A Halloween Story

When Mab was about Caederpie’s age, as is normal, she started fighting naps. I would lay down with her on the bed and hold her in my arms, and she would scream and scream and scream until she passed out. At some point I realized that she was actually screaming a word--”Gum”. Which didn’t make any sense at all, so I didn’t think much of it, until a months later, when she was putting more words together.

It turns out, Gum was a person. At naptime, she was terrified that Gum would get her. At other times, she was more blasé about him. “He a little guy, but he have a BIG shadow,” she explained. She claimed that he wasn’t scary, but promised that she would protect us anyway. He lived in the walls and floor, and sometimes he was in the toilet, and when he was in there, she refused to sit on it until I told her to yell at him to leave her alone. 

Apparently, Gum listened to her and eventually he faded away, like so many weird toddler phases.

Several years later, we had moved to a new house, and the new owners of our old house contacted my husband to ask some questions about some weird problems they were having with the plumbing. He answered their questions as well as he could, and then, before they hung up, they asked if the house was haunted. Not to his knowledge, he said. Well, they explained, because they’d seen a large dark shadow in the house.

“Gum’s back in the toilet!” we laughed afterwards. But it reminded me of something else that I had forgotten.

When the Golden Boy was the same age Mab had been when she first started fighting her naps and screaming about Gum, we were in a weird, in-between stage when my husband had already moved to start his new job while I stayed behind with the kids to finish out the semester and my dissertation. That day, Mab was already at preschool, but I was still at home, upstairs in the bedroom, trying to rock the Golden Boy down for a nap before my MIL got there to take over for me while I went to go teach.

The door was shut, but there was a line of sunlight at the bottom of it from the hall window on the other side. And for a moment, there was the shadow of a footstep on the other side.

I told myself it was a mouse (not unreasonable in this house) but there had been no signs of mice upstairs, and there was no rustling in the walls. Then I thought it must be tree branch, but it never reappeared the way the shadow of a branch would if it were swaying rhythmically in the wind.

The Golden Boy had finally fallen asleep, and it was completely silent, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was on the other side of the door, and I sat perfectly still for the next fifteen minutes, my heart thudding, until finally I heard my MIL’s car pull up and the front door open. 

Reformation 500, or, why I like being a Lutheran.

To wind up to the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the end of the month, members of our church are taking turns sharing at the beginning of the service what about being Lutheran makes our hearts sing. This week was my turn. 

I knew very little about being Lutheran when I first came to Bethany—this is actually probably still true. I had encountered Nadia Bolz Weber and thought she seemed kind of cool, but that was about it! I had a short list of denominations that I thought might be a good fit for us, and this was the one across the street from us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So it’s hard for me to separate the things I love about being Lutheran from the things I love about Bethany, because it’s been the same thing to me. So here goes.

I love the way the church makes room for contradictions and paradoxes. We do it with communion—is it bread and wine, or is it the body and blood of Christ? Yes! The Bible is confusing, Jesus said some strange stuff, life is complicated, our own history—as Lutherans and as Americans—is a mess, people who love God constantly disagree about all kinds of important things, and everyone has, or at least thinks they have, a good reason for what they think and do, and instead of pretending that it’s all quite simple and ignoring the contradictions in one way or another, the church leaves space for people to continue to work and serve together and to see each other as true members of the same church even while they disagree.

So the big one, the classic we are both sinners AND saints! This welcomes all of us into the church, regardless of whether or not we’ve repented “enough” (whatever that means). You’re a sinner, so it’s not like you’ll ever be repented enough anyway, but you’re also a saint, which means you’re already enough, just as you are. You want to come? Great! You want to serve? Even better! You don’t have to have cleaned yourself up to some arbitrary standard before you can start working. You just start.

And since we’re all sinners, we’re never going to have the exact right answers, and neither is anyone else, so rather than get on our high horse about how wrong that person is about this thing or that other thing, we can focus on how we’re all still saints of God and we’d better just figure out how to work together the best way we can, however that is.

And then also to cut ourselves some slack when this is harder than we expected, and we mess up, and get into fights, and other generally un-Christ-like behavior.

When we were preparing to move up here, and therefore also find a new church (which is a terrifying and exhausting task! I have so many strong opinions about church websites now!), I did a lot of research about the ELCA’s positions on all kinds of social issues, and many of them were so refreshing to read—there were statements of repentance, recognizing that the people in the church, even the ones with the very fanciest vestments, are sinners, and others that acknowledged the good faith on both sides of the argument that left space for members to live out these contradictory truths in the best way they could, because the church is made of saints, too.

Here’s another one: we have reformed, and we are still reforming. The church treasures the traditions that have given structure and stability to generations of faithful believers, AND looks for the places where it still needs to grow and evolve. I hope that we’ll be hearing about what these traditions mean to some of you who’ve grown up with them. I didn’t, and I find them very beautiful, and I’m glad my kids are growing up with them, but they aren’t part of my bones the way they are for many people here. That’s something very special here, and unique among the various traditions that I’ve been part of, how the church is practicing looking both backwards for the past good that sustains us, and forward for the future good that we can pursue. We don’t do it perfectly, because we’re sinners, but we’re working on it anyway, because we’re saints.