God in the Multitasking

As I wrote this Sunday’s sermon, I settled into my comfortable recliner, where all of my best praying and thinking and writing happens, if I’m not at Starbucks or some other coffee shop.

​I prayed for awhile, okay, a SHORT while, but I had some ideas and was eager to get to my sermon. But first I needed some mood music, some Transiberian Orchestra, so I decided to pair my iPhone with my new wireless speaker that I got on ebay. Once those sweet sounds were pouring out, I got out my iPad to read my favorite commentary on the readings that I get through my email. I got a little distracted by a Levi’s email that offered 20 percent off, and remembered that my order for the jeans I got my sister for Christmas had been cancelled, so I better re-order them while I was thinking about it, so that they would be here by Christmas.

I finally read the commentary, and the ideas I had been having for my sermon took a new tack. “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” came to my mind. Who said that? I Googled the quote, and found a website called the Quote Investigator, which went into great detail about the many people this quote had been attributed to, including John Lennon, who sang it to his son Sean in 1980.

While I was researching this quote, I realized that my iPhone battery was

going to run down if I played my music from it, and since I was going to type my sermon on my laptop, I decided to play the music from my laptop, which was plugged in.  

The problem, I quickly discovered was that I did not have a Pandora app on my Macbook, and there wasn’t one listed in the App Store either. I could have used Spotify, an app I DO have, but I haven’t liked their mix of songs on theTransiberian Orchestra station as much as Pandora’s. 

I opened the Chrome browser and searched for Pandora app for Mac, and found a website I had never heard of that promised me an app, but the app wouldn’t install because I didn’t have the right program on my Mac. I finally decided to just play from the browser, since several minutes had gone by, and I needed to get to my sermon. 

I fiddled around for 10 more minutes and found the Bluetooth connection so I could pair my Mac with my speakers, marveling at modern technology, and how miraculously it could make life so easy.

​Just as I had typed in the words Advent IV Sermon, the music stopped. I no longer had a Bluetooth connection, for some reason, and a dialogue box told me I was no longer on wifi, either. I clicked on my wifi, and it fired back up, and then looked at the Bluetooth connection, which said it was connected to my speakers, but the music was coming out of my laptop, and not the speakers. 

Okay, I thought, I’ll play the music from my iPad, which I can charge tonight, and proceeded to pair it, and get the app running, and music playing again.

​Finally, I sat back into my recliner, and my laptop was now saying that I must install an update of Microsoft Word before it could go any further. This process took another 10 minutes, including having to close out everything that I had open on my laptop such as the previous draft of my sermon. Well, the title, anyway.

​By this time, an hour had gone by since I had started, and as I began writing again, I reflected back on the quote from John Lennon (and the 6 other people who have been credited with saying that “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”)

​What had made me think of that? Oh, yeah, there was something on the commentary I had read. I pulled my iPadover to read the poem by W.H. Auden that had made me totally switch my sermon idea earlier. 

Before I could read the poem, I was distracted by having to “Like” the music that was playing, which meant clicking on the Pandora app, and clicking on the thumbs up icon on the artist’s page. That only took a couple of minutes, but I was now nine minutes past the hour LATER that I had intended to start writing this sermon.

​Ironic, I thought, that this sermon somehow managed to stay intact, as I was distracted by so many other things. It is as it was those 2,000 plus years ago for Mary and Joseph as well. While they were busy traveling to Bethlehem, so Joseph could register in his native land, a baby happened to be born.

​God happened while Mary and Joseph were busy making other plans.

​God entered this world as almost an afterthought, so that ordinary people like you and me might understand that life happens EVEN when we are busy and distracted and getting the To Do list completed, having forgotten to add“Talk to God” to the list.

​What WH Auden said was this to Mary and Joseph: “Blessed Woman, Excellent Man, Redeem for the dull the Average Way, That common, ungifted Natures may Believe that their normal vision can Walk to perfection.”

​There is hope for you and me. God keeps manifestinghimself to us, despite our other plans, our busy schedules, the frenzied modern lives made more complicated by technology and modern conveniences. Rather than allow it to interfere, God slips into our consciousness even as we are multitasking, even as we are making way for something else.

​I have come to trust that the One who came down from his throne in heaven to live an ordinary life knows what it’s like. And though he may not have lived a life of apps and devices and Bluetooth and wifi, he must have faced other aspects of a human life like diaper rash, and stomach aches and sore throats and puberty, and confusing messages about who he was, and having to decide over his parents’ plans for his career to live the life of an itinerant preacher.  Not exactly a safe, secure career to put his parents’ mind at ease. 

And there’s that crucifixion and Resurrection business, which, more than anything, defined his whole life. If it hadn’t been for that, he might have lived in obscurity, and been a blip of God on a world’s very busy radar screen.

​How many other times had God, DOES God appear to us and we don’t recognize the face of God?

​This Advent, while you’re checking off your To Do List, while you’re wondering what all this extraneous activity REALLY has to with God’s Incarnation, remind yourself gently that it is life. And life is what God came to redeem.

What did you go into the wilderness to see?

Sermon Notes -- Dec. 15, 2013
The Rev. Liz Simmons

You decide. Jesus isn't going to tell you what to believe. It's up to you. Jesus isn't even going to make claims about himself that you have to believe without evidence.

When John's followers come to Jesus asking "are you the one who is to come, or are we  to wait for another?" Jesus simply says to them, "Tell John what you see: the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind are restored to sight." You make up your mind if I'm the one you're looking for.

So is he? IS Jesus the one for you? Is he the one you're looking for?

Last week we talked about the needs of the people who came out into the wilderness to see John.

Maybe you related to some of those needs: most of all an aching sense that there must be more to life than one illness or mechanical breakdown or job loss after another, constant busy-ness, or constant alone-ness for others, the repetitive nature of everyday tasks that can become such a drudgery if we AREN'T connected to something greater than ourselves.

Most of us probably don't need our sight restored, or our hearing made whole; most of us don't need to be raised from the dead, but we can all relate to times when we feel as if our SOULS have been deadened by the hardness of life.

And we are reminded today that there is one who can raise us to newness of life. That one is the anointed One, the Christ.

So, how do we go about asking for this healing, this new life that we so desperately need? How do we RENEW a relationship that has already begun, but may have grown stale and distant because of our own inability to put our life in Christ foremost as a priority?

I don't think it takes much at all. God is always waiting by us for some indication that we want God in our lives. We talk about Advent as a time of waiting. Well, God is waiting for us just as much as we are waiting for God.

It's important that we not use our waiting for God to lull us into inactivity and complacency. In the play "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett, the two protagonists Vladimir and Aragon are talking. One says, "Let's go," and the other says "We can't," "Why not?" the first asks, "We're waiting for Godot," comes to answer. Godot, of course represents God, and Samuel Beckett's is a cynical take on the inactivity of the supposedly faithful in response to the mind-numbing sameness of life. To the outsider, faith often looks like a passive response to a seemingly urgent need to respond to problems in life.

We are faced with a dilemma. We are told that "with God, all things are possible," and yet, feel a need to respond to the problems ourselves. When do we get in the way of God's work? When do we let our own pride claim the credit for what God has done through grace? And when are we being too passive in the face of God's hurting children?

This Advent, we must take stock of what we see. When has God responded to a need of yours in ways you knew were not of this world? When has God asked you to step up and be the healing hands in God's world? What was the difference between the two of them?

Easter Reflections on Good Friday, or is it Good Friday Reflections on Easter?

The hardest part of Holy Week is having to write my Easter Vigil sermon on Good Friday, after very solemn worship, in the midst of real grief of what it is we human beings did to God when we crucified Jesus. Maybe other clergy are much more disciplined, and can get all of their Holy Week sermons done ahead of time, so they can focus on the week, but I have never been able to manage that.

And so this year, once again, I find myself empathizing with the disciples, in their FIRST experience of the crucifixion of their friend, lord and master. I say first experience, because for the rest of us, WE know how the story turns out. We KNOW there will be a happy ending, but if we are really living the liturgies freshly, through the anamnesis of sacred time, we still feel that wrenching of our emotions as we shout "Crucify him!" on Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

If we are self-aware, and have used Lent as a time to examine our consciences, we know that we are capable of the fear and fickleness that would lead us to demand Jesus' crucifixion, to betray him to the authorities, and to deny him when others identify us as his followers.

And so Good Friday is a hard time to write an Easter sermon.

Not to go from the completely sacred to the outrageously mundane, I once had to preach at the Easter vigil on the same day that my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, lost in the semi-finals of the NCAA basketball tournament. It didn't help that they lost to the local team of my parishioners, and I had sworn my allegiance from the pulpit just a couple of weeks earlier. To get so CLOSE to winning it all, and to be beaten while I sat in a sports bar with one other friend pulling for UNC as everyone else was wildly cheering for the enemy, was a very real experience of heart wrenching, and I am embarrassed to admit, not any less than the heart wrenching I feel today on Good Friday, trying to conjure up conviction for the Good News of the Resurrection.

And so this day, I begin with the disciples' approaching the tomb after they have probably wept all night, wondered if it was all a lie. Even though Jesus had told them this would happen so that God could be glorified, I imagine that they had no clue what that might look like. When I have gone through the agony of the death of someone I have loved -- when my mother died, and later my husband -- I could not have been comforted by the words, "Someday, you will be wiser for this experience." Thank God no one said it to me!

Even as a person of faith, a person raised in the church, who (currently) believes with every fiber of my being in the Resurrection that ALWAYS follows crucifixion, I could not have been comforted by the reminder that my loved ones would be raised with Christ. It is and was true, and will always be true, but when we are in the midst of grief, such words are like the women's words to the rest of the disciples when they told them that they had seen the risen Christ: "these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." (Luke 24:11)

It takes awhile for the realization to sink in. And we want to see for ourselves. And so, each of us must roll away the stone from her own heart, and let the Risen Christ be known to her. Again and again and again. That's why we have liturgy. That's why we must walk through Holy Week EVERY year, and come out in Easter, starting in the darkness of the Easter Vigil, when we are like those first disciples approaching the tomb, with its rolled away stone.

But first I have to get through Good Friday.

A Rest Stop of Joy Along the Way

Why is it so hard to trust the good times? Why is it that I see the dark nights of doubt and fear as real, and the good times of grace-filled days, the days full of good conversations and joyful laughter as short stopping points along the way, on a long journey full of struggle and heartache?

This past month has been packed full of hard work, but it has flowed gracefully, with the help of many angels along the way. I said goodbye to my parish of three years -- St. Luke's in Racine, WI: I packed up all of my too-many possessions; and I arrived at the huge rectory of my new parish -- another St. Luke's, in Jamestown, NY -- where I will be the interim rector for a year or so, however long it takes them to find the next rector in their search.

I arrived here just in time for the vestry and the youth group and the Bishop Overs Guild -- made up originally of all the working women in the church, and named after a missionary bishop who ended up settling in Racine -- to have their Christmas parties, so in 10 days, I attended three parties, two meetings and one choir practice. One of those parties was held at the rectory. (Yes, the same rectory that had just received all of my belongings only two weeks earlier.) So, when I wasn't attending meetings and parties, and trying to check in to the office enough to let them know that I WAS here, I was trying to get the public spaces of the rectory clear of boxes, and eventually decorate for Christmas.

All of this was tiring and stressful, but a lot of FUN after not having enough to do in my small parish in Racine, WI.

Already, in less than a month, St. Luke's-J has allowed me to tamper with two long-standing traditions: their Advent Service of Lessons and Carols, which I moved to the Sunday after Christmas, and the singing of "Silent Night" as the very last thing on Christmas Eve, which I moved to the place of the post-communion prayer, and then had the lights come up and sent them out with the uplifting and sending forth of "Joy to the World." We don't need sleepy and subdued people going out into the world. How's that message going to catch fire and attract new people?

But much credit to them for rolling with the changes. If this is a sign of things to come, this parish is open and ready to meet the challenges of a world that looks at church suspiciously, and without much respect. Not to say that I blame the world, after the messes the church has created with its clumsy theology and its claims to have ALL of the truth and ALL of the salvation -- whatever that means.

So, I find myself at another beginning, and it looks promising. I cannot be considered for rector of this parish; it's in my contract, which frees me to be bold and prophetic and not have to please specific people (well, not for long anyway), which is how it should be anyway for priests and pastors. Somewhere along the line, we began to worry about tenure and keeping our jobs, instead of speaking the hard truth in love. Some of my gifted, long-tenured colleagues have learned to do that. Me? Not so much. Too often, I find myself bursting with the urgency of what needs to be said, and don't always say it gracefully, or at the right time.

But for now, I'm going to enjoy this rest stop of fun and energy and promise of joyful Good News in a parish that seems open to the workings of Ms. Holy Spirit.

California Highway

Someone must have praying for me. Good praying, I mean, not the sanctimonious prayer of some, where the person tells God what the prayee NEEDS (in their opinion). No, this one was coming from someone who knew me enough to want me to have God present to me during my pilgrimage-on-the-California-highways instead of my pilgrimage in Ireland, where I wasn't because I have no discipline and cannot save money. I didn't even have the money to be doing this camping trip which was really a pilgrimage of the .... you get the picture.

Doogie and I (Doogie is my Westie and soul mate) set out one early morning in May for San Diego, and planned to camp there two nights before heading up the coast to Oceano Dunes, stay there for two nights, and then get up to San Francisco. Then over to Tahoe or Utah, and down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon or through Flagstaff. I was going to be flexible and open, because I don't get to do that in my work as a parish priest enough (you know how those people can be; they are more interested in schedules and actually following the schedules than they are about being spontaneous in the spirit!).

Except that someone whispered doubt into my ear just before I left... and so I abandoned the trip midway, and it could have been a complete failure.

But somebody must have been praying for me.

After two good nights and a full day of dog beaches and dog friendly shops and cooking over a gas stove in San Diego in between, we hit the road for Oceano Dunes. I was prepared to ditch this portion and find a plan B. Oceano Dunes -- I had read and they didn't exaggerate -- was one huge camping and ATV beach. I envisioned 20 -some people on quads zipping all over the beach, up and down the dunes, and the possibility that there wouldn't much privacy. I was going to listen to my gut (Ms Holy Spirit herself) to see if it felt safe there. I shot up I-5 from the campsite because it was close by, and decided I would just bear down and get through Los Angeles as quickly as possible using sheer stupidity. As with every big city, there were many detractors telling me how many hours it would take me to get through the traffic.

It wasn't that bad, really. Except that bearing down and ramming through is one of the best ways to miss the scenery, which I KNOW wouldn't have happened if I had gone on the Ireland pilgrimage with Gil Stafford and his group. One of the stated principles of his group "Peregrini," which, from what I vaguely remember from seminary, has something to do with traveling, is that you should NOT miss the scenery.

Fortunately, I came to myself like the son in the story of the generous father (also known as the prodigal son), and got off I-5 a little after lunchtime to take the 101 toward the ocean. The 101, I found out later, has a worse repurtation than LA for its notorious traffic snarl-ups. Or "parking lots" more accurately.

I finally got off at a sign that said "Beach Traffic" or something similar, and parked it in a shopping center with interesting shops. After letting Doogie pee and smell a couple of unhealthy-looking trees in the parking lot, I took him to Starbucks and parked him with a scruffy looking guy that looked like he would throw down his life if someone tried to take Doogie from him so I could pee and smell the coffee in my own parking island of caffeine. (okay, that's over the top...)

Doogie and I sat grateful not to be moving and grateful not to be in the sweltering Arizona heat, and we people watched. Within sight of the shopping center was a middle class neighborhood; hell, I might have even been able to afford a house there if it wasn't California or Arizona. I got out my Atlas and tried to figure out where we were. We had been driving five hours by then, and I realized how silly I had been originally to think I might be able to get to San Francisco in one day. I was even beginning to wonder if we would get to Oceano before it got dark, but had re-discovered daylight saving time there in California. We don't do DST in Arizona; there is no need to inflict MORE daylight when the hottest temperatures soar even higher on our time off when our employers are not paying the AC bill.

I had missed the signs saying where we were. I have full-blown ADHD, but that usually doesn'y apply to traveling. I'm more like

Preparing for the Upside Down Kingdom

Sermon – Sept. 23, 2012

One of my favorite pictures is of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama hamming it up at the camera, both with big smiles on their faces. They look almost impish in their grinning, as if they are up to something mischievous.
It is my favorite image of two of the holiest people of our time, and I guess for me, laughter is an essential ingredient of holiness.
I once heard that laughter is the shortest distance between two people, so if God is love, then God must laugh a lot.
So Jesus must have laughed a lot as well. At lunch the other day with the Llanases and Betty Marquand, we got talking about just that: Jesus laughing,  and I told of a painting that I had seen of The Laughing Christ. Well, it turns out that there are several paintings of Jesus laughing, but I downloaded the one I liked best. Here it is.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to instill in his disciples the kind of humility it takes to be a servant leader, an upside down version of what the world sees as leadership. Instead of a warrior king who would be Messiah by bringing political power to the Jews, Jesus tries to help them see that “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Then he takes a child, puts it on his lap and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and welcomes the one who sent me.”
The only other time Jesus mentions children is in the Gospel of Matthew, when he says ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
It’s important to acknowledge that Jesus was probably talking about becoming child-LIKE and not being child-ISH. The disciples are being child-ISH when they are arguing about who is going to sit on Jesus right and left hands.
Instead, he is probably talking about holy qualities of an innocent, natural child. that would best prepare us for the upside down world of the kingdom, where servants are valued over the powerful of the world, where the last in line get to be first, where the meek inherit the earth, and where those who are willing to die to their egos are given true life.
What qualities will it take to prepare us for such a kingdom?
Certainly, the ability to laugh easily, but not AT others’ foibles, but at our OWN sense of importance. The person who can laugh at himself when he feels slighted, and say ironically “Obviously you don’t know how important I am” is someone who will feel at home in the kingdom of God.
The next qualities come right out of the prayer that we say just after a child is baptized, when we pray that he or she will be given “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
An inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.
All of these qualities embrace the gifts God has given us, and embrace the world as if life is an adventure, and there is trust that God will be there all along the way. And there’s JOY, without which life can get pretty dusty, pretty bitter. A Christian without joy is a contradiction of all Jesus taught, and if God is truly at the center of our lives and our being, joy should always be close at hand.
Finally, Jesus valued everyone equally, regardless of status or wealth. It is a very childlike quality to say to someone, “I’m coming to your house for dinner!” as Jesus did more than once. There is a trust in the goodness in other people’s hearts, because your own heart is pure.
Okay, so most of us don’t have pure hearts. But we can at least act a little more trusting, a little more joyful, wondering in the discoveries we might find.
The 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi tells the following story about a young man seeking advice asks to speak to someone wise.  The villagers point to a man playing stick-horse with children.  “He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.”  During their conversation the young man asks the wise man why he hides his intelligence. The man answers, “The people here want to put me in charge.  They want me to be judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts.  The knowing I have doesn’t want that.  It wants to enjoy itself.  I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” The following words are from the middle of the poem.
Knowledge that is acquired is not like this. Those who have it worry if audiences like it or not.  It’s a bait for popularity.  Disputational knowing wants customers.  It has no soul.  Robust and energetic before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there.

Chew quietly your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish.  Your face will turn rosy with illumination like the redbud flowers.  -Rumi   1207-1273
 translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
 The Essential Rumi

If that doesn’t speak to you, maybe this thought will. I recently read a poster that said, “If you haven’t grown up by age 50, then you don’t have to.”
Now, let’s go and have some fun at a picnic!

Send Me Tough Angels

"I am not asking you
 to take this wilderness from me,
to remove this place of starkness
where I come to know
the wildness within me,
where I learn to call the names
of the ravenous beasts
that place inside me,
to finger the brambles
 that snake through my veins,
to taste the thirst
that tugs at my tongue.
But send me
 tough angels,
sweet wine,
strong bread:
just enough."
(Jan Richardson, In Wisdom’s Path)

It seems I must go through the wilderness again.

St. Luke's is running out of money and will not be able to afford a full-time priest after September of this year. We had bought ourselves some time with an aggressive pledge campaign, increasing our total pledges by $25,000 for 2012. We crunched numbers, cut programs drastically, cut back the hours on already very part-time cleaning people, parish administrator, and facility repair guy. The biggest line-item in the budget is the clergyperson.

So I brought it up first. "You can't afford a full-time priest. You don't NEED a full-time priest. The parish doesn't need to go anywhere, but you need to get creative about how you can be the church without a full-time priest." They were all quick to come to my defense. "We need you." Those not as worried about my feelings, but concerned about how this might "look" said, "we will die if we don't have a full-time rector."

Of course this is not true. More and more parishes in the country, in mainline churches all over, are going to part-time clergy. Unfortunately, it can't be me. I have no savings, no other sources of income that will allow me to work part-time. The careers I had before seminary have now moved on without me, and my credentials have expired, the places I worked have closed or changed hands, the supervisors are elsewhere.

 So I am back in the job search again. And though I have gone through this wilderness place before, the demons come back, the temptations can still get their claws in me, and pull me into their haunting cruelty. "This is not going to look good on your resume. Two years in one place. A year in another. Now less than three years here. How's it going to look?"

 Oh, I know that one well. "How's it going to look?" Some people can be very cavalier about this idea. "Who cares what others think?" they ask. Those people have never been on the other side of an interview, or waiting for a response from a job application, or had someone with power over them question if it is something THEY did that created these questionable items on their resume. It is an upper middle class white person's luxury to be able NOT to care, and it is becoming scarce even among this population as "downsizing" makes its way into our daily lexicons.

And so I count on the Holy Spirit, who works in ways that aren't bound by tradition or appearances or worth in the world's ways of measuring worth. She will send those tough angels for support and reassurance when resumes are ignored, when emails are sent saying "you aren't a good fit," when phone interviews fall flat. And she will (and HAS) opened the right doors, the right hearts and ears of a search committee somewhere out there with a parish who needs the gifts of a quirky but faithful woman of God who preaches from her heart, teaches with passion and curiosity, gives deep spiritual guidance and touching pastoral care, who may not keep all the balls in the air from dropping, but has enough humility and self-effacing humor to admit it.

 "Send me tough angels, sweet wine, and strong bread. Just enough."

Reflecting on that First Good Friday

I always imagine the first Good Friday as cloudy, with a dark threatening sky. One version of the crucifixion story says that the sun was blocked and that there was an earthquake, even. Others have cited evidence that there was actually an eclipse. We don’t really know, but it couldn’t have been a nice day.

I also feel for the disciples on that tragic day. Imagine giving everything up, your family, your home, your job, to follow someone who was so charismatic, so inspiring that you KNEW he was someone special, and then watching as he is arrested very publicly, dragged before the authorities, accused of blasphemy, and executed.
Not only would you have felt in danger yourself, as one of his followers, of being arrested yourself, but you would have questioned whether he was really who he said he was.

We know the rest of the story. We know how everything he told them was true, how he warned them that this was going to happen. It all makes sense to us because we know the whole story, from beginning to end. We may even feel a certain impatience with the disciples for being so thick-skulled and not understanding, but those last days, those emotional days before the execution of Jesus must have been incredibly confusing.

One minute they are preparing for the Passover feast, renting an upper room to gather for the Seder meal, even riding into town on a donkey, with the crowd getting caught up in the event like they KNEW this Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. “Blessed is he that comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” they all chimed in. The disciples must have felt proud to be associated with him, shooing away people who got too close, the children who wanted to ride with him, the women who must not touch this man of God.

How could it have gone from that to THIS so quickly? Now they are left to sort it all out, scattered from each other in fear, cowering in hiding places all over the city while their Lord was being nailed to a cross.

The women, the Marys, stayed anyway. Jesus’ mother, another Mary, and Mary Magdalene, whom some said was Jesus’ favorite--they all stayed with him at the cross, kneeling on the ground, sobbing openly.

And John, the beloved disciple, who looked younger because he had no beard, risked his own safety to be there with the women. The guards paid no attention to the grieving group. They were looking for weapons, for signs of an uprising by the followers of this troublemaker Jesus. They were having their lunch using the cloak they had stripped from Jesus as a tablecloth.

They were too busy trying to look fierce and do the bidding of Caesar’s army to notice the interaction between the four stragglers and Jesus, who was telling John to look out for his mother as if she was his own. “Behold, your son,” Jesus also told Mary, of John, knowing that John could not replace him as her son, but would remind him, in his love for Jesus, of all that Jesus had tried to do.

But Mary cannot be consoled so easily, although she had suspected for awhile that this time was coming. Hadn’t someone warned her that her heart would be grieved? When they told her what a great man her son would become, hadn’t they also told her that first there would be sorrow?

John, too, felt as if his heart would break. He had seen and understood so much of what Jesus had said, that as the Son of God Jesus was one with the Father. Couldn’t he have used that power to destroy these soldiers, to save himself from this horrible death?

But Mary Magdalene knew this could not happen. He had said that the temple would be destroyed, and that Jesus would rebuild that temple in three days. He was speaking of himself, Mary realized at that moment when the sky was at its darkest, as Jesus breathed his last breath. And at that moment she resolved to be there when he returned.

A Transformative Peace

Over the last 25 years that I have attended Holy Week services, I have learned that the experience is powerful, transformative, and more moving than I could even anticipate.

There have been Holy Weeks that I have come to with things on my mind, outside disturbances that weighed on me heavily, even a resistance to the experience at times, and despite myself, have been swept up in the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil when we have done it, and of course, Easter Sunday, which is always made more glorious for having walked through the events earlier in the week.
It is not an easy walk. Maybe we should advertise a disclaimer, like we do with dramatic television shows: “Viewers may find this disturbing,” or “Warning: Viewer discretion is advised.”

After all, we are walking with someone through the last days and moments before his execution. That it is our God who is being executed makes it that much more disturbing. Many people, MOST people choose to stay away, to look away at the most painful moments, just as many of Jesus’ disciples ended up doing at the last.

We who are courageous enough to be here do so for many reasons: out of a sense of obligation or loyalty to a God who has walked with US through tragedy; because we believe that our God NEEDS US at this time of need; because we know that there is more going on than just empty worship.

This time of year, more than any other, is an experience of ANAMNESIS, of re-living the walk to the cross, and not just telling the story. If it was merely a re-telling, we could all read our Bibles in the comfort of our living rooms.

But here is one place where our liturgical tradition gets it SO RIGHT: by physically touching and consuming the bread and wine, by solemnly carrying out the furniture and decorations from the altar, we are RE-LIVING Jesus' last experiences. We are living out in our BODIES Jesus’ beginning the Eucharist, his command to “do this to remember me.” When we strip the altar, we are physically participating in Jesus’ stripping before he is hoisted on the cross and nailed to his death.

And sometimes we are even willing to allow someone to wash our feet, and turn and wash another’s feet, though proud Episcopalians have resisted this over and over, perhaps out of embarrassment over the ugliness of feet, or out of distaste for having to “do as I have done” even if Jesus DID say it.

Tonight is a time of sadness and a time for the hope of possibility as well. If Jesus is asking us to REMEMBER him, then he must mean that his Spirit will be there for us. If Jesus is asking us to love others as he has loved us, to do what he has done, then there’s much more to the story.

This is merely the end of one chapter, with more to follow. Of course we know that.
But before we can have Resurrection, we must first have death.

The world, and all of the people who avoid Holy Week, want us to fast forward through that death part, to avoid the pain and sorrow that comes from any ending. Tonight is not a Hallmark Hall of Fame sort of event. It is too complex; there are too many conflicting emotions, and the naked reality of sorrow and betrayal and torture, and yes, promise.

Which is why Jesus says almost ironically just before he is taken away, “Peace is my last gift to you; my own peace I leave with you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.”

This is not a peace which says emptily, “everything is going to be okay,” as some would have us say. This is a peace which passes all understanding. This is a peace which says, “everything is NOT okay, but you will be okay, because God is with you.” It is the sort of peace which will get you through ANYTHING, even death upon a cross.

A Return from the Wilderness

It is now 2 years after my experience in unemployment wilderness, and I finally surface to give an update. My time and energy has been spent on moving to a new city (Racine, WI), starting as rector of a parish (St. Luke's, Racine), settling into a cute bungalow and exploring the city, until two months in, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

My usual routine when I move into a new city was altered as I focused on all the medical details, which I blogged about in CarePages for the last year. I am now overjoyed to report that I am "dancing with NED (No Evidence of Disease)", as my oncologist put it. Yes, God saw fit to put me in the care of an oncologist who is also a mystic and very spiritual: Dr. Michael Mullane.

Now, on the other side of chemotherapy and radiation and baldness, my hair has grown back curly, and I quickly revert to routines. I am still not ready to proclaim what I learned from the experience of cancer. In some ways, the experience of being on the prairie, in the wilderness of not knowing if I was going to run out of money or ever find another job, was much more difficult than cancer.

But I don't want to minimize anyone else's experience of cancer. I just found that having cancer was one of those struggles that I could easily share publicly. People expressed a lot of compassion and yes, some pity, but it was so much more acceptable than being unemployed, or struggling with depression, or having financial problems. The problem with going through more shameful (according to society) life experiences is that it isolates you. I found the same thing with the death of my husband Ernie, after about six months. People feel awkward and don't know what to say, so the tendency is to quit talking about what's happening. They don't ask, so you don't tell.

It's interesting that I did not feel isolated during my time on the prairie, any more than I felt isolated going through cancer. There are some high-powered pray-ers out there, and I have learned to cultivate the ones whose prayers I can feel. I'm not sure I'm one of them. I confess that I forget to keep praying for people. I make a point, when someone asks me to keep them in my prayers (a natural thing to ask your priest!) to say to God, "Take care of them and bless them, and help me to remember to pray again."

And so, there were high-powered pray-ers who were thinking of me, and there were people who checked in on Facebook, and there were others who met me for lunch halfway between Loveland and Boulder, and that meant so much. Because isolation, or estrangement, or alienation of whatever way you experience disconnection from others' care is ultimately a victory for the Dark Side.

I have been encouraged to take up this blog again, and I do so a bit timidly. When I was interviewing for the position of rector of St. Luke's, one of the parishioners Googled my name, and found my blog post about "Unemployment Wilderness." My blogging style is to be pretty candid and revealing about my own struggles of faith and confidence and God's work in my life.

This parishioner was alarmed that the person they were looking at to be their next rector didn't have the confidence to lead a parish, and so he contacted the Bishop's office. Fortunately, the Canon to the Ordinary who read my blog liked what he read, and I was hired anyway, but I wondered if I should risk putting my thoughts and struggles in such a public place.

It is something to consider for every one of us who decides to be honest in a public way. How much is appropriate, and how much is necessary to be authentic? What thoughts are helpful to others and what needs to be kept private, between a close friend or therapist?

The ultimate purpose of any writing is to bring us as human beings closer to each other through shared experience, thought, and culture, or to provide insight through different experiences, thoughts and culture from our own.

In addition, my hope is that through my being honest, it will bring you, the reader, closer to yourself.

Temptations in Unemployment Wilderness

Almost three weeks into the gift and blessing of my "hermitage", being in the wilderness does not seem so hard. I wonder if Jesus felt this way at some point during his time in the wilderness just after he was "driven out" by the Holy Spirit. (I sometimes wonder what the Holy Spirit drives: a Honda Accord, so people could say they were all together in one accord?). Of course Jesus did not have the option of driving into town to go to AA meetings, or coffee shops for internet access, or lunch with good friends when the isolation was too great.

But if I can put myself in the same company as Jesus, I do believe I have been tempted in this wilderness of unemployment that I've been in. And as all spiritual lessons seem to come in threes, I, too, feel I have had three different temptations.

The first temptation I experienced was the temptation to be a victim. After that first breathtakingly bewildering experience of realizing, oh my god, I won't have an income soon. I don't know what I'm going to do to "make a living", there is the overwhelming urge to run around screaming from the rooftops, and get others to say oh my god with you. Since it was the church that I was talking about, I knew it wouldn't be hard to find people (who later found me) who would say, "I wouldn't think the church would lay off anyone," as though the church was somehow exempt from the rules of economy, and that when the church's expenses were greater than its income, a God-flow of money would just fill its accounts again. This type of thinking was what got me in this position in the first place: people who considered the church a place for solace and comfort, but didn't feel responsible to help keep it afloat financially.

One woman in AA actually said in a meeting, "wow, it's bad when you get fired by God," which made me laugh, but touched a really deep fear deep inside me that God was trying to tell me I should leave the church and the priesthood, and that if I didn't, it was like someone in an abusive marriage who stayed in the marriage out of fear of the unknown and the fear that the real world was a lot scarier than anything the relationship could dish out. I still don't know for sure that this is NOT God at work, but friends who seem to see things deeply keep steering me away from this thought, and keep telling me I AM a good priest, and the church needs me.

But this reassurance did not keep the second temptation at bay: the temptation to believe that I am not of value if I d not have a job. Now, this is probably a very common belief in our culture. What we DO, how much we MAKE, how many people we INFLUENCE, how much power we have is the way the world measures a person's worth. But I'm a spiritual person who believes in God's love, and tells people all the time that they are ALREADY loved by God before they ever get out of bed and make a dent on the problems of the world. We can't earn that love, and we are priceless by our very being alive. I tell other people that, but when the rubber meets the road, or when the fears come and roost, the temptation is to feel a lot more like a failure than a beloved child of God.

This particular temptation has taken an interesting spiritual twist, though. I know, even at the heart level, that I am worth more than just what I do. Where I feel as though I don't measure up is that right now I am not contributing any work with the poor or comforting someone who is feeling downtrodden, or giving BACK to the world. I fear that I will become a self-absorbed narcissist who does not care about the needs of the world, which by any standards are worse than anything I am experiencing. We liberals do believe, more than we might like to admit, in a works righteousness world. And it comes back to bite us.

The third temptation hasn't hit full force right now, but every once in a while I can see it peeking up over the mountains surrounding my hermitage. That is the temptation to despair. You could say that so far, I keep telling myself not to go there, not to allow myself to entertain the thought that maybe I'm supposed to experience going completely broke, or the humility of having to work at Walmart, or even having to declare bankruptcy and give up my dogs and go to live in a shelter. Why shouldn't I? There are certainly plenty of people who have had to do this, and God doesn't love me any better than them, so why not me?

There. It's out there. I named it, and it makes a lot of sense, rationally. So do the worst of temptations in our various spiritual wildernesses. They are cold, hard and rational, and don't leave any room for grace or miracles or people who swoop in generously like the friends who are letting me stay in their home right now. I'm also doing my part, and applying to every position for which I might remotely qualify in the church, on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com and even Boulder County unemployment, which I don't qualify for, by the way, because the church doesn't pay in to unemployment insurance, because the church almost never lays anyone off, I guess. Don't get me started; it might set me off into being a victim, which I was hoping I had left behind me securely.

A hummingbird hovers just outside the window, vainly searching for nectar in my ceramic pepper plants, a souvenir from Arizona where I lived 12 years. She darts off as I turn to look at her, just inches away. The wind rustles the leaves of the birch tree planted just off the deck. It will be a warm day, in the upper 80s, and I laugh to myself, realizing that I now think that is hot.

In this second week of life in my hermitage, I am feeling very creative. I had gotten settled quickly into the 2000 square foot home, occupying only the family room and a bedroom, and bringing only the basics for the kitchen. Already I had had to buy an iced tea pitcher, a basting brush so I could marinade meat as I cooked it on the gas grill I had decided to bring. It was like a summer bungalow in some ways, and I liked the free feeling not having so much stuff gave me.

The rest of my possessions were crammed into a Packrat container, one of those portable steel storage containers that can be loaded onto a truck and put into a warehouse until I know where I’m going next. Unless it’s Hawaii, I remind myself. If I end up at Christ Church in Kealakekua, they will have to unload and re-pack my things into wooden crates and ship it across the Pacific. I try not to project too far, even as I feel a slight tinge of excitement. I imagine the older congregation on the “Big Island” as being a little less driven, more appreciative of the things I am experiencing during my hermitage and its slowed down pace. Maybe that’s why God sent me here, I think to myself. To get me ready for Hawaii.

Or there is Rochester, NY, also Christ Church. I have a phone interview with them tomorrow evening, and will have to go into Loveland to make sure I have phone reception. I had decided to use only a cell phone and not get a land line, but found it impossible to get a connection many times each day. My ability to communicate was dependent on having enough “bars” on my phone – at least two, and even then that didn’t guarantee that a conversation wouldn’t be cut off in mid-sentence because the satellite or something shifted slightly.

But this morning I am appreciating the chance to pray, meditate, read, write. I had never had so much time alone, despite the fact that I had lived alone for most of the last nine years since my husband’s death. This was different though, being 15 miles from the nearest wifi connection, 18 miles from All Saints Episcopal Church in Loveland that I had attended Sunday. Sitting here in my recliner in the family room of 14151 N. County Rd. 27, I could see two houses, but mostly just green foothills, and the hummingbird and birch tree.

In the quiet spaciousness, the only sound is the breeze rustling the leaves of the birch. In such openness, it was not hard to imagine a universe with vast possibility. Who knew what my future would bring me? For now it seemed God wanted me to be receptive to the possibilities outside my door.

Summer Breezes and Winds of the Spirit

Theo, my Westie, trots ahead on the dirt road, happily sniffing the various thistles and plants along the way. I do not know their names yet. It is my first full day in my “hermitage” as I am calling it, and I am exploring the 70 acres on which the house sits that my priest friend and his wife are letting live in.

It has been almost three months since I was let go from my position as assistant rector at St. John’s because the budget needed to be balanced. The severance they offered me would run out the end of this month. The parish had been generous and had taken up a collection for a “purse” as well, and I have figured that it would last me another couple of months since I did not have to pay rent. I have this deep abiding sense that I will be okay, that something will materialize from the applications I had sent out on line, applications I had filled out for various parishes, Hospice chaplain positions, a couple of addictions treatment chaplain positions.

Like the sparsely planted plains and hills spread out before me as I walk down the road, the responses to my appeals had been few. Of 20 packets of information I sent out to parishes listed in the Church Deployment Office Positions Open Bulletin, I had never heard anything from several; I had been told by more than half of the parishes that they would be in touch once they collected all of the applications; and of those, five had eventually sent polite form letters saying that I was no longer being considered for the position. I was still waiting, though not very optimistically, to hear from a few more. I would send out another batch of applications this week

Perhaps it was the summer, when most church employees take vacation, that had slowed down the process for so many people. Almost as a reminder of that fact, I feel perspiration trickling behind my ears, as my head begins to sweat characteristically. Or perhaps it was General Convention, our national convention held every three years, and which was attended by every bishop and deployment officer for every diocese. Diocesan business would have ground to a halt around the country during the legislative gathering. It was over now. Maybe I would hear something from one of the remaining parishes.

I did not expect them to realize the urgency of my need for a job. This was not really “their” problem. But being the church… I caught myself in the midst of what was beginning to seem like a very naïve way of looking at life in the church. If anything, it seemed, being the church meant that we operated less efficiently AND less empathetically than organizations in the secular world. I would no longer continue to insist that maybe this time the church might be pastoral in its response to my being unemployed.

Passing the manure pile where my friends had dumped their wheelbarrows when cleaning out the barn, I catch a whiff of the sweet/acrid waste. Jesus had a preference for those cast out and in the margins, those considered unclean and rejected by the world.

Watch it, I tell myself as I enter into the territory of self-pity. I cannot not afford to go there, for my spirit, nor for my motivation to discern where God was calling me next. But I feel embraced by something hidden, even as a luscious summer breeze plays itself around me. God is there. And for now, that is enough.

New Life and a Presidential Election

In his poem "The Cure at Troy," Seamus Heaney writes "Call the miracle self-healing; the utter self-revealing double take of feeling... someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime that justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme."

"...New life at its term..." It feels as if many around me are caught up in the hope, "the outcry," "the birth-cry" of hope for change, a word which unfortunately has gotten tired in itself from sheer repetition. But add to the hope of presidential change, and financial change, even change in the way we sell cars (hopefully? is it too much to ask?) it is Advent for some Christians, a time when birth-pangs and cries in the wilderness resonate and promise to bring about revolutionary change. Because if we don't believe that each coming of Christ brings about revolution, why are we wasting time reading the Gospel and celebrating the Eucharist, where every sacramental act is an earth-shaking offering of God's power visited on our earthly selves?

This last several months leading up to this presidential election saw young people pounding on doors for voters to come out and be counted, and retirees who had once been active in the peace marches and picket lines of the 60s, but had grown jaded and discouraged suddenly bursting again with new hope for the future of our country. If nothing other than that sheer hope I joined in. Me, one of the products of the "Me Generation" who had sold out the legacy of the 60s for our MBAs and economic pragmatism and guzzling gas in our SUVs and Ford F-250s. And while I was never wealthy enough to completely sell out, I got caught up in the self-analysis and psychological entitlement that comes from worrying more about my inner child than about the starving child in Africa, focusing more on self-empowerment than empoweringthose in Second and Third World countries.

If nothing else comes out of the election of Barack Obama than making history, at least it can be said that the generations of the 60s and 70s got caught up in the idealism of Gen-Xers, and many people, the majority of people in this country came to believe that they could make a difference and their voices were heard.

But I believe even more than that will happen, if we also unite our political voices with prayers that we be given the strength to sacrifice ourselves when that is called for, that we put the needs of the rest of the world on the FRONT burner when we act as a country. This new president has the vision of a larger world that comes from living in other countries, a world view that does not assume that everyone shares the values of affluent white Americans.

Can you feel the synchronicity of faith and justice colliding? Out of this confluence of values a new world is being birthed.

I Confess to Christian Skepticism

The email from the training I had inquired about ended with "Remember that God loves you and so do I!"

I didn't even know this guy, and my first reaction, on a visceral level, was to cancel my registration to the workshop. I hate it when people tell me they love me when they don't even know me. I don't even want a stranger to tell me that GOD loves me.

What was this reaction about, I wondered? There was a hint of saccharine, of over-simplistic theology. And my experience of faith and the spiritual journey is that it is NOT always rosy, sweet, puppies and cream (to mix my metaphors a LOT). SO right away, I am suspicious of anyone who wants to brush over the fact that sometimes faith can be hard, sometimes we feel far away from God and question whether anyone can love us, sometimes we need validation that the wilderness is just as legitimately part of the journey as the wonder. Our God died a tragic death at the hands of human beings. And we are called to die (usually painfully) to our agendas all the time.

So what’s wrong with reminding people of the resurrection, too? I usually believe that the reminder is the most important thing about Christian community. I am reminded on a weekly basis that God does love me, and others are willing to share an altar rail with me, despite what the world may tell me to the contrary.

But there’s something more subtle about how that message of resurrection comes to me through community, and it is tempered with many other complex messages about God. God is transcendent as Creator, higher even than the church ceiling in a cathedral. God is as close as the peace that is exchanged after we are forgiven by God. God is in the fidgety kids and the old couple sitting quietly holding hands, and even in the overly precious verger whose job it is to create some sense of order in the large church. Especially for me, God is in the faces that look up longingly at the altar rail, hoping to see images of God for themselves as they receive the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

There is nothing simple about the messiness of church, or even in the glimpse of the kingdom of heaven that such messiness might give us. Which is why I resist trying too hard to do liturgy perfectly.

But I realized also that while my skepticism may be a way of protecting myself from overly simple descriptions of God, it may also get in the way of my seeing or hearing God in others.

I went to the church website of my new acquaintance, and saw some great programs being offered that help bring healing and recovery to people’s lives. I saw an attempt to be inclusive and welcoming, which for me is the ultimate test of whether we are living out Jesus’ Gospel. I decided I did not want to be guilty of “contempt prior to investigation,” and to go ahead and attend the workshop.

But I will probably not give up my skepticism entirely.

Nervewracking: A Tale of Sugar Withdrawal

Jackhammers thudded into the cement outside my office window with a bone-jarring intensity. My head had started to hurt even before getting to work, but this was almost laughable in its assault on my sugar-withdrawing body. In the last five days, it had felt as though my nerve endings were just too close to the surface. Everything seemed to be a colossal effort to accomplish, and my patience with everyone was also pushed to the Nth degree. That morning I had considered getting rid of my two dogs, who insisted on barking and jumping up on me with wet paws from the freshly rained-upon yard.
Not everyone has such extreme withdrawals from sugar, but I have always been super-sensitive to the stuff. When I eat sugar, it is far more soothing to me than the average person. And the next day, I have sick headaches and my energy level suffers unless I have a little “hair of the dog” and eat more sugar, or ride it out for three days of withdrawal.
But this was worse. It was a more complete withdrawal since I was also avoiding white flour and other refined carbs, so my body was reacting at a cellular, emotional and spiritual level. It was not happy. Physically it had become dependent on getting endorphine bursts from the carbs, and had gotten lazy about producing its own sense of well-being without an artificial source.
Emotionally, I was struggling with feelings of unfairness and grief over losing my closest friends, ones who had been there for me when others seemed too busy with their own lives. My friend food had turned on me though, and was now threatening my health. This was what I needed to focus on, I told myself. Not on the cultural obsession with thinness. Not on the distorted value we force on women to be a certain size or shape. It really was a health issue for me. If I did not lose some weight, the stress on my knees was certain to put me in a wheelchair within the next 10 years, I was sure.
But fear is not a good foundation for any project, behavior change, or new perspective on life, so my acceptance of this much-needed change hinged on moving to a spiritual level. I needed God’s grace to stick with my plan. I needed an awareness of God’s love for me that transcended what I looked like, forgave me for treating my body so recklessly over the years, and reassured me when I felt completely alone without my former best friend. And most importantly, I needed a transformative change in my personality that I knew was possible from getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous – a change that had completely eliminated my desire or need to drink.
Had I simply switched addictions, and therefore not really experienced transformative change? It was not so simple. Seeking the high that alcohol produced seemed to come from a very different place in my psyche. It was more social, more motivated in feeling competent and successful. It was not the survival-based sense I got from food that the word was safe, and I was going to make it another day.
This probably sounds pretty melodramatic, but think about it. Food is about as basic as you can get. The instinct to eat comes to us almost immediately after we are born. Disrupt that instinct in a baby, and you get a pretty distressed baby, perhaps even one who is afraid for her life.
And so my addiction to food probably goes so much more deeply than that to alcohol that I am dealing with more deeply-embedded spiritual needs. After 23 years of being without alcohol, and the spiritual and emotional work I have done, perhaps now I can begin to tackle this more insidious and pervasive addiction to food.
If the jackhammers weren’t pounding, literally, outside my window. If crazy people would quit speaking their craziness as though it were truth. If dogs would quit being so jumpy and barky, and if computers at work would quit being so finicky. If life would just be easy and effortless and unfold miraculously. Okay, maybe there’s hope for that last one, but waiting until everything is perfect is one of the procrastination methods my disease has always used to put off doing the healthy thing I need to do. That disease would prefer it if I was dead, or at least immobilized by the intake or behavior of one of my addictions.
So I need to get into the spiritual response to the nerve-jarring, impatient, grief-stricken frame of mind I am in. “Holy Jesus, I take delight in you love,” I pray, using the words of one of my favorite prayers, even though I cannot feel their truth through the edginess. “Increase my faith in that love that I may let go of all depression and worry,” I continue from the prayer, which is a paraphrase of something Julian of Norwich wrote. What if I so completely believed in that love, so fully allowed myself to be embraced in that love that I could let go of the need for food to give me the assurance that God offers? I cannot imagine such a faith at this point; I can only act as if I do.
And so I show up one more day, today with jackhammers and malfunctioning internet, and offer myself hopefully to life: nerves on edge, lonely and in grief. A food addict in recovery. Just for today.

Celebration is a Matter of Perspective

We have lost our way when it comes to celebrating. As a culture we know how to celebrate grand things like winning a super bowl or an academy award or presidential election. We celebrate hallmark events like New Year's Eve or Christmas or Valentine's Day, as though sending cards will somehow make it into the true event we want it to be. We even celebrate good fortune, a new job, a baby, a marriage, but how do we celebrate in the midst of the everyday life of headaches and tedium and broken toys and hurt feelings?

I think about this because I ran across a blog for the spiritual community Aldea, which seeks to live together intentionally, live fully, and be present to life, and as only one of its efforts, to gather on Sunday mornings. I am humbled by how the idea cuts through so much of the b.s. that we call church. This month, the community's blogging topic is "Celebration" and especially on celebrating in the midst of Lent and giving up suffering as a Lenten discipline.

As I pondered invading their blog as a relative stranger (sounds like an oxymoron to me), my first thought of a celebration I enjoyed was as a kid during a blizzard in Colorado Springs. The power was down for a few days, and so the whole neighborhood, 11 townhouses lined up out in the middle of a prairie northwest of the city, had a big cookout one evening. Looking back, it seems almost apocalyptic as thought we were huddled together for survival. Perhaps it was not that severe. But we had to eat some of the meat in people's freezers that was beginning to thaw, so everyone pooled their resources and offered it up to the community.

Did the adults think of it as a celebration? I wonder. Or were they so caught up in the worry of when the power would come back on and when the roads would be cleared so they could get back to their routines and the OTHER worries they had? Did they see the mystery of a community stopped cold in its tracks and taking the opportunity to be a slice of the kingdom of heaven as I see so clearly looking back through 10-year-old eyes?

I am struck once again by how much a role our minds, our perceptions play a role in what we see. This Lent, may I shed some of the adult worry seasoned by responsibility and fear and being caught off guard too times in favor of the simple joy and ability to be spontaneous of a 10-year-old.

Alternative Pilgrimage on a California Highway

Someone must have praying for me. Good praying, I mean, not the sanctimonious prayer of some, where the person tells God what the prayee NEEDS (in their opinion). No, this one was coming from someone who knew me enough to want me to have God present to me during my pilgrimage-on-the-California-highways instead of my pilgrimage in Ireland, where I wasn't because I have no discipline and cannot save money. I didn't even have the money to be doing this camping trip which was really a pilgrimage on the ... you get the picture.

Doogie and I (Doogie is my Westie and soul mate) set out one early morning in mid-June for San Diego, and planned to camp there two nights before heading up the coast to Oceano Dunes, stay there for two nights, and then get up to San Francisco. Then we were heading over to Lake Tahoe or Utah, and down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon or through Flagstaff. I was going to be flexible and open, because I don't get to do that in my work as a parish priest enough (you know how those people can be; they are more interested in schedules and actually following the schedulesthan they are about being spontaneous in the Spirit!).

Except that someone whispered doubt into my ear just before I left... and so I abandoned the trip midway, and I could have seen it as a complete failure if somebody hadn't been praying for me.

After two good nights and a full day of dog beaches and dog friendly shops and cooking over a gas stove in San Diego in between, we hit the road for Oceano Dunes. I was prepared to ditch this portion and find a plan D. Oceano Dunes -- I had read and they didn't exaggerate -- was one huge camping and ATV beach. I envisioned 20 -some people on quads zipping all over the beach, up and down the dunes, and the possibility that there wouldn't be much privacy. I was going to listen to my gut (Mizz Holy Spirit herself) to see if it felt safe once I got there. I shot up I-5 because it was close by the campsite, and decided I would just bear down and get through Los Angeles as quickly as possible using sheer will power. Like every big city, there were many detractors telling me how many hours it would take me to get through beyond the city.

It wasn't that bad, really. Except that bearing down and ramming through is one of the best ways to miss the scenery, which I KNOW wouldn't have happened if I had gone on the Ireland pilgrimage with Gil Stafford and his group. One of the stated principles of his group "Peregrini" -- which I vaguely remember from seminary has something to do with traveling -- is that you should NOT miss the scenery.

Fortunately, I came to myself like the son in the story of the generous father (also known as the prodigal son), and got off I-5 a little after lunchtime to take the 101 toward the ocean. The 101, I found out later, has a worse reputation than LA for its traffic snarl-ups, or "parking lots" more accurately.

I finally got off at an exit whose sign pointed toward "Beach Traffic", and took a pit stop in a shopping center. After letting Doogie pee and smell a couple of unhealthy-looking trees in the parking lot (you would be too if hundreds of traveling dogs peed on you every year), I took him to Starbucks and parked him with a scruffy looking guy that looked like he would throw down his life if someone tried to take Doogie from him so I could pee and smell the coffee in my own parking island (okay, that's over the top...)

Doogie and I sat outside Starbucks grateful not to be moving and grateful not to be in the sweltering Arizona heat, and we people watched. Within sight of the shopping center was a middle class neighborhood. I got out my Atlas and tried to figure out where we were. We had been driving five hours by then, and I realized how silly I had been originally to think I might be able to get to San Francisco in one day. I was even beginning to wonder if we would get to Oceano before it got dark, but remembered they have daylight saving time there in California. We don't do DST in Arizona; there is no need to inflict MORE daylight during our time off when our employers are not paying the AC bill.

I had missed the signs saying where we were. I have full-blown ADHD, but that usually doesn't apply to traveling. I'm more like Jess Blair in his book I Don't Know Where I'm Going but I Sure Ain't Lost which he WANTED to call "I Walk Most Safely When I Don't Know Where I'm Going". His publisher was into selling more books and thought the title needed to have an "ain't" in it like his other books (I Ain't Much Baby But I'm All I've Got was his most famous) and gave it the other title. But I DO walk more safely in new places; I am more aware and more alert to signs and I see great places to relax and eat and enjoy and sit and journal -- well, uring vacations, anway, which could be part of the problem -- that I don't see when I am in my own hometown and into the daily grind.

And while I was on the highway I had been in that mode! I know highways, I had two or three maps, so I was in head-down-just-make-good-time mode. Until I came to myself and got off the highway. But now I was in a town whose name I didn't know and not sure when I was going to make it to my next campsite.

So I asked a very sweet looking white-haired lady on her way into Starbucks.

"You're in Ventura!" she answered me with such glee that I would actually USE the word describing her. I felt as warmly welcomed as any stranger could be, and she helped me find it on my map. When I told her that I had been on the 101 and lost track of where I was, she waved her hand at me and in mock disgust (I don't think this woman could do real disgust), she said "Oh, that 101!" as though not even the smartest person with a GPS and a human navigator both could avoid getting lost on it. Besides, I wasn't LOST. I was just disoriented slightly, and needed to get my bearings.

I left there with the buzz of caffeine and renewed confidence instilled in me by the mother of the the Ventura Chamber in Commerce (well, she ought to be!). We made it to Oceano just two hours later, and got to see lots of ocean on the way. It turned out to be fortifying in needed to deal with the harsh reality ahead.

The REAL Oceano Dunes was much wilder even than the image in my head. First, it was very windy, and many of the 200+ campers had flags on poles in the sand or whipping about from the TV antennas on their RVs, including the Dixie flag, which, after living in the south for 23 years, makes me nervous. Dixie-flag-flyers seem to drink heavily, and when they do, they don't like liberals or women or small white dogs. Well, I made up the last part, but the point is, they make me nervous.

Every once in a while, when I wasn't stuck in the sand or being towed OUT of the sand by one of the Dixie-flag-flyers (they're nice BEFORE they drink), I glimpsed a tent in the midst of all the RVs, looking in the gale force wind like it wasn't going to be there the next morning. And these were decent-sized four- and six-person tents. I had discovered that my Big Five Sporting Goods tent that I had gotten for a sweet bargain at $21.99 was only three-feet tall. Not only did I not look graceful getting out of the tent, but there is no hope of changing clothes inside it, unless you do it lying on your back, which is not easy to do with a little dog who seemes compelled to lick my face if I ever sit or lie still. I wondered where I might find some privacy from the people whom I was sure all knew each other.

And there were quads, all right. Dozens of them. But there were also jacked up pick-up trucks that could have popped my car like a cockroach, or carried my car to a campsight, which almost had to happen three times. In fact, it became so embarassing to be towed out of the sand, that I promised Ms. Holy Spirit and myself that if it happened a third time (because God's signs always come in threes), I was going to leave. So it happened and I did leave. I checked three motels there in town and even the Motel 6 was $150 a night, and I thought there's no way I will pay that much when I missed out on a trip to Ireland because of money and I had already spent $100 on gas, another $150 on campsite reservations, and on the money for food alone I could have flown to Maine to see a good friend (that had been Plan B -- I was in California camping on Plan C, which makes sense alphabetically anyway).

After fortifying myself with a burger and fries and a diet coke, which is NOT as oxymoronic as thin people make it seem, I could think more clearly and make a plan. By this time, I had spent two full days driving and one full day camping. Like my life, I was spending more time getting to the goal than enjoying it once I got there. And the journey had not been that wonderful so far (on my camping trip, not my life, which was defintely better).

That's when I think the anonymous praying kicked in. With great clarity of mind and the calm that comes only from the acceptance of reality, I decided to turn around and head back toward Arizona. San Francisco would wait for another time, when I had more money. As it was, Santa Barbara was an awesome place to visit, and I will make it an intentional destination the next time I go there. It was good that I was heading home. I was out of cash, had lost my debit card before I even left on my trip, and almost no one accepted out-of-state checks. Using my parish American Express to buy gas and another burger on the way home, I put my head down and missed all the scenery getting from LA to Tucson in eight hours. Some habits are hard to break.

Oh, and what had been the doubting comment whispered in my ear, after I had described my proposed itinerary?

"You wish," I kept hearing my friend say as I traveled. I guess sometimes even doubts can be wisdom for some of us foolhardy people.

On the dubiousness of perfection

I am a failure at living a life about social justice. Oh, I recycle, and turn lights off, write my congressman when I can, and boycott Nike, but when I think of a real social justice life, it would involve living simply, and not consuming so much, and being peaceful and meditating twice a day. I know people who actually do these things. And they are vegetarians, too. I barely have enough self-disicpline to stay on a diet for longer than two weeks, much less avoiding meat completely. Or doing anything else consistently for that matter.

Most spiritual people I know are orderly and disciplined and don't move a lot, whereas I move about once a year or whenever the carpet gets dirty, whichever comes first, which is often since I have two dogs. As someone who would have been daignosed ADHD as a kid, and actually was diagnosed as an adult, my life can get chaotically disordered and while I keep my house fairly neat, my checkbook is never balanced and my life is even less balanced.

What I do have that could be considered spiritual are friends and community and a willingness to be honest with myself and others, and maybe even a little bit of humility about never being anything close to perfect. In fact, I look at attempts to be perfect with great suspicion. Perefectionists are people who will never know the joy of finding the right person to do the right job for you, because they do not need anyone else. Perfectionists are tense and rehearse everything in their heads before they make a move, as though making a mistake would cancel out the right for them to take up space on the planet. Which boils down to their belief that you HAVE to be perfect to earn that right.

Forget God and God's unearned grace. These folks have earned their way into the kingdom through sheer, gritty self-determination. And they make me nervous with their perfectionistic glances and the judgment sitting right behind those glaring eyes. I ave not earned anything. I can get giddy with delight at being allowed to play in the kingdom's playground at all.

Perfectionists do not need support groups, either. Oh, they might show up in some of them, out of the pain caused by their perfectionism, but when it comes to actually relying on another person, it just isn't possible. So relying on God, whom we can't see, is an even trickier proposition.

But when I am at my spiritual best, which is relative to my spiritually worst times, I am able to see the scared kid underneath all that neatly ironed and well-groomed facade -- the scared kid who learned somewhere that if he didn't get it perfect, it was a complete failure, and he didn't deserve to be loved. And I am grateful for the mother who used to cuss at me and roll her eyes when I was a handful, but who never let me forget that she loved me. Like God does. Even when I am far from perfect.

Everything in excess!

"Everything in excess!" wrote Robert Heinlein as Lazarus Long, the centuries old salty character in a bunch of his sci fi books. "To enjoy the flavor of life, you've got to take big bites. Moderation is for monks."
What would Lazarus Long say about our current sqeamishness with truth? It has become more important to be careful and not rock the boat than it is to speak truth. There is even a quote floating around out there that Archbishop Rowan Williams can't even defend claiming that he said, "Unity is more important than truth."
I can't imagine that. But if what they say is true, that he hates conflict and just wants peace at all costs, then perhaps he did say it.
Unity may be more important than being RIGHT, maybe. Or unity may be more important than having all the answers. But if some wise person has some truth to offer this crazy world, I sure hope she isn't sitting back worrying about whether it will disrupt the unity. In fact, I might be bold enough to say that without truth, our unity is on shaky ground, indeed.
Let's have an excess of truth! Even if we only believe it's our truth. Let's claim it boldly and let the monks make everyone happy. Although Joan Chittister doesn't seem to care whose unity she disrupts. Salut!