Houses (Friday Five)

Today's RevGals Friday Five from Monica is about houses, spurred by her first home purchase:

1. What is the most important room in your home? What requirements do you have of this room? (Sure, you can answer “bathroom,” but we can stipulate that as a reasonable assumption and you can pick the second most important room).

The living room, I suppose.  It's definitely where we spend the most time, since (a) the tv is in here (yes, at the moment we have only one tv) and (b) I do most of my work on the living room couch.  I love the natural light in the living room, and I like the feeling of being in the center of everything.

2. What is the least important room in your home? The one you use the least, or are not very picky about?

The kitchen is the most un-satisfying room, but I guess it's rather important.  It needs a complete overhaul, but the next owners will be in charge of that event.

3. Do you have preferences for your neighborhood? What are they?

I love love love my neighborhood.  Let me count the ways:

• Wonderful neighbors.
• My friends of 30 years are here.
• One of the most diverse suburbs in the United States.
• Walking distance to stores, restaurants, library, parks, and hiking trails.
• Lots of variety in the apartments and homes, many of which are in the 90-100 year age range.
• A short drive downtown.

I don't think I would be happy living in a non-walking neighborhood, be it city, suburb, or small town.

4. If your elementary aged offspring were to choose colors for their rooms, would any color be off limits?

No.  When they were in elementary school, their room were a rather astonishing array of colors.

5. What is your best piece of packing or moving advice?

I haven't moved since 1984.  I think it would be: Get someone else to do it.

Image: Not my house, though mine often feels like this, in Cedar Key FL.

Lakefront Hike

Lake Erie Bluffs is a relatively new metropark in Lake County, about a 45-minute drive from our house.  Lovely Daughter and I headed there for the first time today, wanting to explore a bit and try out its three miles of hiking trails on this most spectacular of spring days.

We were well rewarded with an easy, paved trail north through fields and woods, clear views of the lake from the bluffs, the discovery of two well equipped and spectacularly located campsites ~ imagine watching the Pleiades meteorshowers over the lake in mid-August! ~ and a challenging hike back on the beach, where the water was high, the waves wind-blown, and the sand covered by driftwood.

Spring migrants included towhees, ruby-crowned kinglets, chipping and song sparrows, and red-breasted and common mergansers in front of of the lakeshore restaurant where we stopped for a late lunch.

We are planning a late summerbackpacking trip in North Carolina, so today's hike was a good baby practice.

Advocacy 101

With Ohio State Representative Anthony DiVitas

My son's death by suicide 7.5 years ago has made a mental health and suicide prevention advocate of me.  I've been to the Ohio Capitol in Columbus to testify in favor of legislation to require continuing education in suicide prevention for our public schools staff, and to Washington, D.C. twice to meet with federal legislators to discuss upcoming bills and prevention in general.  This week I was privileged to do the same thing in Ohio.

The first week in D.C, three years ago, I learned that this is a thing that people do:  They join groups and head to legislative offices to advocate for laws and funding.  Last year in Washington, we meet people from a pancreatic cancer group -- there were 900 of them! swarming all over the Hill -- and a car emissions group.  This week in Columbus, the anti-death penalty and the humane treatment for animals people were there.  And while I was in Columbus, my daughter was in Washington, doing the same thing on behalf of non-profit organizations!

Our task is fairly simple: meet for 15-20 minutes with a legislator and/or aide, tell a bit of our own story, and convey what we hope they will vote for on our behalf.  This year?  At least three legislators told me how much it means that we take the time to do this.  One shared related bills that he has introduced, pertaining to making assistance available to families in which school truancy is a problem.  My own state representative became genuinely excited about helping us with first responder training and about coming to speak at our local Out of the Darkness Walk in the fall. My state senator noted that we in our county have the highest number of people with mental health needs in Ohio, and the lowest per capita funding for same.

Seven years ago, I could never have imagined that I would find energy around the word suicide.  But's it's tremendously invigorating, to see and become part of government in action.   My inner lawyer emerged, I had a great time, and I hope we made a bit of a difference as well.

Unfinished Things

Julie's Friday Five for this week cuts close to home!

She says:

"This week I’ve been thinking about unfinished things. I have so many things started and not quite done just now. . . . 

What about you? Do you finish every task, on time, before it’s due? Do you start and put aside, or keep going? Do you need deadlines or do they freak you out?"

There are, indeed, certain things I finish before my self-imposed (early) deadlines, because they have public consequences, unless of course I completely forget or confuse the deadlines, which I did at least once this week:

1. Sermons and other presentations.

2. Tests and assignments for the class I teach (although just barely, as a rule).

3. Event planning tasks, which are things for which I try never ever ever to take responsibility, but sometimes they plop right into my lap.

4. I can't think of anything else, actually that I finish . . . .  Finish might be akin to a four-letter word for me.  There are not five such things.

There are things I work on but accept that they will be finished when they are finished.  Or not. Those mostly have to do with writing projects, and various church enterprises that will take however long they take.

And there are the big huge categories for which I have grand plans which are never realized.  Those mostly have to do with household organization:

1. The papers going back  . . .  well, literally a century or more, if you count my grandmother's. 

Letters, records, journals, essays.  BLANK journals, papers, notecards, notebooks. 

2. The photographs.  Approximately ten zillion, and that does not count the ones in the attic, which I pretend are not there.

3. The clothing.  Different sizes. Different degrees of sentimentality.  Different degrees of potential usefulness. 

4.  The books. Ohhhhh, the books. Do you need a Laura Ingalls Wilder book?  A deep theological tome or Biblical commentary?  A legal handbook complete with a full set of domestic relations forms, c. 1993?  Chaucer (in Middle English)?  Guidebooks to New Zealand (didn't make it), Italy (got there!), Norway (maybe next year).  Utterly frivolous and stupid novels?  Crime and Punishment?  Come and see me. 

5.  The yard and gardens.  Very small.  A capable person would have those whipped into shape in no time.  I am not such a person.

There are many more categories than five. 

Do not talk to me about Marie Kondo.  She has no idea. For one thing, she lives in Japan, where it is not physically possible to amass the stuff we do.  For another, she thinks that books have no sentimental value.  Also, she has finished her writing projects.  So she has no idea.

Now I will probably spend the rest of the day wondering whether "finish" is a concept I can get on board with. 

Much over-rated, I suspect.

To Be Grateful, For This Life

As I look ahead, I see that this day looks to be filled with good things, with all the dimensions of life brimming with meaning for me . . .

A walk along a metropark path with some friends.  It's chilly and gray out there (because we live in Cleveland) and it might rain, but oh! to be out in nature! and with a few friends and acquaintances gathering under the name Cleveland Contemplative Walkers.  We don't even know what that means yet, but we will be outdoors, and we will walk, and we will read a few words from Thich Nhat Hanh.

A memorial service.  That may sound strange to others, but the work of a funeral or memorial service is work that I love.  To seek out and arrange the prayers, the music, the words.  To see the family and friends gathered, each in his or her own world of confusion and sadness, and yet connected by death, some glued fast to one another, and others clinging to the tangential lines cast out from one life.  To offer in words something of a person's life and a promise of hope.  

And then, tonight (I hope) the Cleveland Film Festival with at least some of my own family. I love the Cleveland Film Festival: the energy, the creativity, the artistry, the surprises.  If I had it all to do over again, I think I might be a filmmaker, trying to capture visually all that to which words are inadequate.  And the longer I preach, and the more I read, and the deeper I descend into this life, the more I come to recognize how utterly and extensively inadequate our proud little words are.

Good Friday Service: Witness to the Resurrection

I don't usually post funeral sermons, but yesterday's, given that it was on Good Friday, was an unusual one for me.  As it turns out, Good Friday is a good day for a Christian funeral.  Names have been changed, but not the significance of the narrative.

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Here we are, our sanctuary bare except for the black draping hung on the cross and the black paraments on communion table and pulpit, all to remind us that it is Good Friday, the first day of the Triduum, the week-end on which we mark the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The most solemn day of all days of the Christian year.  The day on which, 2,000 years ago, Jesus’ followers believed that their hopes had been destroyed, and that the Christ in whom they had placed their confidence was gone forever.

But here we are, with that hope and confidence restored, and with the sure knowledge that , although it is black and bleak today, Dan has gone ahead of us.  We, on Good Friday, are consumed by the sorrow of the crucifixion, and by the grief that accompanies the loss of a husband and father, a son and brother, a friend and colleague.  But Dan – Dan has already reached our Easter Sunday destination, that place of resurrection, that place of healing and wholeness, that place in which he lives in the fullness of the presence of God.

I got to know Dan a little over the past several weeks of his life.  I hope his family will bear with me as I recount again how I searched for common ground for conversation.  It was difficult for Dan  to communicate, and the first time I met him, no one was present to offer me any help.  But the next time, his helper Susan showed me a photograph hanging on his wall, a photograph of a moose in the north woods, and I discovered that he and I shared a love of canoeing in the backcountry of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario.  That led to a discovery of our mutual love of animals, both in the wild and at home, and gradually his story began to unfold.  His family life, his and Joan’s household filled with the activity of children and pets; his love of sports – one day I arrived to find him watching a hockey game and learned that he had played hockey and wrestled in high school; his education; and his career in computer systems analysis.

And then, there was the most recent and most devastating turn in his life – illness.  An illness which imposes such profound limitations on a person filled with physical strength and mental acuity.  A boy who once skated exuberantly across a hockey rink becomes trapped in a small room; a young man who shone in the workplace becomes dependent upon others for every aspect of his care.  There is nothing about this disease that seems right or fair, nothing about it that makes it in any way an acceptable fate – not for anyone, and especially not for anyone with Dan’s gifts.

And yet, in the Christian life, we know, as this Easter week-end so profoundly reminds us, that we are always accompanied by the God in Christ who extends a loving and healing embrace to us. That there is no boundary which God cannot cross. That nothing – neither hardship nor distress, not death, nor life – however we live it --  and not “things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

I wonder whether Dan, from the depth of a life in which he gradually took on primarily the role of observer, saw, perhaps more clearly than the rest of us do, that love of God that is so persistently present: in those who faithfully cared for him; in Joan’s gifts for music and ministry; in the beauty and energy of their daughter, so engaged in her college life; in the creativity and stories of their son, and his adventures in Japan; and in the world of God’s creation, so evident in his pets and his final trip to the zoo.

Perhaps, even here in this world, Dan saw the edge of both old and new creation, that place where hurt becomes transformed, where healing becomes visible and begins.

We Christians believe that our lives on this earth come to fullness in something we call “salvation,” in a final journey into the heart of the God who loves us, and a reunification with all the saints who have gone before us and those who are yet to come.  Did you know that the English word “salvation” comes from a Latin root which means “healthy” or “safe” or whole?  Think of the related word, “salve,” which means a healing, soothing, ointment.

For those here, for you, Dan’s beloved and loving family and friends, this is a time of loss and grief, a time of mourning someone no longer present as he was only a few days ago.  The loss of a life partner, and all of the sharing and hopes with which a life together began on a wedding day filled with joyous anticipation and no hint of the shadows lying ahead.   The loss of a father to children just becoming adults, young people who will miss his loyalty and guidance and humor as they embark upon their careers and build their own families.  The loss of a cherished son, and the complete alteration of a mother’s life. The loss of a brother with whom memories are shared, memories that only brothers know. For all of you, this means being shaken to your core by the reality of death as we know it here. But for Paul, this is the time of salvation, of healing and wholeness, of the soothing ointment of God’s love poured out for him, God’s child. Paul is now fully the person he was created to be, and he sees the love and the eternal presence of God with a clarity which we cannot.

God never gives up on God’s creation.  God is out to heal creation – these bodies, this world.  God is utterly concerned with both our bodies and our hearts, even our most broken bodies and most broken hearts.  We know this because of Jesus’ arrival among us – Jesus, God in the bodily form of a human being, with a human heart that ached and sorrowed and felt compassion.  And with Jesus’ arrival came the beginning, the inauguration, of God’s reign on earth, of a restored creation, of superabundant life for all.  Superabundant life for Dan.  A healed and whole life with God.

Today is Good Friday, a day on which we are soaked in the horror of the separation which death imposes upon us.  But Sunday is Easter, and on Sunday we will remember, perhaps more powerfully this year than ever before, that with Easter comes resurrection – the old passes away, the broken is healed and the new is born.  When you wake up on Sunday morning, you will know: the victory over death which Jesus accomplished for us all is already reality for Dan – for a healed and whole Dan.

May the Lord bless you and keep you, Dan.  May the face of God shine upon you and grant you peace. Amen.

Busy Week, Busy Season

This week has been packed beyond reason, and as a consequence we are spending a quiet evening at home instead of heading out to a gathering of friends. I realized a couple of days ago that the extra Lenten services and planning have added the equivalent of a full work day to each week, so I have good reason to feel a bit stressed.  My consistent response to almost every question or suggestion for the past two weeks has been, "Talk to me after Easter."

This one has been a regular week, filled with small meetings and conversations, a stack of telephone calls, classes to teach, people to visit, and services and sermons to plan.  And then there were the extras:

On Monday night, a friend and I presented an evening retreat on Ignatian spirituality for an ecumenical group.  We had a small (fewer than 20) but enthusiastic audience, with several people from various arenas of our lives showing up.  It's been ten years since I made the Spiritual Exercises, and at least a year since I've given them to someone else.  For me, the evening turned into a much-needed reminder of that powerful experience of prayer.

Tuesday night, our church council gathered for what should have been a short monthly meeting but, due to one prickly issue, wasn't. Another item for the "after Easter" list of matters requiring my attention as an interim pastor.

Wednesday we held our final mid-week Lenten service, this one focused on healing. I had little to do with that one ~ it's an annual tradition and one of our members, a nurse by profession, did the preaching.  We anointed and folks lit candles for a gentle, relaxing time of worship.

I'm not sure that I remember much of Thursday. Last night my daughter and I went out to see Hello, My Name Is Doris.  There are two other films I really wanted to see, but I did not have it in me to spend a Friday evening on either heartbreak or serious political matters, so we steered clear of those. 

This morning was devoted to a First Communion class for three lovely ten-year-olds, and then my daughter and I went for a walk together and began to plan a North Carolina backpacking trip for September.  I came home and looked up trail information and checked out backpacking gear, and felt much cheered by the prospect of a week in the woods. 

"After Easter" I am going to spend some concentrated time re-thinking all of these demands on my life.  I love everything that I am called to do, but I don't want to be this busy ever again.