The Circle Game

You'd think that Black Friday took its name from the dark clouds that packed the sky all day today. Another turkey dinner come and gone, another Christmas shopping season ramping up.

My in-laws are infirm and deteriorating more every day. My husband's mom can't go out anymore, too difficult for my father-in-law to care for outside of their own home, so we brought dinner to them. I cooked the turkey breast on Wednesday and the vegetables at their house on Thursday. Our sons came too, the older one accompanied by his girlfriend, the younger one back from a tour with his band. We all celebrated the holiday together.

I'm having a hard time putting it all together, my in-laws in their decline, my mom dead almost 8 years now, my sons on the threshold of their adult lives... and me somewhere in between. I have trouble even remembering when they were the babies whose pictures adorn the wall in the den. Even if it's all in the natural order of things, the cycle of life, the circle game.




And I remember an infant keeping me awake when I felt desperate to sleep...and rage because I was shut inside with that baby while my husband grabbed his briefcase and went out to work...the first vaccination, the first time he climbed into the schoolbus, first Communion and first honors...and doing it all again with baby #2...their first steps and my mom's last...watching them take their first bite and my mom take her last breath...then suddenly it's today.

Some day, I hope someone dear to me comes and makes me a holiday dinner when I'm too old and feeble to cook and maybe even to care.

Gotcha, Christian!

Maybe we've been going about it all wrong.

You know, the in hoc signo thing, converting the king, defeating and baptizing the hordes, Gothic cathedrals, pilgrimages, relics, auto da fés. And more recently, televangelism, rallies, megachurches, blockbuster serial novels, and a graphic Passion on the big screen...

Where's the subtlety, where's the cunning and skill in any of that? Where's the cleverly planned gotcha! moment?

"Come, follow me, and I'll teach you to fish for men," Jesus said to Peter and Andrew. How many fish do you catch, I wonder, by making a lot of noise and disturbing the quiet of the lake? Fishermen spend long hours out there on the sea's placid surface, waiting with baited hook for the first sign of a tug. Then what do they do, pull out a gasoline-powered crane? No, they depend on their two hands and sheer muscle strength to reel in the writhing, struggling creature. Our prey are slippery types. We forget to ask ourselves, as a New Testament professor once asked our class, "Have you ever known a fish that wanted to be caught?" But we think that bigger, louder, and more threatening will ultimately lure them.

On the contrary, stealth and surprise are indispensable elements of Jesus' fishing tackle. What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? --a lost penny, a treasure hidden in a field, a bit of yeast kneaded into dough, a thief coming in the middle of the night, the tiniest of seeds...

And we Christians, the supposed followers of the no-account rabbi from Lower Middle Eastern Podunk, how do we sneakily bait and catch men (and women)? With bulk mailings, fire and brimstone railings, condemnations, and promises of pie-in-the-sky...with mass produced holy pictures, billboards that proclaim to our fellow gas-guzzlers Jesus died for your sins, nonstop Christmas carols (Do you hear what I hear? Yeah, and I sure wish they'd shut it off!), and sanctimonious demands to display an artificially illuminated plastic Nativity scene in front of the downtown municipal building.

You know, I bet the common, run-of-the-mill Palestinian peasant would have laughed too...before running in the opposite direction.

And then, of course, we throw back the very ones that Jesus would have reeled in and kept:

Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame...and maybe also the gays, the addicts, the foreclosed, and those with piercings in strange or embarrassing places. Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. Sometimes I get the feeling that Jesus wasn't as particular as we are.

Devious, subversive, and welcoming. Maybe that's the trick...

Love in the Time of H1N1

The Goodnight Anthem is on the road again, taking my son Tony (guitar and lead vocals) with them. They're off to venues in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia and beyond.

One of their first shows had to be canceled because a couple of musicians in another band got the current version of the plague that's also touring the country. This got me worried, so I sent Tony off with a shoebox full of over-the-counter remedies in case he gets hit with the H1N1: Advil, Chloraseptic, Sudafed, Hall's vitamin C cough drops....and I told him to be sure to take his health insurance card with him and to go see a doctor if he got sick. I included a bottle of hand sanitizer too, for all the good it will do with all the instruments, equipment, amps, cables, and the like that they'll all be handling.

Fortunately, I'm hearing from the nurses at our university that the illness seems to get young people down for only a couple of days.

Where have all the children gone?

I've never pretended to be someone who just loves kids. When I would wistfully dream about falling in love and getting married, having children was something I forcefully pushed out of the picture. I'm an only child and never did much babysitting. I'm used to teaching undergrads. Furthermore, the very idea of this mysterious thing that was going to happen to my body and that I would only learn about several weeks after it started, along with the upheaval that it would bring to my personal and work life (and I loved my job and had no desire to be home full-time), well --to be brutally and shamelessly honest-- all this was something I dreaded, not something I looked forward to. (I guess I should add that I come from a very traditional background, where the idea of being a working mom was treated like an aberration. I did manage to work part-time once my kids were in grade school and then to increase my hours over the years until I was full time again.)

Add to this the problems I had sustaining a pregnancy --5 attempts in order to have 2 kids-- and then the wonderful c-section experiences. (NOT!!!!) It's no exaggeration to say that I felt I was being dragged into motherhood kicking and screaming. If ever there was proof that God works miracles, it's the fact that I have 2 handsome sons who managed to survive their upbringing at the hands of an inept and often impatient mom.

But this blog entry is really about the First Day School at our monthly meeting. We follow the practice of having the children sit with their parents for the first 15 minutes or so of meeting for worship, and then the First Day School teachers stand and the children follow them to the schoolhouse, a building located only about 10 yards or so from the meetinghouse.

If raising kids doesn't come naturally to me, baking does. I find baking --and cooking in general-- to be a very relaxing and restorative activity, provided I'm not rushing home from work and rushing to get dinner on the table. So, for the last couple of years or so, I've been in the habit of throwing some muffins or banana bread or something into the oven on Saturday evenings either just before or just after making dinner. Usually I use a mix and usually I doctor it up a bit, adding whole wheat flour, vanilla yogurt, and whatever else strikes my fancy. There's a full kitchen in our social room, and I place my baked goods on the counter there before entering the space reserved for meeting for worship.

I have to say that I've gotten very accustomed --and very fond-- of hearing our Young Friends outside as they leave First Day School running, skipping, and chattering, and re-enter the meetinghouse. They head straight for the muffins, of course, and I take great pleasure in imagining the kids devouring the muffins in the social room while meeting for worship is winding down.

One of the reasons I doctor up the muffin mixes is to stretch them so that there will be enough for the kids and also for the grown-ups after meeting for worship. We have a small meeting, and about 2 1/2 dozen muffins suffice so that everyone will get one.

But I've noticed that there has been no chatter to listen for the last couple of weeks. And last week there were more than a dozen muffins left over. That's when it hit me that our little monthly meeting is in trouble.

It seems that the usual complement of children never made it back after the summer. Some moms come with babies, and our generous clerk takes them down to First Day School and plays with them in a corner so that the moms can enjoy silent worship. Some weeks a few grade-school-aged kids are there, other times one of the high schoolers shows up. Howerver, it seems that several families have just never returned to our community.

I also happen to be the chair of the Financial Stewardship Committee. Where, I wonder, did Friends ever come up with such a committee name??? We meet every fall along with our faithful treasurer to devise the coming year's budget. We make the proposal at Meeting for Business in September or October and we ask committee chairs to submit their requests for funding. Then we send out what we call a "covenant letter" to members and regular attenders, asking them to pledge their contributions for the coming year, to be paid in a lump sum or quarterly or monthly, as they like.

The intangibles like a lack of children's chatter are beginning to coincide with a smaller number of pledges each year. The amount of money we've collected this year is falling short of our expenses.

Last month we made a presentation on the budget and --thanks to the wonders of Excel-- did a pie chart of where our 2008 expenses went. (We don't have final figures for 2009 yet, of course). Hard to argue with numbers. About 60% of the budget went to upkeep of the 19th-century meeting house and more than 30% to meet our financial obligations to Quartely and Yearly Meeting.

Only 1% of our 2008 budget was spent on activities of a directly spiritually nurturing nature.

As a matter of fact, last year we were able to assign very little funds to Worship & Ministry and First Day School. These two entities have been operating on a shoe string.

Tomorrow we'll hand out covenant letters and pledge forms for the 2010 financial year.

Sure hope I hear some chatter...because, frankly, I'm worried.

The crusader against insufficient questions and answers

Just finished reading Krista Tippett's book Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters--and How to Talk about It. The author hosts the weekly American Public Media's progam Speaking of Faith, which airs at 7:00am in the Philly area, so I rarely catch it--or if I do, it's usually the tail end. I usually try to sleep a bit later on Sundays. However, Tippett certainly know how to talk about religion. I don't know how to describe her style -- sort of rapturous metaphysical reality. Her writing sometimes bears the reader up on a warm, sensuous wave; other times it jolts the reader awake with a cold splash of truth expressed in surprising terms. Here are a few of her jeweled expressions:

Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality--a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

My mother tongue was Christianity.

I learned to be wary that summer of a pious approach to life that saw good intentions and righteous prayer as substitutes for planning and pragmatic action. This way of faith only deepened the despair it was called to heal.

This sentence could easily be entitled "The seeker's manifesto":

I have become a crusader against insufficient questions and answers that stand in, prematurely and destructively, for both justice and mystery.

[religious moderation contrasted with fanaticism] Developing eyes and ears for moderation does not mean denying the importance of religion in human life. It means inviting and enabling the devout to bring the best of their tradition to bear in the world.

Each person's presence, action, and words in the world matter, however inconsequential they may seem against the backdrop of this evening's news. Religions remind us of this fact, this faith. Like any political or economic theory, this is empirically unverifiable. I choose it. Week after week, my conversation partners illuminate the imaginative and pragmatic possibilities of this choice.

...as soon as human beings pick up a piece of the truth, they make their mark on it. They codify and literalize. They distort the rest of the picture to fit their chosen center.

In some mysterious way, "containing" religion [as opposed to a vaguely practiced spirituality] helps us unlock the sacred within us. It enables us to participate in the human encounter with the divine even when our own spirits are dry.

"Thin religion," as [Croation American theologian Miroslav Volf] describes it, is not religion lacking in zeal. It is religiosity reduced to a formula, and this can render the passion behind it very dangerous.

As a journalist I'm deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant, or at least as perversely thrilling as evil.

On the nature of religious mystery

Mystery resists absolutes.

If mystery is real, even more real than what we can touch with our five senses, uncertainty and ambiguity are blessed. We have to live with that, and struggle with its implications together. Mystery acknowledged is, paradoxically, humanizing.

Introduce mystery into any conversation and the conversation gentles; reality doesn't lose its sharp edges but the sharp edges are not all, not the end.

On our spiritual practice as we get older

I need to discern my tenets of truth constantly, know their texture, revisit and cleave to their assurances as keenly as I feel how they are changing and expanding as I grow older.

And there's a beautiful, startling oxymoron at the heart of this sentence:

From the beginning of my life of listening, I have observed fierce humility as a quality in the lives of people I admire.

This quote from The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, situated close to the end of the book, could be the credo of this fearless crusader:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. Reinhold Niebuhr

The Niebuhr quote invites us to let the light of the discerning Spirit shine even on the good that we try to do so that we see it from the perspective of God's eternity. We can not in our lifetime know all the consequences even of our good deeds. We rarely discover a definitive answer or solution to any problem that we tackle. But remembering this will keep us centered in that "fierce humility" described by Tippett.