I spent the night with two long time friends.  One put me in my first pulpit, the other was a part of my heart before I was even born.  They are married to each other and wildly in love.

And one of them is seeking to chase the tentacles of cancer from his body.  It began in his bladder, did this invasion, and it has moved to his fine and voracious brain.  It has been two years of doctoring and drugging and changing eating habits and praying and breathing and surgeries and they are tired and aware of the succulent thing that is life.

Honest conversation comes easily when time seems finite.  Love is voiced freely when each moment is realized as precious.  The warm of sun, dreaming of dreams, speaking of gratitude and wonder; all are unwrapped as gift and marveled over with trembling and tender heart.

Oh, the mercy that is life and love.  Unwrapped, please God, in the temple of our hearts.

Well, after many conversations about which one of our six children would present us with the next heart to love, the answer arrived on Sunday. I now count a grand-dog as kin.

We’ve always been dog people.  My children grew up with a pound Golden Retriever who detested other dogs but loved us (and bread) with a priceless passion.  Bivio was the nanny and keeper of comings and goings and snugglings and rompings.  Zoe, our current dog, is a Black Lab (mostly).  She is gray of muzzle, lumpy and creaky and walking grace.

And now, there is Chela.  She lives in Denver with my daughter and her partner.  It seems she was wandering the parking lot at Chase’s work.  My daughter Leah has always wanted to be the kind of person that her aunt Anne is:  the kind that dogs in all of their core wisdom come to when they need a good home.  Chela has found home with Leah and Chase and in a week, I get to meet her.

Love is an expansive thing.  There are nooks and crannies in our hearts that only the liquid and loving eyes of dogs can fill.  So when the opportunity to love wanders in, the brave of heart offer welcome, knowing that from this time onward, family time will be noted by the era of the dog of the day.

For Leah and Chase, this is the time of Chela.

(The following was shared at an Out Front rally for equal marriage rights in the capitol rotunda in St Paul)

My oldest daughter Leah is 25.

She is passionate about working to create a world where hope is the first language of all.

I talked with her a month back about why she is resistant to having anything to do with church.

She rattled off to me some of the verbiage she has heard spoken in the name of the church. The words made me wince. Because what she rattled off were small and gnarled and hate-laced proclamations that seek to draw the circle of grace small.

I challenged her: she for sure hadn’t heard those things preached in the church where she worshipped growing up.

She waffled a bit and then she got to it. She spoke a question long on her heart. She said this: “When is the church going to step up?! When is the church going to speak out for justice? How is it that a church built upon the teachings of a man who was relentless about enfolding all into God’s vision of justice, how is it that Christians of all people are so silent and so unwilling to claim power and voice? When is the church going to step up for justice, Mom?”

Well, Leah, we are stepping up and speaking out.

The people of Jesus are joining our voice and power with people of all faiths to say that discriminating against any of God’s children based on who they love in a culture gone mad with hate – that is just plain crazy-making.

We DO believe in love, justice and equality in Minnesota and throughout God’s creation.

Love is sacred gift. Living that love fully in families with two moms or living that love in the marriage of two men or living that love in a family with a man and a woman is living sacred gift and the world is withering for want of lived love so why on earth would people of faith be silent while across this nation legislatures are perpetrating injustice through denying equal rights for same-gender loving people?

We will NOT be silent. We WILL speak for love and justice. And I say this to Leah and to all people who have longed for the church to reclaim its prophetic voice:

We are stepping up.

Last night I had a date with my daughter. 

She is 22, freshly graduated from college, immersed in creating a life of meaning, working for Green Corps and as a hostess at a pub, and living in the third floor of our house.

We don’t see each other often beyond a “is there coffee in the thermos?” in the morning or a creaking of floors above me when she comes in after her old mother has retired for the night.

She is walking delight.  So, having a free night for both of us and having the luxury of time together, we opted for dinner and a chick flick.  We perused the movie listings and landed on the most unlikely movie ever to attend with our partners and thus, on a Friday night, we found ourselves in a throng of woman people – Rachel counted nine men in the packed house – and sat through “Dear John”.  I was easily the oldest person in the place.

It was as we expected:  Drivel (ok, I did cry) and surface-skimming.  But of course, that wasn’t the point of going.  The point was, we claimed the time and participated in the ritual of sharing food and laughter and appreciation for the wonder that is liking people called kin.

Blessed am I among women.

Yesterday I participated in an interfaith forum.  There were four of us presenting:  a Jewish Rabbi, a Hindu, a Muslim and me, the Christian rep.  We each spoke for ten minutes or so fegarding our faith tradition and its teachings about poverty.  Following our presentation, we responded to questions raised by folks in the room.

It was a rich experience.  The hospitality was warm and the appreciation for such a gathering lent shimmer to the event.

What I came to know about myself is this:  I begin from the place of the power of Jesus’ social teachings.  Built upon the strength of his Hebrew roots, Jesus had much to say about how it is being God’s beloveds means we live with an awareness of our connection in community.

I suggested more than once that if we organized:  within our faith traditions and across our faith traditions, the structures that create the blight of poverty would be dismantled.  It was a novel concept to some, this notion of joined power and civic impact.

We have a long way to go.  But if we are not willing to lean into our faith teachings and bring them into the light of day of lived values, I figure we ought close the doors of the busily kept up temples and churches and content ourselves with a world we are not much thrilled about leaving to our children and grandchildren.

We are rich in instruction and promise.  Will we summon the imagination and faith to live it? 

What I experienced yet again is the conviction that the teachings of Jesus are sufficient for this task.  And I learned that I am oh so hungry for a movement of folk who see the oughtness of fully lived Christian life.

How many emails is it reasonable to digest and respond to in a day?

How much information is enough?

In a posthumously published book (A Failure of Nerve, Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix) , Edwin Friedman maintains that we are near paralyzed with the volume of information we have coming at us day after day.  We don’t take action or take the risk involved with bold leadership because we feel that we have to somehow have all the information possible in order to decide wisely.  We are paralyzed by this information overload.  It stalls us physically, and even imaginatively. 

Medical intuitive Carolyn Myss maintains that the zinging through the air of the so-much information beamed through emails and wireless portals affects our beings at a cellular level.  We are bombarded; under seige.

At a training I was at yesterday the presenter maintained that stress (the common day lament of the masses) is not caused by doing too much.  It is caused by not doing the things that we should be doing.  When we knowingly set aside or try to ignore the things we know are ours to do, we become stressed.

Provocative.  So maybe what this means is that on this Friday night when I owe no one my presence I will relieve my stress by doing what I know I need to do.  I will stop.  I will stop inputting and outputting and allow a wide-open space  for my whipped-into-a-frenzy input-overloaded brain.

No emails.  No tasks.  No interactions.  No easy thing, this.

There are so many ways lives are poured out.  Watching the news from Haiti and imagining the want and fear that drench that land is almost overwhelming.  And, I am a part of a people sending prayers and aid over the water and that helps.

Working at our monthly food distribution (two bags of groceries given per person, no questions asked) I encounter volunteers who offer to come to this church and teach Spanish classes.  They are delighted to be asked, and generous in their response.  This will happen, this tutelage of mono linguists such as myself.  Barriers melt when relationships are tended.

I have been asked to speak at the state capitol on February 11th at the Freedom to Marry Day held by Outfront MN.  The rally seeks to name the injustice that exists when beloveds of the same gender are denied the right to marry.  I will speak, because as a person of faith I believe that injustice wounds all of creation and silence countenances the wounding.  As a part of this movement sparked by Jesus, speaking helps.

I sat on Saturday with a family who is returned from years of seeing the face of Christ in others in lands far from here.  They were willing to share their questions and their convictions and their story and I am moved yet by the sacrament of holy conversation. 

Where else can one such as I find such beauty?  There are people who want to be a part of healing and shaping and living into the promise of wholeness.  I am a part of their number and together what we do helps.  It surely helps me.

It is sacramental:  Morning spent sharing coffee and conversation with heart people. 

My household has been peopled with usually far-flung children for almost two weeks now.  Blending families with three children per spousal unit means six young adults and their partners who are generous enough to carve out time over the holidays to touch base with their parents and siblings.  They come and go and bless.

Mornings have meant numerous pots of coffee and conversations rich in laughter and thought.  We are sleep-fuzzed and trust each other enough to clomp downstairs in the rumple that is rest.   Days passed are savored and the day to come planned and singing through the whole is the hum of gratitude.  We are together, we are warm and stilled and relaxed in the cocoon that is home.

Tomorrow my Denver daughter and her partner leave for the rich good that is their life there.  I cannot get over how her nearness affects me at a cellular level.  My whole being feels full of right and good when I can hear her voice and see her beauty.  The power of subconscious body celebration is so real.   And, blessing her on her way is my job as her mother.

The discipline is living the now.  And so I do.  Savoring coffee and love and being.

My husband, daughter and daughter’s beloved are off on a grocery store mission.  Tonight, the men will take the kitchen and create gifts.  Football games and basketball games and comings and goings and wide open spaces make for the good of this day.

What I like about the feast to come is that each of us will contribute our own touch.  The kitchen will soon be chaos, the ribbing and jostling for space, mutterings about inferior knives (will I EVER have knives that are sharp?) and tools not deemed suitable to guest chefs will be thrown out and deflected.  And we will sit down to eat at a table ringed by the most beautiful faces in creation.

Me?  I am making mango salsa.  And then I am getting out of the way.

May the indrawn breath that is new year’s day bless and sustain.  May we trust the good we bring to all tables.  May we soak in the beauty and laugh and launch and live.

I read a lot.  Embedded in the wisdom of many books is this bit of advice:  don’t expect things.  Expectations lead to clutching wanting grasping disappointment.  So just quit it, the expecting and the wanting.

It’s the last day of 2009.  As I think about the year to come, I don’t know how to fashion an image sans expectancy.  I understand the bruises and soul-clunks of disappointment.  They dance in my being.  I could live their sour drag less, I suppose, if I trained myself to be fully present in the now and dispensed with all the vulnerability that is expectancy.

But how can I jettison expectancy?  It seems impossible that a follower of Jesus would disdain the yet-to-be-realized.  How can I not want peace on earth?  How can I still the stir of expectation that wakens me to each day of life?  If I expect less, have I cashed in some of the unique fizz that is Spirit gift?

I’m pondering this in my soul, as Mary pondered the angel song and its proclamation that she has a magnification-worthy being.  She said yes to living expectancy, did Mary, and the Christ was made flesh.

I want.  In the year to come I want my loves to grow and flourish, I want my community in Christ to know its beauty and power, I want some quiet time alone to unwrap what the Spirit would have me know about life, I want less finger-pointing and more cooperation in our civic life, I want creation to know the power of our connection, I want clean air and compassionate eyes and hearts.  I want a reverence for differences and a delight in the crazy and often clumsy thing that is living into truth.

Do I expect these things to be worthy of expectation?  As a follower of Jesus, I have to say “yes” because through partnership with the Holy all things are possible and we have not even begun to live the way of Jesus.  We never have. 

But I expect that we will try.

Happy New Year!