Rest now, Luke. Rest in Peace.

A huge storm has pounded its way ashore here in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately, it is not freezing out there. Driving will be hazardous, but not suicidal. I will be out in the elements, keeping my car on the road, avoiding the largest puddles and most splashing trucks, being distracted by the storm outside the car - distracted from the unsettled weather inside my chest.

This morning we will bury Luke.

We loved him. I loved him.

He did not let us know much about his personal life. It had already cost him too much, and he didn't want to bother us with it. He protected us from it, I think. He did not want anyone to pay attention to it.

Luke played the organ at church. He was there for every Sunday and holy day of obligation. He was there for every special service. He worked around the parts that needed repair, using what would work instead of bothering others to fix anything - in the organ, in the parish ... he didn't insist. He worked. He loved us.

I am remembering conversations I had with him. We were friends.

I am remembering the times I was in the choir loft when he was. I am remembering his uncanny ability to move all over that loft in utter silence. He could pass out sheets of music and give directions to the singers and pay attention to the service at the altar at the other end of the church, even though the rood screen and statues hide it so fully from the view from up there. He responded to something in the room. He knew when to do what, and he never missed a step and he never made a sound. We heard only music.

This morning we will pray the prayers of absolution. We will breathe the incense and listen to the music played by his fellow organists and sing the hymns for him. We will sing to God for Luke, our brother. Our friend. Our cantor - the one Luke trained - he will sing the Ave.

And later, in the afternoon of wind and rain and storm and chaos all around, as the last of the leaves blow off the trees and stick to our legs and shoes in the graveyard, we will commit him to the ground and to God. Quiet in the storm. Rest in the blowing rain. It suits him.

At the end of his life he was in agony. A cancer had taken hold of his brain. I have been praying for him every day for months now, asking God to release Luke from his body. It was broken. It was making too much noise.

Today we let him go.

Be at peace, Luke. We love you. I will try to sing this morning. But it may not be quite possible. It will be possible to pray. Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord. Light perpetual shine upon him.

Summer in so many Ways

Okay, so maybe the weather isn't quite up to speed this year. "Summer" looming on the calendar looks a lot more like spring just barely starting outdoors, but I'm okay with that. Summer is usually a little too long and a little too hot for me anyway, and if we sneak up on it with some of this foggy, chilly, beachy, dampness, maybe it won't seem like a torture at the end of August. Shoot - at this rate, we'll be lucky to turn off the heat in the house by the end of August!

Season changing, and again there's a huge clock overlaying the world, and the second hand is near the top, and the minute hand is about to click. The scenery has already changed. Everything has changed. For me, everything has changed. Again.

At the parish, we are doing a huge project to organize, format, and use a multi-age, multi-purpose curriculum for children's religious education. This past school year was our first experiment, and it was a stunning success! Those kids learned hymns and catechism and songs and lessons ... they can recite in "choir" with each other, and they watch out for each other like a group of loving siblings. I couldn't be happier about the effort they've put in and the things they've been able and willing to do, and the final presentation for the congregation at coffee hour was a smashing success. But the secret's in the sauce.

And the sauce has been simmering for a long time. The sauce was not a one-person endeavor. The sauce needed more than one person to stir it. And THIS year another cook signed on for the fun - not just for awhile, but for years to come. Others have pitched in over the years when they've been needed, but none of them could stand and stir like this one does. You know who you are, my friend and sister, and without your creative input, enthusiastic willingness, and determined patience, I could not possibly have gotten those catechumens through a real year of vigorous, traditional Anglican children's instruction. I want to cut loose with the joy of it - to sing like Maria von Trapp in the opening sequences on mountaintops! This team we've formed - it's just so GOOD.

On the home front, we enter a new summer of our lives. This - here - now - this is two adult people who've passed all the way through child rearing and out the other side, and this is the first summer of the New Order of Things. We've done practice runs before. Evenings, or weeks, or school terms without offspring in the house. But this isn't practice. This is it. And now it's summer.

It's summer for us in a lot of ways. We planted and tilled and planted and weeded and tilled and planted and tilled and planted ... and the kids grew up! All at once, it's summer and there's nothing to do but watch what happens in this field we've worked on all these years. Now is not the time to try pulling out the tares. Too much of the wheat may be harmed, and it's not ours to do. Now is the time to let it alone to do what it will. The harvest is coming. (Please, God, send the latter rains.)

Life is like this. It's seasons inside of seasons - a wheel within a wheel, a'turnin', way in the middle of the air. For this family, it's summer. And I've just planted something I've never planted before ... and ... well, did you ever put a seed into the ground and be unable to stop yourself from checking on it several times a day? I feel like the boy in The Carrot Seed.

They keep telling him, "It won't come up." But he's an Idealist and a Dreamer and he knows. He just knows. If every day he pulls up the weeds around the seed and sprinkles the ground with water ... he just KNOWS it will come up.

And it does! It's HUGE. He carts his carrot around on a wheelbarrow because it's gigantic.

And my seed was a marketing idea, and my weeding was the courses I offered but never got to teach at the community center, and my water was hope ... and now I have a student. One perfect student who understands what she's doing and participates with her whole self and is learning to write for self-discovery and follow directions with the most sweetly lovely trust imaginable, and I am beside myself with the possibilities for the seeds I've planted.

Why ... what if ... what if a whole CROP of carrots as huge as my entire self came up? What if?

Approaching

This is Holy Week. This is the music of the soul as she approaches.

"O My people, what have I done unto thee? Wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against Me."

"Holy God. Holy Mighty. Holy Immortal. Have mercy upon us."



It's odd to move through Holy Week in this culture. We have no daily parades through the streets, no Passion Plays, not even days off from the world of commerce as we sometimes have for Christmas or Thanksgiving.

But ... this is not a party.

On Palm Sunday, our tiny band of parishioners went outdoors with our palm branches as always, singing, following the cross and incense. The Starbucks customers, as always, bemused by us ... the TriMet bus at the stop across the street giving its passengers a tour of the oddity. This year, passers by on the street came with us as we filed back into the building.

Today I will work at the library. Throughout the week, there is school work to do. The Great Husband goes and sits at his desk at work every day, and makes the deposits and talks to the account managers and patiently deals with the next interruption - and the one after that. It all just keeps going, and woven into the relentlessness of it all, we will go to church.

On Thursday, we hear again about the night in which he was betrayed. Our Lord gave "a new commandment," and so, to show this new Maundy, the priest washes the people's feet. The altar is stripped bare. Bit by bit, each thing we love and use in the worship is taken. Gone. The service becomes more raw. The sounds of the busy world fade away. The Watch begins. For that night and all the next day, parishioners take it in turns to "watch with me one hour" where the holy Presence waits quietly for Friday's sacrifice.

We drive home on Thursday night. The roads are the same. The cars are the same. We need a little to eat before we go to bed. We stop at the traffic lights and speed up to merge. We park near our door and put another bag of pellets into the stove and we go to bed. Warm. Safe. Dry. Befriended and free. Jesus wasn't.

We sleep fitfully and wake at three in the morning. It's dark and cold and hard to move. Mostly in silence, we drive back to take our watch. Each of us, alone with the Presence for an hour. Each of us in prayer. Quiet. Sometimes in tears. We wait.

Breakfast, and a drive home, and a shopping trip for Easter's feast. How is it possible to go to the store and buy groceries? It is as if nothing has happened. This world does not know about the Presence still there, waiting, patient in the glow of candles and the scent of warm wax and yesterday's incense. I act my part and pay the person taking the money and we go to the car again. We drive a lot in Holy Week. Each trip feels just a little more surreal.

Good Friday service goes through me like knives. The altar is bare. "Behold the wood of the cross," the priest intones, "on which was hung the savior of the world." - the melody of this chant more complex and difficult. We answer him, stumbling a little on the tones the first time. "Oh come, let us adore him." He says it again. We answer him again. And once more. And each one, alone in his turn, walking, kneeling down three times, venerate.

The Passion is told - by them, and by us, singing out, "We have no king but Caesar." "Crucify him. Crucify him." We say those awful words. We did this to him. There is no wine in the cup. There is no music at the last. There is no light. We have crucified our king, and we go out into the night, weeping.

This is Holy Week. Every year, not in a movie, and not in a book. This is the Passion of our Lord, and now we move through it again, approaching, weeping.

Good Night, Virginia. I'll see you in the morning.

Last month, Virginia died. She was 98 years old.

It's hard to believe that she was that old. I saw her most Sundays, after she'd attended the early Mass, and I was coming in for the later one. She would be waiting for a kind parishioner to take her home, or she would be calling a taxi. "Hello, this is Mrs. Chester Ott. I would like a taxi at the Parish of Saint Mark, please. Ten twenty-five northwest twenty-first avenue. My account number is ...."

A few years ago, when the new VW Beetles came out, she bought one in bright banana yellow. She drove it without any sort of problem and with a lot of enjoyment. I mean, what's not to love about a bright yellow VW Beetle?

But one day, she read in the paper about a man who'd crashed his car into things, and she thought to herself, "Why, the old fool. He shouldn't have been driving at his age!" ... and then, "Oh dear. He's younger than I am." So Virginia sold her yellow Bug before she became the old fool in the newspapers. That's why she had an account with the cab company.

In recent years, she had acquiesced to using a cane - but that might have been only since her fall and subsequent broken shoulder. She certainly never was seen hunching over or hesitating when she walked. And once her shoulder had healed, she continued on with her several service projects and responsibilities.

Awhile back, after we had both been at the same midweek Mass, we had a conversation. She told me she was sorry she couldn't come to the ladies' luncheon, but that she couldn't do everything she used to be able to do. She wasn't complaining - more just noticing it. It was like she was describing the limitations of a new raincoat, not suitable for colder weather. But she could still read, she said. She was very grateful for that - she still had the full use of her eyesight, and she could read all she wanted to. When I remember all other things she did, I suspect that she did not do much of this leisurely reading during daylight hours.

One day last month, she made a phone call from her apartment in the assisted living complex. She told the nurse who talked to her that she didn't feel quite right. They said she should come on down to the clinic so they could check her out, but she said she would not be doing that. "Do you need an ambulance?" "No. No, I don't think an ambulance is necessary." They sent someone to her room to find out what was going on.

When they got there, they found that she had hung up her phone, sat back in her chair, and gone to God. Peacefully, quietly, and, Virginia-like, only after cheerfully informing someone that she'd be leaving now.

Virginia Ott fell asleep in this life and woke in the next. She has joined the others from our parish who wait for me - this group of smiling and contented people with whom I've knelt to pray. These people who have wished me a Happy Easter and a Merry Christmas - people who have shown me what duty and real happiness have to do with each other - people whose confidence in the goodness of the Lord has taken them through World Wars and widowhood and losses they never fussed over.

Someday I will join them.

Good night, Virginia. I'll see you in the morning.

O LORD, support us all the day long,
until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes,
and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,
and our work is done.
Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging,
and a holy rest,
and peace at the last. Amen.

You may say I am a dreamer

I am a Christian.
I believe the ancient Christian creed, partake in ancient Christian sacrament, read the sacred text, and follow the year's liturgical pattern. I feast on feast days, fast on fast days, and thank God for the example and prayers of the Saints.

I am an intellectual.
I study the minds of the ages in the written work they left us. I grapple with both logic and ethics, I admire both art and technology, and I work with conscious intention to understand and enact a life of educated honor in the world in which I live.

I am a woman.
I believe in Yin energy, and the darkly internal nature of generative power, embodied in women everywhere. I have borne children, and nurtured their years of maturing. I have taken to myself the Yang energy of a husband, and know that he has Yin energy of his own, but that mine is in my body as well as my activity.

I am an American.
I believe that the government of the people is necessary, that it should be done by the people, and that it is for the people. I believe in the public good, provided by the public will. I desire public roads, public parks, public education, and public radio. Where we have worked together for the good of all, America has been a noble and kind, as well as an inventive and buoyantly brash nation.

I am an optimist.

And I pray that the spirit of fear which so easily seizes mankind will begin again to recede from our shores.

The young and determined in the countries of the Middle East are waking to their inherent rights as humans. They are taking to the streets, and daring to believe what our founding fathers believed when our Great Experiment of a country began.

I am imagining what the world could be with free people everywhere, and the common good to guide us.

Eggs in One Basket

Yesterday was Septuagesima. Next Sunday will be Sexagesima and the Sunday after that is called Quinquagesima, which is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent, which is the forty days (not counting Sundays) leading up to Easter.

I came into this antique vocabulary as an adult, and I still delight in it like a little kid. The words sound to me like ballet terms (arabesque, coupé dessous, pirouette) or the names of the diacritical marks on a sheet of music. The liturgical terms mean something to the practitioners of the discipline - in this case, it's 70, 60, and 50 days before Easter (which is odd, since a week only has seven days in it). On Septuagesima Sunday, we enter the countdown to Lent - and the kids in that picture are pretty good representations of the moods present at the beginning of Lent in various years.

The annual season of Lent, more than the beginning of the calendar year, is when I take stock. Somehow, since this time last year (whichever year I'm in), I have invariably acquired random piles of stuff. Duties. Relationships. Distractions. About a zillion zillion distractions. Ugh.

It's time once again to sort mental piles, toss distracting clutter, and only keep the eggs that fit in the one, intentionally filled, deliberately chosen basket. Time to stop living in Multitasking Fantasyland, where the illusion of doing several things at once is sprinkled like pixie dust on all the plants and animals, dazzling the eye and dizzying the head, and all we end up doing is spinning and spinning and spinning. Lent reaches out a hand, and I can grab it and stop.

Just stop.

Cease.

Quit.

One little blog has spread under the soil of my world, and shoots have come up in other places. Now there are three blogs, a facebook page, and a newly opened account on SmashWords, where I intend to put some of my writing into the open market. That's too many eggs. Too many sprouts. Too many metaphors for too much distraction.

One little degree has turned into a sprawling, spreading, lolling about, directionally diffuse, too faint and watery in intention, unchanneled. Instead of a river, carrying me on to a place I want to go, I'm sitting in a swampy sort of landlocked wetland. And wetlands are wonderful for wetland-dwelling species. If I wanted to live here, I'd be home. But I don't. So I'm not. I need to dredge a channel and get moving again because it's getting too attractive to disease-ridden pestilence and I need to breathe freely again. (Translation: I need to FINISH my Prior Learning portfolio, turn it in, and get the credit for it. And that's for starters.)

All in all, it's also time to chuck out some of the eggs that looked kind of interesting, or quirky, or familiar from another place and time. I've been going on too many daytrips back down paths I've already walked. It's like a little check for psychic buyer's remorse. Am I glad I went this way? What if I'd stayed there? When I left that place, I was unhappy (or scared, or angry, or hurt) ... was that a good enough reason to leave? Was I overreacting then? Did I miss out?

(Oh, the lure of "You're missing out ... you're missing out ..."!)

(click on that picture! It came from a very cool site called artsyTIME)

We can only remember things from where we were standing at the time. We can only have seen them through our own eyes, interpreted them from our own personalities, our own assumptions. Along the way, we rewrite the memories, re-form the images, re-remember, and incorporate into our lives what we thought we saw when we saw something. It is not a bad idea to go back and check and look with the eyes we now have. Usually, we find that our view was surprisingly incomplete at best.

And then we have to learn that our current view is still incomplete, at least.

So it's clearing-out-time. Remove the eggs and count them. Keep only the one basket. I've only the one life. Eggs that tend toward the rot and disintegration of fear-mongering, contraction, and staying put, contented with conclusions already drawn ... out, out, out. Eggs that still hold the health and life of joy, anticipation, openness and change ... put those in. Keep those.

And maybe in the end, I'll be so sorted out that I won't be conflating eggs in a basket with boating on outa here - with a ballerina added to the cargo. Sheesh! Metaphor muddle: dead giveaway, proof of the need for the annual assessment.

Books I've been thinking about lately

My soldier will be home soon.

The other night, my husband said, "We've been putting a brave face on all of this - but I am going to be relieved when it's over."

Me too.

And she's seen and been near and heard about and dealt with the fallout from so much hideousness that I wonder ... I wonder what part of our country's burden she will deal with. What part of the warrior's sacrifice we will deal with.

See, that's the deal. Soldiers don't just walk off the stage and repair their costumes and then come back into view. While they're gone and we can't see them, they absorb into their bodies and minds a permanent burden of pain. And, as William Blake said, "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." That's the other part about being a soldier that the people at home cannot know. The narrative includes the doubting Thomas and the thrice-denying Peter. Closest friends who don't get it. Betrayal. Abandonment.

In this Eastertide, as we approach Ascension Day on Thursday, I think about the fact that Jesus used his scars as proof. Remember that? Jesus, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, came to earth, and was a helpless baby, and now he bears the scars of our pain. That's the Christian story. He who knew no sin became sin for us.

He showed Thomas the scars. See? he said. It's really me. I am not a ghost. I'm the risen Christ - look where the nails and the spear went in. He could eat with them - feast with them - talk with them - rejoice with them ... but he still held the scars in his body.

Soldiers do that. Even if they come home "without a scratch," they hold in their bodies and minds the pain - the anguish of the world. They bear it for the rest of their lives.

Lots of research has been done lately about post-traumatic growth and health. There is such a thing. I'll be looking into it. I need to know how to process this kind of pain. The story of the restoration of Peter - when Jesus asked him three times, "Peter, do you love me?" - that story is important to me today. Peter was restored. Peter turned from the sword and learned to feed sheep.

Odysseus. And Achilles. Our Lord, too. Permanently changed because of sacrifice and battle. Victory doesn't come cheap. And now I want verbiage. The book covers are linked to sites - just click.

Worth listening to (and try not to panic or react before doing the listening part)

Hm. Let's see if this loads. If you can't hear it from here at my blog, click on it to go to Chicago Public Radio and listen to it there. Frank Schaeffer's interview with WBEZ is a really good one.

Worldview - Atheism and Christian Fundamentalism Miss the Mark on Faith

(Nope. Doesn't load here. If you click on the link, you'll go to WBEZ's "Worldview" - the interview is from back in December)

Beans!

If it's Holy Week,

and it's also the first week of the spring academic quarter,

and you're also scheduled to work as a sub at the library on a couple of days (which means your schedule never settles down to a rhythm for which days are work days),

and you grind your coffee fresh every morning ...

well, it's just a bad idea to reverse where the coffee maker and the coffee grinder sit on the counter. (And while coffee makers have water reservoirs that can be dumped out, the water that comes with the errant coffee beans is not as easily removed from the coffee grinder.)

Just so you know.

Experimentation

Over at the bubbling blog of author Gretchen Rubin, everyone has access to the record of all the research that has gone into her most recent book. This was just about the most publicly interactive bit of research I've ever seen. One day, I hope to follow in her footsteps and do the same sort of research, interviewing people, finding a hypothesis and testing it myself, looking up the science and the art of the thing ... this was really cool to watch as it unfolded. Her "One Minute Movies" are poignantly beautiful - and I love her list of Happiness Myths.

No. 1: Happy people are annoying and stupid. This is an automatic assumption that many people make.

No. 2: Nothing changes a person’s happiness level much.

No. 3: Venting anger relieves it.

No. 4: You’ll be happier if you insist on “the best.”

No. 5: A “treat” will cheer you up.

No. 6: Money can’t buy happiness.

No. 7: Doing “random acts of kindness” brings happiness. The emphasis here is on the word "random."

No. 8: You’ll be happy as soon as you… Falling into the "arrival fallacy" is something that many people (including me) recognize in themselves.

No. 9: Spending some time alone will make you feel better.

No. 10: The biggest myth: It’s selfish to try to be happier.

On a much smaller scale, inspired by Gretchen, I've started to experiment here - in my house - at my desk and in my day. What does it, I'd like to know? What makes a day start right, continue well, and end satisfactorily? It cannot be dependent on the "stuff" that happens in a day. That would be far, far too unpredictable and besides - I've already figured out that it's better to be a stable person than to live in a stable world.

So ... is it breakfast? It would be hard to find a habit more thoroughly documented as healthy. Everyone from WebMD to Mireille Guiliano will confirm that breakfast is essential to a good day.

Is it Morning Prayer? Some form of spiritual orientation in the upcoming day seems essential to mental and emotional health. I once asked my naturopathic doctor how on earth she manages to get through her day. All those people with all those needs - how does she stay clear from their energies? Their burdens? Meditation, she said. Every day she starts with quiet, and reminds herself of her place in the world.

For a long time, I was a bit soured on this concept - it was the "devotions" of the evangelicals that did it to me. I could no longer stand the either the highly emotional and ultimately draining experiences of the "good" days nor the blank and confusing lack of response I felt on the "bad" days. I kept looking for the right reactions - the right responses from inside my soul. Ick.

But ordinary Anglican Morning Prayer is not that sort of exercise. This equates much more closely to the meditation my doctor was doing. This is a first-of-the-day orientation within my life. Under heaven, among men, grounded in my own life. This is the daily playing of scales and practicing of arpeggios a musician does, and the spiritual equivalent of housekeeping. And it makes an enormous difference. ... So ... is that it? Is that the key to the day? (That's me in the blue dress - that's my piano behind me.)

Or ... maybe it's Julie Cameron's "morning pages" that makes the whole thing work. Lately they've been helping me ... and I wonder if they'd help more if I did these pages ... well ... you know ... in the morning. Oh, well. They work any time of the day for me. It's the writing thing I need, like I need water and air and movement and peace. For me, it's not "gotta dance," it's "gotta dash" - as in, dash off some words, scrawl, scribble, write, forge, frame, knock out, bang out, dream up, and pen. Gotta write.

The sun is all the way up now - above the fir trees on the sunrise side of the field. The day has begun. One thing's for sure. If I don't stop observing the day and start living it, it will have passed and no matter how well a day starts we never get a do over. I think I'll go make a protein smoothie and get my prayers said.

Item: Monday

Monday

--- course work to do: rough draft about Six Characters in Search of an Author due on Wednesday, remaining glossary items and annotated bibliographies to do for the Human Studies courses

--- next quarter's registration includes the rest of my PLA work. I'm getting nervous about it

--- packages to mail to Afghanistan today - the soldier wants her running shoes

--- I have posted some thoughts about Anglicanorum Coetibus over at my Anglicanism blog, for anyone interested

--- and I've changed my mind about my senior project. I don't want to write about the topic, "Is Happy Stupid?" -- or, I do want to write about it, but not for that. My Human Sciences courses have opened new doors for me this quarter. Best thing about school this time around: new doors coupled with the courage to open them. This is FUN!

Isn't it interesting

...that the words we use can morph and re-frame and change the "nature of the debate," to use an over-utilized buzz-phrase du jour (straight out of the box, off the rack, and mass produced). We need to start replacing our native phrase "conservative Christian" with the phrase "Christian extremists." This sort of thing is so hateful and so very, very wrong-headed - and this is not an issue of liberal and conservative. This is an issue of extremism and it is the agenda of every extremist who has ever tried to assert that the rest of humanity must submit and obey, regardless of the religion or ethnicity of the extremist at the time. I am a Christian. I have classical Christian values governing my life. I accept the sacramental view of Holy Communion, I obey the Church's "marriage laws" which govern my own sexuality, and by that same Christianity I am thereby obligated to love the people Jesus died for.

I am a white woman, and not a white supremacist. I am heterosexual and have homosexual friends and relatives (and wish that such a distinction between people never came up in conversation - or, at least, not any more frequently than other personal matters). I homeschooled my kids, but not because I wanted to keep them safe from the big, bad world. I homeschooled because I wanted my kids ready to take their places in this world of ours. Christians are not supposed to be conducting a culture war at all! Jesus, in case you are not a Christian and do not know this, wasn't the least bit metaphorical on this matter. He said it outright. "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom was of this world, then would my servants fight." We're not supposed to fight. We're suppose to love. To serve, like the Son of Man himself came to do. We are supposed to be disappearing like salt and leaven, quietly doing good work to the best of their abilities and in our own situations, praying and worshiping, loving and loving and loving. And Christian extremists are hideous parodies of Christianity, in their teaching if not in their personal lives. I apologize to the world on their behalf.

This is where I lay my hat

This is where they know my name
This is where they show me that
I'm not so all alone.

And what's really cool is how well the visitor describes the whole thing!

After Christmas

Two untouched bottles of cola and
the rum was barely breached and
the wrappers from the bits and pieces of
sweets
now pulled crackers and
their prizes
and paper crowns
refolded neatly - set at right angles to the books -
little pointed careful neatness in the mess.

And there was laughing.

I think I may have laughed myself.
But for all of these
and all the other sins I cannot now remember
I beg forgiveness.

The offspring of the Virgin's womb
the boy she bore to live, to love us all
and prove it by a death so brutal and inglorious
the fine exacted punishment for Love.

Last week we called it Christmas.
And I think I laughed.
I know the others did.
I know I cooked. We feasted and we even loved
the brussels sprouts.

The scattered bits and pieces and the dishes
sitting waiting to be cleared
restored to order
quietly
put away privily because I will not
make it public.
I ponder in my heart.

I think I laughed on Christmas.
I know I loved.
I wanted quiet, but the shepherds came.
Of course they did.
The whole of arching, reaching, dark and vaulted
sky was full of angels, and the startled shepherds
had to come.

I have read the story.
I know
what happens next. Here is a little space of time and
quiet so that
the baby grows until another angel brings
a message.
Run!

Gold and frankincense and myrrh and
terror as the blood of babies
drips from soldiers' swords and
Rachael weeps.

This is the One enormous Glory
as it labors and delivers.
This is the stuff of saints and angels.
The innocent and martyred babies, dying,
make their mothers
weep.

The Holy Family flies to refuge
in a place that is not home and do not know
that it will all be right
in the end
after the blood is shed and tears dried up.
They do not know.
They have not seen.
Not yet.

This Christmas

• I made a largely successful, but not universally loved trifle.

• My husband found one first edition, one British edition, and one other very well preserved book to buy me the whole Eliot trilogy, by Elizabeth Goudge. And not satisfied with that, he also found and bought for me a very unusual pearl bracelet!

• The newest consensus on Christmas stockings is this: "Having a stocking is not the important part, Mom. If not having a stocking means less candy, I want a stocking. If having a stocking means less candy, I don't want a stocking." (Santa used bags this year. Momma needs newer, larger, more manly stockings to hang.)

• A person who attended Midnight Mass put a drawing into the offering plate and told my husband, the usher, "This is all I have."

• I got a hand painted cross from one of my Sunday School children ... wrapped in the most amazingly spiraled gift wrap, stuck together with bright blue duct tape.

• The next day, I got a handpainted wooden tulip from another of "my" girls ... I feel very loved, and both handpainted wooden items are now part of my growing Fontanini nativity set on top of my piano. (I got camels and camel accessories this year.)
  

• After getting past the initial surprise that my 23-year-old son would rather go back up to school a week earlier than classes start because he has reading to catch up on, I realized that I am relieved to have a week's space before my classes start. I need to do some weeping, and I can only hold it together for a couple more days.

• My daughter has spent "Christmas" in a convoy in Afghanistan. (Hence, the necessary weeping time.) And that same daughter pretty much provided Christmas for us this year. She shopped online, and the nice delivery men have been greeting our dogs every few days for the last couple of weeks. The ... uh ... "tavern puzzle?" Uh, yeah. Now everyone's irritated by it, and the youngest young giant took it home with him, determined to solve it.
  

• I bought some Armagnac soaked prunes stuffed with foie gras for my husband. He has only eaten one of them. We have two Christmas crackers left. I figure we'll crack the crackers and eat the earthy, fragrant, permeating, gorgeous, rich, decadent little bits of amazingness on our first evening alone in our house again.
  

Ring out, wild bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Compiling Christmas

This was on my Quotations widget on my homepage this morning (without the picture, of course):

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel

I did a search. My brain wasn't clicking on the right name, but I knew the name Arnold Lobel was in the file somewhere. Oh!!! Of course! It's the Frog & Toad guy! Those are the most wonderful books! Now, why didn't I know there was this little volume of verses? My children would have loved this book. I am going to have to go find a copy in the store and add it to my collection soon.

I do not currently have books to the ceiling, books to the sky in my office, however. Well, not really. I mean to say, the books to the ceiling, books to the sky are not the ones that were piled in here a couple of weeks ago because of school. I took all those books back to the library libraries from which they came. Next quarter, the piles will be compiled once again. (Best use of the word "compiled," don't you think? Compiling: verb, indicating an action taken with books, done by a researching student during the school term. Compile: To pile books higher and higher.)

About ten years ago, my daughter once threatened to switch my piles with the piles of a family friend - and then sit back and see how long it would take the two of us to figure out we were working on someone else's piles. (She's got a mean streak, that kid.) There are fewer piles in my house these days, though. I don't think it's less stuff - it's just more selective. Fewer categories of time and attention = fewer piles.

Piles I want to compile in the next few weeks are food piles. I want to make bits of things on sticks and toast dollops of things on little toast triangles, and then pile those up onto pretty plates on the table near the bottles of lovely things to drink. The Great Husband seems to be thinking along the same lines. He just sent me this picture of Stilton-Pear Crostini drizzled with pumpkin seed oil. That's what was on his home page this morning. (You can click the pic for the recipe.) See how the little crostini are piled up? There are only two, and yet the photographer/food stylist person felt the need to pile them. We're in a compiling time of year.

People compile lists of things at this time of the year. Gifts, and shopping items, and people being invited to the party. Soon, it will be annual resolutions - and receipts. My lists of compilation are mostly interior right now. I've been compiling memories and prayers and perspectives, largely due to the fact that I've now got three adult children who are spreading my inner world to four corners of the earth. It's an interesting thing nobody ever told me. If you expand your heart so that your children all have access to it, and yet are not confined by it -- if your heart allows their growth and their comings and goings and successes and failures as theirs, not yours -- then you end up expanded and pried open and broken and renewed much, much larger than you'd ever meant to be. It's very odd.

Right now, there is a pile of UPS and FedEx and USPS boxes compiled on a side table, unopened. I'll open them - wrap them - and that pile, all things sent to us by our soldier daughter, will become the bulk of our presents pile under the tree. It's a lean year - for us, and for a lot of people. Those expansive offspring have also expanded our financial obligations for now, and so their Christmas piles are going to be a collaboration between Santa and their soldier sister, with their parents providing bits of things on sticks -- and duck a l'orange -- so it's not like anyone's doing Christmas with Oliver Twist in a cellar or anything. There just won't be compiled toomuchstuff this year. No one will be sad, I'm sure.

We'll compile heaps of branches and clippings in the middle of the living room floor in a few days. Someone asked me if I was going to buy decorative greenery this year, and I had to tell 'em. I live on forty acres of decorative greenery. I just have to go outside and cut some of it. To that pile, I'll add a whole tree for decorating. That I'll have to buy - but I'll go and pick it out where it stands now, growing in the good Pacific Northwest earth, waiting for me to find it.

Then we'll pile up the boxes of decorations, and somehow, inevitably, there will be people in the living room, leaning to the left and right, watching the television while I walk back and forth between them and it. Why is that? Why is there something on the television when the tree is being decorated? Decorate it at another time, you'll say. Yeah, yeah. The theory's sound, but it just never works that way. It's one of life's mysteries - like the fact that the less distance there is to travel, the more likely you are to be late to an appointment. And when the tree is decorated and the various annually displayed oddments are nested into random bookshelves or perched on picture frames, the boxes will all be compiled in the cupboard for a few weeks until they're filled back up and stored away for the year.

Here we are, at the compiling time of the year. We heap up the piles of This Year's Stuff - or, I do, anyway. Look it over. Set it out where I can see it. Take some of it back to the libraries (seasonal work that's over now), throw some of it away (because some packaging's just packaging and how you learned that or where you did that isn't the point of it), wrap some of it for giving to others (right now, I'm very busy packaging a lifetime's study, learning, experience, and enjoyment for a suddenly larger Sunday School), and some of it gets displayed where everyone can see it.

But some of this year's compiling is private. After the shepherds came to worship the Baby, after they left and noised it all abroad, the Blessed Mother began a life that was about to hold all the pain and difficulty of the best of blessings. That Baby of babies was God, and she knew it. Yet she didn't feel the least bit like following the shepherds out the door to help them prove their story. She didn't show that tiny bundle to the folks in house after house, saying, "See him? This is the Incarnate God! Isn't it wonderful?"

No, the Blessed Mother did something I am very glad the Evangelist included in the story. I'm glad I know about this part. I feel a particular fellowship with her this year. She "kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."

Some compiling is private. This year, on my fiftieth Christmas, pay no attention if you see me cry. I'm just compiling.

Within

This is a view as familiar to me - as deeply a part of me - as my own name. It's the coast of Oregon, where the mountains meet the sea, and it is one of three places where, if I stand within it, I know exactly who I am. I know myself if my bare feet are on that strip of sand; I know myself when I am on my knees in church, and I know myself when I am pouring out my inner life inside my house, lighting candles or dusting and arranging things in the living room, baking in the kitchen, ironing ... or writing. Here. At my desk, with my view outside the window and my computer streaming radio or - finally - when I am all the way, deep inside, when I turn it off because all the sound is coming from inside of me. This morning I realized that the avoidant silliness of, "I work better under pressure," has a sister who tells the truth. I realized that I work better within, deep within, and I work better when the water is moving. And the water does not move unless it is huge. It has to be large enough to respond to the magnetic pull of the moon - it has to have incoming and outgoing tides. The place where writing happens is a place of enormous power, and foam, and rich salt air, and the inconvenience of sand. In my worshiping soul, this means increasing practice and skill at becoming "recollected" when I get to that pew you can see in this picture. It's on the right side. The first wooden end is the front, then the first pew behind that, and then my pew behind that. I kneel down, I collect "all that I am and have," and then, just as if I had gathered up the things themselves and put them all into one place, I step aside. I come to God with all of this, I name some of it (the most present, most worrying, or most amazing at the moment), I refer to the rest, and I step aside. Here it all is, Lord God of Hosts. And here am I. "Be it unto me according to thy word."When I go to the beach, the same gathering - the same recollecting - the same wholeness of self has sandy feet and awareness. When I do the creative parts of keeping a home, I bring my whole self to that too. And today I have realized that the gathering of the whole self is the thing I do when I write. (That photo is from a cool blog I just found called, "Stuff Journalists Like.") Today it dawned on me that it's "the same, only different" when I do this recollective gathering for the purpose of writing.

But now I'm annoyed. I am annoyed and irritated because the fact is that to gather up my whole self for the creative task of writing is really really hard. I don't relax into this. It doesn't feel like release (which is what happens at the beach), and it doesn't feel like presentation and trust (like what happens in church.) No, the recollection necessary for writing feels like sit-ups or plank pose or hiking up a steep hill. Ah! Now, here's a good picture of it. I found this picture at a very lovely (often laugh out loud) blog called Bath Daily Photo. See the cow? Yeah. That's my pile of writing to do. The cow is walking up to St. Michael's Tower, which seems quite perfect to me.The schoolish part of writing has been surprisingly hard, and turning in drafts for other people to see has been and is still really hard. Just finding the tide shift and the momentum I need is hard. This, then, is the definition of difficulty for me. Writing - the thing I love best - the task in which I recognize myself most clearly - this is my difficult thing. Crap. Do you know what I thought? I was actually silly enough to have believed that the thing I loved the best should be one of the easiest things to do. Why? Why would I believe such a goofy thing? I can think of no reason at all - other than just because I'm human. Wishful thinking, maybe? Probably. I hate Plank Pose. But Plank Pose it is, then. Dolphin Plank Pose for me. Holistic, recollected, deep, deep, deep within. Apparently, bringing the whole self is bringing the whole self, whether I do it in prayer, at the edge of the ocean, or in front of a keyboard. C'mon, cow. We have a hill to climb. There are only a few weeks of the quarter left, and I have a lot of writing to do.

Shhh! Don't tell my husband

And for that matter, don't tell my sons either.

I've started listening to Christmas music for part of the day.

I know, I know. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. But it is almost "Stir Up Sunday,"*** and on Stir Up Sunday I have to be ready to stir! And one of the fastest and easiest ways to get ready to do anything is to listen to the right music for it. Music begets inclination, inclination begets planning, planning begets list-making, and list-making begets shopping. And shopping must happen before stirring.

And speaking of planning, I really really really need to make a trip to IKEA. I've burnt up all my candles - or, all the candles that are not those little tinned votive candles. Those little rounds must've had a frisky summer in the drawer because I have zillions of them for some reason. Begetting. That's the only reason I can think of. Candles begetting candles.

I need the box of white candles for my very Nordic looking black IKEA five-candle holder - and I want to add this charming candle holder this year. It's a floor stand for the block candles - a metal one. It's three feet high!!

So ... that's

• block candles
• white candles for the candle stand
• floor stand

...and ironing board. After two decades of hard use, I've actually broken my ironing board. I couldn't have been more surprised if I'd been ironing and suddenly fallen through the floor. (Actually, the longer this house remodel goes on, the less surprising the floor surprise would be. But that's another post.) Does an ironing board count as a household appliance? It'd be my first IKEA household appliance if it does.

I'll add some more votives to my Whole Foods/New Seasons list as well. Those are the real candles that smell like real candles - IKEA candles are for light and fire; real candles are for scent. The WF/NS list is the one that includes high quality dried fruit for the stirring - on Stir Up Sunday - which is on November the 22nd this year - which is the Sunday right before Thanksgiving Day - which is why I'm listening to Pandora's choices for a station called "The Choir of King's College."

But don't tell my husband.

***In the Anglican Church, the Collect for the Sunday before Advent, or the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, which occurs some time in late November, commences ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’, and all over the country this has given the day the colloquial name of Stir-Up Sunday. Brand reports a verse recited by children: ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, The pudding in the pot, And when we get home, We'll eat it all hot’. The day was taken as a marker to advise the housewife to start her Christmas preparations, and the grocer to see to the Christmas stock of his shop (Sussex Archaeological Collections 33 (1883), 252-3).

If you wanted to know

Just a quick note here. I'm attempting to keep the more religious writing over at my small Anglicanism blog, and I have put a statement there about the news this week from the Vatican.