Trouble!

I am having big issues with Blogger. Three times now the Prelude has failed to post. So I'll be on hiatus until I get this fixed. So sorry.

Happy birthday, Nancy and Collie.

My birthday is tomorrow, and I always think of Nancy and Collie on my birthday, because Collie's was  August 19 and Nancy's was August 20. They were both my best friends at different parts of my life, and they are both gone. I still miss them.

The first birthday I remember is my third. What I remember -- and know full well may not be entirely true -- is that there is a cake on a card table in the driveway, and that there are children around it, and that when the candles are lighted my cousin Peter, who was five, blew them out. I cried and it did not console me that the candles were lighted again.

There was another birthday, probably four, when the party had a cowboy theme. I have pictures of this party. I wore shorts and a striped T shirt and a bandana around my neck and a straw cowboy hat. Someone gave me a doll with a cloth body and a plastic face, and my brother bit the face so that it got all caved in. I'm not doing so well with birthday parties.

Until I turned five. All I wanted was the Cinderella wristwatch that came in a glass (plastic) slipper.
 And I got it! I was over the moon. I don't remember another thing about it, except that the cake came from Hough Bakery, and there was nothing in the world like a Hough Bakery birthday cake. It was bore little resemblance to the frothy, styrofoamy, crisco-and-sugar cakes we get today. It was rich and light and everyone in our whole family ate cake for breakfast until it was gone. It was so good that when I went home for my 25th high school reunion our class got one and devoured it the same way we did when we were five.

Nancy North was my soul sister, though of course I didn't have these words then. I like to believe that were she alive we would still be fast friends. She was one day older than I and a smidge taller. She had curly brown hair and I had stringy dark blond hair. We were too young to sleep over, but whenever we were together it was as if we were complete. She learned to skip before I did but did not brag about it. The day we started nursery school she and I holed up in the very cool loft and watched the other children cry. We had no clue why they were crying. I knew she adored me as I adored her.

The only clue that I had that Nancy was sick was that one day my father brought home one of the very first television sets. It was a rather small box with a round screen, and it sat on the kitchen counter. We all crowded around it to watch Howdy Doody. Suddenly it disappeared. My mother told me that they had taken it to the hospital so that Nancy could watch it.

I had a little bit of a cold, so I had to stay in the car when we took Nancy her birthday present. She couldn't come to my party. She died before kindergarten started.

My mother is changing the sheets in my parents' bedroom. The windows are open and the sunlight pours in from them onto the bare mattress and the sheet, which floats like a sail on the breeze. Somehow I have accidentally overheard my mother talking to someone about the fact that Nancy had died. I confront her in disbelief. Maybe it was my five year old version of denial. What my mother actually said and what I heard were very likely different things. What I remember is that Nancy had gone to heaven to be with the angels, and that she would have to be perfect or they would kick her out and she'd be born again as another baby.
Mother tucked the sheets in. 

I ached with the absence of Nancy. I wonder if there is another person alive who remembers her. I'm guessing her parents are dead by now. They were Sally and Bill. They lived at the end of our street, but I don't remember seeing them a lot after Nancy died. She had a brother, Billy, who was a baby when she died.
I learned later that she had had bone cancer and that it was likely the experimental treatment that caused her death.

I met Collie on a phone call. I don't remember whether I called her or she called me, but somebody told our mothers that we needed to meet each other. We had both just moved to New Orleans, newly married, and she had just had her first daughter and I was  pregnant with our first son. I loved Collie before I even met her in person. It was as if we had known each other forever. She had huge wide-set eyes and was warm and exuberant, and we shared those days of early motherhood with crazy joy. We walked the streets of the Garden District and we had each other over for dinner. She had a slow, Georgia way of talking and an easy, slightly cynical way of seeing things, and a huge black lab that shed incessantly all over their tiny walk-up apartment. One day I was taking care of Jennifer for her. Jennifer was just over a year old, and we were in a fabric store, a cavernous place where she realized that her voice echoed, and she sat on my hip yelling at the top of her voice, "Shiiiit! Sheeeyit! Sheeeeet. Sheeeit!" I knew for certain where she learned that.

Collie and Lawton moved back to Georgia and we moved back to Shreveport. They invited us to go quail hunting with them, but it was over my mother's birthday, and she was visiting us.

She was pregnant with Wells, and I was pregnant with Tyler when we left New Orleans.

A friend called to tell me she had died. We had been on vacation when she had a seizure while taking a bath. They had already had the funeral. No one knew where to reach us. Collie hid from us the fact that she had had epilepsy since she was a child.

I would like to know that if she were alive today we would still be friends. I think she was 27 when she died.

This spring was my 50th high school reunion. I didn't got because it was the same weekend I was retiring from the parish I have served for the last nine years. I got a picture of the women who did go, and it was somewhat vindicating to me that they were all the same age as I am. Some look better than others. But we are all in our late 60's.

Collie would have turned 68 on Tuesday. Nancy would have turned 68 on Wednesday. I turn 68 on Thursday. But Nancy is five, and Collie is 27. It is a privilege to be turning 68. I wish I had a Hough birthday cake. I'm grateful that the love I felt for these two beautiful people has never left me. I can see their faces as clear as day.And I am five, and I am twenty-seven, and I am sixty-eight.

The Avowal by Denise Levertov

I remember so well the day I learned to float on my back in what is a small fountain, maybe two feet deep, at my school. It was during summer day camp, and I was four.

I hope you get to float on cool water under warm summer sunshine.


The Avowal by Denise Levertov

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Not exactly!

My friend observed to me this afternoon that I am woefully behind in posting to my actual blog. The Prelude is up to date, and the page on books I've been reading is almost up to date, but I'm not doing so well in this department. Or any writing department yet. I'm surprised at how daunted I am by the blank page. I intend to get over it.

Retirement is about six weeks along, and so far it is a whole lot of housework. Quite satisfying housework, but still it is all about transition. I'm told by my elders that it will take a while, so I'm not frustrated yet, and I have hope that when the dust settles, I will find my pace and attend to the creative sirens that lured me to take the step.

After seventeen years of first seminary and then non-stop parish ministry, this house needs a lot of my attention. There was not a spare bookcase anywhere, and 16 boxes of books followed me home from the church office, so I've given quite a lot away. I thought I'd feel all nostalgic and depressed about this, but I'm actually energized about it, imagining that I'm a seminarian who has come across this treasure trove of nearly new books. It's mostly preaching resources and pretty hard-core theology, and my attitude is that, except for the rare few I'm keeping, if I haven't read it by now, I probably am not going to. And that if I've read it once, it's time to read something new. 

Peter Walsh is my guardian angel in all this purging. He used to be on Oprah and is now on Rachael Ray a lot, and he sees clutter as a truly spiritual issue. Too much stuff robs us of the life we are meant to live, a life in the now rather than the past. The small areas of order I've managed to create so far truly are sources of inner peace. Walsh's first book is It's All Too Much, but the one I really like is Does All this Clutter Make my Butt Look Fat. Maybe it's just the title, but it's great. I'm getting to know the guy at Good Will pretty well. And I'm looking forward to more peace and order.

But in all this sorting I'm still making time for rest, exercise, fun with children and grandchildren, cooking (I''ll tend to that page next), and reading.

I"m missing St. Alban's terribly. Terribly. Really. The people especially, but much to my surprise, the weekly sermon writing and sharing. It's a gap in my schedule and my inner life. Saying that I miss the liturgy doesn't even begin to express that hole in my life. It's going to take time to find a new parish. We're giving it time.

I know that it was time to retire, but it still hurt. I need to be with the grandchildren before they are grown, not to mention John Bennet and friends. My blood pressure is down about 20 points. I need exercise and a better diet. And St. Alban's is so incredibly healthy and will find just the right person to lead them in the next phase of their exciting and blessed life.

So that's where I am right now. A work in progress. It's going to take a while, but it is good. Thanks be to God. 

Monday by Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.

They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth-
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.

The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see-
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlight of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.

The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.

By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.

Just think-
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.

And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.

I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman's heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.

Speechless: A sermon on December 16, 2012

Advent 3 C                                                                                         December 16, 2012

Luke 2:28-39                                                                                       St. Alban’s, Austin

There are times I don’t know what to think. Let alone what to say. I have to tell you that it is daunting to stand up here before you on a Sunday morning and feel responsible for helping you to make sense of something that makes no sense.

Imagine you were with me yesterday morning at Torchy’s Tacos grabbing a quick breakfast with my sister. The man at the next table, who was sitting with a darling little boy about seven years old, stood up to put his trash in the bin, and I saw that he was wearing a black T shirt with a white assault rifle on it. It took my breath away. I didn’t know what to think. My jaw dropped, and I was speechless. I’m glad we didn’t actually have eye contact because anybody who would wear such a T shirt on the day after twenty children the same age as his were slaughtered was clearly looking for someone to pick a fight, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He could even have had such a weapon in his car. But the sight of him haunted me all day long. I don’t like believing that there are people so utterly insensitive in the world, let alone people who would actually murder first graders and their teachers. If you need me to make sense of Sandy Hook for you, I am sorry, but I will let you down.

If I had kept with the lectionary this week we would be talking about John the Baptist again,

and he would be calling people a brood of vipers. But I just spent the fall in Florence and while I was there I spent a great deal of my time and attention on images of the Annunciation to Mary, and that was not one of the offerings for this year, so I snuck it in. Apparently when I played fast and loose with the lectionary a couple of weeks ago and joked that the liturgical police were coming to get me, just that minute a couple of helicopters flew over the church, which caused some degree of hilarity in the choir. Trust me, it is legal to do this.

And so today we read the story of the Angel Gabriel coming to an unsuspecting young girl and, without giving her ample time to think about it, announcing that God has decided that she will bear his son. Mary is startled and confused, but she quickly accepts the invitation. The angel departs, and that is that. The world is changed forever

It is a scene we can easily get all sappy and sentimental about, and some artists over the years have done exactly that. The angel can look like a belign fairy godmother,

and Mary can look so sweet it will make your fillings ache, but those paintings don’t take into account the world into which the angel is bursting forth. They don’t consider the cost of this consent to Mary. And they don’t stop to think about the power of the Incarnation, that even though this precious little baby is Jesus, this is in fact God incarnate coming to live among us

as innocent and helpless and vulnerable and hopeful as those twenty first graders who got on their school buses on Friday with their Hello Kitty lunchboxes looking forward to playing with their best friends and running around in PE and pleasing their teachers and coming home to a weekend to houses magically decorated for Christmas or Hannukah.

There are many stories still to be told. Much is still not clear at all, and I’ll have to admit to you

that I have not spent every hour since it happened glued to the TV or even to Facebook, so you may well know things I don’t know. One story, though, is about one of the teachers, Kaitlyn Roig, who had fifteen children in her room when she heard the shooting begin. She shoved a bookcase against her door and got all the children into the bathroom and told them they had to be quiet so the bad guys wouldn’t know they were there. She told them that there were bad guys out there right then and that they had to wait for the good guys to come. (See interview with Diane Sawyer: http://now.msn.com/kaitlin-roig-sandy-hook-teacher-recounts-saving-her-students-during-shooting)

You’ve probably heard the wonderful quote from Mr. Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.’ Ms. Roig was assuring the children that there are helpers.

She told them that she loved them, which she does, because she thought they were all going to die, and she wanted the last thing they ever heard to be that they were loved. And the children said that they wanted to go home, that they wanted Christmas.  She told them they would have Christmas and Hannukah and that if their family believed in prayer to pray, and if they didn’t believe in prayer to think happy thoughts. The police came,  but she refused to open the door, thinking it might be a trick, and she said that if they were really the police they would be able to get the key. What an amazing young woman.

Little children, six and seven years old, facing trauma they could not comprehend but which will haunt their lives from here on out expressed that what they wanted in that moment of terror and darkness was Christmas.

I remember being six and feeling like Christmas would never come. Looking back, we had pretty average Christmases. We didn’t go to church. My parents always went to a party on Christmas Eve and we were left at home to hang our stockings with the babysitter, who might or might not read us The Night before Christmas, but definitely not Luke’s gospel.

In the morning my father would be the first one downstairs and without fail, as he got his movie camera ready, he would announce that Santa had forgotten to come. We’d get our presents, which were rarely over the top, we’d go to dinner at my grandparents’ apartment, and we’d go home to bed, but it was all magical. That’s what the children held onto when they were afraid. That’s what their teacher promised them when she honestly believed they were all about to die.

In John’s gospel we read, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

That is the gospel. That is what we hang onto today even as we continue to hear this horrific story unfold. Yes, evil has invaded our beloved season of holiday cheer, but evil will not overcome it. This is the gospel. This is why God sent the angel to Mary. This is why God broke into time and history. This is why God came to live in this broken world, to show us, to prove to us, as St. Paul writes, that neither death nor life nor rulers, nor things present,  nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There are a lot of songs we love to sing at Christmas, and if you stop to listen, you will hear that quite a number of them are the songs of people whose situation is not all holly jolly. “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” implies that the singer’s Christmas will fall short of his dreams. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is the song of someone who is lonely and stuck far, far away.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was sung by a tearful Judy Garland to her even sadder little sister when their world seemed to be falling apart. But the song I remembered on Friday

was from the musical Mame:

So climb down the chimney;
Put up the brightest string of lights I've ever seen.
Slice up the fruitcake;
It's time we hung some tinsel on that evergreen bough.

For I've grown a little leaner,
Grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder,
Grown a little older,
For we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carols at the spinet.
For we need a little music,
Need a little laughter,
Need a little singing
Ringing through the rafter,
And we need a little snappy
"Happy ever after,"
Need a little Christmas now.

I know it’s secular, but it is the truth. We do need a little Christmas now, not just because of the tragedy yesterday, but because we live in a world in which that tragedy is possible. We live in a world where hearts are broken every day, where people with mental illness can get multiple assault rifles, where families are broken and jobs are lost, where people suffer from depression and betray each other’s trust, where good people and not so good people get ill, where wars continue and refugees are cooped up in camps for years at a time. This is the world that needs Christmas. This is the world into which God sent an angel to a young girl in Nazareth, where God’s own self broke into time and said, “I’m on my way.”

We get our hearts broken again and again. And we get Christmas. And the Christmas we get is way more than the stockings hanging on the mantel, the turkey roasting, the presents we give and receive, or the songs we sing. The Christmas we get, which is the Christmas we need and the Christmas that the angels announce is the redemption of this world  begun with the unexpected arrival of Gabriel and the unimaginable acceptance of Mary.

It is the song of angels, and it is the blessing of angels.

Let us pray:

May the angels in their beauty bless you.

May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the angel of awakening stir your heart

to come alive to the eternal within you,

to all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the angel of healing turn your wounds into sources of refreshment.

May the angel of the imagination enable you

to stand on the true thresholds,

at ease with your ambivalence

and drawn in new directions

through the glow of your contradictions.

May the angel of compassion open your eyes

to the unseen suffering around you.

May the angel of wildness disturb the places

where your life is domesticated and safe,

take you to the territories of true otherness

May the angel of justice disturb you

to take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the angel of encouragement confirm you

in worth and self respect

that you may live with the dignity

that presides in your soul.

May the angel of death arrive only

when your life is complete

and you have brought every given gift

to the threshold where its in its infinity can shine.

May all the angels be your sheltering

and joyful guardians.

Amen

(Prayer adapted from John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us)

Bridge Time

I guess you could say I've been back at work for a week now, but this is just the beginning of my fourth day in the office. So far I'm managing to retain the peaceful energy of my sabbatical. It helps to keep revisiting the images on my iPhone and iPad. They open my memory to the sights and sounds and smells of a place that is still very real to me. I've seen pictures of the Duomo Piazza with its big Christmas tree and narrow streets with Christmas lights and store windows. Oh, how I would love to be at Mercato Centrale right now.

In my imagination I can be there in an instant and tell myself that I'll be going back to Florence again and again. I hope that proves to be true. But when I go back, even if I make a bee line to Osteria Giovanni or to the convent at San Marco or to the little bar where we stood for our morning cappucino, it will be a new day and a new experience. That is as it should be. As Herclitus said, you can't step in the same river twice. Time remains such a mystery to me.

There were three bridges in Florence that I crossed on a fairly regular basis. The one in the picture is Ponte Vecchio. Until the time of the Medicis the shops were butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers. The river, in addition to being a source of fish and a means of delivery, was their waste disposal system. The shopkeepers would toss their scraps and trimmings overboard to hungry creatures below and the currents that carried them away.

But when the Medicis built the Vasari Corridor -- those are the little windows along the top of the bridge -- their 'secret' passageway from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Pitti Palace, they were offended by the smell of the shops and used their muscle to displace the food market in lieu of the silver and goldsmiths who have their shops there to this day. Some of the jewelry was nice, but it was all so glitzy and much of it tacky and ostentatious that it wasn't very tempting.

And of course now there are artists selling 'original' watercolors of the Florence streetscapes, Nigerian boys with their knock-off Guccis and Pradas spread out on blankets so they can swoop them up and run when the caribinieri show up, and throngs of tourists being informed by guides holding furled umbrellas overhead. And everybody on the bridge is either eating gelato or smoking a cigarette. At night musicians play there and their music floats up the river.

The bridges of Florence have been destroyed a number of times by floods, which are not all that infrequent, and by war. The Santa Trinita Bridge was designed by Michelangelo, blown up by the Germans, and rebuilt from the pieces they found in the river.
I'm thinking about bridges today, the beautiful, magical bridges of Florence and the utilitarian highway bridges of Austin that take me to and from work every day. My father's family were literally bridge builders. I have a photograph of my great grandfather and my very young grandfather at the ribbon cutting of the Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, which they built. But I'm not an engineer, so my call to bridges is more poetic and theological.

I'm aware of being in a bridge time. The very sacred gift of sabbatical is on the other shore of the river now that I am back at home and at church, but I hope I can keep the access open, that I can travel back to the realities I experienced on both banks of the Arno, the little wine bar right at the stoop of the Church of Santa Felicita, the sandwich shop where we ate and balanced our wine in the street as motorcycles and cars wove among the crowd, the steps of the Convent of San Marco, where I conversed for hours with Fra Angelico's Annunciation, the window of our flat, where I'd watch the bells of Santa Croce swing as they rang the Angelus. I don't know how to keep it all alive until I go back, but I'm clinging to the bridges right now to be my help and my access.