“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.”

Wisdom from the “Big Yellow Taxi” rings in my whole tormented body on this day.

I was on retreat with 30 wonderful women over the weekend.  And, clearly I was on retreat with some kind of nasty pestilence that has taken up residence in many of our bodies.

Ah me, the misery! It’s almost laughable how sad sad sad a body can become.  I’m hauling myself from place to place in my house, bleary and spaced out from fever and all I can think about is getting rid of this headache and living through this so I can feel like a human again.

Knowing that I am not alone in this is no comfort:  I am feeling bad that anyone else would feel this miserable.

There is hope, right?

I was in a room tonight with Gloria Steinem.

There were hundreds who gathered in St Louis Park to hear her speak about Feminism as the longest revolution.  

“Tell the truth, and discover in the telling that you are not alone in that truth.”

“Infuse everything you do with the values you want to see realized.”

What was shared in the room full of hopeful and committed hearts was the conviction that the world longs for a better way of living in community.  It can be brought into being, this way of living that honors differences and seeks the fullness of life for all.

It will be done through deep listening and a sense of reverence for the power that is our ability to see the sacred in all.

“The means are the ends.”

What was shared was a sense of compassion for all – men and women alike – who have been mangled by a “power over” way of living in community.  It just doesn’t work.  We know this to be true.

Instead, conversation by conversation, living the vision as we seek to birth the vision, we have the opportunity to live into a more fulsome way for all genders.

I want that for my daughters and for my son.  I want that for the tender promise that is the future.

I want that for all.  

Now would be good.

Thunder is rumbling.

My dog is glued to my leg.

The house is buttoned up.  Candles are lit.

There is something about the first thunderstorm of the year (in March?!) that brings back body memories of summers gone by.  Usually I hear the rumbles and rain and am transported to the cabin, where I spent most of my summers growing up.

The sound of rain on the roof of the cabin or the bunkhouse was and is some of the finest music I know.  Rain meant cards and books and nesting.

So tonight, Zoe and I will follow time-honored tradition.

It’s wild how much ears matter.

I have two infected and sore angry with life ears.  I am on uber drugs and happy for them.  But in the meantime, I am living with a sense of the surreal.

I depend on my ears.  Last night I was the cantor for a delicious new worship adventure at our church.  We are sharing Holden Evening Prayer every Wednesday.  Each Wednesday we come together, pray and sing words shared through the centuries, and hear the faith story of one of our members.  Last night was amazingly powerful.

Even more so for me because I heard multiple pitches.  The overtones coming from the piano were perplexing:  which note was THE note?  I decided to trust myself, and asked those gathered to hold their noses to let me know I had made the wrong choice.  I didn’t see any held noses, so I have to believe I was in the right place pitch-wise.

What that did?  It freed me!  Crazy but true.  Because I knew there was potential for wild discord, I was happy with what I could do rather than hyper critical of what I heard as I sang.  I was able to sing with a bemused sort of gratitude that while my ears were wildly funky, my voice could still share powerful good news.  Our prayers do rise like incense before our God.  They do.

Now I am in Denver.  I was worried about the air pressure challenges on my plugged up friends, but it was no problem.

I am here to celebrate the life of my uncle.  I will gather with cousins and siblings and mom and we will give thanks for the zest of Peers Fawcett.

I enter this time of family still encased in the cocoon of compromised hearing.  But the faces and the light of love will shine through the muffle.

Powerfully aware that I walk in my own company, I am.

And that’s ok.

I was blessed to do Clinical Pastoral Education work at Saint Mary’s hospital in Duluth.

Through the program, we met one day a week for group time, spent time on call at the hospital, and most blessedly spent an hour a week in one-on-one conversation with our supervisor.

Mine was a Benedictine nun, Sister Judith by name.

She walks with me yet.

CPE is a program that helps pastors and chaplains come to know themselves as ministry instruments.  Since we are complex and lumpy things, we human folk, it is vital that we learn our flinch points and foibles.  Our beauty, too.

I engaged in CPE while I was a student pastor at a church in Duluth.  I was learning how to be a pastor to a congregation of 250 people while taking classes and parenting three small children.

It was and is a perfect set-up for craziness for those of us who want to do it all, and do it all perfectly.

At one of our sessions, after hearing my litany of woeful inadequacy, Sister Judith spoke up in her grounded and gentle way.

What she said was this:  “Elizabeth, you are enough”.

It wasn’t qualified by how many people were in church on Sunday or how well my children were doing or how many papers I had written.

It was just about me being enough.

I am home after ten days of beach walking, book reading, husband savoring and space.

The first well-known entity to greet me was my old friend “not enough”.  Emails and mailboxes and troubles and calculations of church health tumbled into the spaces of being that had been unjumbled.

I spent ten days loose in the arms of Holy enough.

I figure it’s a moveable temple.

Sister Judith, speak on!