Well, I knew it would come to me during this three month renewal leave:  The itch to work.  It has me on this day when a long beloved program is coming to an end.  We are saying good-byes that have to hold us for two years and usually at such a time I pack my bags and land back in the midst of my role as pastor of a church.

But not this time.  Since I am on leave, I was able to tack on a few extra days of rest at the monastery.  The spaces no longer inhabited by my clergy sisters is huge and my default setting when things get empty feeling is to launch myself into work and doing but  not this time.  This time I have time to pay attention to the silence.  This time I have time to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this time.

I feel like a pressure cooker.  I have so many ideas and so much energy and I am feeling strongly the desire to be back at work.

But instead I’ll breathe deeply and give thanks and pay attention and stow away this yen for work for a time when I have an equally compelling yen for rest.

Balance is hard to find, maybe not possible, and probably not worth chasing after.  Instead I’ll pay attention to what is.

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Sister Mary Cecile is home.

She was doing the work she had long done – tending her parish – when she died unexpectedly, with her boots on.

I know this because I am folded into the community of Our Lady of Grace monastery outside of Indianapolis.  As guest of this house, I was here for Sister Mary Cecile’s homecoming. 

For four services of worship – morning prayer and noonday prayer, a wake and her funeral, her casket was open for the prayers that washed over her.  Prayers chanted, silence held, the gaze of her sisters who honored her with the caress of their eyes, stories told and tears shed.  Sister Mary Cecile was held by her community even as she was held by the God she had served for eight decades.

As the group moved out of the chapel and to the cemetary on the monastery grounds, the names of the saints were chanted, followed by the names of each woman from the community of Our Lady of Grace who had gone before.  The litany of the saints wove Sister Mary Cecile into the web of the community past, and it will weave her into the community future as her name is voiced with the passing of each sister who follows her home.

Ritual.  It holds us.  It reminds us of the huge of mystery and the power of what we can know:  the love and witness of holy flesh in the being of our beloveds.

Some day my name will be voiced as one who has moved into a new way of being and I pray that my soul too will know the washing of prayer and the weaving of witness borne on the lips of my community.

May it be so for us each.

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I’m in Indianapolis ensconced in a monastery that has become home for me.  For almost six years I have joined thirty other Protestant clergy women to gather for learning:  about Benedict, about communal spiritual life, and most of all, to learn what it is to be aware of how it is we are each immersed in grace. 

This is our last gathering.  I’m choosing not to think about that much as we greet each other after a year-plus of being apart.  We know each other’s stories – the parts that are shared – and catch up on children and partners and dreams and defeats and we are in a place where we are known as women touched by grace.  That common denominator is our core identity. 

And there is this.  My soul is bubbling with gratitude for these fine women and the Holy power that brought us together.  But also my soul is celebrating because a dear compatriot in the ministry and in the world is “back” after a serious heart attack.  I am so grateful.

We are touched by grace.  All of us.  Bubbles are good.

Salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

So I’m having fun.  I’m in a sea of  United Methodists and we who are present in this place (Florida in January.  No fools we!) are celebrated as maladjusted creative  subversive spirit-filled hope.  I like that.  The conference is called “Living the United Methodist Way:  Turning Worlds Upside Down” and it is so clear from speakers and preachers and the knowings of our own hearts that church as usual is killing us.  By that I mean church more concerned about boundaries and protocols and safety than the unleashing of the Spirit in this day and this world and this people.

This stuff gets me buzzing.  There are so many places and ways I could use the juice of my vocational life.  I just can’t shake church as the place I am called to be:  church as alive, church as movement and proclamation of hope, church as witness, church as binder of wounds and teller of stories and church as midwife of promise.  So I am in a sea of people who are groaning to bring this promise to life and I want to roll up my sleeves and jump into action and I am on leave.  All this energy has to be bottled and learned from and distilled into life practice. 

So I have time to digest.  And pray.  And tend the fire in my belly that gives thanks for a God who would call me and millions to creative maladjustment.  And together?  Oh, together there is a world sore in need of spiritual kooks – the people who celebrate being upside down.

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I have been in conversation with a soulful one.

Our conversation has been rich and roaming.  Most recently, it has touched upon a topic that has felt somehow dangerous:  how is it we are in relationship with all that is?  How does our answer to that question impact our sense of being in community?  And very much at the quick of this question, how does our answer to the question shape our communal policy making?

I think on this conversation as I read of layoffs and cutbacks and the crystalizing of economic values unfolding in these days.  As a people long unwilling to consider limits, we are being asked to consider what it means to pare down and pay attention.  The signs are ominous.  So many of us have so much.

And so many of us have so little. 

And we are all in it together.

How is it we can any longer afford a health care system that is not available to all?  How is it we can afford to cut spending to programs that equip and empower our children through early childhood programs and public education?  How is it we can imagine that the squandering of the potentiality of any does not impoverish us all?

In conversation with my mother-in-law yesterday she spoke of the ways she learned and lived through the Great Depression.  The community paid attention.  They sought to reach out to those struggling and there was no one in her town, she believed, who landed outside of the communal net of care woven by all.  

Idyllic fantasies?  No, faith bedrock.  Throughout scripture, poverty and the challenges it spawns is mentioned thousands of times as the concern of the community of God.  To be a person of faith is to know stewardship of the lives and hopes and potentials of creation.  Stewardship is engagement;  taking the considerable that we have and seeking the good. 

As we live into the rebuilding of these days, I pray for an awareness of how it is we are woven one with the other.

There is a cardinal singing outside.

Improbable and amazing, the splash of color and the insistence upon song on a morning when it is -15 and yet there it is.

I’m on renewal leave.  It is a time for letting the ground of my soul lie fallow.  I am taking this leave while the earth lies seemingly frozen and dead. 

And yet, cardinals sing.  Coffee is brewed.  Newspapers are leisured over.  The eyes and touches and sounds of beloveds are savored.  The silence experienced while not preaching or writing or teaching or leading or problem solving is dense with the song my soul has long ached to hear.  The song of being.

In the throat of the cardinal.  In the temple of my heart.

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It’s hard to keep the tears in their place.  Maybe that’s what this is all about.

I have been weeping for four days now.  I wept as I joined in worship with the good folk of Minnehaha UMC as they marked MLK Jr Sunday and the power of scriptural justice brought to voice through him and through each of us.  I awakened on Sunday without car access (having kids home from college is not without its challenges) and thought about sitting  Sunday out in the company of newspapers and coffee.  But I knew in my heart that I had to participate in the power of song and celebration.  I also knew there would be a mighty preach in there (my husband is the pastor, my bias is real) and so I hailed a taxi and got myself to the power of community and faith on a day that my heart needed to mark.

The prayer over the gifts on Sunday was given by a woman who had known in her own being the power of racism.  She had lived internment camp evil in Hawaii and as a woman of color she had known what it was to be denigrated and as she prayed gratitude for a world turned upside down through the inaguration of Barak Obama, her voice broke and my heart cracked open.  The tears would not be barricaded.

I have heard the words of scripture quoted and the sensitibilities of our powerful and demanding God – the insistence upon justice and peace – voiced by person after person through this inaguration and I believe I believe I believe that we are living into a new day of promise and reconciliation even as we roll up the sleeves of our beings to do the work awaiting us.

I am proud of my children and the many who lent their hearts and bodies to the movement that eventuated in this season of hope.  I am proud of the vision and promise of this country and of the millions who showed up to mark it on a Minnesota-esque day in Washington DC. 

The tears belong outside.  After long weeping over the despair that has gripped us collectively and the fear that has threatened our promise, I am leaking hope through the waters of my eyes.  And the world sparkles, yes it does.

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A good woman I know gave me a card that says “Change, of any sort, requires courage.” (Maryanne Radmacher)

I am embracing change for the three months to come.  I will be on renewal leave.  I will depart this church, the hub of much of my energy and focus these six years past, and I will embark upon a wild adventure:  I will discover what pleases me.   I will cease my busy dash through the days and I will discover the wide open spaces of time and options and the radical wonder of being idle for a time.

The stack of books I intend to read is towering.  The writing I imagine doing beguiling.  The people I am hungry to connect with numerous.

But what I need more than all of the above is the courage it will take for me to rest.  To be.  To allow silence and solace to hold me and gentle me.

That kind of courage I seek to make my own in the months to come.  The courage to rest.

And so the sport continues.  The bashing of women and most tragically, this bashing is done by our own: Women.  Women savaging other women for the choices they make and the living they embrace.

Sarah Palin has tossed us in the pot of stirred judgment yet again.  The tsks and raised eyebrows around arising from childbirth beds to sit behind a desk.  The wonderings about the kind of mothering that would lead a seventeen-year-old to her own mother status.  The furor of these days over the “proper” role or conduct of women has been news media fodder and it hurts us as women, especially when women join the savaging fray.

One of the core challenges to patriarchy is this notion that dualism is:  there is right, there is wrong, there is woman, there is man, there are maternal ways and there are not.  Increasingly, feminists and others are coming to appreciate the nuances and rich depth of a world conceived and lived between the axis.

Do we all have opinions about what makes for healthy mothering and working and living?  Of course.  But as soon as we sweep those judgments over the lives of others, we have lost our ability to appreciate the complexities of life faced by all people:  Governors and single moms, professionals and stay-at-homes.

The woman manipulation of this election is palpable.  Perhaps it has always been so.  My prayer is that this does not cause us to turn on the very thing that will join and save us:  relationships, linkages and hope.  There is so much at stake for both parties and all of creation. 

It would be good to live and let live in a spirit of grace.

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It has been a wondrous week of political theatre.  I have been able to see and hear many of the main speeches delivered during the Democratic National Convention.  Persons who have given of their lives in order to be a part of our unfolding as a nation have spoken, and the affirmation of the past whilst holding a vision for the future has been moving.

Two days ago my men’s Bible Study group (average age perhaps 75) watched a DVD one of our members brought in featuring Newt Gingrich.  He was lecturing on the foundations of our country:  a shared belief that through our Creator, we are gifted with certain unalienable rights:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Gingrich was a strong presenter.  He left his listeners with no doubt that the founders of our nation were well attuned to the power and presence of the Holy.  It has long been assumed that God is present in the living of our communal life.

We talked in the men’s Bible Study about how it is that all things evolve and change.  The realities of a largely white and largely Christian movement (not to mention male, since it was all “men” who were created equal) that founded our nation has changed significantly.  We live in a world vastly different than that of our forebears.  We are a rainbow of peoples, faiths, ethnicities and hopes.  For some of us, that evokes a sense of fear and a desperate wish to return to the comfort of what was.  For others of us this sense of evolving into what this nation is called to in this now is rich and exciting.

Seeing an African American man with his wife and his children brown of skin and shining of soul accept the nomination to become one of two contenders for the office of the President of the United States was a moment perhaps not even imagined by those who founded our nation.

But it happened.  With a nation watching and praying and celebrating and wondering. And we hold these truths to be evident.  That all are created with stunning promise and shine.  And we pray that we may live into a day when we as a nation see diversity as blessing, hope as sacred, and differences as opportunity to expand our understanding.

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