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.