Voices from the past

Last Thursday we went to hear Gordon Lightfoot in concert. GL was probably my favorite musician when I was growing up. Certainly, he has gained the longevity award as the musican whose songwriting and musicianship still deserve my appreciation.

His music is the music I associate with my first love, a seventh grade crush on a blonde-haired kid named Mike Russell. The love was unrequited - all on myside! But Mike was a ski buddy and turned me on to Gordon Lightfoot and his abilities on a twelve-string guitar. At the time I was still attempting to learn the guitar myself and had great appreication for the ballad-style storytelling of Lightfoot's compositions.

When Lightfoot began the concert, I could tell even from the first balcony that he had aged. With the first few lyrics, we could tell his voice was pretty much shot. I was so disappointed and distracted by the loss of his beautiful, haunting voice. I had to work hard to get past that. What a peculiar sense of betrayal - how could he have grown old? After a few songs had flown by I began to focus on the instruments - ah, he still has the old magic on that guitar! And in some magical way I was able to hear the old voice of Gordon Lightfoot mingling with the music. Maybe he sang better as the concert wore on. But I think it was really all in my head.
I am not a particularly nostalgic person but like anyone I have certain pieces of music that evoke a long ago time; friends, places and expereinces that have become a part of me. Listening to those songs seems very much like turning the pages of a photo album and trying to remember who I was at the time those snapshots of life were taken. It has been a long journey from those days to this. If You Could Read My Mind, Love, What A Tale My Thoughts Would Tell .................

Vacationing in Place

This summer there have been no restful beach vacations, no camping trips, not even a trip to visit the extended family (we can discuss whether or not that even counts as a vacation).
My husband works in an industry in which summer is their busy season. There is no let-up until mid-September. For several years that has been OK. I have managed to deal with it. But something got under my skin this summer. I started having dreams at night about summer adventures I had as a kid - our cabin in the mountains, fishing on Diamond Lake, going to Girl Scout camp. Vivid sunsets and the crackle of BBQs, the smell of roses as the heat of the day dissipates - all came through in both my sleeping and waking and I was getting pretty tried of staying home.
I stumbled on a solution. We're doing some work on our yard with the help of a teen in our parish. Going to the nursery to choose plants is a real treat! I have had the help of a friend who is a gifted landscaper and a knowledgeable horticulturalist. She pulls plants off the shelf and arranges them into groupings inviting me to experience the smell, the feel and envision how they will look in our yard. Next, I made a couple of trips to the supplier who carries flagstones. Cool - they have an incredible variety of colors and textures. Bouquet Canyon is a stone that is gray in some lights and rusty in others. Running my hands across the surface I feel smooth and rough.
The longing for a trip has lessened. The yard is not yet done but the journey to this 'vacation' has been as satifying as the destination.
Gail+

Consider the Turtles of the Field

This is an interesting POV on an important spiritual issue. I am particularly concerned with the question he poses: Can there be some alternative to the extremes that either deny or enshrine private ownership? Could a biblical stewardship that celebrates God's ultimate ownership someday fuel a new grace-based economy - just as private ownership currently fuels our greed-based consumerist economy (or as government ownership fuels a control-based socialist economy)?
Gail+

Consider the Turtles of the Field
by Brian McLaren (From Sojourners Magazine, on-line)

The hallowed concept of private ownership is being confronted by the biblical concept of stewardship. If liberal Christianity was tempted in the last century to become the civil religion of socialism that reverences state ownership, then certainly conservative Christianity has since become the happy mistress of capitalism that enshrines private ownership. No wonder then that private ownership and private enterprise are defended by many conservative Christians as vigorously as the doctrine of the Trinity or salvation by grace.
For increasing numbers of us who consider ourselves post-liberal and post-conservative, words like private (meaning personal and individual), ownership (meaning autonomous personal and individual control), and enterprise (meaning autonomous, personal, individual control over projects that use God's world for our purposes) seem to fly in the face of kingdom values. Values such as community (meaning seeing beyond the individual to the communal), fellowship (which means sharing, holding in common with the community, not grasping as "mine!"), and mission (meaning our participation in God's projects in God's world for God's purposes).
Can there be some alternative to the extremes that either deny or enshrine private ownership? Could a biblical stewardship that celebrates God's ultimate ownership someday fuel a new grace-based economy - just as private ownership currently fuels our greed-based consumerist economy (or as government ownership fuels a control-based socialist economy)? read more>>

Family Feud

Family Faith Feud
by Brian McLaren
Most families share something in common: their young adult kids are not easily finding their places in the church of their parents. The problem is widespread. I have been in two groups of pastors lately where someone asked how many of our post-high-school kids were actively involved in the church. No pastor in either group had a majority of his kids involved in the church; most had no kids actively involved.We are well-practiced in the arts of blame and guilt and shame. But I would like to propose a different response. Why don’t we start asking the same questions? Why don’t we begin with the questions young adults are asking? Let’s start collecting data from families in thousands of churches on the responses to these questions. The purpose would not be for rebuttal or argument, but simply to understand and learn. Here is a question that might begin the conversation:What questions did the church not answer for you or not answer well?Maybe a season of asking questions like these could move us beyond family faith feuds, to family faith conversations.http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2006/08/family_faith_fe.html#comments

Ouch

I have mentioned to several of you this weekend at the workday and church yesterday, that my brother just moved out to San Francisco with his girlfriend. She is beginning a graduate program in San Francisco and Drew will probably be working as a Chimney Sweep in Marin Co. I am so excited to have them here. It's been almost 9 years since I lived near my brother.

The amazing thing has been what has happened since he arrived. I have experienced that painful kind of love for someone that results in worrying all the time. Will this and that be OK, will he wear sunscrean when he is working outside, will they find a good apartment...? I mentioned this to Drew's girlfriend and she reminded me how self-sufficient he is, he doesn't need me to worry.

Previously I only felt this kind of worrying for Colin, my husband, when he goes surfing or hiking, driving a long way.

I remember saying to one of the adults on the mission trip that I like being a youth leader because I am not a parent, and I am free of this particular kind of worry-love. But I sure am feeling it with a family member newly arrived. Loving people really is costly, it can hurt!

3000 miles

Our daughters both went to college on the East Coast. One is still there about to enter her junior year at Emerson College in Boston. The other graduated in May. She found work in Washington DC. Having been a mom at a distance of 3000 miles for the past four+ years has, on some level, made me accustomed to seeing my kids only 2 - 3 times a year. I guess there was a little hope in my heart that they would miracuously begin their careers back on the West Coast. Now it appears that won't be so. I find that hard.
We've been a close family. And we still talk on the phone several times a week - thanks to Cingular Family Plan! But it's not the same as living in close proximity to one another. I keep wondering how the distance will continue to affect our closeness. What keeps me hopeful are the ordinary, sometime silly reasons we have for picking up the phone and calling each other. The girls call their dad to discuss the recent exploits of the Giants or the A's. Sometimes I will get a call asking, 'Hey, Mom, how do you make that chicken salad with the curry and the grapes?' I love those conversations. I treassure them.
I believe they are sacramental conversations. Sacraments are just ordinary things - bread, wine, water, oil etc. made holy because they are offered up in thankfulness for the gifts God has given and will give. Sacraments transcend time and place and distance. Can family? Can our relationships? Is geography going to dictate our closeness? We shall see.
Gail+

Thy Kingdom Come

Check out a book entitled, The Kingdom Come: How the Religoius Right Distorts the Gospel and Threatens America. The author is Randall Balmer. Balmer was a favorite professor of our daughter's at Columbia University in the Religions Dept. I and several other Epiphanyites had a chance to hear Balmer at the Commonwealth Club about a month ago.

Here's what I like about his premise: He says we need to learn to distinguish between Evangelicals and the Religious Right; they are not nor should they be one and the same! And Evangelicals need to see where they have betrayed their own legacy.

Evangelicals of the 19th century were those who fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery, for voting rights for women, and the temperance movement - all progressive causes of their day. Currently, it is hard to tell the difference between the cause of the Religious Right and the Republican Party.

Religion is at its best when it stands apart from the powers that be. The Gospel of Jesus Christ should be able to critique the systems and people who govern. How can Christian evangelicals critique the system when they have become part of the power structure? I do not think Jesus intended to initiate a theocracy yet that is what I see happening in the liasion between religious conservatives and the party that is currently in power.

Don't worry - Balmer has plenty of criticism left over for the failures of the Democratic Party as well! Read for yourself.

Gail+

I am reading a book called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I recommend it. It is written from the POV of the Rev. John Ames, an aged minister of unstated denomination who is nearing the end of his life. The book takes the form of a long letter he is writing to his then seven year old son so his boy will be able to 'know' his father.
I was struck by this next passage. In it he is writing about the privilege of doing baptisms, a favorite aspect of my own ministry:
I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I don't wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It's a thing people expect of you.

I am particularly struck by the idea of baptism being 'primarily acknowledging the reality of blessing and sacredness'. On Sunday we will baptize two children and their own mother. I am struck by that miracle; the mother who has herself cradled and blessed her child will be blessed, and held by this community who is, in turn, held and blessed by a Loving Parent. Imagine the privilege of beholding that!
Gail+

End of Days !?!

Wow-- check out this segment of the Daily Show about main stream news coverage of the war in the middle east and how it is related to a possibly immanent Armageddon. I would love to know what you all think about this!

Packing Up: Part two

Between evacuations due to forest fires and hospitalizing my father for a couple of days, we finally got my parents prepared to move from their home in Sisters, Oregon into Portland. There was a process of parallel packing going on. The whole reason I was there was to help my mother sort through her household and to decide what to move, what to sell, what to give to the Habitiat Thrift Shop and what to toss. That was difficult enough (see Packing Up, Part 1). But the forest fire forced another attempt at packing - anything you can throw into a Toyoto Prius in 30 minutes!

Have you ever played that game; you have 30 minutes to evacuate your house - What would you take with you? It's a kind of parlor game. What do you hold dear? What can you not imagine life without?
I've always thought of family photos but - well, now I would need to take my computer because that's where they're stored these days. I have little jewelry I would deem worth saving, a few books, and a couple of pieces of artwork I treasure. Currently, we have no pets. What to save?
Well, I know something that I would truly miss is the archive of old sermons and essays I have written. For me they are a living, breathing look at where I have been, who I am becoming, and what God has been doing in my life, and the lives of friends, parishioners and family.
My mother chose: a filebox of important papers, family photos, my dad's swimsuit and swim goggles, and several pairs of her newest shoes. We all have our priorities. What are yours and why?
Gail+

The primordial soup of Tide Pools

I have lived in the bay area for 5 years, as of this summer, and I finally made it to the tide pools last weekend in Santa Cruz. I saw anemones, starfish, little mussels, crabs, and best of all: a playful sea otter. Tide pools are like little microcosms of oceans. Well, not really. They remind me more of the Gulf of Mexico-- the body of water in which I practically grew up. These tide pools are warmer than the Pacific as the sun beats down on the little pots of water, natural aquariums. And they are protected from the pounding surf. They are teeming with life. Teeming is the word, because the anemones actually grow to just the size of the little pool of water that holds it. There is a harmony of proportions as each little tidepool sustains just the right amount of life-- but life abundant it is.

As a teenager, I would spend the late summer months scalloping in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, that really is a verb. It's like snorkeling, but then you dive down and pick up the scallops that sit on a sand bar. Scallops are truly surreal-- they have hundreds of little blue eyes around the edge, and if they see you, they try to swim away. Scalloping was an incredibly grounding experience swimming in water the temperature of a warm bath, breathing easily through a snorkel, with nothing but the sound of the ocean and my breath in my ears-- it was easy for me to feel totally connected to the ocean and all the life in it.

At some point in my education, I learned about life evolving on the edge of hot bodies of water where proteins first got stung together. I began to associate that primoridial soup with the gentle and warm Gulf of Mexico's coral and sea horses, shallow sand bars and sweet little scallops. I miss that tranquillity when I am on a fog-banked and frigid Pacific shore-- but something about those tide pools reminded me of primoridal soup.

On Monday I told the creation story to the older children who are participating in the Animal Crackers summer Camp at Epiphany. The camp is focused on animals, creation, and humans as a part of creation with a responsibility for stewardship. We were imagining what there was in the beginning. Eugene Peterson translates it like this: "Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss." The children's minds were puzzling out what they know about evolution and what they were hearing about creation. And I was right there with them, thinking about warm oceans of primordial soup and tide pools as microcosms of God's quirky creation.

News from the Anglican Communion

If you follow the developments in the Episcopal Church, the controversies over consecration of gay bishops, the controversy over various churches and dioceses that are threatening to leave the US Episcopal Church because they feel the US Church is not heeding what they see as scriptural prohibitions re. homosexuality, then you may be interested in reading from this link on the Episcopal News Service (ENS) www.episcopalchurch.org/3577

Background: Bishop John David Schofield is bishop of the Diocese of San Joaquin here in California (essentially the Central Valley). He is threatening to take his diocese out of the US Church. In addition, he is charged with allowing his diocese to pass a resolution that said, in essence, the Diocese of San Joaquin would not have to comply with the canons (rules) of the national church. Several other bishops including the bishops of all the other 4 dioceses within the State of California, have decided to bring what is called "presentment" charges against Bishop Schofield for "abandonment of communion" - something that could get Schofield removed from his episcopal oversight of his diocese, if upheld.

I find this more than just esoterically interesting. It suggests we need to reflect on what we mean by communion - who is breaking with whom. Is such a break ever justified? What does scripture teach us about breaks in relationship?

Packing up

As promised I am beginning to share with you how my trip to Oregon went. This was the trip to assist my parents in preparing for their move from their home in Central Oregon to a senior living community (assisted living) in Portland.
Between my one sister, my mom and me we were trying to decide what to give away, what to keep for my parents new apartment and what my siblings and I might be interested in having. My mother is having some difficulty imagining the belongings of her 2000 sq. foot home fitting into a 700 sq. foot apt. - clearly it is not all going to fit but her choices on what to hand on to seem - well, let's just say, a bit impractical. Not that she is all that sentimental about 'things'. She's not and I think I inherited that from her.
The best part about this sorting process was the opportunity for me and my sister and to reminisce and for my mother to pass along stories about family heirlooms and their previous owners. We spread the silver and glassware, crystal and what-nots out on the dining room table. My sister and I were being really careful not to jump on an item (even when one of us clearly wanted it!). 'You should have this' ................... 'Oh, no, you - you've always loved that'
Polite generosity finally gave way to sincere consideration of what fits our lifestyle and what had meaning for us. I found I was not interested in the sterling tea service, for instance. But an inexpensive cake plate that has held countless family birthday cakes was something I really wanted.
By the time we were finished I had two boxes to ship home. They arrived yesterday and the joy of unpacking them with my husband, who patiently listened as I recounted the significance of each item, was profound.
I am not much of a collector. Nor am I particularly sentimental. I am not a pack rat. I find it very cleansing to de-clutter from time to time. Moving a lot in my adult life has probably kept me from being too attached to things or even places. But today I am feeling very much aware of some kind of spiritual continuity with grandparents and other ancestors. The connection comes throught the 'things' that have been passed down through the generations. But mostly the connection has come through stories. Not a seamless , contiguous, chronological story. Instead, stories that are imbellished, fragile, cracked and crazy just like the memorabilia that comes down through the ages with them. Yet loaded with meaning and spirit.
Funny - that's often how I understand scripture and reading the Bible.