How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

My 21-year-old son has returned home after a year of adventuring in New Orleans.  He did a stint with AmeriCorps.  Through his work, he learned the lives of children very different from his own.  And, he learned things his mother doesn’t need to know.

So he is home for a time.  Plans are afoot for an apartment where he can revel in friends and music without parental controls.  But for now, he is home.

Every morning as I pass his room, a head pops up.  It is the head of our lumpy and ancient black lab.  She is happily nestled in the bed of Jamie-saturated clothing carpeting the floor of his room.

She looks up at me as I pass as if to say: “He’s home.  He’s my boy.  Sleeping in his scent is of course what I would be doing.”

It makes my heart flip, this sight.  Through the comings and goings of my three children and Cooper’s three children, Zoe greets each returning child as though they are the best present ever.  Her devotion to them is a thing of beauty and power.

In her brown eyes is liquid love.

How does Zoe love us?  Let us count the ways.

Recently I have reconnected with a cousin.  As such things go, she was grouped with my older siblings while I was only too happy to frolic with her younger siblings.  We grew up together in parallel play sorts of ways.

And now, years between us don’t matter much and years gone by don’t matter much. What matters, I am finding, is that we grew up together.  It is a precious bond.

When in her company, I find myself utterly moved by the glimpses I get of her mother. Her mother and my mother were sisters of the titan sort; each strong, each strong-willed, each poetic of soul, each imprisoned by the oughts of their day and each beautiful in a timeless way. My cousin’s mom died a few years back and it shook us all.  How could the world be without the regal and self-minimizing presence of that woman?  How does a life force like that encounter finitude?

It hasn’t, not totally. Because my aunt’s daughter carries her mother in her being.  It is gift.

It’s that way, isn’t it?  We carry within our cells the essence of the woman whose heart beat established our elemental rhythm.  Sometimes it is struggle, this maternal legacy. The refrigerator magnet I gave to my mother years back featured a lovely 50’s era über housewife with a tray of steaming cookies and the message said: “Oh *&^%!  I turned into my mother!”

We take the elemental real that is our mother and her way of being in the world and we learn from it and adapt the parts that rub us raw (therapists are happy to help with this, thank God) and we sort and discard and add and we weave an essence that can be mother to us.

When we see her in others, in ourselves, and in kin, we give thanks for the day when our souls are free to pay the sorts of homage that are due.  We are able to laugh about the ways the beat goes on.  We celebrate the tenacious power of the echoes of our mothers that will live always.

Surely my aunt lives in my cousin.  Surely my mother lives in me.  Surely I give thanks.

In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes shares folk tales resonant with power.

One such tale, shared in a chapter about women’s need to cherish and steward the juices of creativity, she speaks of the need to sit in the lap of a trusted other in order to be rocked into a sense of rest and re-creation.  Sometimes what is needed is the “there, there, there” of tending and hold.

It has been such a time for me, these days of vacation.  I have felt the “there, there, there” of embrace from a lake whose smell is life for me, from echoing loon call, from unstructured days and from time spent with clan people who make my heart stretch with almost unbearable gratitude.

Books have been inhaled, stars admired, cribbage and monopoly games have been won and lost (when did my children become such consummate capitalists?!) and I have felt the stirrings of a desire to re-engage with the considerable richness that is my vocational life.

But oh, I want to remember the sense of Holy holding when the temptation to book my life crazy takes hold.

Our lives, each of our lives, are held in the embrace of the holding “there, there, there”.  Holy shelter is not finite nor bound by vacation calendars or locale.  The arms of grace are longing to enfold and bless in ways that lead us to co-creation of the good, the healing, the deep-breath-being that is mindfulness.

No matter where we believe ourselves to be: stuck in traffic, in despair, in the sometimes wrench that is reading the newspapers.  No matter.  We have but to breathe and remember the expansive lap of grace that holds us, pats us, stills us, enlivens us, and asks us to do no more than we humanly can; God being our guide, our witness, our shelter, our lap.

Remind me in a week that this is so.

Sometimes the beauty we find one with the other is too much to take in.

This day is one of those times.  Hearts were open; both giving and receiving through the dance of wisdom and good-swapping that is living in community.

In her book “Leaving Church” Barbara Brown Taylor relates a learning she had as she was nearing the end of her tenure as a local church pastor.  She writes of being at a social event surrounded by church members.  Knowing as she does that she is soon to morph out of the wildly odd role of parish minister, she finds herself interacting with people at the gathering in a wholly different way.  No more are they a part of the clamor and hue that can often accompany interaction with church folk.  Instead, she finds herself marveling at how fine it is to interact and be with people both interesting and connected with her life and the life of creation.

Her tale was cautionary for me.  Since reading it I have sought often to mindfully stop the race of my mind and open myself to the now of the Christ in those around me.

Today the Christ was legion.  It seemed that each person I encountered had a heart for the dance of life and a willingness to reflect upon it.

After days of such shine, I am troubled not at all by the hand-wringing so often present in our thinking about the future of “church”.

Church is.  Church is found in the hallowed joining of heart to heart. In those places we are told the Christ is present.

I believe it.

I was married for 23 years to a very fine man.

We grew up together.  We got married right out of college when neither of us knew what we wanted to be when we grew up and we adventured and played and parented and learned about life.

Part of our adventuring had to do with seeking to support each other as we sniffed the winds for vocation.  Jim knew his calling strongly from the get-go:  he wanted to write musicals. He wanted to write musicals that would play on Broadway.  So, we sought colleges for graduate work, took ourselves and our then almost two-year old to Pittsburgh where he studied at Carnegie Mellon, had another babe whilst in Pittsburgh, and moved to Duluth where we completed our child flock with son Jameson.

While I tasted the maybe-good of seminary (of course I loved it) and commuted for five years from Duluth to Minneapolis to get a Master’s of Divinity, he supported the adventure.

We were good for each other.  And maybe most heartbreakingly, it came to be clear that being good for each other meant being not married to each other.

In the time since our divorce, Jim has devoted himself to his muse and to his craft and now he has a musical opening off-Broadway.  Our children will be there for opening night and while I will not be there physically, my heart and wonder will be there.  I suspect that the tears that would be rolling down my face will shine on the faces of our children.

It has been a relationship of applauding, one for the other.

It continues yet.

Break a leg, Jim Olm.

Being felled is such good.

It has been a tumultuous sort of time for me.  I’ve been bumped physically and professionally (fear not, all is well) over the past month or so.  Both created tailspin of great introspection and self-searching about life and my being in it.

And, both brought to the forefront of my being the importance of reflections of the Holy in human form.  There are many of us – I surely am one – who get rolling in life and the tasks and duties of the day become so intense that the sacred stuffs of relationships get put on the to-do list of some future day when there is time for such seemingly non-essential tending.

Foolishness, that.  What I discovered when faced with recent challenges is the stunning beauty of hearts and ears open and able to hear pain.  Sitting in the company of those willing to mid-wife wisdom through the power of their presence and care is reminder to me that relationships are the core of any richness I might name.

I am blessed.  I am blessed with people who are able to hear pain and listen without seeking to solve.  I am blessed with people who know well that answers are to be lived into and questions sometimes the most holy of teachers.

Human beings crave a sense of belonging.  We need a place we can call spirit home; a place where, as Parker Palmer puts it, “it is safe for the soul to show up”.  I am held in many such places.

As I name my gratitudes, the circles of care that sustain and hold shine in my heart.  May it be so for us each.

May it be so.

On Saturday I put myself in the hands of another.  I sat in a chair at our church carnival and had a mini massage in the midst of the chaos there.

On Wednesday I was in Urgent Care with neck muscle spasms.

I am awed by the power of angry muscles.  Most times when things are not clicking right it is possible to push past them.  There was no pushing past the gripping of my head in a vise of pain.

It was almost funny.  I had led men’s Bible study with only one spasm and figured that I could roll over the whole thing.  After class, I had time to do the thising and thating that is pastoral ministry as I waited for a funeral home to pick me up for a committal at Fort Snelling.  I was set.  I was prepared.

It didn’t matter.  As I readied myself to go with the funeral director, I was gripped by waves of pain I can’t much describe.  With tears running down my face I had to quickly explain to our Vietnamese pastor Phillip the ins and outs of leading a committal service, and explain to the compassionate director that it would be Phillip leading prayer and not me.

The ride home made me aware of just how many pot holes there are in our streets.  Every bump was registered.  Luckily my chauffeur is strong and huge of heart.

Drugs are amazing things.  Muscle relaxers are my friend.  The storm has subsided and I am left with a body aware of its own fragility and ability to feel pain and delight, both.

I’m also left with a huge well of humility.  A seemingly small thing like sitting down for a mini massage can lead to immense things that swoop in with ferocious power and take us where we do not want to go.

So it is.  Every day.  The small decisions made have implications we cannot imagine.

Today is a day of little pain and much gratitude.

I’m paying attention.

The bell tone of wisdom cut through my muddle the other day.

I have been trained to see things.  I began my paycheck life as a life guard, moved to serving near every kind of food ever imagined in near every kind of establishment imagined, became a mother of three, and then entered parish ministry.  I approach each Sunday with a kind of life guard’s vigilance:  I want to be sure that things are calm and safe and well tended.

So I see things like people interactions and set-up seemliness.  When things are amiss, I want to see that they are not amiss.

We have half an hour between services.  That half hour is spent shaking hands and greeting people and getting reset for another service in another space and it is often a chaotic time.

I noticed in my trekking that the coffee urn was empty (again!) and that while there was a full one in the kitchen, no one had made the switch.  So I did (again!).  I carried the empty to the kitchen and hefted the full and steamed into positioning it on its stand in the narthex and a fine soul standing near the coffee said this:

“You didn’t have to do that!  All you had to do was tap someone on the shoulder and ask for help, and we would happily help.”

Her words were like a ringing bell.  Gosh, a person could ask for help!

Rather than trying to do it all, a person could ask for help and indeed that is what life and gospel life at that is all about:  being willing to know limitations and the great good of leaning into the power of community.

Tonight is Maundy Thursday.  We’ll gather for worship to hear the telling of how it is Jesus knelt at the feet of his beloveds and tended them and how it is we are called to do likewise.

Some say that Jesus came to know this power of tending through the ways he felt the good of his own feet being annointed by Mary.

And so it is.  We feed, we tend, we bless.  And sometimes we are reminded that mutual tending is the dance of our faith. Asking for help is sign of knowledge of our limits and trust in our community.

It’s the Way.

We need to stop trying to fix up people so that the system works better, and start fixing up the system so that people work better.      Thelma Goodrich

I’m writing a sermon for Palm Sunday.  It’s the time when we remember that Jesus rode into the gates of power on a borrowed donkey.  Consistent with his teachings, his choice of mount had much to say about his notions of power.  Power: Holy power and communal power and individual power.  Power is meant to be mustered by people of faith;  not to “get along” in a world where more are in want, but to recreate with God’s help a world in which people work better.

Our systems are broken.  This is clear.  What is also clear is that we are wont to finger point in order to busy ourselves with righteous indignation.  In so doing we vent our anxieties and change nothing.  The systems remain broken.  Our world remains bound.

And the parade continues.  The parade that begins in cheering hope and ends in a slink away to muttering because really, it is easy to cheer but oh so hard to live these teachings brought to us by the donkey rider.

How do we change the system?  We remember who we are.  We are the followers of the one who named each as holy.  We are the followers of the one who maintained that we have heart and courage enough to create God’s vision for wholeness here on this God-blessed earth.  We are the followers who know our penchant for quick fixes and the thrill of other-condemnation and we pray about that.  We are the followers who choose to follow by opening ourselves to the message and to hope and to the power of living our values in community and the thrill of inviting the world to the table of grace because there is enough for all in the God vision taught us by the Christ.  Enough grace, and enough food, and enough compassion:  enough.

Sometimes the broken barbs of the system lodge themselves in our hearts.  We lose hope that there can ever be another way.

But then we take in a parade featuring a man on a donkey and we remember that while it is can-get-you-killed work, it is our work, this healing of systems that crucify too many.

Too many.