Standing in the den two nights ago my husband rubbed his hands through his hair, looked at me and said, “Have I come undone?” I said, “Well, I’m sure you have. Listen to this. . . .” I opened a book and read something I’d found earlier that very day. Stumbled across it really. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other” (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004, 19).
Read MoreLent IV
Lenten Lament on Grief
Yesterday was the first day since Lent began that I did anything I’d call productive for work. Why? Well grief keeps kicking my backside. And all my other sides, for that matter. I’m attending to it. I’m not rushing to get back to things. But it keeps spurting out in surprising and unsettling ways. So I’d like to write an honest lament about grief’s effects on me.
Lent III
“On practicing Our Faith” On practice. On practicing our faith. On practicing our faith with the Jesus story.
Where exactly are we in the Jesus story, right about now? Let’s try to locate ourselves on our journey through the Jesus story. The lectionary. You recall what that is: the list of scriptures that reaches out across the Christian landscape and leads us week by week and season by season through each church year. Each year we follow the Jesus story in the Gospel readings . . .
Lent I
Lent should not ever really begin the way it did. But then tragedy does not seem to have a timetable. At least not one I like. My feelings are still too raw to blog about this now. And some of you who read this are raw as well. So I’ll stick with one of the prayers I prayed in the funeral today. It’s a prayer for children, and it followed a reading of Luke 18:15-17. Jesus Christ, we love our children. You love our children. You love us as your children. And so we bring you our children now . . .
Read MoreAsh Wednesday
“Letting Go: An Ash Wednesday Reflection”
DRIVING TO CHURCH IN THE GATHERING darkness of a late-winter afternoon, I find myself in a state of persistent indecision. By the time I arrive at the Ash Wednesday service at my church, I’ve still reached no conclusion about what I should give up or take up for the Lenten season. Like most years, as Ash Wednesday approaches I wonder what will make my journey more meaningful. What do I need in this season? Some years the need is to let go of some burden; in other years the call is to take up some spiritual practice. Still other years I settle on nothing and wander through Lent more lost than the children of Israel in the wilderness.
Epiphany XII
How can we live generously?
When I landed in Charlotte, NC, yesterday the first email message I read on my phone said that Howard Cockrum had died. I was struck immediately by two deeply felt responses: grief and gratitude. In life we’re sometimes lucky enough to have friends who are truly worth knowing, people who manage to love us with no strings attached, faithful ones who bless us with gifts, love and generosity, people who become family and who share without holding back.
Epiphany XI
How much is enough? I’ll start with (another) story of disorientation. It began three days ago. On Sunday night I flew to St. Paul. It is fairly uneventful as flights go. I sit alone. I read and write. I plan for the week. On the ground this calm uneventful evening starts to unravel slowly. Snow is pouring.
Read MoreEpiphany X
What is margin? Talk of money and our personal relationship to it are still taboo topics around most conversation tables in US American society. The prohibitions keep us from learning wise practices about handling our stuff and our money. This church year my husband Lynn is chairing the Stewardship Ministry in our congregation, and we are in the midst of several conversations about our money and our stuff. I want to spend the next three posts before Lent addressing three questions, which are at the heart of our conversations. There is lot more to say, but this will be a start in this forum. The questions are: What is margin? How much is enough? And how can we live generously? I’ll take them in this order.
Read MoreEpiphany IX
Embodied Practice: Three Crashes from the Past Week
I stood looking at my things for the Prayer and Pastoral Care class: papers, books, chime. I was missing my water and one book. My watch said I had about three minutes before it was time to start the class. Just enough time to run up to my office and back down to the classroom. I turned quickly to my left and headed for the door. Half way there: Crash.
Epiphany VIII
The wisdom of a tree . . . Trees show up a lot in my poetry and life. This afternoon a look at some trees reminded me of this journal entry from September. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina for a meeting. I was feeling a bit lonely and bereft in the midst meeting. I ended up on a bench outside. Here is what I wrote. I turned at this moment on the bench and realized there was what I needed – right in front of me – a very large tree.
Read MoreEpiphany VII
Laundry. It seems like a good night to write about something mundane. And besides I’m doing laundry while I write. Multi-tasking is such an unexamined part of life for most of us. We do the laundry, run the dishwasher. Back up the computer. All while we’re taking out the trash. Or we send three emails, write a blog, pay the bills and post on facebook, all in an hour on the computer. Does this way of life really accomplish more? Or is it just a sign of an overly-busy and distracted existence, endemic to the middling classes?
Read MoreEpiphany VI
This Epiphany season one image keeps flitting through my mind. I snapped this pic of a statue of Jesus at Christ Lutheran Church on Capitol Hill last fall. I was there with a group of faculty and students from Luther Seminary sharing the experience of Pray and Break Bread. When I’ve visited churches of the neighborhoods of the Twin Cities I’ve found it interesting to ask this question: “What does Jesus look like here?”
Read MoreEpiphany V
Being here on campus this week reminds me of that first trip as a new hire. I arrived late in the evening to the snowy winter dark. The next morning I went in search of breakfast. I hoped I could remember where the dining hall was. I found it (eventually), but I felt disoriented at every turn. I couldn’t even decide what to eat. And I was slightly nervous about my first day on the job. When I finally managed to get a bowl of oatmeal together and some toast, I stepped up to the register to pay.
It was J-term which meant there weren’t many people in the cafeteria at 7:30 a.m. There was no line. I put down my food.
“You don’t owe anything,” the cashier said.
“Do what?” I sputtered.
“Someone already paid for your breakfast.”
Epiphany IV
A prayer for the children and parents of Haiti
I rocked my daughter to sleep just now
And I wept for the mothers who would never rock their children again
Epiphany III
Storytelling . . .
In 2001, as I was working my way through doctoral courses in Religion, Psychology and Culture at Vanderbilt, I read pastoral theologian, Andy Lester’s book, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that book he articulates several important ideas including the notion of “future stories.” The stories we tell ourselves about the future can have as much impact on us in the present as do all the stories we tell about our pasts.
For instance right now I’m carrying around a host of future stories about everything from what time I’ll turn out the lights tonight to what movie I might see this weekend, to where I’ll be teaching and what I will be researching 20 years from now. The power of future stories seems obvious when you try it on. But it is a significant challenge to the psychological traditions which mostly focus on the past as the main or only key to understanding personal identity or behavior in the present.
Read MoreEpiphany II
Tomorrow is the second Sunday in Epiphany.* Many churches will read and hear the story of Jesus’ baptism. Some churches will invite worshippers to remember their own baptisms. I want to remember mine with you for a moment . . . I was baptized on Easter Sunday, 1973. I know because the date and occasion are written in a Living Bible (very popular in the 1970s) that my parents gave me on that day. What I remember vividly is the little white dress I wore that Sunday.
Read MoreEpiphany I
A wing and a prayer . . . This morning I prayed in darkness. And then I saw a great light. It was the sun. Filling up the all of the cold morning. My husband called me into the kitchen. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sparrow breathe,” he said. Not taken to fits of poetry or even flowery prose, he had to be speaking literally. He began to explain. It seems that the sun is at just the right mid-winter angle to fill our backyard bird feeder with light. If they perched just right the birds at the breakfast buffet were silhouetted by the rising sun. As they took their turns and tilted their heads just so, puff, their tiny warm breath exhaled in a little cloud.
Read MoreChristmas III
one tiny nest
perched high against a cold december sky
what comfort?
soaking up the gray morning
Christmas II
Pastors don’t pray much it seems. They are busy. But they are not filling their time with prayer, meditation or personal devotion. At least a study that came out this week says this is the case. Seems to me that more than families are likely hurting if pastoral leaders are spending so little time attending to their own spiritual lives. But lest I sound too judgmental, I remember well the struggle to care for my own spiritual well-being while also attending to the spiritual well-being of those I served in the years when I was full-time on a church staff. Even when I was doing what I knew to do to care for my own soul, it was not always the most effective or spiritually nourishing thing I could be doing.
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