Category Archives: Christianity

new life for all

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I have been asked to preach at a service of ordination.

I’m terrified and thrilled and moved and honored and oh, so hopeful.  The woman being ordained has been a pastor for years.  She has led and blessed and moved and witnessed as a whole woman of God in a denomination that welcomes her wholeness.

But she had to search far from home to find that denomination.  Because she is a same-gender-loving woman, she has been forced to wander through many places of parch and pain until she found herself in the Metropolitan Community Church where she was welcomed and is welcomed and there she has been.

And, her heart kept calling her home; home to the Lutheran church which, until a year or so ago, would not welcome the full glory of her being.

She is coming home on Sunday.  She will be ordained in the ELCA, a denomination willing to pray and ground and be in the way of Jesus; inclusive and welcoming of All God’s Children.

This is weeping material for my heart.  I feel such gratitude for her courage and tenacious belief that the church can be grace.  I feel hope for a world in which the church is willing to be living grace.  I feel humbled by the preaching task and honored and I pray so very fervently that some day my church, the United Methodist Church, will allow the floodgates of grace to open for all of God’s beloveds.

We need that washing of grace.

clarity

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The amount of money that goes into the misinformation of the American people is far vaster and far more enthusiastically spent than that which goes into the education of the American people. Stuart Ewen

 

Sometimes words land in my belly with the power of a clenched fist.  The above quote is one such collection of words.  I groaned when I read them, because they seem all too true.  Perhaps it is the word “enthusiastically” that hurts the most.

Our nation has been involved in a time of intense mourning and grief, followed within seconds by a time of intense finger pointing and dissembling.  The violence unleashed on a street corner in Arizona has touched us all.  As has the aftermath of that violence.

This Sunday is Human Relations Sunday in the United Methodist Church.  It is also the Sunday when we as a nation celebrate the message and ongoing witness of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The poignancy of considering human relations within the sloggy air of these political and cultural times is piercing.  I have held the task of preaching this Sunday to my heart and have given thanks while being daunted.

I am daunted because we have each been nourished on a steady diet of enthusiastically marketed misinformation.  How do we find truth in the miasma of spin and vitriol?

I am thankful because the core teaching that grounds any preacher’s task is the gospel of the Christ.  Over and over and over again Jesus teaches us to be open to others, to know our common heart beat, to see the holy that walks with each and to know that we are incomplete until all are invited to the table of grace and attention.

I will admit that I am afraid.  The above quote would indicate that we as citizens are more willing to be manipulated than educated.  We go along, it seems, content to huddle with our like-minded like children huddled in snow forts lobbing snow balls over the ramparts.

It’s not enough.  It isn’t enough for us as citizens of this nation.  And surely it is far from enough for those of us seeking to live the teachings of Jesus.

It’s time to put the snow balls down.  It’s time to leave the cocoon of our forts.  It’s time to breathe the sharp and clean air of grown up engagement.

happy birthday mom

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Two days ago, my mother turned 82.

My mother is titan and tender, both.  I do not know anyone stronger, and this has to be great burden for her.  She has faced pains and trials too great for a well-bred beautiful hopeful woman to face.  But face them she has, with grace and grit.

This snippet of her life is illustration:  she skated in the Ice Follies.  She was one of the bespangled beauties who learned to live out of a train and share glamor and thrill with audiences and do you remember the finale of the Ice Follies?

A kick line was created.  A spinning line made of skaters linked one to the other.  Those joining the line waited on either side of the rink to skate for all they were worth to link up to the circling spectacle.  It was easy for the early joiners.  But as each skater was added to the line, the line got longer and harder and harder to catch.  Sometimes the show ended with the last skater pushing harder and harder and harder to catch a spinning line that eluded her.  It becomes clear she will never link up.  The audience cheered and groaned, both, since they wanted the determined skater to find success and they knew in their own souls the humiliation of public less-than-perfect.

My mom was the last skater.  She would pump her heart and legs and determination to join that line.  Sometimes with success.  Sometimes not.

A year ago, she was hit from behind on the freeway.  Her car rolled a number of times.  We got the call no child wants to get – the call that intimates that the author of your childhood heart is in peril.  She was in rough shape, broken of pelvis and bruised of body and for a time, we sat with her as she weighed the living or the dying of her days.

She lives.  She is walking miles a day and managing her brood and pain of body and heart are real and she lives yet.

Around her, things are dying:  her sister, the cognition of her brother, the fantasy of a family Walton-esque, friends, and some of her passions.

But the flame of life that is Barbara Jane Fawcett Macaulay Forrest is fierce and honed and hungry yet for meaning and she is much alive.  And the world is better for this.

Mothers and daughters live with hearts close.  Our hopes for each other are dense and complicated.  We are the other, we are ourselves, we are wildly different and we are often heartbreakingly lonely for each other:  for the was and the is and the might have been.

And, my mother is that last skater, determined to do the impossible:  to do it with grace and with grit and to make it look good in the doing.

Happy birthday, mom.

life song

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I am a Sound of Music-crazy fan.

What to say about that…Christopher Plummer, Liesel’s dresses, unlikely love impossible to quench… ah me, so fine.  And then there is the singing.  I wanted to grow up and sing like Julie Andrews sings, whether on mountaintop or cloistered.

One of my favorite songs from the movie is not in the Broadway version.  It is entitled “I Have Confidence” and is sung while Maria is walking toward an impossible-to-imagine challenge in her life.  She takes it on, of course, guitar in hand, ugly dress belling out as she dances into believing in herself.

If only it were that simple.  But maybe it is.  There are times in life when we feel overwhelmed and run over and way inadequate and we want to wimper rather than sing.

But the world is made so small without our being fully in it and love and adventure await and the cobblestones of our life path await our tap dance and darn it, singing our way into confidence or whatever sort of mantra-like activity we want to embrace that reminds us that we ARE and we are meant to be fully and wildly and improbably alive; that kind of cavort is life and it is ours to take up.

So why not dance into believing in ourselves? 

Why not indeed.

north by south

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The last week was spent vacationing.  With many books, cross-country ski trails, and my beloved to create play and rest, I was nestled into our cabin in the north woods.

I slept.  I ate.  I read.  I prayed.  I laughed.  I stilled.

So now, finding myself south of that north woods idyll, there is soul work waiting for my attention.

Namely, how to live that sleeping eating praying laughing stillness while pastoring and being in the midst of the bustle that is city living.

I am rarely caught up to my ideas of what is possible.  I can see what ought be and know it as real in my belly and sometimes vision conviction can short-circuit serenity in ways stupendous.  I forget that unfolding takes time and patience is must and laughter necessary and God knows, I forget that this thing called the Body of Christ is not saved nor lost without the Holy’s breath infusing each stumble and soar.

I take on too much.  Maybe you know this way of being.

So this is what I hold as I reenter the non vacation life God has given me:  there are ski trails through woods always.  There is the ongoing amazing grace of my partner always.  There is a hunger for learning and stilling and being that beat through my being always.  There is midwife God, always.  There is an unfolding of the Holy going on in the community I serve and it is powerful in its always-changing-what-the-heck-just-happened ways.  It is beyond my control.

They are not just vacation treats, these knowings.   Holy gifting is a constant.  Great God of Life, grant me the serenity found in letting go.

fast

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I was visiting church members today.  They have well launched children and umpteen grandbabies and what we agreed upon is this:

The lives of our children go so fast.  One minute, they are handed to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and we commence to loving passionately and then, after countless breakfasts and shoe ties and recitals and games and wet beds and school conferences, they are grown and gone to the lives we helped ready them to live.

Watching my children unfold into their beauty is probably the greatest miracle I’ve been given to witness.  I like them so much.  I love discovering that they are funny and wise and interested and I love knowing that I will never be able to know them fully, these persons who resided next to my heart for nine months and who walk with my heart for the rest of their lives.

It goes fast.  I watch families now.  Cooper and I are those slightly creepy old people who ooh and ahh over the children of strangers.  They interact with us, these kind parents, with a wary sort of appreciation.  What I want to say to them is savor it savor it savor it savor it.

When your eyes are crossed with fatigue and you are not sure you can stand one more question or interrupted whatever, take a breath and take your babies on your lap and smell their heads and listen to their hearts because before you know it they are launched and gone and you too will be one of those people who tries hard to live in the present whilst mewling for the past.

It goes fast.

tender shepherd

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Music grew me.

Always in the house there was music playing.  I learned the melodies of operas and symphonies through osmosis – they soaked into my soul as givens.

One of my favorite records was Peter Pan, the Mary Martin version.  I can still see the green record cover with a Mary-Martin-in-tights and attitude.  The songs were the very best to sing along with, since they were full of bravado and wistfulness, both.

One of my favorites on the album is called “Tender Shepherd”.  It is the lullaby sung to the Darling children as they nestle into beds in the safety of the nursery.  Their mother seems to intuit, as she sings this song with heart and soul, that her children are soon to fly from her into lands and life far from the power of her tending.  It grabbed me then, and does now, as prayer:  Dear God, watch over the sweetness of  hearts precious beyond the telling.  Please.

No one ever told me that having children would require such courage.  To love so fiercely and know so fully that life has bumps that will jar our tender lambkins is impossibly painful.

And it is so, this pain.

So we sing.  We conjure up days gone by when we could sit by bedsides and songpray our children to the warm of sleep.  We remember the smell of their heads and the gentle of the love that wrapped our lullaby times.

And when they are grown, and the challenges they face are grown with them, we sing on, sure that the universe and our God hear the imploring of our hearts: 

 Tender Shepherd, guard our children, we pray.  Please.

sniff

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I forget. I flat-out forget.

I forget that I am a woman pastor and that somehow my gender combined with my role is offensive to some.

I forget.  And then I run into the barbed wire of suspicion or the distaste of those who are quite clear in their minds and expressed sentiments that I am abomination.

I will admit that it wounds, this sniffing around my being for the sure-to-be-found pollution lurking in my unseemly-vocationed self.  Barely hidden sneers, voiced longings for the “good old days” when pastors were men and a man could have a pastor, the boycotting of community based in some part upon the gender of the Lead Pastor; all are real and on good days they roll off the sure of my soul that speaks of God’s calling of me to this work.

But some days, I gets tired.  Some days, I ache for a world in which we are seen as the Christ first, and the dreaded other, second.  Some days I want to let fly my anger about being assumed upon.  Some days I want to weep, knowing that what I am living is a picnic compared to my sisters who have gone before.

And the waste of the power of the Holy is ongoing.

rolled r country

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I write from Edinburgh, Scotland. 

A group of 31 pilgrims from Minnesota launched on a great adventure October 1st.  Trusting that there was soul food to be found in deliberately choosing to immerse ourselves in Celtic wisdom and stillness, we set out.

And we are here!  This is the second stop on our journey.  We have encountered rain, castles, kindreds, belly busting laughter, and the Holy at each step.

It feels like coming home.  Travelling to Lindisfarne, England, to worship and take in a place where people have gathered since the mid 600’s to create community in order to immerse themselves in God, the power of place has been elemental.  There is a soul knowing that kin are not of blood only, but of heart and desire.

The crew from RUMC are a gloried lot.  We are behaving (mostly) and so many times a day I pray blessing on our church community, our promise, and our call.

Making church together is a Holy pilgrimage.  We do Body building in the mundane and the exquisite, and whilst this Wednesday night I may be eating Haggis, I am aware that across the miles there are folks sitting down to a meal and classes and choir and bell rehearsals and we do this weaving of life together because we are called as those have been called through the ages:  we want to worship the God of  life and love. 

And we know that fellow soul travellers on the journey make all the difference.

a day in the life

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One hundred and fifty people came to Richfield UMC today.  Each left with two bags of food, a birthday bag, a children’s book, and please God, a sense that the community of Jesus followers do more than talk about justice and grace.

We have come to know each other through the years of fourth Saturday food ministry.  We work side by side to unload the truck, sort food, bag potatoes and onions and today, briny hard-boiled eggs.  We communicate with smiles and broken English and while we spend this time together there is so much we do not know about the lives lived outside the doors of the church.

People leave with bags of groceries.  We feel good about that.  But as important for the privileged that call our church home, we have a sense of who the often unseen neighbors are who are made in the image of our creator God.

One woman told me today of her dying husband, her incarcerated son, her battered body, and her sense of impending doom as the months tick by before she has to vacate her home.  I watched English-speaking and Spanish-speaking youth work together to sort and distribute bags of goodies provided by the Richfield Rotary.  They had a job to do and savored the work and the gift of partnership.

Following the food distribution I visited a member of the church who has been in the world of dementia for years.  She had fallen and broken a hip, survived the surgery, and on the other side had begun to fail.  When I entered her room her daughter was there and her eyes lit up and while her words indicated her presence in another realm, her eyes communicated joy and life and oh, to be witness to the love of a daughter and the spirit of a woman some ninety years old.  I left blessed.

There are zillions of questions to answer, prayers to breathe, a sermon to write, chores to be done and wonder to be named. 

This life called ministry is rich beyond the telling.