Labyrinth
About a year ago, I walked my first and only labyrinth. I’m not the most prayerful person, but there was something about the slow plodding and occasional changes in direction that spoke to me in the midst of my too-busy brain. The hamsters in my head that never seem to slow down took a brief, but refreshing snooze. I vowed to myself that I would do it again and maybe even re-create a labyrinth of my own.
In the last 11 months, I have used a labyrinth exactly once. And it wasn’t even a walking exercise. A classmate from my internship group handed out a copy of a “finger labyrinth.” Even that short exercise brought me back to the feeling I had last summer.
This morning over coffee and divvying up tasks for the day, I decided making a labyrinth was going on the to-do list.
Granted, for a person who failed geometry a couple of times in high school, it was a little intimidating, but the planning and execution was strikingly similar to the way my life has been going lately — lots of planning, some research, too much thinking, mistakes and improvising a new way, and most importantly, reliance on others to reach my goal.
Just as my supportive spouse has been on the sidelines, yet willing to jump in and help at a moment’s notice as I’ve tried to take on more than is feasible for the last year, he was there for me again this afternoon.
The symbolism that Bob anchored the rope I was using to cut concentric circles into the lawn was not lost on me. So often, I have reached out for support and he has good-naturedy held tight while I went around in circles that often didn’t make much sense. His direction and supportive coaxing to keep me on track and my need to occasionally trust him and his perspective when I could only see the uncut path in front of me is an act of love.
So often I have no idea what I’m doing, and neither does Bob. Yet, he’s game to let me try something out on my own. The rope that connects him to me sometimes is so loose that things seem out of control and at other times is brought so taut that it would be easy to imagine it snapping.
But, the rope didn’t snap. The end result isn’t quite what I had in mind, yet at the end of the day, with Bob’s help, I had carved out an awkward and shifting path that leads from the outer reaches of the yard to the center, where Bob had provided the centering and support I needed to get the job done.
My creation of a labyrinth today took me on a journey. I had a rough idea of the outcome but I wasn’t sure how I’d get there. My creation of a labyrinth was an act of giving and receiving love. It could have been done alone, but like so many things in my life, the journey is much richer for having traveled it with the one I love.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
A Cheat of a Blog Post
I haven’t had much chance to post things lately. I’ve been crazy busy at home, school and work, so I’m doing a bit of a cheat tonight. I ran across something cool in something I read for class a few weeks back (well, cool for me, anyway) and it reminded me of something my grandma talked about in her childhood.
Grandma is gone now, so I went on a bit of an odyssey online and with family members and tacked down a little piece of family history. Nothing is really resolved after my quest, but the work was fulfilling and I learned enough that I was able to do a 12-minute narrative in one take and with no notes. I cut it down for this video a little.
I was working with new video software that was a nightmare to use and also to produce something that would publish, but after about 10 attempts, it finally published (and then I noticed I missed a bibliography entry for a Wikipedia link, but it took 7 hours — really — to upload, so I ain’t fixing it.) With no further ado, here’s tonight’s cheat of a blog post that I plan on submitting for class later this week.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
I make a point of not providing much information about the people I encounter in my “theological journey” and this will be no exception, but in talking about the very last patient I saw for my chaplaincy internship, I encountered myself. Rather, like ol’ Ebeneezer, I met the Ghost-of-Lefty-Yet-To-Come. And in that meeting, I saw redemption.
As someone who was in a specialized unit, I wasn’t required to pick up any on-call shifts throughout my nearly 9 months at Large Teaching Hospital, although from time-to-time, I’d pick up a consult on my unit and once or twice I wandered to another unit on a particularly slow night. On my last night, the person who directly supervised my work was already running late and had two calls she needed to follow up on before she could head home to let her poor older dog, who had already been indoors for more than 12 hours, out to relieve herself. I told my supervisor I’d pick up one of her calls. That is how I ended up in a darkened room seeing a woman who could very likely be me, if I were 20 years older and dealing with advanced cancer in the abdomen.
For reasons unnecessary to go into in this blog, a nurse had ordered a number of consults for this patient, including a chaplain visit. I had scanned a few details about this patient, but as is my practice, I didn’t commit too many of the details to memory. Long ago I realized that the “facts” of a particular patient’s case are by far less important than the patient’s current reality. So, I popped my head into her room and said “Hi, I’m Chaplain Lefty. I understand you had a tough night last night.” Then I shut up. For a long time. Eventually, she nodded and agreed that the previous evening was difficult, but she didn’t believe she had much need for a chaplain. More silence. Then she started talking. She told me many things, very little having to do with the reason the nurse had put in the consult order, except recent events acted as a catalyst for some thinking that had been brewing for nearly a year.
The upshot for this patient: She’s tired. She’s suffering. She’s tired of suffering. Now, you’d think when a person has a cancerous tumor so large that it would be easy to assume she were pregnant .. if she was about 30 years younger, that her fatigue and suffering were a result of her cancer. You’d also be wrong. Call it sensing a kindred soul, sixth sense, a knowing glance, but I had a feeling I should ask her to explain her suffering.
Turns out what has caused this woman the most anguish in her year since her diagnosis was herself. There’s something to be said for having a fighting spirit, especially in the face of a serious diagnosis with a grim prognosis, but as this woman reflected in the twilight of the night and what may also be the twilight of her life, all of her fighting and circumventing doctors orders had not added a single day to her life and had only led to anguish for her family, adversity between herself and her doctors, and unfocused anger in her own life. On the day I met this patient, she had resolved to stop fighting her doctors, and more importantly, herself.
I commented that this sounded like a major decision on her part, maybe a bit like embarking into a foreign land. She agreed, noting her daughter didn’t know what to make of her new-found calmness today and wondered if it was a medication change. The patient herself said many times throughout the day, she didn’t quite feel like herself when she didn’t fight every treatment and recommendation made on her behalf. She got quiet for a few moments and I finally said, “But at the end of this first day, you’re still ‘Sally’.” She thought about it and replied, “Yeah, ‘Sally” is still here.” I told her I doubted ‘Sally’ would ever be lost — the force of her life, despite her fatigue and pain, was as strong as any person I’ve ever encountered. Stronger than many supposedly “well” people.
This visit wasn’t terribly long, barely 30 minutes, as she couldn’t physically take much more than that. She smiled a little as we were wrapping things up and said it was funny that she didn’t think she had much to say to a chaplain, and yet she had just “spilled her guts to me” and wondered how I knew so much about what was going on in her head. I told her I knew someone else who is like her, her first instinct is also to always fight first and think about the consequences later. She asked how this person turned out. I told her I wasn’t sure, that she too is trying to learn how to respond with more grace and humility, but that I was hopeful both she and the other would turn out for the better in their hearts and souls, no matter what life handed to them.
That’s no lie. It’s anyone’s guess where this woman’s physical condition will take her but I have a pretty good idea. I’m much more optimistic that her family, who sounds as if they’ve been waiting patiently for the storm to blow over so they can meet her where she is, are ready to accept her new-found, and sure to be awkward, approach toward a more peaceful life. The other person I know who has been battling for as long as she can remember is grateful for friends and family who have been waiting for the storm to blow over. Now that the clouds are starting to clear, I can say that even in the awkwardness of trying to be a new person, Lefty is still here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tonight at my internship site, I had to say goodbye to another patient who is going home. Getting off my unit and discharging home typically means one of two things: the procedure was a resounding success … or it wasn’t. This time it was door number two.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed at the graciousness of some folks who have been told the next chapter in their life story will be shorter than planned. He asked me to stop by so that he could thank me for all I had done for him in the three months since we first met.
This is not one of those go-gracefully-into-the-night types of patients, and I’m not a grand champion chaplain: There were any number of times that he was cranky or I made a completely inappropriate statement. The only thing remarkable about our time together is how unremarkable about 99% of it was.
I’ve talked sports, pets, kids, cars and cooking shows with patients. I’ve heard about vocations, callings, and jobs that pay the bills so that passions can be bank rolled. Too often, patients lose their identity in their diagnosis. The visits that seem the most mundane — where God is never overtly there — those conversations that remind the patient that they are an interesting person with hopes, dreams, disappointments and opinions, that they are connected with another, those are the real conversations. Talking about lab results just isn’t the same as talking about spring training… Sometimes it’s more important.
There are people for whom I can say I pray without ceasing. Some I’ve known my whole life, others a few years or months. The list continues to grow, but the actions–the ways in which love for friend and stranger is known and felt–expand and simultaneously become easier and vastly harder.
And if you’re reading this blog, you can count yourself among the loved. Even if we’ve never met, and I don’t know who you are, we still have a connection. It’s where the mundane and divine meet. That intersection can be the holiest place on earth.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
A Gentle-Hearted Soul
“I’m going to miss my kids.” That’s what sticks most in my head when I think of Gentle-Hearted Patient and our last conversation. I learned last week that he died at home, in the presence of his family. He was an extraordinarily motivated patient, on a unit of extraordinarily motivated patients.
His wife was substantially younger, and he was surprised to have found love so late in life and was thrilled to have been able to have fathered a son and a daughter, both still very young. His family was his entire being. After his procedure, he endured side-effects that I’ve heard other patients describe in detail and tell me couldn’t possibly be better than death.
I’d enter his room to find him staring at his children’s photos as though by sheer will he could conjure them into his presence. Small wonder that when his biopsy indicated a relapse, he took all the energy he had been pouring into recovery and used it to arrange for the fastest discharge and cross-country flight home I had ever seen a patient pull off.
So, I saw the notification go through this week that he died. He had 2 1/2 months at home with the kids. His love is even more palpable now than it was when I last saw him. I have no doubt he misses those kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
The Reasonable Thing
Lefty Notes: In my last post, I recounted a story I planned on using in a sermon. I preached it yesterday and thought I’d share the whole enchilada for those who are interested. A shout out to my ever-supportive spouse who did some late-night editing, as I have been running a fever on all week, and a few spots needed a little TLC.
This is the gospel text I was assigned to preach on. It’s a reading from John 1.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
… He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Here’s the start of the sermon…
The Reasonable Thing
In the beginning when God began to create the heavens and earth, the earth was a formless void. There was no light, no shades of gray or of color. But soon enough the void was filled with an abundance of light and darkness, of living creatures. And yet, even in this formless void, there was the Word. …
Indulge me for a moment. Allow me to share what may be old news to some in the room, but might be new for others. Within today’s reading is a reference to the word “Wisdom,” including this great verse from Proverbs 9: “With you is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments.” The Greek word for “the Word” is logos. Biblical references have long lists of definitions and uses for that deceptively simple word logos, from “a decree or mandate” to the lofty “essential word of God.” One translation I’ve found appealing is “Reason.” Let’s hear what the opening verse sounds like with these substitutions,
In the beginning was Wisdom, and Wisdom was with God, and Wisdom was God. … In the beginning was Reason, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God. Wisdom and Reason – the Word. Wisdom and Reason – Love.
In the beginning, there was love and there was reason. We don’t often equate reason, cold hard reason, with love. Reason is calculated. Reason is objective. Reason prevails above all things. Seemingly opposing reason we have love. Love, as we know from 1 Corinthians, is patient and kind. Love does not insist on its own way. Love prevails. Since the beginning of time, when there was the Word, reason and love have been intertwined, and in the end, they will both prevail.
***
Let me share a story where reason and love became one and the same. One of my early memories involves the loss of my goldfish, Mary. From the perspective of a five year old, she (as least I decided Mary was a girl, not having any idea how to determine the gender of a goldfish) lived a long life. I had her for a couple of years. She never caused me any problems, never threatened to run away or transfer her affections to another five year old or tire of my attentions. She was a loyal and steady friend.
On the fateful evening of her demise, she looked a little wobbly, having difficulty remaining upright. On coming across her ailing form, I must have let out one of those blood-curdling, little-girl screams. Something was wrong with my friend. My dad was soon at hand, assessing the situation. Now, granted, in his eyes, goldfish are mere carp; their only real use is as bait to catch real fish. Still, dad understood the gravity of the situation for his “little girl” and took swift action.
Soon, he was using a spoon to guide Mary to the surface of the bowl to help her gulp air, as she was too weak to surface on her own. After a time, he went to the garage and removed the aerator from his bait bucket and inserted the hose into Mary’s bowl to provide more oxygen to her environment. He did everything he could to save my fish. But in the end, as all things do, she died, and dad switched roles from rescuer to funeral director. We buried Mary that evening in a corner of the garden and sat in lawn chairs in quiet reflection for some time after her interring.
I doubt I would have remembered Mary too clearly all these years later, were it not for the memory of what dad did for me that night. Through his actions, confused and useless perhaps from his perspective, mighty and unselfish from mine, Mary lives on in my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.
I brought this story up to dad recently. In a twist of fate, he is now the one who requires an oxygen line and his ability to recall the past isn’t as sharp as it used to be. But surprisingly—or maybe not—he did remember the episode. I asked him why he went to such heroics for a goldfish. His response was “I don’t know. Seemed like a reasonable thing to do.” Reasonable? Hardly. It was a crazy, desperate thing for a man nearing his 40s, more accustomed to guiding the hooks in and out of fish than trying to save bait, to do. It wasn’t well-reasoned at all. It was, however, a loving thing to do.
***
As children, it’s easy for us to accept the help of others. If we are lucky, we cry out and someone comes to our aid. Somewhere along the line, most of us were taught to believe that we should become more “independent” and no longer rely on the help of others. We must learn to “save ourselves.”
Let me share a few of the verses I read earlier, but with a slight change in terms.
… LOVE was in the world, and the world came into being through LOVE; yet the world did not know LOVE. LOVE came … and … people did not accept LOVE. But to all who received LOVE, who believed in LOVE, LOVE gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Too often, our “independence” touches on a fall from grace. In our quest to be masters of our own destiny, we reject love. Yet, how often are we like Mary? Struggling for air? Struggling to remain upright? In the midst of our struggles, someone comes to our aid. To be sure, we can’t always be saved, but sometimes for reasons that confound us, and sometimes them, they try. Too often we fail to accept this gift.
Too often we’re too busy trying to not be a burden on others to recognize that Love came, sometimes in the form of a ride on a rainy day, in the offer of a hot meal in a time of crisis, in the form of a gentle voice asking if we’re okay when we decidedly are not. Too often someone reaches out because it seems like the reasonable thing to do … and we reject it. In an opportunity for grace for both the one giving and the one receiving, no one is saved.
It comes easy to us, those of us who grew up thinking we needed to provide our own salvation, to reject that offer given through grace. There’s an old saying that it costs nothing to be nice. But it often costs something, for both the one who offers and the one who would receive, to reject it.
Mary of course was just a fish. Bait. Something to befriend and entertain a five year old for a couple years. In Jesus, we have a human expression of the vastness of creation … and the vast love of the creator. This child of God helps many to more easily accept we are all children of God. His incarnation seems in retrospect a reasonable gift, just as 40 years later a man’s gentle spooning and jury-rigged fishbowl-shaped version of an oxygen tent can come to seem reasonable. Imagine what your world would look like if we could deliver and receive this gift anew each day through such simple acts of love.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
A Dad Story
Lefty Notes: I’m putting together a sermon/meditation for a Lenten service at work and will be using a favorite “Dad Story” to illustrate a point. Here’s the story part of that sermon.
One of my early memories involves the loss of my goldfish, Mary. From the perspective of someone around five years old, she (as least I decided Mary was a girl, not having any idea how to determine the gender of a goldfish) lived a long life. I had her for a couple of years. She had been a loyal and steady friend.
On the fateful evening of her demise, she looked a little wobbly, having difficulty remaining upright. I must have let out one of those blood-curdling, little-girl screams and soon my dad was at hand, assessing the situation. Now, granted, in his eyes, goldfish are mere carp; their only use is bait to catch real fish. Still, dad understood the gravity of the situation for his “little girl” and took swift action.
Soon, he was using a spoon to guide Mary to the surface of the bowl to help her gulp air, as she was too weak to surface on her own. After a time, he went to the garage and removed the aerator from his bait bucket and inserted the hose into Mary’s bowl to provide more oxygen to her environment. He did everything he could to save my fish, but in the end, she died, and he switched roles from rescuer to funeral director. We buried Mary that evening in a corner of the garden and sat in lawn chairs in quiet reflection for some time after her interring.
I doubt I would have remembered Mary too clearly all these years later, were it not for the memory of what dad did for me that night. Through his actions, Mary lives on in my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.
I brought this story up to dad recently and asked him why he went to such heroics for a goldfish. His response was “I don’t know. Seemed like a reasonable thing to do.” Reasonable? Hardly. It seems to have been a crazy, desperate thing to do. It wasn’t well-reasoned at all. It was, however, a loving thing to do.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Time: Why my paper’s going to suck, I’m an ineffective employee, and I find it really hard to care
I have a paper due later this week, and given my schedule, I should have had my draft completed yesterday, but I spent the day loaded up with various forms of migraine medications and narcotics, mostly in darkened rooms, trying desperately hard not to throw up. I suspect the headache has to do with my first physical therapy session after The Great Jaw Dislocation Incident. I have five pages of fragments, but nothing remotely close to something I can hand in. Because some of you are living the life of a seminarian vicariously through the continuing adventures of Lefty, here’s what I’ve been tasked to do:
Three—five page paper on liturgical, sacred, secular, rhetorical, and seasonal time: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic understandings/juxtapositions of time; the meaning of time in the life of faith; meaning of time in liturgy/ritual and music; special relativity of time; ways of expressing and experiencing time within the liturgical/religious year and worship life; historical developments of marking time; calendars; and/or implications for your ministry and worship. Proper notations and bibliography required.
There are a couple of terms that are handy to know so that you understand how time is described in the context of this class: chronos (think chronological or calendar—but lest you think our Western calendar makes sense, check this out[1]) and kairos (a groovier sense of time, put like this in one of my readings: “Kairos does not imply chronological time so much as a moment of truth, a period when the mundane reaches to the sacred nature of man.”[2])
Most, if not all, of you reading this are stuck in a chronos world. This is not a judgment; it’s our reality. We have employers who expect us to be at a particular place at a particular time, doing particular things while we’re there. We have appointments. Even most worship opportunities start at a specific time, and the congregations tend to get antsy if the service goes one minute past its prescribed time.
However, to think that our world is devoid kairos is to be in a serious state of denial. My churchy friends may feel a sense where the events in worship have transcended the normal; they have moved on to the holy and feel they are truly in the presence of God; those spiritually attuned may resonate more with life emerging from the half-frozen ground at the sighting of the first spring crocus; all of us have been physically located in one place, yet our souls are someplace else—at work, you suddenly realize you’ve been thinking of a loved one and felt their presence with you as you drone away at the mundane task of drawing a paycheck.
The Muslims do a good job of linking the chronos with the kairos, in holding both the mundane and sacred in suspension. Not only that, they have blended the personal and the political so that there is not “church” and “state”; there is just how one lives in the present and in all time, simultaneously. “In Islam,” notes author Karen Armstrong, “Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission. … A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant that state affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of religion itself.”[3]
Like Islam, Jewish celebrations and holidays are historically oriented but they are not a memorial service of something long gone and dead, rather they rituals involved with the holidays are a way of being present with another point in time. “The celebration of any holiday,” notes Rabbi Paul Steinberg, “represents something other than a dot on a timeline; each occasion is reinforced by the collective experience of our ancestors mingled with the observance of holidays throughout our own lifetimes—sanctification and re-sanctification[4].”
Christianity tends to locate God through the use of time. As noted in New Handbook of the Christian Year, “History is where God is made known. Christians have no knowledge of God without time, for it is thorough actual events happening in historical time that God is revealed.”[5] While I have serious reservations regarding the word “actual” in this quote, I do agree that Christians are inclined to associate God with events, that God was present with people in times of need. Even when Christians are talking about Genesis, God is lumped in with the beginning of time; when God was, the clock started. While Christians seem to find God in history, I don’t think Christians have done as effective a job with bringing the God of history into the present. We could learn something from our Muslim brothers and sisters. “A Muslim would meditate upon the current events of his time and upon past history as a Christian would contemplate an icon,” says Armstrong, “using the creative imagination to discover the hidden divine kernel. An account of the external history of the Muslim people cannot, therefore, be of mere secondary interest, since one of the chief characteristics of Islam has been its sacralizaiton of history.”[6]
One of the most compelling sentences I read so far for this class also came from the New Handbook of the Christian Year and is one that is very much with me as I consider my future as a minister: “The way we use our time in daily life is one of the best indications of what is really important to us.”[7] This is not a Christian-exclusive sentiment, and it is so often said in so many ways, that it has become trite, but at the same time, I can’t help but think about how I spend my days.
- I work. I have to work, and I do my best to squeeze in a minimum of 40 hours each week. We need the income and the benefits, especially as we have learned that random maladies can strike at any time and are likely not going to be anything one could have possibly expected. I do my best when I’m there. I have too strong a work ethic to let my work slide, but I also know that there is no physical, mental or emotional way that I can be even half as effective as the person they hired when I returned to my employer from another gig four years ago. So, sure, I care, but I also care about a lot of other things, and I stopped being identified with what I do to pay the bills a long time ago, when I decided to seek a more “balanced” life. Don’t laugh. That’s what I hope to attain someday. A girl can dream.
- I spend three evenings a week on work related to my chaplaincy internship, either on-site or in my reflection group. I find the time on my unit to be some of the most fulfilling of my week. It is in my interactions with the patients, family and staff that I encounter the most kairos time each week. So much of what these people deal with transcends the mundane and enters the realm of the holy.
- I spend time at my parents’ home. As I’ve mentioned in this blog numerous times, my father has been receiving in-home hospice care since last summer. Unfortunately, I only have part of a day each week to be present, but this is another place where time takes on a different meaning, and I find the holy in the mundane. Exhibit A: Sometimes cooking a simple meal satisfies the soul and the appetite.
- I squeeze in time to study. I love learning. I love seminary. I often feel as though I’m cheating myself and also those who I will eventually serve, because I am never able to focus myself fully on my studies. I’m in class, and I have to log in to the office. I pick up a book and thumb through a few pages during a lunch break. I skim chapters while playing scrabble with my spouse. Certainly, I could spend more time on my studies. I could write a really good paper, instead of one that will ultimately suck, but had I taken the only “free” time available to me this week to put more time into it, I would have missed Exhibit A above. You tell me where God was this week, if not there?
- I try to spend at least part of my weekend with my ever-patient spouse. Because of my current schedule, four nights a week, I have to sleep in an apartment in Minneapolis. It makes me incredibly sad to have to leave Sundays and go back to my empty room. No husband. No dogs. No cats. The only good thing I can say about the necessity for physical therapy is that I can now spend a few Sundays at home, as my appointment is closer to my real home than it is to my unwanted, but necessary home.
- Where I do not spend my time, at least for now, is at church. Don’t get me wrong. I actually love my faith community and very much miss my “Sunday School” group. That being said, I don’t think I’ve had a study-, family-, work-free Sunday since September, and it will be at least a couple more months before it will happen again.
I do miss my ability to practice Sabbath, and long for a more Jewish approach at celebrating God’s creation. Yes, like yesterday, there are days where my body completely shuts down and precludes me from working, but this is not intentional time spent, in the words of Erich Fromm, and repeated in Exodus and Exile: The Structure of the Jewish Holidays, “a day of peace between man and nature; work of any kind is a disturbance of the man-nature equilibrium … Stopping interference with nature for one day you eliminate time; where there is no change, no work, no human interference there is no time.”[8]
What would be most beneficial for my future ministry, and least likely to happen as I work to pursue the qualifications for ministry, would be to take more time being at peace with nature, be it the nature of family time, with dogs, or with the blades of grass blowing in the breeze or the pellets of ice glazing across the sleeping field behind the house.
Works Cited
Harris, Monford. Exodus and Exile: The Structure of the Jewish Holidays. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
Hickman, Hoyt L., Don E. Sailers, Laurence Hull Stookey, and James F. White, eds. The New Handbook of the Christian Year. Nashville: Abingdon, 1992.
On Being. Truth and Reconciliation: Transcript of Radio Program. http://being.publicradio.org/programs/truth/transcript.shtml (accessed March 4, 2012).
Steinberg, Paul. “Eternal Moments of Jewish Time.” In Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Winter Holidays: Hannakkah, Tu b’Shevat, Purim, by Paul Steinberg, 4-7. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007.
Wired Science. Proposed New Calendar Would Make Time Rational. December 28, 2011. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/rational-calendar/ (accessed March 4, 2012).
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
When I die…
We played a bit of a parlor game at our chaplaincy internship group this week. The student facilitating our evening reflection concluded by asking each of us to complete the sentence, “When I die…”
The answers were fascinating from many standpoints. Each of the Lutherans in the room used the word “heaven” in their answer and voiced their certainty of being there. The folks from the more-to-the left side of the Christianity spectrum put things more vaguely but voiced a hope of seeing loved ones or being in the presence of God.
As is often the case, I found myself being a bit of an outlier in my response: “… Love doesn’t.” I don’t necessarily see heaven as a destination; I’m not even fond of the word, but for the sake of speaking a common language with the people I encounter, I’ll use it when it is helpful for another. I’m not convinced there’s any kind of a conscious state of being. When I distill everything down to what I am certain of about this world and what happens when our physical beings are no longer a part of it, that’s what I’m left with: “When I die … love doesn’t.”
Not feeling that there’s a heaven or that we’re going to “see” our loved ones in “the next life” doesn’t leave me with a sense of despair, however, as I’m sure some of you who read my blog may conclude. Like my doubts about a “real” historical Jesus, believing in a greater, “Big-T Truth” about what happens after we die if there is no “heaven” gives me a stronger faith than I had in my earlier faith journey.
How I see the sacred, faith and our relationship with the holy can be boiled down to one word: Love. Now lest you think I am somewhat heretical in my musings, let me remind you, I have biblical precedent: Without love, we are nothing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Rude Awakening
For the first time in my life, I woke up with the realization I was praying in my sleep. This is something I might expect to have heard from a nun or something, but as a person who is so far off the Christian-variant scale that for a good-sized chunk of the community, I may not register at all, I found this a little disturbing. I mean, what’s next? Snake handling?
I’ve heard the phrase “desperate times call for desperate measures” and I guess that’s what’s happening. Things have gotten so nuts in my life that my subconscious must be crying out for divine intervention.
I believe the divinity I seek is already here in the loving support of friends and family who have been walking with me on my life journey. I have been leaning harder on folks in the past few months. Indeed, there are times when I see God most in those who have taken a turn in carrying a piece of the stress, grief, sleep deprivation, joy and discovery.
While my subconscious seems to be crying out for relief, my conscious self lifts us a prayer of thanksgiving for all of you who are a part of my life in large and small ways. You are each a blessing. Love and thanks to all.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Recent Entries
- Labyrinth
- A Cheat of a Blog Post
- I Have Met the Enemy and She is Me
- The Intersection of Mundane and Divine
- A Gentle-Hearted Soul
- The Reasonable Thing
- A Dad Story
- Time: Why my paper’s going to suck, I’m an ineffective employee, and I find it really hard to care
- When I die…
- Rude Awakening
- Like Sands Of The Hourglass
Categories
- Uncategorized (141)
Archives
- May 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- November 2009
- October 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
