Restringing the broken things

A year or so ago, my mom gave me and my daughter some necklaces that had belonged to my Gamaw. When she gave them to us, she was very clear that they were worn and would need to be restrung, so I wasn't surprised when one by one several of them broke and went into a jar on my dresser.

The first to break (and my favorite) was one that had been knotted, so at least I didn't have to chase beads all over the house. But that also meant that restringing it was especially intimidating--I had no faith in my ability to patiently make even, teeny knots in between every single bead on the necklace.

Finally, I went to the craft store and bought bead silk with a little attached bit of wire for threading, looking up online how to get the knots close and even and tight, and when one afternoon the Kitten decided to grace me with a nap, I sat down with the broken necklace, some tiny sewing scissors for cutting apart the original cord, the new beading silk, and a needle for pulling each knot tight against the bead. 

The broken end, before I started cutting

Three beads and one end of the clasp, after what felt like an hour

At first, it was slow, and I considered setting it aside for the rest of the afternoon and picking it up again another day--that this might be a weeks-long endeavor. But eventually I got the hang of it, and how to allow gravity to bring the newest bead to rest snugly against the knot and bead below while I drew the needle in the knot evenly down against it.

The new necklace grew into a satisfying weight in my hand, heavier than plastic or glass, and as I cut the fraying grayed old knots apart, I wondered about the hands that had tied them. I imagined decades in the future, someone else cutting my knots apart to restring it again. The image of a theoretical granddaughter at her dinner table cued a bit of climate anxiety--what kind of world is outside her windows right now?--but if we are the kind of people who restring disintegrating necklaces and preserve the beautiful beads, maybe we can also be the kind of people who restore a collapsing world, too, and take the time to bind each little broken piece back together into a whole.

After about an hour and a half, when I began to think that maybe I could actually finish it today, the Kitten woke up. He sat and ate a snack while I finished up the necklace, and listened attentively while I explained what I was doing. At my mom's suggestion, I put a drop of super glue on the knots at each end, against the clasps, and reminded myself that if anything did break, at least the beads were tied on individually so nothing too disastrous would happen.

I'm not going anywhere today, but I decided to wear it anyway.

Why we need more Nazguls in church

Our church recently took on a new challenge—to try to help families with young children feel welcome. This sounds simple to someone at a church like the moderately large evangelical church I grew up in, where we had a packed Children’s Worship and a large well-staffed nursery, but when there aren’t many children to start out with, it’s actually extremely difficult. For one thing, there’s no nursery because there’s maybe one or two babies there at a time, if that, so the nursery “volunteers” would basically just be a mom sitting alone with her baby, and at that point you might as well either stay home or try to tough it out with the baby in the service.

Once upon a time, when my family was new at another church and the Golden Boy was a baby, the rector assured us that crying babies are just the church breathing. And it’s true—no babies, no church. That is, you can limp along for awhile without any babies, but probably not for more than a generation or so. We could try to keep our church pristine and unchanged, beautiful for weddings, impressive and historic for visitors, but then we would be a museum and not a church, and the local Historic Society (held in a beautiful old former church building and often used for weddings) is already just a block or so down the hill.

Hence the Prayground. We recently put one up front, and it’s adorable—there are little foam chairs and a table, IKEA finger puppets, foam blocks, felt food, and board books. All the kids who have played there love it!

BUT

(yes, that’s a really big but)

That’s when you bump up into the other huge challenge of trying to help families with little kids feel welcome without a critical mass of children already present. It’s too quiet. And then your one little kid up there throws a little felt tomato against the radiator cover and, because there is literally no other noise happening at that moment, it sounds like the starting gong for a sumo match, and you urgently try to get them to play more quietly, and they gleefully defy you (because they think it’s a game) and throw the foam block, too, and when you intervene again they SHRIEEEEEEEK like a Nazgul, at which point you shamefacedly haul your still-screeching monster over your shoulder and out of the sanctuary.

You probably don’t come back the next week, either, because it was exhausting and you didn’t even get through the entire service, and you’re kind of embarrassed about the whole thing.¹

Which is why the Prayground isn’t getting used nearly as much as we had all hoped it would—too many parents I’ve talked to have decided that it’s not worth it because their happy kids make too much noise in the most awkward location at church—right under the pulpit. And I understand. While lots of wonderful people will encouragingly tell you that they don’t mind your kids’ noise, and that they’re just glad you’re there, you know there are probably plenty of others who wouldn’t say so to your face, but are definitely judging you for not meeting whatever standard they remember themselves having totally mastered back when they were parents disciplining their own children through church.

Today, though, was a little different. Today another little boy was there who wanted to play. He and the Golden Boy had a great time with the shark finger puppets and the blocks, talked quietly together about how old they are and where they live, discussed having a play date, and were generally imperfect yet delightful. Technically both of them are “too old,” according to the Prayground description in the church program, but they’re exactly the age that most needs wiggle room, so they played together and made friends with each other. And having a buddy you can count on is the thing that’s most likely to bring you back to church again and again.

So I’ll keep sitting in the front with my tiny Nazguls, because in the long run, the thing that will be most helpful to families with young children is all of us knowing that we’re not alone and we don’t have to hide in the back—there are other kids here to play with, other parents here who won’t judge because we all understand that kids are destroyers of standards and paradigms, other little kids filling the silence with joyful noise.

1This is another danger point (if you’d like your congregation to last for another generation, anyway): when you have little kids and it’s too stressful to get to church on Sundays you just stop trying, then you get out of the habit because yeah, it’s exhausting and you’re really busy, and the kids grow up seeing church as maybe a nice thing but not integral to their lives, and do you really think they’re going to magically decide to show up every Sunday when they’re adults?

The Great Family Legend of the Flamethrower and the Bees

(NB: Like all good legends, this one has been told and retold and transformed in the telling. The truths it tells about my family are true truths. I wouldn’t swear in a courtroom to the accuracy of some of the specifics, however)

Shortly after my parents married, they went on a quest to find some wide open spaces where their theoretical children could roam, and settled in an old farmhouse with a tottering, rusting barn on the back corner of the property. It became (or already was, and they just continued the tradition) a place to shove odds and ends that weren’t easily disposed of—old tires, riding mowers that neither rode nor mowed, piles of worn out carpet, and other similar junk.

But the west wind that comes ripping across the wide fields that surround my parents’ house are more powerful than rusted sheet metal. I remember watching through the back windows during a storm, as those metal sheets would arch back, flapping slowly and rhythmically. Over the years the bits of barn that remain were peeled off piece by piece, until finally the whole thing began to collapse on itself.

It wouldn’t do to have a giant yard for children to play in if there was a giant rusty metal death trap in the back yard, so my parents rented a massive dumpster from Ray’s Trash Service and had it parked next to the barn. Some big piece of heavy machinery came to visit for the day to pick up the busted riding mowers and other super heavy pieces to dump them in the back, and after that it was my dad and my Gapaw in work gloves. For several days, it was slow going.

Then one gorgeous morning, my sister and I awoke to a BOOM.

We scrambled out of bed and to our bedroom window, where we saw a mushroom cloud unfolding itself into the cloudless summer sky from behind the garage, in the general direction of the barn.

Knowing Dad and Gapaw, we were perhaps not as flabbergasted as one might have expected.

That morning, while we were still asleep, they had already been hard at work through the archaeological layers that were the wreckage of the barn, when some bees took exception to their work and started to buzz menacingly around them. After backing up and cautiously inspecting the area, they realized that under the giant pile of old carpeting that they had been attempting to clear, a hive of bees had made itself a home.

My dad hates bees. At least, that’s what he claims. I’ve since come to realize that when guys say things like “I hate bees” or “I hate bats” or anything else like that, what they actually mean is “I have a mortal terror of bees and/or bats.” At any rate, his aversion to bees crushed my childhood dreams of having my own beehives, in spite of my extensive research into the subject.

He and my Gapaw stood back for a long time, watching the bee sentries sternly patroling the perimeter.

Finally, Gapaw (the instigator) says slowly, “You know, what you need….is a flamethrower.”

“That’s it!” says Dad (the engineer), and runs to the garage, leaving Gapaw to watch the bees and wonder what sort of abomination of desolation he’d just unleashed.

My dad returned with the gas can he used for the (functional) riding mower, a pint jar, and a smaller box in his pocket. He filled the pint jar with the gasoline and tossed it on the pile of carpet.

More bees appeared to inspect this mysterious and vaguely threatening phenomenon.

Pleased, he tossed on another pint, and then one more.

The bees were really vexed now, a whole humming cloud of venom and sting.

Dad pulled out the box of matches from his pocket. He couldn’t get close enough to the pile of carpet, so he grabbed a fistful of matches and struck them on the side of the box in the same movement as he threw them.

Fwoom! The bees vaporized in the resulting fireball, and my sister and I woke up.

There was obviously no more work to be done on the barn that day. Dad and Gapaw watched the flames for awhile with satisfaction, and then went inside to tell Mom what had happened. Later my dad would return to the (now cooled) ashes to find all sorts of interesting treasures to show guests, like solidified pools of aluminum from an old mower deck.

They occupied a place of honor on the pantry shelf for several years before vanishing into the ether where all such sacred objects go, alongside the Holy Grail and the Art of the Covenant.

A eulogy for my Gapaw

I know his story is more complicated than this, but through the eyes of a much-loved grandchild, the thing I will always remember about my Gapaw was his sense of silliness and mischief. There was nothing too mundane to be transformed into a game or a story. The drinking water tap on the corner of the kitchen sink in their house in Lizton? That was magic water that Gapaw claimed made him more beautiful. The door that was always kept closed to curious little grandchildren, behind which was a set of dangerously steep steps to the unfinished basement with the water heater and furnace? It hid a monstrously ferocious wombat*.

When he hid plastic eggs around the yard for Easter, some contained candy, some contained money, and some contained…..driveway gravel. He claimed to be descended from bold and brave Vikings.** He made the infamous “flamethrower” suggestion when he and my dad were clearing out the rubble of the collapsed barn in my parents’ backyard and discovered a massive hive of angry bees under a pile of old carpet, which led to one of the Great Family Legends. Furthermore, he was an astonishingly good sport about my constant childish pestering for him to give up smoking*** and sometimes he let me “help” in his woodworking shop, distressing finished pieces so they would look comfortably worn-in. The smells of cigarette smoke, varnish, and sawdust always send me back there.

I grieve that his story has ended, but I’m so very thankful for how much more magical my own story has been because of him.

Thank you to my cousin Amanda for letting me borrow this absolutely perfect picture

*Gapaw didn’t actually know what a wombat was, and was very surprised one day when my sister and I came over with cuddly wombat stuffies that another relative had brought back for us from a trip to Australia.

**His side of the family was descended from Jacobites on the Scottish-English border, so this isn’t entirely implausible because Danelaw, but it seemed fantastical to me at the time.

***He did eventually quit, but it had nothing to do with my anti-smoking “campaign”

My bookshelf

We recently did some major rearranging at home, which necessitated moving about half my books to another room. So I took the opportunity to institute a new organizational structure on my library.

Last time I shelved them, it was right after I had submitted my dissertation and we had moved to a new state, and I was still thinking of myself as a professional academic. This meant I had two libraries--my Serious Scholarly Library, and everything else (i.e. my "unserious" library). 

Three and a half years later, this division made absolutely no sense, and my house was overrun with books I was probably never going to read again, certainly not in the foreseeable future. 

The first thing I did was put all my secondary scholarly sources in a nice sturdy tote and put it in the attic. If I do start writing literary criticism again, it will have to be because I am fascinated or enamored by a particular story, not because I want to get into a fight with another academic. 

The next thing I did was return to my old Brownsburg Public Library Mini-Page roots and sort everything into Fiction and Non-Fiction. (I admit I'm still not sure what to do with the texts that wobble on the border between those two categories, though--like Layamon's Brut and Geoffrey's Historia, for example, or any of the family sagas. For the time being I'm keeping them in fiction with Snorri's Edda, but I'm open to persuasion.) 

Malory's Morte Darthur is just as fictional as Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (and just as Arthurian) even if one got a whole dissertation chapter and the other was "just" a favorite in high school. And I took a particular delight in shelving my collection of Shakespeare plays with Ryan North's To Be Or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet choose-your-own-adventures.

But the Non-Fiction section is especially magical. I paired books as though I were an elementary teacher trying to keep unruly students in line, or a first-year composition instructor arranging conference groups so that students would be encouraged to collaborate with representatives of diverse viewpoints. This means that St. Augustine, that notoriously misogynistic genius, has to sit with Rachel Naomi Remen and Kathleen Norris, two equally brilliant modern women who have a healthy respect for their own femininity (and expect others to do the same). John Calvin has to hang with Rob Bell (which makes me giggle every time I think of it). Less antagonistically, I put Margery Kempe with How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Everything you never wanted your kids to know about sex (but were afraid they'd ask) because someone with 14 children and a fraught relationship with her own sexuality probably could use the support. 

I'm delighted with the conversations my books seem to be having with each other, now that I've removed the artificial barrier of "serious" and "non-serious." Turns out all my books can be taken seriously, but they can also all be taken too seriously. 

Bonus: having my academic books out there with everything else means that it's easier for me to loan my Biography of the English Language to Queen Mab, who, I recently learned at Parent-Teacher Conferences, has been sharing all kinds of linguistic trivia during language lessons at school. It almost makes up for the toddler de-shelving everything onto the floor whenever he feels a bit destructive. 

My anti-busy Lent

I love Lent.

Which yes, is kind of weird. But I know I'm not the only person who does! Part of it is that I'm one of those people that Barbara Brown Taylor calls "lunar Christians" and seasons like Lent and Advent are made for people who like to sit in the dark and ponder their doubts. The other reason, maybe, is that Lent is a time for doing less--eating less, boozing less, Facebooking less, whatever, in order to make more space for Good in our lives. For me, more space for God usually includes going to church more.

This year, though, there were out-of-state travels to see people I love, David being on-call on Sunday mornings and so unable to help wrangle kids in the pew, stomach viruses, and a new very part time job (that nevertheless occupied a lot of head space, especially the first few weeks). And I actually ended up going to church less than usual.

At first this really bothered me. But I still kept my little fast and added a discipline that I didn't entirely fail, and I've ended this Lent with a sort of peaceful resignation--I'm not Super Christian Lady, and that's ok. 

I tried reading through the entire New Testament with the read of the congregation. I didn't finish (I got bogged down in Romans, which reminded me way too much of a really unproductive and spiritually pedantic stage in my life) but it was good anyway. I read the Message version, to try to keep away from any automatic responses to passages I've read so many times before, in very different contexts. 
Galatians, of all places, had the most to say to me this year.

4-6 "I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.
(...)
25-26 Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original."

Happy Easter, all you marvelous originals!

Thanksgiving sermon

Preached at Bethany Lutheran Church on Saturday evening, November 18 and Sunday morning, November 19. 

Deuteronomy 8:7-18

Psalm 65

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

Luke 17:11-19

When Pastor Elaina gave me the readings for this weekend, I thought I knew the story of the Ten Lepers really well. It’s in a beautiful illustrated volume of Bible Stories for Children that was given to our family for Blaise’s baptism, and I’ve read that version aloud many times over the past four years. But of course, the authors chose to simplify the story for their audience to keep the focus on the importance of saying Thank You to Jesus for your blessings. So as it turns out, there was a key detail left out: the fact that the former leper who returned to give thanks is a Samaritan.

There’s something about Jesus and Samaritans that keeps popping up, over and over in the Gospels. Today, when the phrase “good Samaritan” has come to be synonymous with “helpful passerby,” it’s easy to overlook how shocking this former leper’s ethnicity would have been, because for the original audience, a “good Samaritan” would probably have been considered an oxymoron. A Samaritan role model? Inconceivable!

It’s not just that Samaritans were foreign. In fact, Samaritans were actually descended from from the tribes that had been conquered by the Assyrians. No, they were also heretics—they claimed to worship the same god, but they didn’t do it in the “right way”—they worshiped on Mt. Gerazim instead of at the Temple in Jerusalem, and 2 Kings claims that their worship had become corrupted by the worship of other gods as well. Tensions erupted a little over a hundred years before Jesus’s birth, when the Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple, and then again around the time of his birth, when the Samaritans defiled the Jewish temple with human bones.

So for Jesus’s contemporaries, when they thought of their neighbors in Samaria, there was disgust, there was anger, there was fear. Everyone has those areas, of course—the parts of town, or the next town over, where you don’t go, where you lock your doors if there’s no way to avoid going through it, where you certainly wouldn’t let your kids go for an event. Those countries where you would never go for vacation, or let your kid go backpacking or do a study abroad. The sort of places where the only Americans who do visit are associated with the military in some way. And if the people from those areas come here, they are often looked at with suspicion, treated with caution or even hostility. For Jesus’s community, that neighborhood was Samaria.

So note that nine of the lepers are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do—go to the priest to fulfill the requirements of the law. In Leviticus, God directs people who have been cured of leprosy or other skin diseases to go to the priest to be officially declared clean by means of a special sacrificial ceremony. I looked it up—it’s eight days long! And finally, once that’s done, the person who has been healed can officially rejoin their community. So these nine lepers already have plenty to do! Besides, Jesus didn’t tell them to be sure to send a thank you note, or anything like that.

But meanwhile, as you might expect, the tenth, the Samaritan, the foreigner from an enemy nation, ISN’T following the directions.

Instead, he’s overwhelmed with gratitude, so he ignores the rules and the eight-day ceremony and runs back in the opposite direction from where Jesus told him to go.

He’s the one who gets it right—or rather, he’s the one who makes the others look bad. I’m imagining Jesus’s disappointed father look—you know the face, right? The one your dad made when he wasn’t ANGRY at you, per se, but he knew you could have done better. The other nine followed the rules! They were fulfilling their responsibilities—things that weren’t just old laws or customs but obligations important enough for Jesus to actually remind them to do!

Instead, the example we’re supposed to follow isn’t the nine responsible former lepers, but the one who who doesn’t live in the right country and doesn’t worship in the right way, the one whose nation has been at odds with Jesus’s nation for hundreds of years. By focusing only on following the directions, the nine responsible former lepers missed out on something. Because by returning, the Samaritan is given another gift—being “well.”

Being cleansed is one thing, but being made well, being made whole, is another. The story uses two different words here, and the first one that’s translated as “clean” means physical healing—their bodies have been made well. The second one, though, that’s translated as “made well” is a spiritual healing as well—it’s the same word that’s translated “salvation.” All of the lepers were made physically well, but the faith and gratitude of the one who came back made him spiritually well, too.

What makes gratitude so powerful that it can bring about that kind of wholeness?

The reading from Deuteronomy reminds us that giving thanks keeps us turned towards God. After the Israelites have settled into their new land, and become comfortable and established and wealthy, God reminds them of the importance of gratitude. “Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today.” We often want to give credit to ourselves, for our own hard work or good choices—but thankfulness turns us away from ourselves back to God, who gives us the ability to work and the wisdom to make the right choices.

And now that we’ve looked to God, what happens? The joy is magnified!

In the psalm for today, we catch a glimpse of the intense joy of gratitude--it's full of images of overflowing delight! and it's intended to be sung as a congregation in worship, where speaking or singing your thanks to God amplifies it by sharing it with everyone else. And then again, the reading from 2 Corinthians describes how gratitude leads to generosity, which leads to more gratitude! Gratitude is like a mirror, and when you light a candle in a room full of mirrors, the whole place lights up.

And today, I would like to give thanks to God for surprising mirrors of God’s gifts and God’s glory, like the Samaritan in our gospel reading, who help us turn back to Jesus after we’ve gotten distracted by all our other obligations. Maybe after he ran back to thank Jesus, he turned back around and finished the task Jesus had given him, showed himself to the priest, did all the sacrifices. Or maybe he accepted Jesus’s pronouncement of his wholeness and salvation as sufficient and decided that he was as whole as Jesus said he was without the need to do anything else, and went straight home to get on with his life. The person who wrote the story down for us didn’t seem to care. The story only says that turning back to Jesus to give thanks, before doing anything else, was more than enough, regardless of what else he may have done later.

Gratitude was enough for the Samaritan, it’s enough for our neighbors—even the ones who don’t do things the way that we do and make us a little nervous—and that means it’s enough for us, too. Because it’s not like we always get around to following every rule or fulfilling every obligation exactly the way we’re supposed to, either! Our gratitude, and our neighbors’ gratitude, and the Samaritan’s gratitude, still reflects the light of God everywhere we are, and makes us whole, just as we are, whether or not we ever get around to doing all that other important stuff we know we’re supposed to do. Thanks be to God.

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.

Body

The baby is now over a year old, and I’ve been a little frustrated in my (lack of) weight loss. By the time my first baby was a year old, I had lost all the baby weight + twenty-some pounds. I was the skinniest I’d been since puberty, and as someone who’d always felt more than a smidge wider than I wanted, it was amazing. And I lost very nearly that much weight again with my second baby. Breastfeeding was like some kind of magical elixir that gave me the body I’d always imagined (not to mention the fabulous boobs!).

Third baby is different. I lost exactly the baby-related weight over the first nine months (which is to say, down to the weight I was before I got pregnant with my oldest child), and then stopped. I’m over thirty now, which probably has something to do with it, but it’s disappointing.

So the other day I started thinking—maybe I should go about being a little more on-purpose about losing weight? Like, make some kind of plan, set some goals? I know that BMI is a flawed metric, but I figured it would give me some kind of ballpark idea as to what I should be aiming for.

And here’s what it gave me.

Turns out there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my weight. Which seemed odd. So I redid the numbers for my weight this time six years ago, when I had felt so amazing.

Oh.

Knowing that my weight is technically fine doesn’t change my feelings about lumpy squishiness, or my fond memories of that short-lived thigh gap. It does change how I should probably try to deal with it, though. It’s easier for me to give up bedtime snacks, or beer with dinner, or whatever, than it is for me to do something that causes me to sweat or be out of breath, to strengthen and de-squish the muscles in my middle.

And it’s even harder to unlearn that lesson summed up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” to allow myself to take up space on my couch or in my clothes.

Siblings

Yesterday afternoon I was startled by the intensity of a thought that has rarely, if ever, crossed my mind. I wish Queen Mab had a sister. (I blame an onslaught of flowery pink facebook memes on sisterhood for the lapse, and possibly a song from Frozen having got stuck in my head) My childhood memories of having a sister close to my age glowed with rosy nostalgia, and I even briefly imagined generic scenes involving fashion and makeup that had never actually taken place.

All this lasted for approximately three nanoseconds. I love my sister and respect the hell out of her badassery. We could talk on the phone for hours if our children would let us, and I often miss her, since we’ve spent much of our adult lives half a country apart.

And when we lived in the same house we were frequently sick of each other, and there was a simmering rivalry that put an uncomfortable edge on the activities we had in common. We never did each other’s makeup. I’m so glad we have each other, and I’m sure we were an education to each other growing up, too, about getting along with someone who is radically different from you! But there was nothing uniquely magical about the sisterly relationship (my sister does bear a striking resemblance to Anna from Frozen, though).

Queen Mab and the Golden Boy are, as I write this, immersed in some sort of fantastical imaginary landscape deep in the overgrowth wilderness of the back of our yard. They spent hours out there yesterday and will probably do so again today. They wear each other's clothes and shoes and cover for each other while they’re sneaking fistfuls of chocolate chips out of the pantry. If they were any closer, they would be a creepy codependent cult. They’re perfectly capable of making their own magic.

Eulogy

I am ashamed to admit that, for someone who prides herself on having all the best words, I haven’t been able to put them together to give a proper tribute to my Gamaw. I’m like a little kid at the grocery store who’s been separated from her mother. “What’s your mommy’s name, kid?” “Mommy.” “And what does she look like?” “She looks like a Mommy.”

What kind of a person was your Gamaw?

She was a Gamaw-person.

My sister and I looking at Highlights with our Gamaw

It seemed so self-evident that it didn’t occur to me that I should maybe be a little more specific until I was flailing around to explain just who, exactly, I had lost. I listened closely to the eulogy at her funeral, to find the words that I needed to explain her. Hospitality. Listening. Welcoming. Commitment to her family.

She wasn’t particularly religious, though she always asked for someone to pray at mealtimes. She had her own liturgy—restocking the fridge with Pepsi, the freezer with chocolate and lemon pies, serving the grandkids biscuits with honey, then wiping the sticky blinds clean again. Sometimes sundaes—vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup and crushed peanuts. She worked in her garden, read a lot of books, and painted folksy designs on the furniture she and my Gapaw sold in their shop. When I was older we—she and I, and later both of us with David—played a lot of Scrabble.

I don't know when this picture was taken--it's at their old house, so at least 20 years old. But this is what my Gapaw and Gamaw will always look like in my head, forever and ever.

Even when she was too tired for long visits with supper and games and dessert, there was always the generous listening. I knew it was safe to talk to her, because I never heard her say anything mean about anyone else, so I knew the things I said would be treated with respect too. She noticed when I had put effort into something I was wearing and told me I looked beautiful. 

Her Highness has my Gamaw's first name.

 Whenever I came to visit after I’d moved away, she would talk about me coming to see her and Gapaw as though I were doing them some tremendous favor. And I would thank her right back, because really, being there felt like she had done me a tremendous favor, too--I felt so very loved. Of course I would be there.

Queen Mab and the Tooth Fairy

Sunday afternoon, Her Highness was getting fidgety in that sort of way that she often does when she needs a nap and therefore won’t stop moving for fear she might accidentally doze off. So we sent her downstairs with strict orders to CHILL OUT AND READ A BOOK OR SOMETHING. David and the boys (who had both already had their afternoon quiet times) went for a walk to enjoy the sunshine, and I made myself some tea.

Or at least, I started to make some tea, but I was interrupted by bloodcurdling screams from downstairs. “MOMMY! MOMMY!!!!!” To be perfectly frank, Mab screams aren’t necessarily a sign of an emergency, so I walked to the top of the stairs and asked what was wrong. She was holding her mouth and crying….and then went back into the bedrooms? Very strange. I went downstairs to her.

“I lost my tooth!” she sobbed, her mouth bloody, and indeed there was no tooth. My stomach backflipped—I hate teeth, especially when there’s blood involved. So I said, “Ok, let’s go to the bathroom,” because if there was going to be blood, the bathroom tiles were the best place for it, and it gave me time to figure out something else responsible and maternal to do about the situation.

But Mab already knew what needed done (thanks to a Fancy Nancy book, I think) and started swishing with cold water. Well that was good. Then she told me she wasn’t sure where the tooth was, but it was probably around *my* bedroom door. She was much happier now.

Um….why was it around my bedroom door?

Well, we got down on our hands and looked, and I pressed her for answers about how and why her tooth was lost next to my door.

“It’s not like I did anything silly like tie my tooth to a string and tie it to the door and shut the door like some people do!” she said, laughing awkwardly.

“Oh?”

She told me that she was just chewing on a string and relaxing and the string just happened to be tied to the door and then her tooth just fell out and then she panicked and hid the string….?

I hadn’t even been aware of her having a tooth that loose. She’d mentioned it to me once, but I’d forgotten because she’s been talking about this or that tooth being loose for months, ever since her friends and cousin started losing teeth over the summer. So I hadn’t thought anything of it.

We put the little tooth in her coin jar.

Then her shiny-stuff-hoarding-dragon-of-a-little-brother got into her money. I rescued the money, but the tooth was lost. She left a note for the tooth fairy,

who understood. I suspect this happens frequently in her line of work.

I felt a little hypocritical about this part, actually—we’ve always been very clear with the kids that Santa is a fun game we play together, and I don’t think we’ve even mentioned the Easter Bunny. But I wasn’t sure what she thought about the tooth fairy.

Mab, as you can maybe tell from her nickname, has had an affinity for fairies ever since her Auntie Kate dubbed her Queen of the Fairies at 6 months old. And as much as I hate tricking my kids into thinking that a red-suited reverse-burglar left them the presents that I purchased for them myself, with things like fairies, I’ve been very non-committal about their existence or lack thereof. I hedge about the impossibility of proving non-existence, but it's probably more to do with secretly hoping fairies do exist.

So I was relieved when one of Mab’s favorite church grownups, Miss Beth, said that Mab had told her that she’d noticed the tooth fairy’s handwriting looked a lot like mine!

I haven’t said anything to her about this. It’s not that I have anything against tooth fairies—it’s that I don’t like the idea of lying to her—playing make-believe *at* her. But playing make-believe *with* her is awesome.

March 15th "sermon"

(preached on March 15^th for Lent Midweek Worship)

Our story connections: Share a story of your spiritual renewal. What is your story from unbelief to belief?

Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
John 3:1-17

So one year for Lent, I gave up church.

I have always been the kind of person who goes to church almost automatically—it’s probably why I ended up moving across the street from one! I just can’t help myself. Our family had invested almost ten years in this particular congregation, both the kids had been baptized there, and so even though none of us were happy, we kept showing up, with two little kids who were constitutionally incapable of sitting quietly with crayons and board books the way all the other kids at church did. I’m pretty sure the record Queen Mab set for the number of times she thrashed herself off the pew or out of our arms and cracked her forehead on the pew in front of us is still standing. And I disagreed with just about everything anyone said, and I resented them for saying it, and I resented their version of God, who seemed so small and petty compared to the massive, beautiful, and totally messed-up world. I decided that even if that God was real, which seemed unlikely at this point, he wasn’t worth worshiping and certainly wasn’t someone I could count on to take care of me—this God was only interested in his own glory, and everyone else could go to hell—you know, if that was what would bring him the most glory. I passed lots of angry notes to David, and after we got home I would gripe all afternoon.

And my husband kept asking me, “Well, why don’t you talk to the pastor about it?” And I would answer, “Because I would just be telling him why I thought everything they do and believe here is wrong, and that doesn’t seem helpful,” “Well, then we could find another church.” “I mean, we could….but….” And actually, we did try one Sunday, and we visited a different church, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. I hated church, especially my church, and God looked like nothing more than a particularly vindictive authoritarian character that some guys had invented to keep uppity over-educated women like me in our places who I wanted nothing to do with, but I couldn’t quit. I just kept dragging myself back, Sunday after Sunday, and coming home feeling worse than ever, snarly and resentful. My problem is that I am pathologically law-abiding. If I think I’m expected to do something, I can hardly stop myself from doing it. Even when I don’t believe in the reason for doing it.

One gray, chilly, damp February day—no snow even—just the worst and ugliest kind of late winter, I decided I wasn’t going back. I was going to take a few weeks off and then try the most different church I could find. I wasn’t ready to quit church altogether, but all I could pray was “I do believe. Help my unbelief.” and sometimes even that felt a little over confident. I had never gone to a church that followed the church calendar beyond maybe Christmas and Easter, so I only discovered later that it had been Ash Wednesday when I decided to quit.

I didn’t tell anyone at church that I wasn’t coming back. I just ghosted them, even our midweek Bible study attended by my favorite people at church, who tolerated and sometimes, I think, even welcomed our pointed questions. That's a thing I regret.

But that first Sunday morning, waking up and neither scrambling to get ready for a church service I didn’t want to go to nor feeling guilty for not going—just laying bed as long as we wanted (or I guess, as long as our kids let us) and having a lazy breakfast—was amazing. I felt weightless. I wasn’t constantly arguing in my head about what God was like—I didn’t even have to bother to worry about whether or not I actually thought there was a God. Something told me that, whatever the truth was, it was going to be ok.

After sleeping in for a few Sundays, we went to the Episcopal church down the street—that was the most different thing I could find to our old church. They were marking Rose Sunday, which is the halfway point in Lent, so everything was “rose,” and by rose I mean magenta—the paraments were magenta, the vestments were magenta—Mab’s eyes were huge!—she and the priests matched. It was the most flamboyant Welcome To Our Annual Contemplation of the Sin and Brokenness of the World that I’ve ever seen.

So there, in the middle of all this high-level churchy stuff—they had everything but incense—which was so totally foreign to me in every way—I wasn’t arguing anymore. Maybe I was just overwhelmed by the color and pageantry. But we went back the next week, when everything was now purple, and the next. And the God they described wasn’t nearly as grouchy and vindictive as the one I had been railing against for way too long, though while I certainly liked this God better, I kind of suspected that he might just be wishful thinking on their part. But now that my brain had sort of quieted itself down and didn’t feel the need to shout “WRONG!” every few minutes (in my head, of course, not out loud!), God started whispering in my ear. Just a little, once in awhile.

Especially right before communion, and I should point out that we almost never took communion at our old church, because they only had it quarterly, on Sunday nights. They were afraid that if you didn’t believe the right things, you would end up eating and drinking judgment on yourself, so the elders always wanted to talk to visitors beforehand, just to be safe, and this was easier to arrange on Sunday nights. But Sunday nights with our children weren’t really conducive to going out to a SECOND church service, so we usually skipped. And then I’d quit believing the right things, so I quit trying. Or rather, I’d stopped feeling guilty about not trying.

But now, every Sunday the priest would welcome the congregation to the table with the same words:

This is the table, not of the Church, but of God.
It is to be made ready for those who love God
and who want to love God more.

So, come, you who have much faith and you who have little,
you who have been here often and you who have not been for a long time,
you who have tried to follow and you who have failed.
Come, not because I invite you: it is God, and it is God’s will
that you who want God should meet God here.

Hearing this welcome every Sunday morning, I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but I sure did want God. And it was a relief to hear that I didn’t have to have faith to be welcome. But I wouldn’t get in line, because the flip side of being the kind of person who is obsessed with fulfilling obligations and following the rules is being the kind of person who is paralyzed with terror at trying something new and breaking some secret unwritten rule that will doom me forever. I even signed out a book from the little book cart in their fellowship room that was something like, “How to be a convincing Episcopalian” and I memorized the section with the little diagrams about how to take communion.

But I was still terrified that I didn’t really belong, and that it wasn’t for me, and it was easier to just observe from our back corner, instead of gathering up the kids and herding them down the aisle and through the line—because of course no way were we going to leave three year old Mab in the pew by herself! I wasn’t convinced that this thing that might not even really be for me was worth risking the scene of me doing it wrong or a child breaking free and crashing the beautiful altar with all the candles and that super fancy purple tablecloth.

The Maundy Thursday service, though, was a potluck, because Last Supper, held in the fellowship room instead of the sanctuary. Everyone filled plates and sat around big round tables with ordinary, slightly stained white tablecloths, and all the kids, including Her Highness, vanished pretty early on to go play. We were with some friends from grad school, and there was good food, and great conversation, and then a service while we were still at the tables. Though by the time we got to communion, the Golden Boy, who was about the Caeterpie’s age, had gotten squirmy and kind of squawky, so I was pacing around the edge of the room with him in the carrier. It felt like a good place to watch without being conspicuous about not getting in line.

And as people were lining up, I saw, at the front of the line, Queen Mab. Of course I started to panic, like ya do when you suddenly see your kid doing the thing that you’re afraid to do yourself. She must have been watching the priests’ kids she had been tagging along with, and she put out her hand with total faith that this was hers and she belonged there and she took that little gluten-free wafer—

so I got in line too.

Community and etymology

So first off, here is a good song for Advent, when we look towards a promise and a world that seems too good to ever come true.

I didn’t make it to the midweek Advent service this week, because Sleepy (Grouchy) Children. But I did have a wonderful conversation with Pastor Elaina over coffee about building community, which is a way we can see, dimly and imperfectly, a bit of that promised world. Specifically, we talked about eating together.

Remember the story “Stone Soup”? Where everyone was afraid they didn’t have enough, and so they hid and hoarded it, until finally they were persuaded to share, and suddenly there was abundance. In the church newsletter, Pastor Elaina wrote about this contrast between our fear of scarcity and the abundance of God, in which 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, but 100. And when we each bring our little bit and pool them all together, suddenly there’s more than enough. Like loaves and fishes.

In many cultures, the role of the host of a feast is deeply significant--remember the panic at the wedding of Cana, when they ran out of wine? It’s a matter of honor to be able to provide for your guests, and the guests in turn are expected render honor to the host (hence Sir Gawain’s infamous quandary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Our modern English words “lady” and “lord” are derived from Old English “hlaf”--loaf. Lord comes from “hlāford,” which in turn came “hlāf-weard”--bread-keeper. Lady comes from “hlæfdīge”--bread-kneader. Basically, the most prominent members of the community were those who provided food for the others and hosted the feasts.

So what happens when we all feed each other, at a potluck or pitch-in? When we each bring a little something, and lay everything out on long tables--casseroles and chicken wings and salads and the bag of chips we grabbed on the way because we didn’t have the energy to cook--the feast multiplies, and so does the honor we owe to each other.

Later in the day after that coffee conversation, I came across this post--it’s mostly about current political events, but I was struck by the repeated phrase “the kindness of cooks”--this conviction that there is something inherently generous in the act of cooking for someone else, and that this is reflected in the character of those who make a habit of it, that they are the kind of people who won’t support hatred or discrimination. Obviously this isn’t necessarily true, but it tells us something about the power of feeding our neighbors with the best we can provide for them.

There’s a reason that Jesus told so many parables about parties and feasts to describe the Kingdom--wedding feasts, celebrations of finding lost sheep and lost sons. Eating together, feeding each other, sounds like a good place to start when it comes to (re)building communities in a time when we’re fractured and broken.