I hit a deer yesterday.  With my car.  On a two lane highway.

I had been aware of them and was being very careful, even though the sun was out and it seemed that danger on four legs couldn’t be too tricksy.  But suddenly there was this creature, threading itself between my car and an oncoming vehicle.

I hit it.  Detached and wondering even as I did so.  Aware of the need to not hit the other car.  Aware of the inevitablity of contact with the live and defenseless creature impossible to dodge.

I pulled over to the side of the road and watched the deer flop around on the pavement.  It was heart breaking.  The car behind me pulled over and two young women got out.  We called 911 and described the scene to the dispatcher who must deal with this daily but for me it was no common place ballet I was watching.

Cars stopped in the road, providing a protective shield for the deer as it tried to get to its feet.  Repeatedly.  Its tongue was hanging out.  It seemed to be talking to itself, doing a systems check, ascertaining possibilities.  And then, after what seemed like and hour, it loped off into the woods.

I wept with gratitude and relief.  To be an instrument of death was a burden I couldn’t much bear.  I was grateful for the deer’s return to the safety of the woods, away from the stretcher of the asphalt highway.  I was grateful to the two young women who bore witness with me and kept me company as I breathed with the deer.  I was grateful that my car has only a few nicks and my person none at all. 

Except for my heart.  We can be so careful.  We can do all the right things.  And it matters not.  Tender and beautiful things leap out at us and sometimes there is hurt.  And we bear witness.  We pay attention and we do our best and we motor on aware of the life we know so little of playing out all along our pathways.

All last night I wondered how the deer fared.

I forget which poet it is – ee cummings?- who speaks of the great celebration that is spring.  The world becomes puddle-luscious.

And so it is here in Grand Marais, MN.

I put on my skis this morning to spend an hour or so in the woods and they LAUGHED at me!  I was moving (or trying to)  along on bannana peels, since I had no wax designed for spring skiing (I have since learned it is Klister wax that I need.  Tomorrow is another day).  I tried to make my way down the trail because  it is a day for outdoor savoring but finally gave up, laughing at myself and life because shuffling in place just doesn’t suit me.

Driving into town to get above mentioned antidote to skids, I topped the hill and saw kites flapping in the wind.  Kites!  Superman kites and box kites and dragon kites, anchored on the ice of the harbor, catching the wind with laughter, and tended by ice-skating people carving their joy on a shelf of ice with the sparkle of open water behind them. 

The world is puddle-luscious in this in between time.  I am perched in a coffee shop in a town I love, sipping a triple espresso and eating a Thunder Cookie and I will soon go out to play in the wind and the slush and the warm and the luscious.

Thanks be.

This big old lake that I find myself perched beside has been midwife throughout my life.

Lake Superior has sung her song and it has woven its way through generations of my people.  She sings to me as I near the end of my renewal leave.

My parents were both raised on her shore.   They grew and made life and play and meaning with her constant presence lending wisdom and a sense of awe impossible to dodge if souls are open to hear.  My kin are buried in soil watered by her presence.  I nearly met my own death along her shore thirty years ago when meeting a semi truck head on.  My children were raised with her breath in their being.  And now I am here.  A woman stepping into rebirth, seeking to knit the learnings of my life into celebration of that which is ongoing, eternal, and so much more given to delight than the deadly serious grind so often made of life.   And She is singing her song as the moon and sun echo their response.

Mostly I am moved by her eternal witness to the rhythms and power of life.  There is borning and dying always.  There is wonder available and offered to us always.  There is a force larger than our own fears and she sings her song if we will but stop long enough to open the ears of our heart to it.

These things I savor as I strap on my skis.  Entering the forest after a big snow is entering into holy ground.  And I am on it, in it, and of it.  Midwifed into the life uniquely mine to enflesh.

I went on a pilgrimage today. 

I’m no baseball guru, but I am married to a man whose first read in the morning is the sports page.  So we jumped into the car and motored thirty miles to watch the Twins play Puerto Rico. 

Who knew that such things happen and are so important?  We were in a sea of Minnesotans celebrating spring and cheering on their guys.  Being in the midst of the party was wonderful.  Listening in on conversations going on around me about the team and catching the delight emanating from my beloved made for a great bit of wonderment.  All of that, and sun too!

Who we are matters.  What it is we pin our allegiance to matters.  Watching the rituals of batting stances and knowing that in all my baseball ignorance I was a part of a communal celebration mattered.

A man sitting next to me was from Indianapolis.  He wondered how often we saw games in our home town, since it is so close.  We had to admit that we didn’t go to games.  That interchange led to a great conversation about why it is the opportunities to play go so often unexplored.

But not today.  We played.  We journeyed to the place of baseball and threw ourselves into the adventure and it seems to me we’re learning some good lessons about our own play as we watched it unfold before us on the field.

Being from Minnesota has its distinct advantages.

Today in Naples, Floridians and most other critters are hunkered down.  It is windy and brisk.  The waves on the gulf are majestic in their power and relentless in their movement.  The seagulls seem to have found shelter along with the bipeds who are shunning the beach.

But not me.  It is magnificent!  The crash of the waves, the expanse of beach without human presence, the smell of salt and the game playing with waves determined to catch my feet;  all are mine to savor.

The same creative ache of love that spun the waves and the wind and the sun into being walks with me into this day.  Snow and ice are fine tutors.  So too is this world wildly alive with wind.

Maybe it’s the right and good practice of venturing out away from the familiar that makes home so precious.

Home is that place where meaning making gets thrashed out.  It’s familiar and most times beloved and the place where real happens.

This was so real to me last night as I marked Ash Wednesday away from home.  I got myself to a church that has almost five times the people in worship each Sunday.  So many times we are made to imagine that bigger is better.  It wasn’t.

I was longing for a good soak in silence and contemplation.  I was longing to feel connected to the teachings of my faith that ground me no matter where I find myself.  I was longing for… home.

I didn’t find it there.  The shimmer of the Spirit that I feel every time I walk into the sanctuary at home was missing.  I struggled to stay open to it, even as I inwardly winced at the jovial chit chat going on around me during the prelude (on Ash Wednesday, my judging critic gasped!), and at the seeming inability to go through worship to the place of one of our most soul quaking realities – our own finitude and the expanse of Holy holding.

The most powerful internal conversation – and it was holy in its teaching – had to do with an appreciation of the profound love for the heart that leads people to gather in the name of the Christ to hold to themselves the promises and challenges of the gospel.  I was in someone else’s home.  In family speak, they didn’t mash the potatoes the way I do at home (communion wafers!  Oh, the sterile wrong of it!), but they set the table.  And I, who was hungry, came to dine.

I walked from worship longing for home.  My church home isn’t perfect.  The family fights and squabbles over the goofiest things.  But in the church community I call home, we learn in our sharing and in our squabbling and in our seeking of the sacred.  We learn that doing the work of making faith home matters.  With our warts and our quirks and our bungles and our glories, we are doing the work of Jesus together.  And somewhere along the way we forget about our own terror in the night and focus on the whisper and sometimes trumpet of assurance of Holy tending and care.

And people come.   People who know a hunger for home.  People willing to claim kin.  And please God, they are taken in and unwrapped in the way that only home can hold:  unwrapped into the real of their own good and the gentle of their place in it and the nudge of their own power.  That’s home.

On this morning’s beach walk my Minnesota heart knew these things:

Seagulls here have wild and crazy hair-dos.

My feet are happiest bare naked.

Watching a big billed pelican swoop in and dine in the company of a seagull hoping to share the action made for great reflections on the principles of economics.

Wandering without agenda or time crunch stretches the heart.

God has a great sense of creativity.  I met bodies of all kinds – lumpy and lean and old and young and held proudly and schlumped.  We were all there taking in creation’s show.

People in paradise greet each other.  It was good to be happy in the company of others who look up, see another and make connection.

Missing my church community is real on this day when for years I have looked into the eyes of kin in faith and rehearsed with them what we all know:  we will die someday and be enfolded into the mystery of ongoing life.  Ash Wednesday is a rich time of marking the presence of the Holy within and around us.  I will worship tonight in a new place where I will not lead.  I will be among the marked.  I will take my place in the procession and know blessing and within me I will carry the faces and presence of the community of the faithfilled at RUMC.

I am full.  I am wind blown.  I am sun kissed and space filled and alive.

Never are we alone.

This I know well even as I am lodging in a place I have never been before.  Outside my window are palm trees and growing things.  The Gulf is close at hand on one side, and the promise of a dolphin sighting on the other side and I am alone in this place.  Except I am not alone.

I am in the heart place of a huge hearted clan.  For decades, these walls have held laughter, celebration, and the good of time spent with no agenda beyond pleasure seeking.  It has been a pilgrimage site for a family that has welcomed in new members with amazing grace and they too have come to know holding in this place.  And so I am here, marvelling at how it is family matters.

We give our hearts to relationships.  We say “yes” each day to the challenge and wonder of claiming kin – blood and heart, both.  We weave life with people and we make life with people and we widen the net to include others and the glory that is loving and living is made shining because we have the courage to take what we have and offer it in the hopes that it will bless another.  We have the audacity and courage to offer ourselves.  And we are taken up. 

Never are we alone.  The cloud of witnesses that make for our lives travels with and blesses us.  And that cloud of grace wraps sojourners and kin alike.  Sacred trust savored with gratitude.  I like it here.

Battered and scarred and scared, I began a Lilly endowment program entitled “Women Touched by Grace”. The advertisement promised learning and the carrot of travel to Rome. I applied to the program through the nudging of the Holy. The dwindling capacity of my God-kissed heart to know its own washing in grace was real. The logo of the program: two women’s fingers reaching toward each other, ala the Sistine Chapel’s depiction of God reaching out life to Adam, was foreshadowing of the life I would receive. Life. Reached out to me. Through the Christ alive in women touched by grace.

The strange of worship soaked in silence. The odd of raising voices in the sort of chant that frowns on the trumpet of any one but rather pursues the communal weave of all. The sharing of conviction that thoughts, those convictions of my own badness and inadequacies that thronged my sensibilities and created trudge in my soul; those thoughts are in fact affront to the Holy and impediment to grace. The sharing of community with shining and human monastic women who chose as vocation worship and prayer. The telling of hurts and the holding of love and the safety of being known and the wonder of being unwrapped and bathed and held and claimed by the very God who brought me to the waters of this life.

John Wesley preached long and fiercely before his heart was “strangely warmed”. He didn’t come to know Christ as a loving grace-gift in his being until he was able to observe the faith grounding of another people – Moravians, in his case.

For me, a woman who has preached and believed and loved and grounded her life in the gospel provocation and gift of Christ Jesus, it was a group of women who reached out their fingers and hands and heart in the touch that has given me soul life.

I am whole. I believe the good news. I believe it not only for those with whom I share sermon and pastoring life. I believe it is so for me.

I unwrapped that gift in the community of saints both Protestant and Catholic at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove Indiana.

And my heart. My strangely warmed, unpacked, thirsty, and so profoundly grateful heart, will live its rebirth forever more.

This morning, the hugs were for my stepson who is off to Nicaragua to revisit a youth program he helped to establish.

Yesterday, the hugs welcomed my son who staggered off the train after an 18 hour trip.  Pulled by the power of Cupid, he wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with his beloved.  I’ll be hugging him goodbye tonight in order that he clack his way back to college.

My daughter is soon to arrive from Austin, Texas, where she was invited to participate in a conference hosted by Bill Clinton.  She and other passionate souls will lift the vision of an earth well tended and reverenced.  I will pick her up from the airport, provide a meal and an ear, and hug her on her way back to college.

They come and they go, they unfold and explore and the world is their parish, these loves of my life.

I marvel at it, even as I reflect on the teachings of Benedict and the dessert mothers and fathers about the power of place and stability.

My delight in their thirst for experiencing, learning, and giving is real.  It is crucial classroom, the vastness of the world.  They are enthusiastic students.

And my prayer is that they and the hug dispenser (that would be me) learn the power and honesty of finding a place in which to ground;  a place that sustains, challenges, and holds them.  A place where they are graced to learn the lessons of being.

Travelling mercies:  In the whee of doing.  In the sweet grace of being.