the thing with feathers

I had time apart.

I was in the thick of the north woods mucking around in ice-rimed mud, breathing in the crisp of the air and the blue of the sky and two grouse showed themselves in that terrifying wing-thrum they have.  They were vexed by our presence and glorious.

Later that day while in town I looked up and not ten feet above was a bald eagle.   I was blessed by winged power and amazing grace.

As dusk was falling and the lake called for attentive presence, I was lakeside when a whirr of wings drew my eyes to a lone tree.  There, in the skeleton of a foliage-naked perch was an owl.  She sat there, surveying the vast of the lake and the deepening of the night and I felt the vibrations of the Holy sing sing sing in my soul as stars came out to join the chorus of wonder.

We live in the midst of the Holy.  Every day, every moment this is so.  Poet Emily Dickinson says that “hope is the thing with feathers”, and so it is.  And, hope is the thing watchful and still and deep and taloned and vast in its sweep.

And it surprises sometimes, this thing called hope.

falling

There is a yellow on the tree outside my office window that greets me each day.

Through the fall I have watched it burst into color and now the rain (will it EVER end?) and the wind are dispersing the color to a carpet around its base.

There is melancholy in this falling. I’m aware of the power of season and cycle as I bear witness to the tree and its release of leaves.

At this time of year it calls my heart to pay attention to the witness we call All Saint’s Day.

On Sunday the 1st of November we will welcome into the consciousness of our communal hearts the twenty of our church folk who have died in the past year.

Through the naming and the seeing of their faces projected on the screen and through the ingathering of their people joining us in this ritual of thanksgiving, we remember.  We give thanks and we laugh and we hear the echo of their voices and feel the power of their spirits and we mark the changing of the season that is life.

Their witness and teaching create a colorful carpet around us and while we mourn the change in relationship since their release of earthly being, we give thanks for the color and presence that blesses us yet.

We are all falling into the cycle and power and release that is living.

Sometimes we even stop to remember our being in the midst of it.

 

wonder

I met Leah 25 years ago today.

In a hospital room in Stevens Point, WI I learned what wonder was. 

Wonder was struggling out of the fog of an emergency Cesarian section and being fearful about asking after the health of the child who had been constant companion for ten months and being answered by the handing into my arms a bundle capped by blond fluff and eyes bespeaking a soul old and fine.  Her eyes found mine  and there was an “of course” as we took each other in, as if to say we had been destined to learn love and life one from the other.  Of course.  Of course.

Wonder. 

She is far from my arms on this day, making and learning her life.  It aches, this not holding her on this day of remembering and celebrating.

But the world holds her.  She is, and she is so fine, and of course she will venture and learn and explore while her mother marks the day remembering.  Remembering the communion of soul-meet.  Remembering the advent of wonder.

Grinding the seed corn

Key Minnesota statistics around on the status of children:

• 11.4% of children under 18 years old are living in poverty in Minnesota.
• For families the poverty rate is 6.2% and for families with children under 18 years, the poverty rate is 9.8%, and for families with children under 5 years the rate increases to 12.7%.
• In Minnesota there are 78,629 children living without health insurance (6.3% of children in the state).
• There are 108,098 children not enrolled in school in Minnesota between the ages of 3 and 17.
• The median household income is $72,008, and 12.5% of children are living in households with Supplemental Security Income (SSI), cash public assistance income, or Food Stamp benefits.

The above statistics landed in my email in box courtesy of the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.

Artist Kathe Kollwitz has an incredibly powerful work in which a mother is depicted in a fiercely sheltering embrace of her children.  It is entitled “Seed Corn Must not be Ground”.  It speaks volumes.  As do the above statistics.

I just can’t figure it.  I can’t understand that any sort of rationale could be shared that would legitimate our grinding of the seed corn that is our children.  They are the crop of the future.   They are our hope and our legacy and, increasingly, our witness to our values.

Clearly we value armaments and strip malls and stadiums more than we value the seed corn.  Clearly we have deafened our ears and hearts to the teachings of Jesus which are so very clear about our need to care for the “least of these”.

I don’t much want to hear arguments from politicians about whose failed policies created a reality in which so many of our children live without basic human necessities.  I don’t much want to endure any longer the finger pointing and posturing because clearly, the only place the finger can point with unerring accuracy is at ourselves.

We are a part of the problem.  And, thank God, we are a part of the solution. 

Let us put down the shields we hide behind as we play the partisan blame game.  Let us instead wrap ourselves in the awareness that whilst the battle for blame goes on, our children are being ground.

Check out the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.  Organize a group in your church.  Raise your voice and your awareness.

Seed corn must not be ground.

in it

Living in the city is hard for me.

So, I bought a scooter.  A Barbie pink one.  It is a 50 cc which means I can go up to 45 mph, it gets 80 – 100 miles per gallon, and it has made me giddy.

Now upon waking, one of my first thoughts is whether or not it’s a “scooter day”.  Now, I plot out routes across town that are back road beautiful.  Now, I am delighted to run errands and tend to tasks that require travel because I get to feel the wind in my face and I love it.

I was twelve or so when I first got bit by the mini bike bug.  A friend had one and I remember loving the adventure of putting along trails with it.  I have toyed for years with the temptation to get a motorcycle, but as a mom and as an ever-aging woman-aware-of-vulnerability I wasn’t too keen on high speed and long distance power.

But scooters, well, that’s a whole different thing.  They began appearing before my eyes everywhere and each time I saw one my heart did a lurchy kind of call out to it and when I had run out of the necessary restraints that kept me from plunking down my money for such a one-person toy, I entered a store and there is was:  not the classy red that I had thought to call my own, but a shocking pink one that was priced to sell (imagine, pink as a hard color to move off the floor!).

Fall is fabulous on a scooter.  The smells and the warmth of the sun, the quality of light and the right-in-your-face beauty of flowers and trees and children waiting for school busses is breathed right in. 

I’m in it:  life and living.

to life!

Yesterday’s text from Ephesians had to do with joining together to create hymns and songs of gratitude.  Making celebration in concert with all that is is spiritual bread for the journey that is life.

This morning is the first of my 52nd year of life.  Involved in the oh so vital decision- making about getting out of bed for that first cup of coffee, I received a sung gift.  A loon flew over my urban house.   The first call I heard seemed like it couldn’t be:  the singing out of my favorite bird, a spirit animal I have long associated with a father who died way too early and suddenly fourteen years ago.  Loons live on the lake at my cabin and in the north land that still is home place and in the midst of not being there, an emissary appeared.

Four times it called out.  In its song was life and remembrance and proclamation and the weaving of the shine that is creation. 

Happy birthday to me.

in the boat

I was at a training recently for United Methodist pastors.

A statement made really got my attention.  The issue was how it is that sometimes, when we seek to build community based on shared values and corporate buy-in, people who exist on the edges of the community seek to dictate course.  In other words, they show up only rarely, “invest” themselves minimally or not at all, and then lob their comments into the “boat” of the community and expect that they will be able to chart the course of the communal boat.

The comment made was that these folks are “on the dock” and have not earned the right to pilot the boat.

I loved it!  Church is so often a messy and confusing place.  We are somehow under the impression that as dutiful followers of Jesus, we cannot practice clean and clear boundaries around process.  We’re too nice to say to someone “Hey, get in the boat and we have something to talk about.  As long as you remain on the dock, your voice just isn’t going to be pilot”.

What happens when people forget that living in healthy ways together is a foundational value of Christian community is that members wield power in the ways practiced in secular culture.  They withdraw their monetary support.  They boycott worship for various and sundry reasons.  They mutter and mutter via emails and spoken word their denigration of the course of the boat called church.  They refuse to practice the Jesus teachings of face to face conversations and communal problem solving.  And they somehow believe that if they shout loudly from the dock and enjoin others to join their campaign of discontent,  they can pilot the boat from the dock.

I had a clergy colleague, a former District Superintendent, who asked a question that lives with me yet:  “Do you want to be Christian, or do you want to be nice?”

I think that in charting the boat called church in these days of necessary honesty and new shore seeking, we need to be Christian.  We need to celebrate those who are in the boat. 

And we need to leave the dock party in the hands of God as we set out on the thing called being community in Christ in the 21st century.

The seas await!

blended families

We’re blending families at church.  Two congregations that have collectively spent three hundred people and ministry years are coming together to become something new.  The process has been amazing grace.

We talk about being the One Body of Christ all of the time in the church.  It’s one of those phrases that get tossed off as an “of course”.  Of course we are one.  BUT, we like the way we do things and we like the way we know each other and we like the way our sanctuary looks and we like the treats we serve at coffee and changing these things that give us a sense of ground in a shifting day and age seems too much to risk.

But risk we will.  Edgewater Emmauel will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  Richfield UMC will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  And then, on the 20th of September, we will join together as a new Body: Richfield UMC, composed of folk from EEUMC and RUMC and anywhere else God sees fit to garner partners in ministry.  Some of us will be in a sanctuary that may look and feel familiar, but we have to know this:  we are a new creation.  We’ll learn from each other and we will change and grow and explore and blunder and wonder about how it is that we have been so blessed.

We’re blessed by a Spirit that leads us into new celebrations and expressions of what it is to be community in Christ.  Blending families (this I know) is a work that is challenging.  But done mindfully and prayerfully and with a willingness to just plain laugh at the foibles of being human, it is Spirit work of immense power.

We gather at the common table of grace. We trust that God is in our midst.  We are blessed.

words

Words have great power.  Sometimes that power scares us, because words peel back layers we have wrapped around the quiver that is our hearts.

I run into this a lot as a clergy woman, this word aversion.  At a former church I served, the word “struggle” sent a shiver of distaste up the spines of some of our leaders.  We wanted to use the word in our mission statement.  It seemed important that our church claim our participation in the struggle against the death-dealing amnesia that can be our cultural reality.  The amnesia would have us to believe that poverty and isms and injustices of the endless stripes that exist are somehow beyond the notice of nice Christian folk.  To acknowledge that living the teachings of Jesus is struggle in our world means that we might have to engage, get dirty and roughed up in the living of the gospel message.   Well, of course.

The lament goes up often:  why is it that the church seems to be increasingly sidelined in our civic life?  Why is it that our young-ins seem to scorn an institution that is built upon the teachings of a man who was radically inclusive and insistently justice seeking?  How is it that in a time when loneliness and a sense of powerlessness grip our communal being the movement of Jesus is deemed somehow irrelevant?

It’s about words.  The words we are afraid will somehow offend or challenge or confront.   Words that would stake our claim upon the challenging and cosmos healing vision of Jesus.  Words that would call us to claim that systems of oppression, even when they facilitate our middle class comfort, those systems of oppression must be named and claimed as foe.

Why?  Because of a word that we hold to: gospel.  The good news.  The good news to the poor and the outcast and the addicted and the lonely and the frightened and the hopefilled and the beaten and the powerful.  The message of relief to those burdened and awakening to those whose hearts have been too long wrapped.

Our hearts need to quiver.

swelter

It is awful.

I love the graciousness of my house.  It has stained glass windows and rooms meant for entertaining and woodwork and it has… no central air conditioning.

It is 95 out in Minneapolis.  Humidity is at about a bizzillion.  Yesterday was the same.  On such a day it is hard to summon the energy to think a coherent thought, let alone stir bodies that simply want to sleep through the agony of it all except sleeping in such heat is impossible so what is a person to do?

I walked a three mile path around Lake Harriet yesterday during the worst of it.  My man was swimming the buoys at said lake and I knew that if I didn’t move I would be scraped off the walls or floors so I set out.  There were other crazy people out, too.  And really, about half way around as I was finding how truly effective the body’s coolant system is (read there was sweat streaming EVERYWHERE) I started to laugh.  What else was there?  I waded into the lake after my walk and laughed again.  The cool water I sought to refresh my hot toes?  Not there.  Even the water of a MN lake in early summer had given up semblance of cool.

Driving around in cars is respite.  Going to movies works.  Libraries are our friend.  Coffee shops work too. 

I’m so happy to be at work.  It is cool here.  The space under my desk seems near large enough to stretch out and sleep.  It is feeling tempting…..