety is nothing more than the symptom of the real challenge, that challenge being the ease with which illness and loss and all that accompanies them separate me from the confidence that a loving God is laboring on my behalf in all circumstances.

Last night my daughter unwittingly offered me a clue that set me on a new path in unraveling this mystery of challenge and response. Hearing the story of my early-morning pre-surgery procedure for the first time, she shook her head and said, "I don't understand why the doctors don't listen to you. You really did everything that you could in advance to explain that your experience of pain is apparently an unusual one. It sounds like the surgeon nodded and then went on automatic pilot, and then was surprised at the outcome. It might have been better for her to have said, 'This doesn't usually hurt but, given your description of past procedures, I can't guarantee that.' "

Yes, that kind of candor might have made things a bit easier. (Also: If she had not insisted that my friend leave. Note to self: Leave no stone unturned in your preparation.)

But perhaps the important question has little to do with medical procedures or with my response to them. Perhaps the real question is the one that my professor asked over and over again in my ordination sermon: What is Jesus doing? Or, as I might put it, in perhaps a less Reformed and more Ignatian manner: into what is God inviting me?

Let's start with reality: I are not young, or strong, or brave, or beautiful, or pain-free, and no insistence otherwise will make me so. (No, I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm trying to think this through.) But then, if this is not about me, those cover-of-People-Magazine attributes matter little. What matters is: What is God doing?

My knee-jerk reaction is to say: "Ya got me."

But seriously. Last summer, Jesuit Father Jim Martin said on The Colbert Report that God's job is to sustain the universe. If that's the case, and if we believe that what God is doing is, in fact, God's job ~ sustaining the universe ~ then what questions should we be asking, what invitation should we be looking for, during these times when it does, indeed, seem that God is dropping and losing things all over the place?

Tee-hee

2011-11-22T22:47:00.000-05:00

Just turned on the tv: Joel Osteen!

May I quote:

"When you look in the mirror in the morning, just say:

I am beautiful!

I am strong!

I am young!

I am healthy!"

I just hope he sends Victoria out real quick.

Dream

2011-11-22T19:24:00.002-05:00

I am siting in my pajamas in the dining room in our center hall colonial when the front door swings open and a friend peers in and calls my name. Startled and angry, I pull a blanket around myself and yell at her to leave.

I dash (something I cannot do!) up two flights of stairs as she wails, "But you were so angry that we stopped coming around after Josh died!" "That was when I looked like me!" I yell backward.

I reach the landing on third floor between Josh's and Matt's rooms, where I encounter another young man, a complete stranger.

"And who on earth are you?" I demand.

He gives me a name and tells me that Matt said that he could live here.

"In my house? Without my knowledge or permission?" I am really angry now.

**********

Drug-induced dreams? Or a revelation of reality?

Other people? Right response, wrong time.

Me? Scared and inadequate to the task.

Cancer? The stranger who had settled in before I knew he had arrived.

Death? Outside Josh's door.

**********

I've quit the narcotics.

**********

Editorial comments: This, remember, is a dream. My friends are amazing. All kinds of friends in all kinds of ways. But one of the things uppermost in my mind these days is the overall difference in experience ~ for me ~ between losing a child and losing a breast.

Spirituality and Healing ~ 2

2011-11-22T11:06:00.003-05:00

We don't all have the same spiritual needs in a hospital setting.

I have parishoners who have related with delight stories of doctors who pray with them.

I know a lot of other folks, religious and otherwise, who would consider a doctor's or nurse's offer to pray with them as a major step beyond appropriate boundaries.

And the reality is that few of us know much about the religious beliefs and practices of others ~ even of others who self-identify as we do ~ and and if we do seek to offer spiritual friendship to others, we may find ourselves offering well-intended prayers that baffle at best and alienate and anger at worst.

This morning, I'm thinking about those moments in my own experience, this fall and in years previous, in which fragile doorways opened briefly, and closed silently, before any light was captured.

I have stories, not answers.

This is one of them:

Somewhere in the registration process for my September procedure, I was asked a fill-in-the-blank question: Religious preference?

Official answer: Presbyterian.

Real answer? A wondrous thing is about to happen to me. I'm about to be ordained to ministry. After years of prayer and study and preparation, I'm about to raise a plate of bread and a cup and offer them to others as the body and blood of Jesus.

But here's the thing: in the middle of all that prayer and study and preparation, God departed. Vanished. I had to learn to see and hear all over again, in the dark and in absolute silence, before I could dream about that bread and cup again.

My real religion is Psalm 139, except for when it's Psalm 88. And so I am not a little apprehensive about what lies ahead. In a spiritual sense. A friend told me that after her 28-year-old husband died and then her kitchen burned down, another friend said to her "God drinks." She told me this when I called to tell her that I had been approved for ordination and diagnosed with breast cancer in the same week. Yet another friend for whom cancer has been part of life sent me several books of poetry by a Benedictine monk as ordination gifts. One of them is entitled God Drops and Loses Things.

I don't know what the hospital registration people think that the religious preference question is about; probably they imagine that it is simply about what clergy to call if things don't work out. I think it's a bigger question than that. I for instance, want to discuss the drinking and dropping and losing.

But I answered: Presbyterian.

Spirituality and Healing

2011-11-21T13:38:00.006-05:00

I don't think that there are any breast cancer healing stories in the Bible.

No explicit ones in the Gospels, anyway. There is the woman who has been bleeding for years; there are women reputed to have engaged in various sexual misadventures. The woman "caught in" ("framed for"?) adultery; the woman at the well and her six partners. That's about what we get from the four evangelists where women's bodies are concerned

There is no woman who suffers from disease in that most intriguing area of human anatomy, the one designed for beauty, for intimate pleasure, and for the nourishment of children. The one that reflects so completely the multi-prismatic wholeness of the human life, both body and spirit.

**********

Last week, the local paper ran a multi-part series on cardiac care at The Cleveland Clinic. Profiles of doctors and patients, descriptions of procedures.

Under normal circumstances, I would have absorbed every word with great interest. I did my summer chaplaincy internship there, I observed a heart surgery there, and I spent a lot of time with patients on the units which the articles describe.

Given my actual circumstances, however, I quickly skimmed the pages most days. I could have missed something major. I hope that I did. Because what I did not see was any reference at all to the spiritual aspect of heart disease. No mention of chaplains or of families' own pastors, priests, rabbis, or imams. No discussion of the spiritual side of health. No one claiming victory for God or decrying God's absence. No one praying.

My husband rolled his eyes. "The series was an advertisement for the Clinic surgeons," he said. "I don't think that's what the writers thought they were doing," I responded. "But they did leave something out."

**********

I've had two surgeries at University Hospitals in the past several weeks. I did not encounter a hospital chaplain either time. The only out-loud praying was done by my friend (and Presby pastor) Maggie in the pre-op area on Friday morning. As the OR team made its final preparations and told me that the anesthesia was about to take effect (I forgo the pre-op meds, so I was wide awake and alert), my last coherent thought was that the room and its activities were something of a shrine and an offering to science. You would never guess that our lives might be in the hands of someone more loving, more creative, and more powerful than our physicians.

**********

Two years ago, after Christmas, my first spiritual director sent me the outline of a talk he had given on the Holy Spirit's overshadowing of Mary, on the Spirit's gift to her of the freedom within which she was enabled to recognize and respond to God's accompanying presence.

Not a breast cancer healing story. But maybe a breast and heart strengthening story?

That's what I was imagining and praying with right before my surgery. And I was supported, magnificently, by the picture in my mind's eye of the dozens of candles lit and prayers being spoken for me literally across this entire country. I loved thinking about the terrain of Idaho, the dark waters of Lake Superior, the waves of both oceans, the interiors of chapels and churches and synagogues, the morning masses and evening Shabbat services. I loved imaging the faces of my friends, each taking a moment to support my encounter with the Holy.

**********

I don't want to be the least bit dismissive of my medical care. Maggie reminded us in her pre-surgery prayer of the tremendous learning and skill represented by that hospital, and it's important to remember that if God is in all things, as Ignatius teaches us, then God is in all things medical, whether we like them or not.

But I do think that the most important proceedings of the day had no insurance codes ascribed to them. No co-pays, no deductibles, no consent forms, no picture IDs ~ and the only preferred provider almost completely unrecognized.

Recovery 101

2011-11-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

Among the many detestable things with reference to being post-op is the constant focus on one's personal physical well-being. It is SO BORING, which explains why I do not host a cable tv show on food or fitness.

Well, ok, so there might be other reasons for the latter.

I am all about pain control today. I thought that I was in pretty good shape last night, so I cut back on the meds and started looking forward to a shower.

Really stupid idea, which left me looking at my phone every minute for the last hour this morning until I could load up. And load up I did!

And then I slept soundly for three solid hours.

And now I am too tired for that desperately longed-for shower.

The good news is that I have recovered almost complete movement of my left arm. It hurts, but it moves. This is A Very Big Deal!

I suppose everything will work together eventually.

See how boring this is? But the only other thing on which I have to report is the drama of narcotic-induced dreams, which I forget as soon as I wake up. And also, I suppose (see Caring Bridge), my late-night discovery of the Barbie Channel. Who knew?

Still Alive -2

2011-11-20T08:03:00.000-05:00

My friend W, Director of Nursing Operations for the Cancer Center and Mother of The Lovely Daughter's apartment-mate, stopped by to see me yesterday morning. I told her the good, bad, and ugly, as she is actually in a position to pass along praise, and to effect change where no praise is due.

She and her older daughter, a brand-new peds oncology nurse, came over to the house last night to help me with a procedure I cannot manage on my own. ("See where all that Montessori education got us?" I said.)

And they both laughed at my rx ("This is a peds dosage!") and told me to double it and shorten the time between dosages. As a result, I actually got some sleep last night, and made some physical progress.

Things I Can Now Do: Get up from a chair by myself. And sit back down.

Image: Goal.

Still Alive - 1

2011-11-19T20:39:00.000-05:00

Relentless pain - it's been about 30 hours since I woke up from surgery.

To my surprise, RevGal Maggie showed up in town last night and offered to accompany us this am. Since she has faced similar challenges, I said yes.

The first pre-surgery procedure was excruciating. Probably exacerbated by the doctor refusing to let Maggie stay with me. I collapsed sobbing into her arms as soon as the door was open; the doctor merely commented that that degree of pain was highly unusual.

Maggie and The Quiet Husband and our kids stayed with me till I was wheeled off to the OR; good thing, as what little faith I had that things might go well had been completely shattered.

Lotta screaming and crying last night in connection with another procedure. Really scared that nurse!

Anesthesia headache. I can go to the bathroom on my own, but that's about it. I really haven't had the energy to consider the emotional ramifications of what's happened; the physical stuff is taking everything I've got.

My son's assessment: Mom, your resistance to narcotics is becoming legendary.

What I'm Gonna Do . . .

2011-11-16T08:21:00.000-05:00

with the two days I have left with an intact body . . .

Complete the preparation for and teach an introductory class on Chinese religions ~

Make phone calls to substitute for pastoral vists ~

Finish all those thank you notes ~

Read some of what people have been recommending to me ~

Try to hold it together (I am pretty much failing Holding It Together 101) ~

and

Pray.

See y'all on the other side.

SUICIDE

2011-11-15T11:14:00.004-05:00

I am writing the title of this post in all caps for a reason, which I hope is about to become apparent.

All bold and red highlighting in this post is my own:

Yesterday's anonymous commenter supplied this link to a very short article in Forbes, which quoted a previous article in part as follows:

Roughly 35,000 Americans commit suicide each year–more than die from prostate cancer or Parkinson’s disease. Another 1.1 million people make attempts, while 8 million have suicidal thoughts. Among those aged 15 to 25 it is the third leading cause of death. Yet researchers know astonishingly little about how to treat people who contemplate killing themselves. The subject has been so roundly ignored that the 900-page bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, offers no advice for doctors on how to assess suicide risk.

Fear, logistics, low research funding and more risk than reward for drug companies all conspire to make suicide the neglected disease. The National Institutes of Health is spending a paltry $40 million in 2010 studying suicide, versus $3.1 billion for research on aids, which kills half the number of Americans. (Another government agency spends $48 million on hotlines and prevention.) Therapists often don’t want to treat suicidal patients, and university clinical study review boards are skittish about studying them, says the University of Washington’s Linehan.

2010 NCI spending on breast cancer research alone was $631 million, according to this site.

Estimated breast cancer deaths (all ages) in 2009 was 49,170, according to this report.

Excuse me for a moment while I go and throw up.

A few days ago, Evelyn Lauder, a major breast cancer activist, died of ovarian cancer. I believe that she was in her mid-70s. Lauder? Think Estee Lauder cosmetics. Daughter-in-law of Estee.

I am not a New York socialite and cosmetics tycoon.

I am the pastor of Tiny Church in Tiny Town, a town so tiny almost no one has heard of it.

I'm guessing that Mrs. Lauder had her some pretty nice digs in New York City, and that she knew "all the right people."

We just painted our living room after 27 years of living here, and I know my friends and and congregants.

I absolutely do not have an activist personality. I'm a spiritual director, for heaven's sake (literally). I like quiet conversation and prayer with one other person more than just about anything else in the world. But I do have a few other skills in my pocket, mostly research and communication skills. There is that lawyer side of me, lying latent.

And I am sensing a swell of outrage welling up inside me. Perhaps that is how these things get started.

My approach to my own health care could be described as casual at best. And yet (much as I hate it), I am being treated for a cancer at a stage so early that I can barely believe that I have to endure major surgery and its consequences to address it. Were this a generation ago, the cancer would not have been detected for years (if at all, which is another whole issue with DCIS, some of which turns into Something and some of which does not, but no one yet knows how to predict which is which, so we all get treated, and that's a whole other and disconcerting story). By the time it was discovered, it most likely would have been invasive and resulted in even more disfiguring and disabling surgery than what I am about to undergo. Two generations ago, that surgery would have been done in the dark -- no one could predict who would survive and who would not, because testing and treatment for metastatic breast cancer was in its infancy.

All that has changed because of all that pink money and all those activists, women and men alike, who said: No more BS about this.

Suicide and depression? I know something about those matters now. And one of the things I know is that we don't routinely screen people for depression. We don't plaster pink-ness, or some other color, all over the place with posters and brochures telling us risk factors and what to look for, in ourselves and in those we love. I have posted very little about my son because I try to protect the privacy of my family in my online life, but I will say this (and perhaps someday, much more): Like many suicide survivors, I look in retrospect at the evidence, including journals I did not have access to until after his death, and it all screams: Depression! High risk of suicide! And we had no idea at all.

So. This is not the week. I have other things to do this week, things that are possible because the massive Komen and ACS and NCI machines and money have been at work, with the result that there are TWO state-of-the-art breast cancer teams and facilities down the road.

But when this week is over, I am going to join every damn suicide prevention organization out there and I am going to volunteer everything that I have to offer and if I have to make something up from scratch I will because ~ my son, with his brilliant and creative mind, with one of the finest educations in the world, living in one of the greatest cities of the world, with a great job that provided him with excellent medical insurance, should have been able to put all that together to get for his illness the excellent care and support that is so easily available to me.

I have been writing for three years about how my grief and sadness have been exacerbated by the many times people have avoided the topic of my son's death, and by how much I have been helped by those who were not afraid of it. But ~ and this is true, pathetic as it may sound ~ it took breast cancer and the universal willingness of people to get down and dirty with me for me in this new challenge for me to understand how much of a taboo suicide still is.

BS that MUST STOP.

Image: A Joyous Josh, Sleeping Bear Dunes, 2001.