dogs and houses

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We are readying our house for sale.

This house energetically reached out and grabbed me from the moment I first entered her front door.

Home for the last nine years is a grand old foursquare Victorian. She has gleaming wood and stained and leaded glass windows and she has held us with such grace. Parties – those I know about and the many I do not – to celebrate graduations and weddings and college leave-takings and returns and room to settle when life threw curves and coffee pots drained and cards dealt and meals shared and flotsam and jetsam accumulated through nine years of merging and setting out; all these things live in this place.

We are readying her for her next work.

And we are having to do our own work of celebrating and marking and mourning that which was and that which will be no more as well as that which will always be.

It seems I tell my life through dogs and houses.

I mark my days and ways of being according to the dog love and the house that conspired to hold me.

This house has held me and mine with such grace.

It is the house of Zoe, Mick and Ball and an Olm Wiggen Macaulay clan made flesh under her roof.

Good work.

light shine

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People are so good.

Getting into my car yesterday after a major snow dump, I knew I was in trouble. We live in the city and the city had not plowed the alley behind our house. By the looks of it one or two cars had made it through, but the snow was deep and my Honda poorly equipped.

But of course I tried.

And got stuck.

Wedged into my neighbor’s snow bank, I couldn’t get my car door open so after clambering over seats I freed myself and went in search of a shovel.

I heard a lovely and hopeful sound. A neighbor was out shoveling and chose to see my plight. He came over and while we shared wonder at the volume of snow that had come our way, we dug and threw and freed my car for a time. I almost made it through the alley before it got stuck again and this time the original fine friend was joined by another who made it possible for me to get out.

They set aside their own time and agendas, did these men.

I watched the same sort of light shine throughout the day. A different neighbor worked at the end of the alley clearing away the snow. Pushers and shovelers and commiserators and wonderers all, we were.

We had come through another storm. The world was bright and beautiful and we had kindness to spare.

People are so good.

cellular

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It feels like cellular shift.

We are moving.

I have been appointed to serve as Lead Pastor at Christ Church in Rochester, MN. This will happen in mid June of this year.

We are moving.

This means many things. It means imagining the jostle of moving away from the city in which five of six of our children and Cooper’s mother live. It means being an hour and 1/2 farther away from our cabin and my mother.

And it means leaving churches with whom we have made life for eleven and nine years.

It is cellular, this shift.

We who are United Methodist agree when we are ordained that we will be itinerant. What that means is that “the world is our parish” as John Wesley saw it and we agree that we will be deployed in ministry by the Bishop and the Cabinet.

It means a phone call comes and we trust that God is in the midst of cellular change.

There is grief in it and a sense of such immense gratitude for the lives I have been blessed to encounter through these eleven years. I’ll have time to sort all of that out in the months to come. Tears flow readily.

And, there are adventures and learning ahead.

I was blessed to serve in Duluth. I am blessed to serve at Richfield. I will be blessed to serve at Christ Church in Rochester.

Blessing. It is cellular.

We are moving.

mantle

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My mother is 84 years old.

She skated with the Ice Follies, raised four children, survived divorce and a second challenging marriage, rolled in a car three years ago and picked herself up to begin life again. My mother is petite tungsten. She raised us to work hard, be gracious, and appreciate the beauty of creation and music.

She came for a visit. To do so, she climbed on a shuttle from Duluth and when she arrived at the Minneapolis airport she was summarily dumped by a driver who was in a hurry. In the midst of his rush, she was dropped at the wrong place with the wrong suitcase. How to connect with her waiting (in the wrong place) daughter? How to forgive herself for her suitcase blunder?

We found each other due to a kind fellow traveler. As we were going down the escalator to get into the car and there discern how to retrieve her missing suitcase, a traveler ahead of her lost control of her suitcase. Said suitcase, with handle in the up position, wedged itself in such a way that as my mother went down the escalator that suitcase handle encountered and gouged her shin. She was trapped. She was injured. I was there and powerless to do anything but hold onto her.

She limped away and after a few steps tossed off in a sort of no-big-deal way that she was bleeding.

And so she was. Her leg had been barked and opened. When she allowed a look at it, my whole body hurt because she had such grievous wounds.

We got her suitcase after a trip to the Mall of America Transport Hub and to Shakopee. All the while she worried; not about her leg, but about how she was inconveniencing me.

I am so very much aware that the woman of steel and grit and heart is a woman made fragile by years and life.

She let me tend her. She whose voice, tenderness and steel I carry was willing to let me kneel at her feet and tend the places of wounding. It felt like a passing of the mantle. Much of me is moved and grateful to be able to mother my mother. The other much younger and surely primal part of me wants to shout and fuss because it will never be done with needing a mother, this child.

I will never be done with needing my mother.

A Kind of Hush

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People want to feel sorry for me this time of year.

Yes, Advent and the run-up to Christmas is a busy time for church pastors.

And, it is so real, this remembering of promises of peace and the gifting of hope. People come to church leaning in to hear the song of the angels.

We do a lot this time of year. This Sunday we will treat our hearts to a service of Lessons and Carols. The following Sunday the children will lead us in a telling of the Christmas miracle. The next Sunday we will expand into a Taize service meant to help us make space in our souls for the Word Made Flesh.

We’ll have a special service of Hope and Healing where we’ll name our losses and allow tears to be. There are teas and gatherings and Christmas toy drives and gift wrapping offered at our Thrift Store.

While all these things are going on, people will be hospitalized and will welcome a church pastor. Families will gather and dissolve. Gifts will be pursued and purchased and children’s wishes will be heard and all of what we do happens because in Jesus flesh became the living place of God.

That’s church in these days.

For me, it is one of the best seasons of the year. On the 25th I will rest. But in the meantime, church is a stable offering warmth in the sometimes bitter cold of life.

This innkeeper gives thanks.

too close

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For a number of evenings I have been tumbled into a strange and troubling land.

Cooper and I have been watching “Mad Men”, the television series that details the birth of the advertising machine in the 1960’s. Through all the cigarette smoking all-day-long drinking woman squashing I find myself drawn and heartsick, both.

I am watching on television the generation that raised me.

The assumptions that speak through the dialogue are those that have bedeviled me through much of my life: The assumptions about the role of women, the “boys will be boys” catering to male privilege, and the insistence upon not seeing what is going on. All of those assumptions were in the smoke-filled air that I breathed growing up.

I watch the trim-waisted women desperately seeking meaning and the loneliness of the men. It seems both genders are engaged in a desperate attempt to avoid the realities of life. Their children are cossetted and kept safe from the world but they know the great world of the unspoken and they are uneasy in their cloister.

I find myself amazed at how much has changed in fifty or so years.

And I find myself amazed at the wounds that remain, subterranean flinches that make themselves known throughout the day as I encounter what is in the year 2013.

We still make assumptions that harm both genders (including the assumption that there are only two genders with no gradation between).

We still don’t want to have to see what is going on.

We still exalt those who can manipulate us best.

I don’t know if I can continue to watch the series. It hurts too much.

Oh my mother, oh my father, oh those of us raised in those days.

Is there balm in Gilead?

gingerbread

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The ground keeps shifting.

For awhile shifting was something that felt important to resist. With change comes loss and grief about that loss. Letting go of what was in order to live what is felt somehow wrong or disloyal.

I spent precious energies trying to recreate what can never be again and in that insistence upon constancy I forgot the core constant: The ground keeps shifting.

Anything that cannot change will die. Biological truth is making its way to my heart.

Around the table at Thanksgiving were beloveds. Some were missing. Those not present were joining other families or they were doing what felt important to them. Next year the same will be true. There will be those who are there and those not there and rather than lament or rail or whimper about what is not my heart was and is so full of what is.

I am able to set a table and there are those who come.

The wonder of it.

At church, in my home, and through my heart I am able to set a table and there are those who come.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

midnight

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Last night Cooper and I were welcomed into magic.

Our music director for Living Waters is Victor Zupanc. He is an amazing musician with the kind of soul that invites people to join him in making beauty.

He is also the music director and composer at the Children’s Theatre here in Minneapolis.

He invited us to see his new show “Cinderella”.

We found our seats in the midst of kid-zapped energy. It was a Friday night after a long week and often such nights find us home seeking to remember who we are.

What we discovered is that we are children longing for magic.

We found it.

We were invited into a world where mice speak and longings are heard and dreams do come true.

Tears were near the surface throughout. We both missed the days of innocence we shared with our children. We both cheered as the whacky wickedness of the stepsisters and their mother was undone by kindness. We laughed and we wept and we left reminded that beauty and goodness cannot be undone by cruelty.

And, I was again reminded of the needful place of story. The telling and the sharing of story created in that theatre a people only too willing to be led.

Mice turn into coachmen. Cinders are replaced by wand work. Kindness trumps all.

Midnight looms. It comes.

It is not the end of the story.

good news

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The United Methodist Church is in the news these days.

We are not in the news for the ways we reach into places where typhoons decimate and poverty gnarls, though we could be.

We are not in the news for the ways we have fought for justice through a conviction that we are called to “be in ministry for and with all persons” (Para. 161F, Book of Discipline),  though we long to be.

Instead we are in the news for the ways our church polity trumps gospel imperative.

At Richfield United Methodist Church we have sought to listen deeply to the heart of the Holy.  In our discernment we have turned to scripture, tradition, reason and experience to lead us to the recognition that we cannot collude with the barricading of grace.  We desire to welcome all families into a transformational relationship with Jesus the Christ.  We want to provide a church community through which people are held and known as they move ever deeper into communion with a God who welcomes and sustains love in all its manifestations.

Jesus welcomed all to the table of grace.  We believe we are called to do the same; in fact, we feel powerfully blessed to be able to do the same.

Our conversations, prayers and deep listening prompted us to adopt the statement shared below*.

We pray that through this United Methodist Church the wildly inclusive love of God in Christ will be proclaimed, lived, shared and celebrated by all.

We would like for that to be good news of great joy.

How else would we live the gospel of Jesus?

RICHFIELD UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

Commitment to Marriage Equality

As a church in the Methodist tradition since 1854, Richfield United Methodist Church’s ministries are grounded in Jesus’ call to love both God and neighbor. We acknowledge that we have often failed to extend the radical hospitality that God asks of us, even as we continually strive to do so.

In 2007—seeking to open our hearts, minds, and doors—we publicly welcomed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families into full participation in the life and ministries of the congregation, and we continue to do so today.

We recognize that when two people come together to form a primary committed relationship, they often ask the church to bless their wedding. With due consideration, the church responds by celebrating, in the presence of their families and friends, the work of God’s Spirit in their lives.

We lament that in our time, so many courts, legislatures, and religious institutions still deny same-gender and transgender couples equal access to marriage and all the blessings, rights, and responsibilities thereof.

We rejoice that at this point in history, the arc of justice now bends toward equal recognition of marriage for all couples.

Today we affirm that God’s grace is open to all, and we witness to that grace through our commitment to justice and equality in our congregation, the state of Minnesota, the United Methodist Church, and the world. We will honor and celebrate the wedding of any couple, licensed in Minnesota, who seek to commit their lives to one another in marriage.

Approved by the Administrative Board of Richfield UMC

Signed on September 17, 2013 by

Sue Restemayer, Ad Board Chair, Nick Dewey, Trustees Chair, David Couillard, Lay Leader, and Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay, Pastor

*We are grateful for the work of Dumbarton UMC.  Our statement is patterned after theirs.

oh

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Folding clothes my heart was pierced.

On the radio the strains of Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams transported me to another lifetime.

Suddenly I was eighteen and under the direction of Dr. John Hunter at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. My only previous experience with choral singing was with a mighty fine church choir but I was little prepared for singing in the select choir at UW-Whitewater. I will never forget the first rehearsal when fifty voices joined as one. It changed my life forever.

The man who wove the strands was a Texan by birth. He was huge of heart, exacting and had a laugh we sang for. His conducting was fluid poetry and his soul desirous of communion and he got that from his singers.

I fell in love. I fell in love with heart given soar through music. I fell in love with friends who are life companions yet. I fell in love with choral literature diverse and resonant. And of course I fell in love with Doc Hunter.

I wonder. Did he have any notion that years after his death one of his singers would gasp upon hearing music previously shaped by his hands?

Oh, to be eighteen again, broken open by amazement.

Oh, to be fifty-six, broken open by gratitude.