Love in Skin

It has been years since I wrote a post in this blog. Some serious health issues and the vagaries of life itself intervened. I moved on to other things and I'm sure you have been busy living as well.
Yesterday a friend asked me to pick back up. We are indeed in the middle of a time in which we need stories of grace and hope to hold us up. So today a small reflection to start.

Amid the growing covid-19 storm, I am taking it as my personal mission to pray daily for you and all those who touch your lives. This morning in my prayer time, two comforting images from the life of Jesus came to me. The first was of Jesus calming the fierce storm at sea that had panicked his friends while he was sleeping quietly through it in the boat with them. They thought he didn’t care about them because he was unruffled. But he was there and when he saw their fear he acted to calm both them and the elements that they feared. The other similar story is of Jesus walking on the sea to reach his disciples when they were exhausted and discouraged. In scripture the sea is often a symbol for chaos and danger, as well as provision. So this passage gives us a glimpse of Jesus, Love-in-Skin, coming to us unhindered by the chaos and danger of the moment. I love this!

So, whatever your faith or none, I invite you today to pause and ponder the image of Love-in-Skin calming your storms and walking quietly over the unconquerable deep to be with you in your fatigue and confusion. Ponder, too, if you are a Christian (or not really) how you might be the Body of Christ – Love-in-Skin- today even in your isolation.

You are all in my prayers and for heaven’s sake…wash your hands and be grateful! 

The Dance

            Years ago when I was young and fresh in ministry, full of galloping hope and energy, I went to a continuing education conference in San Anselmo California at our PCUSA seminary there.  The title of the conference was “Companions on the Inner Way.” The Episcopal priest Morton Kelsey led it.  He was marvelous, as I recall, but since I had already read every word he ever wrote there were not a lot of surprises.  There was, however, the wonderful sweet recognition of remembered insights and there was the loveliness of his spirit that filled the room with a winsome light. 

            There was also the powerful presence of his wife.  In those days as a young woman in ministry, one of the few I knew, I relished every experience with a strong and self-assured older woman. I was anything but strong and self-assured then, although those who knew me at that time remember me differently. Memory is a wily thing.

            There was another speaker there as well.  I cannot remember his name or what exactly he was speaking about.  Did I go to a workshop of some sort?  Was he a worship leader? Was he a pastor?  I don’t recall, but he told two stories that have stayed with me for nearly thirty years. I beg his indulgence, whoever he is, if the details have gotten a little muddled over the years.  Still the power of their grace is as clear and pure in my mind today as that startling day I first heard them. I’ll tell you one now, the other in my next post.

            The speaker had, over the summer, attended the wedding of his cousin.  The bride and groom planned every aspect of their day together…the service, their guest lists, each canapé and colored ribbon.  It was to be a witness to their life, a well-planned partnerships filled with family, friends and laughter.  Everything went off without a hitch. The ‘I do’s got done.  The veil flipped like a cloud.  The bride blushed.  The congregation applauded.

            At the reception, he and a group of his friends from school sat at a table reminiscing about letter jackets and school papers and nights at the drive in.  A longhaired disc jockey played swoony tunes and raucous rumbas as well as some English Invasion 60’s rock.  People danced on the slick parquet dance floor.  He was having a fine time.

            Shortly, he noticed a man in a wheel chair whom he did not know.  He was in his fifties perhaps.  It was hard to tell.  Pain and immobility age a person.  The man in the chair wheeled himself to the dance floor alone, fine arm muscles pulled against his shirt.  For sometime he struggled to get his chair over the tall lip to the floor.  He backed up and tried to crash up.  He wheeled sideways and tried to sneak up. Finally, in a do or die moment, he crested the hurdle and wheeled himself to one side of the floor.  There, carefully out of the way, he moved his chair with the music.  Switching arms, one turning a wheel, the other lifted around an imagined waist, he danced.  Tune after tune, eyes closed, head lifted.

            One of the young women at my speaker’s table couldn’t take her eyes from him.  She began to have trouble following the conversation at the table.  “No thank you.  I’ve had plenty,” she responded to a question like, “What time did you get in last night?” The conversation went on around her.  When one of the young couples got up to dance, the woman leapt from her seat and went to the man dancing in the wheel chair.

            “May I have this dance?” she asked him, wondering how in the world to proceed.

            “It would be my honor,” he said, reaching for her hands.  And they danced together until the wee hours, swaying and dipping, even managing a twirl or two.  Just with his hands he led her all around the floor.  They were in sync.  They chatted a little, but not much, each intent on the music and the movement.

            At the conclusion of the last song of the evening, he took her hand and kissed it lightly.  “You have done me a great kindness,” he said to her.  “Until tonight I have not danced in 20 years.  I used to be a professional ballroom dancer.  My wife was my partner and vice versa.  There was an accident coming home from a competition.  My wife was killed and I was paralyzed. You have brought me joy and healing tonight.  Thank you.”

            “My pleasure,” the woman said as he turned his chair and headed for the door.  She went back to the table with her friends who were gathering up their things.

            “Did you know him?” one asked.

            “No, not really,” she said.  “He was just an exquisite dancer.”  The young men looked at her puzzled, they with their rippled muscles and their seamless hair. 

            “That was nice of you,” one said.  But she did not hear, did not notice.  She was dancing with her arms.

            When I heard that story, I felt a wash of Spirit over me, like warm grey seawater, like an envelope, like a cloud.  When I heard that story I felt a glow of Spirit and the great power of kindness to change life dawned on me.

            Around the first of the year, I was praying for our church and asking for guidance about where we should go and how we should set our goals and priorities for the year.  Secretly, of course, I was hoping that God would say, “Don’t worry about it.  Just keep doing what you are doing.  I’ve got you covered.” But that was not the reassuring answer that came to me.

            As I prayed I felt God say, “Genie, this is to be the year of kindness. I want my people to learn to be kind.” I’m thinking, well, we aren’t mean as snakes to begin with. Most of the time.  God said, simply, “Let the Spirit make you kind.” That was it. “Let the Spirit make you kind.”

            As I thought about that call to kindness, I thought of the woman and the wheelchair dancer.  Let the Spirit, wind, Breath, make you kind.  After all, what is kindness but making space for the other and giving complete attention? It is not possible to be kind on the fly.  Kindness doesn’t require much but it does require that we notice, that we are attentive, that we humanize the others in our world rather than adding to the sum total of dehumanizing, fragmented, isolation that there is already plenty of around us.

            The beauty of the story of the two dancers is not just that she noticed the man’s struggle and felt sorry for him.  A quick assist with the lip of the dance floor would have taken care of that.  The beauty is that these two people noticed each other and attended to each other. When she offered her hand he took it.  When she looked uncertain, he gave her a twirl. I suppose they never met again, but each, no doubt, carried the kindness with them into whatever life might be. 

            I wonder sometimes, as I stumble through my life, left footed both, how many dances of kindness have escaped me unnoticed, past like an ocean ripple, dissolved in the murky chaos of ordinariness.  But I don’t stay there long, in that melancholy over the shoulder glance of a place.  Rather I try once more to give attention to the dancing all around me, and the dancer waiting to be released in me still.

            By reading this post you have noticed my hampered dance.  You have seen me bang up against the lip and find my little corner of the floor.  You have extended your hand to mine.  You have done me a great kindness.  Thank you. I’d love to hear your story/dances, too.

  

A Day with Spaces

     As I sit on the warm ceramic lounge chair, the dissonant yet soothing sounds of Indian flute in the background, and stare at the pea soup fog clipped only minimally in two by the bow of the ship, I thank God for a day with spaces.

      I did not realized how long it has been since I had an unscripted moment, much less several, much less a ‘sea day’ day.  Muscles knotted, mind in a twist, I have plugged through these last months on sheer determination.  The weekly trips to Stanford Medical, the tests, the clues, the partial answers combined with the daily-ness of congregational life program my every moment.  Not today.  Today is a day with spaces. And today the spa is running specials and I have signed up: a hot stone aromatherapy massage.  This is how angels spend their afternoons.  This is grace in a cubicle. 

     I have never been much of a chatter when getting a message.  I usually just vacate, evaporate, slowing dial back the notches until I find an old after hours test panel on the screen of my mind.  This is a rare thing.  I have always thought too much.

     I remember when I was living in Denver reading an article in the newspaper about the terrible time the Hmong refugees were having.  Churches all over the area sponsored families, built them small neat homes with sand colored wall-to-wall carpeting that the Hmong covered with real sand and upon which they lay their pallets in rows in the living rooms.  Bedrooms were clean swept and empty. Strangely, strong and apparently healthy young Hmong men where going to sleep at night and dying quietly.  No one could figure out the cause. Doctors from the University of Denver scratched their chins, in print, and encouraged the people to come in for check ups.  They came in, got clean bills of health and went home and died. When asked what they thought was happening, the Hmong women were quite sure of the cause.  Evil Spirits.  Processed food.  And thinking too much. Ah.  That will do it every time.

     When Ejuane ushered me into my little massage room, I willed myself to relax.  What does that feel like?  I wracked my brain and came up with nothing.  Ah yes, that’s it.  It feels like nothing, nothing left undone, nothing running rampant in my body or my congregation, just lovely for a limited and safe space, nothing.  It feels like a day with spaces.

     Ejuane is a quiet young woman, speaking only to ask a question about pressure or scent.  At one point, massage paused and my face wrapped in damp towels tucked with lavender, I asked her where she was from.  South Africa, an Afrikaner.  She told me that her parents had founded the Global Day of Prayer when she was a baby when South Africa was so in need of prayer.  I told her that everyone I had ever met from her country was a true beautiful spirit.

     “Who have you met?” she asked.

     “Well,” I said.  “Desmond Tutu.”  Several years ago when I was a pastor in Birmingham Alabama I was invited to a small private luncheon with Archbishop Tutu and the South African ambassador to the United States.  The Archbishop graciously answered questions for more than an hour.  I don’t remember the context but I remember asking him if he thought there was any hope.  He looked so startled.  “Of course.  We are Christians.  We have nothing but hope,” he replied.  Later the Ambassador turned to me over desert and said, “Tell me, pastor, about your struggle.”  She asked with such sincerity, such interest, as if there were no difference between her struggles and her country’s struggles and my own as a child of the segregated south and a woman in a man’s profession.  There was an exquisite genuineness in her, so I told her, memories, slights, humiliations and triumphs.

     “Oh yes,” Ejuane said.  “I have heard of him.”

     “There is another I have met,” I said.  “A beautiful bird of a woman name Muriel. She was a part of the struggle with apartheid. She is the most forgiving person I have ever known.”

     “South Africans have to be,” Ejuane said.

     Really?  Muriel once told the story of her father, bent and torn by apartheid’s horrors, telling her that if he got to heaven and there was even one white person there he would spit in God’s eye and go gladly to hell.  She told the story of her arrest at the seminary where she taught.  The Afrikaner policemen stormed up to the school while the faculty was sitting under a shade tree having tea, machine guns pointing, fingers itchy. 

     “We have a list of terrorists to arrest,” they said. 

     “Well, sir,” the seminary president said, “There is no need for guns.  Get me your list and I will get the people you want for you. Now please, sit down for tea while I find them.”  The soldier had the decency to look abashed as he handed the list to the president and a member of the faculty handed him tea and a biscuit on a china cup and saucer. 

     Muriel was one of those arrested that day for attending a peaceful protest rally the day before.  As she and her companions were loaded into the truck and driven away, she looked through the back window and saw her colleagues standing, holding hands and singing hymns: How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace, I Greet Thee Who My Sure Redeemer Art.

     Later, or maybe before, I can’t recall, Muriel and a friend were at the train station coming home from holiday.  They had a cart piled with all of their luggage and the gifts they were bringing home. Muriel saw a young Afrikaner soldier, barely more than a boy, struggling with heavy gear.  There were no more carts.  She went up to the young man, a chargeable offense in those days.  “You may share our cart if you like,” she said.  He could have hit her.  He could have arrested her.  He could have shot her with no repercussions.  But he just looked at her, threw his things on the cart and wheeled it to the curb.  Then he disappeared.  Did he say thank you?  Did he look the woman in the eye?  Did he see her?  I wonder.

     Her friend was aghast.  “Why did you do that?  Are you crazy?  Why do you help the oppressor?” 

     “Because he is a human being,” Muriel said.  “He is someone’s son.  Someone’s brother.  Maybe someone’s husband or father.  I have to decide everyday whether to hate or to forgive.  I choose to forgive.”

      Ejuane, my masseuse interrupted these memories and said,  “The troubles were a long time ago.  Soon the old ones will forget and everything will be ok.”

     “We may be forgotten,” I thought but did not say.  “But we will not forget.  If we forget, we will forget the best of us, whether in South Africa or south Alabama.  If we forget the struggle, then we do not know who we are and we can never be better than we are. Whether it is Mandela on Robin Island or James Meredith with a walking stick and a Bible his only possessions as he tried to prove a black man could walk the highways of Mississippi in the open in 1964, if we forget then forgiveness is hollow and has no meaning.

     But if we remember

             in those precious few days of our lives where there are spaces for all that is noble and fine and forgiving,

            in the moments of small triumph and fleeting loss

            in those moments of sweet clarity and breathtaking compassion

if we remember

            those who sang the songs of freedom and made a space for our today, then the spaces in our days will be filled with graceful dips and sways and we will be that crowning glorious thing that is a truly human being.

     As the hot stones glide along my ragged back, I give thanks for the young woman who touches me so expertly, for the fact that ‘the troubles’ are only history to her, and for the spaces of this day.

MoMA

       The heavy rain clouds that hung low on the city buttoned up their bottoms sometime during the night.  The lights of Time Square flashed red, gold and blue: “Nuns Rock, The Book of Mormon, Best Musical of the Century. Samsung.  Corona Beer.  Disney.” All flashing, all calling to me. There is nothing in the world like Manhattan and there we were with only one full day to spend. 

      We woke late after a long night.  My husband, mother and I had gone to see Pricilla Queen of the Desert the night before.  It was playing in the old Palace Theater, I think, with its ornate gilded boxes and tiny flip up seats.  Pricilla is the story of three drag queens who buy a bus (Pricilla) and head to the Australian outback to play a gig at a casino run by the ex wife of one of the men and, unbeknownst to the others, to see his son.  I had expected fun…feather boas, platform shoes and Gloria Gaynor; but I had not expected the poignant moments, the sweet reality that the actors gave their characters.  I laughed and boogied, but I wiped more than one tear as well. 

      Before the show we went for dinner at The View restaurant atop the Marriot Marquis Times Square where we watched the sunset light the tall buildings as they slide softly past us, all full of stories. 

When we returned to our room after the show, I drank ginger ale from a Pricilla Queen of the Desert sippie cup and read the bios of every actor we had seen.  It was the final tags of those bios that touched me.  After the list of credits…the Broadway, the Off, the regional, the cruise ships…each actor had a word or two for someone.  Some thanked God.  Some thanked their mothers, their partners, their acting coaches.  Some sent kisses to their babies. One just said, “Oh Wow!”  My favorite. My sentiments exactly.  Just “Oh Wow!”

     Robbie and I decided that we wanted most to go to the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA.  Robbie grew up on Long Island in the 50’s and 60’s.  His father took the train into Manhattan each day to work as an auditor for the state of New York while Robbie rode the bus or thumbed a ride to St. Dominick’s High School in Oyster Bay.  When he could, Robbie would sneak into the city after school, take the subway to Chinatown and buy fireworks that he hid under his letter jacket and sold at jacked up prices to all his friends back in Bethpage.  Chinatown he knew and even a little of Harlem where he had worked summers for the Cohen brothers installing windows in the 6^th floor walk-ups and the well cared for brownstones, but he had never been to MoMA and always wanted to go.

      At first I resisted.  Not a fan of Picasso and Pollack, I wanted to go to the Met and pour for hours over the tiniest of antiquities, reliquaries and tiny ivory crosses, fading icons that still pulse with energy, Hittite household gods…bronze and nearly shapeless like the ones Rachel stole from her father and hid under her skirts as she and Jacob fled after robbing Laban blind.  But when we woke late and I realized that Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Monet’s ‘Water Lily” panels hung there, I was ready to go.

     We stopped for lunch at the Stage Deli.  It was recommended to us by a street vendor whose round, dark, dreadlock framed face was full of sparkle as she pointed us toward her favorite eatery.  Our waitress, maybe her name was Velma, was short and solid.  Her old SAS shoes, run over on one side, had clearly schlepped decades of matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches.  We gave her the opportunity again.  She talked about her love for New York, how she would never leave it. 

     When she learned we were from California, she asked us about the Michael Jackson doctor’s trial.  “I watched it for seven hours yesterday,” she said.  “Day off, you know.  I think he did something.  I just don’t know what.” 

     “Well,” I said.  “He either did something or should have, I guess.” 

     “Yeah,” she said, pointing a twisted finger at me.  “That’s it.  He should have.”

      After lunch we walked the few blocks to MoMA.  It is a sleek building with fencing covered with signs and drawings from people who visited the museum.  “I told you I’d come, Mom,” one of them read. Others had line drawings of dragons and daisies and short notes of awe and immortality.

I am always surprised, although I don’t know why, at how great works of art affect me.  They make me cry.  Every single time.  Especially Van Gogh. 

     The first time I really remember this was on sabbatical in Zurich. It was there that I saw one of his ‘Sunflowers.’ I just stood in front of that small canvass and cried.  That was when I first discovered that Van Gogh was my favorite, right then on a jet-lagged Thursday in a gray Swiss summer.  The energy nearly knocked me off my feet, like lightening bolts, like stand-your-hair-up-straight sheet lightening. I knew that there was something powerful and transcendent at the heart of the universe when I looked at that picture.  No, I always knew that.  I don’t remember a time before knowing that. When I saw “Sunflowers” I felt it, an internal goose bump of the soul. 

      It was the same with ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Olive Trees’ and Monet’s ‘Agapanthus.’ And so I cried.

     After we made our way through the exhibit, Robbie and I went to the café for tea and a cookie.  In line an older woman turned back to speak to us.  “Did you see the de Kooning exhibit?” she asked as if she could not believe what she had just seen. 

     “No,” I said.  “We’ve been up on the fourth floor.  I wanted to see Monet and van Gogh.”

     “Good,” she said with unexpected force.  “The one I just saw was awful.  I don’t get it.  What was the point?  I liked him in the beginning but boy, later, sheesh!  Don’t go. It was just awful.”

     By this time we were approaching the counter to order.  “Listen,” she said. “I’m a member here.  Stay with me and you’ll get a discount.”  So we sat with her for a bit. 

     “I’m 87 years old,” she said “and I still walk with no cane.”  She winked.  “And I’m spending all my money.  Who cares?  My kids don’t need anything and I’m having the time of my life.” For years she worked as a school psychologist on Long Island. One day she came home and told her husband she had just bought an apartment in Chelsea for $42,000. 

     “Get rid of it,” he said.  But she wouldn’t.  Now she lives there alone.  “It is a wonderful building,” she said.  “It is my family.  I can walk anywhere or take the bus.  I go to concerts at Julliard every week.  I come here and learn things every time. I just love my life.”

     Every part of her was alive, inquisitive, open, and ready.  When I looked at her it was like lightening, stand-your-hair-up sheet lightening. Like Sunflowers, like Starry Night, like tiny reliquaries and simple bronze gods; the woman at MoMA was a force.

     As we walked back to our hotel, I tried to memorize her face.  She was wiry and gray like a city pigeon.  Her skin was mapped and soft.  Her eyes were startling and full of fire.  Maybe they had once been the color of an iris in full bloom.

     “That is what I want,” I thought to myself.  “A well mapped face, full of life, waking each day thirsty for more.  That is what I want, to walk without a cane, to say de Kooning stinks, to eat a mushroom tart and tell strangers my stories.  That is what I want: to be just such a work of art.”

A 911 Memory

           

            What I remember most vividly is the taste, that metallic gritty gray taste, in my mouth as my friend Marika and I walked in silence around the huge crater we call Ground Zero. It was November 2001. The ruins of the Twin Towers still smoldered. The people on the streets of lower Manhattan washed and scrubbed clean of ashes, were ashen still.

            But I get ahead of myself.

            I heard the news, as we all did, with a numb shock. I slept in that morning after a long church meeting the night before. I was dressing to go to a committee meeting when my mother called and told me to turn on the TV. I rarely did that first thing in the morning pre 911 and almost always do now.  Just one of 911’s aftershocks in my life. 

            My dear friend Luanne’s husband Fabrizio and son Jack were to fly to Italy that day for a family wedding. They were, of course, the first to cross my mind.  Where were they?  It was some hours before I knew so the catch in my throat was specific, had faces, names, a shape and a history.

            As the numb day crept by, I did what pastors do. I checked on my people and organized a prayer service for that night, candles and psalms of lament, comfort and a deep stretching for hope.

            Over the next weeks we shuddered through our new lives, didn’t we? Bits of truths and half-truths surfacing and submerging daily.

            The church where I was pastor in Birmingham Alabama was evacuated one day, in October I think, because white powder had been found in envelopes delivered to the Birmingham News Building next door.  Confused men in HAZMAT suits told us to take the 70 children in our child development center to the old church basement and stay there.  The little ones formed straight lines as they had been taught, holding hands fore and aft, like baby elephants trunk to tail in a circus, as they followed their teachers down the dark rickety staircase. 

            “Is it time for us to die yet?” one little one asked.

            “No honey, no,” his teacher assured in a honey voice as she shifted the two infants in her arms a little higher on her hips.

            Shortly the fire crews came back and told us to go home. They handed us surgical masks as we filed out to the parking lot. Baby powder, as it turns out.  A cruel and expensive hoax.

            In those early days we changed, as hard as we tried not to. As desperately as we did not want to give the terrorists that particular win, we changed. Our young country grew up in a way. War on our shores with an enemy so amorphous as to be nearly invisible made us look at each other in different ways. Arab taxi drivers in New York plastered their cabs with American flags. Sikh men, the most peaceful of religions, were detained everywhere simply for wearing their turbans. Despite ourselves, our shock and confusion lashed out at ‘foreigners.’ Even Muslim Americans whose families had been in this country for decades became pariahs in their workplaces and communities.

            We did not know what to do with our fear.

            We did not know what to do with our outrage.

            We did not know what to do with our impossible need for things to go back to the way they were.

            ******

            Each fall my mother and I took the Amtrak Crescent from Birmingham to Penn Station for a week of theater going. We were scheduled for our trip in November. We debated.  Should we go?  Would we be safe?

            We watched on television as New Yorkers valiantly tried to respond to the tragedy. We watched the streets empty of tourists. We saw clips of Broadway actors tap-dancing their hearts out to nearly empty theaters. We decided that we would go, if for no other reason, to support in our small way the economy of New York and to see our friends who lived there.

            *********

            As the train rounded the awesome curve in the tracks past Newark, we saw the snaggle-toothed skyline. Like a third grader’s smile in a class picture, the city’s face was set in a grimace. A plume of smoke still rose into the air. We could hardly bear to look. Mama and I decided then and there that we would not go down, we would not visit the crater, gawk at the scene of the crime.

            And yet.

            One of my parishioners, Marika, had recently moved to Westchester County. We had made arrangements weeks before to meet for the day to catch up. The plan was to go up town to the Cloisters Museum to see the Unicorn Tapestries, great medieval tapestries rich with as yet unexplained symbolism. And so we did. Meeting with a long hug, we made our way to the museum, just the two of us in a sea of shaken people.

            After we saw the gorgeous ancient things--the soft colors almost felt living--

we sat in a quiet chapel together talking about everything. I don’t remember debating it or even really discussing it at all.  Suddenly we just both knew that we needed to go to the site. So we took the subway as far as the line went, destroyed as it was, and walked the long blocks to Ground Zero.

            It was a clear day up town, but down town the air was still thick with dusty particles that we shuddered to think about. The area was huge, blocks and blocks and blocks. Fences were erected all around the perimeter.  Sheets and tarps covered them to shield mourners from the total grimness of the task taking place in the deep, deep pit.

            It was possible, if one tried, to look through cracks and see the responders in their protective gear, their search dogs like small insects moving through the charred and smoking rubble. The so-called cathedral girders stuck up eerily.

            The street was silent, thronged with people just walking, looking and feeling. The fences, thick with flowers at the base, were covered with messages in dozens of languages scrawled or carefully written on the fabric coverings.  Tiny Japanese, Korean, Chinese characters in neat up and down rows.  Sharp Russian with its hard edges.  Round and sweeping Arabic.  Dimly remembered Hebrew and Greek. Tamil’s tiny circles. Guttural German, fluid French, melodic Italian, bent shouldered Polish.  Too many to identify.  Too many to number.

            Pictures of the lost were stapled to the sheets.  A third grade picture and the words “I love you son, Mom.” Someone’s New York Marathon medal hung from a wire: “It wasn’t the same without you.”

            In a churchyard, volunteers handed out sandwiches to workers on break and held grown men in full fire gear as they sobbed with their faces lost in their hands. Murmurs of comfort and the wracking crying of the responders were the only sounds that I remember. That and footsteps, hundreds of muffled footsteps.

            So we walked.  We just walked.

            The next week I knew that I would preach on Jesus walking on water; that mysterious image of Jesus coming to his frightened friends in the midst of a great storm, across the sea…an ancient symbol for chaos. Perhaps that was what was running through my mind.  I don’t know. But suddenly, take my breath away suddenly, I could see him. Not with my eyes but with my soul. Suddenly I could see Jesus there, in that horrible pit, picking through the rubble, patting a firefighter on the shoulder, scratching the dogs on their chins, and lifting heavy objects with those whose shoulders could no longer bear the load.

            Suddenly I saw him there, like he always is, in the very midst of our pain, suffering, chaos and confusion. Suddenly I saw him there, intimately there and a part, hallowing even our worst hour.

            I will never forget it.

            *******

            Marika and I made our way back up to midtown and stopped for an early supper at a half empty Italian restaurant. I told her what had happened and we cried together. When finished our meal, we hugged once more and she went on her way home. I went back to the Algonquin, that precious little hotel where writers gathered at the round table in the 20’s and where Miranda the cat greets guests as they check in.

            That night, a valiant group of actors tapped their hearts out to us in a half empty theater and Mama and I wept.  We clapped our hands numb.

            *******

            As I shared this memory with my own little flock today, we wept again together.  We sang prayers for peace.  We dug deep for hope and forgiveness.  And we made a solemn vow: We will not become the people our enemies think we are.  We will not add to the sum total of violence and fear in the world.  We will live on the other side of 911 as people of a different way. 

            In a hundred years 911 will be no news at all, just a piece of history’s long trek of human violence and mayhem.  How we respond, though, now that could be news.  If, against all odds, Christians decided once and for all that we were going to live like Jesus and become the change he died to offer the world, that would be redeeming wouldn’t it?  If, against all odds, we decided

            to return to no one evil for evil,

            to banish the notion of enemy,

            to stop drinking to poison of unforgiveness,

            to give up our right to avenge, that would indeed be news for the history books.  

           Then horror of 911 would become a bit like the cross, a blasphemy that God used to reconcile the world.

******
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The Man in the Blue Flannel Shirt

            It was a late autumn afternoon, one of those crisp perfect days in the Deep South when the humidity goes down and southerners begin to feel spared, invincible, able to cope again after the grueling summer.  The sun peeked through the long needle pines and soaked the world in a honey light as my host dropped me off at the Pure Station on Highway 61 somewhere in northern Mississippi.

            One retreat behind me, another starting the next day, I was heading to Memphis.  Highway 61, sometimes called the Blues Highway, runs from New Orleans to Minneapolis right through Memphis and St. Louis.  I remember feeling a kind of writer/artist’s romance about the whole thing.  Like the writers who gathered around the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in the 1920’s or expats who fled to Paris to write poems with fountain pens while they walked by the Seine, I was traveling a path about which songs were written.

            “The Bus Station is that little room on the side,” my driver told me as she helped me with my ‘before-wheels-were-standard-suitcase.’  “Don’t let time get away from you,” she continued.  “Because if you aren’t standing outside when the bus comes by he won’t stop.  That driver doesn’t like to stop.  They say he likes to drive but he’s not so sure about people.  Okay, then.  You got what you need, Eugenia?”

            I looked at the empty service station, closed on this Sunday afternoon, and at the open door into the little side room.  I hoped fervently that I had what I needed.

            “Yes, I’m fine,” I said.  “Thank you so much.” 

            “No, honey, we thank you,” she said giving me a quick hug and sinking back down into the soft leather seat of her Lincoln.  She needed to get home.  It had been a full weekend and she was steeling herself for whatever had transpired while she was away.  You could see it in her, almost smell it on her.

            I was exhausted, not so much from the leading of the women’s retreat but from the sheer effort of keeping my mouth shut after the University of Alabama rather spectacularly proved that God was in heaven and all was right with the world by beating Ole Miss something like 60 to nothing.  I hadn’t said a word, not even when the hangdog Rebs had goaded me a little. I was feeling pretty righteous about it, too, as I dragged my suitcase into the little room; briefcase and purse tucked under one arm.

            I wore my 80’s “I am woman” suit, a plaid skirt that looked like it had been dyed in the piles of leaves outside the station, rust colored pumps that matched my hair and a big shouldered nubby jacket over a silk charmeuse blouse. I was on the road working in leader development for women for the PCUSA and it was a heady wonderful time.

             A rusted sign hanging on a swaying chain was the only indication that the room I entered was indeed the Greyhound Bus Station.  It was a small room with white plastic chairs lining three walls and an old bare mattress on the floor in one corner.  The word ‘clean’ did not leap to mind but I wasn’t afraid to sit down either.  I had two hours to wait for my bus so I got out my notes for the next event and sat to go through them one more time. 

            A little while later, a young man, maybe 30-35, came into the station.  He picked up a bus schedule from the little Lucite rack by the drink machine and sat down across the room from me. He studied it seriously as long as he could. 

            He wore a blue flannel shirt with golden lines. He had it neatly tucked into his jeans.  I’d like to say that his belt buckle said Ole Miss, but I don’t really remember that.  What I remember is that he had dark wavy 70’s hair, and deep eyes the color of the shirt with tiny golden sunbursts.  They were beautiful eyes. 

            I kept right on working.

            After a few moments he asked, “Where you headin’?” 

            “I’m going up to Memphis,” I said.  “You?”

            “St. Louie, for me,” he said. 

            “Ah,” I said.  There was silence.

            “You traveling on business or for pleasure,” he asked eyeing my briefcase and sizing me up. 

            “Business,” I said. 

            “Oh,” he said, “What line of work are you in?” 

            “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” I said brightly.  Then came the double take.  I watched it in him. 

            “Oh,” he said.  “Well, do you pastor a church or are you a roving evangelist?”

            I laughed.  “I’m a roving evangelist I guess,” I replied.

            “Well, son of a gun,” he said.  “I’m a believer myself.  I got saved back in May of 1969.  Have you saved any souls yet?”

            I laughed.  “I’m still praying,” I said. 

            “Well, you keep on praying.  You’ll get one.” He was trying to comfort me.  “Where you from?”

            “Alabama,” I said.

            “Oh, Lord,” he said.  “Y’all sure handed our butts to us yesterday, didn’t you?” I smiled and the conversation went on to the safer ground of college football and the social ordering of southern self esteem that it provides.

            I have thought of him often over the years.  Not so much the blue eyes to match his shirt.  Not the sideburns just a little past fashion.  Not even really the surprise that registered as he tried to fit this young woman into his image of minister.  What I’ve gone back to again and again is the idea of being a roving good news person. 

            For nearly 30 years while pastoring churches or serving in judicatories, I’ve roved the highways and airways to towns too many to remember.  30 new suits. 5 new briefcases. Souls saved?  Not a clue, that being the Spirit’s business and not mine, of course. 

            Still, as I sit now in my ‘chair of inspiration,’ laptop on lap, I think of all the faces of the thousands of strangers I have taught or preached to over the years. I wonder if real good news somehow leaked from me in some way. I pray that it did.

            There is a vast good news shaped hole in the heart of our culture, the core of our hearts. It is a gaping hole dug deeper by the evening news, the betrayals of life and love and body. I think of the young me sitting on the Blues Highway with a briefcase full of hope and plans, and no notion whatsoever of real Blues. She makes me smile.

            But now I do know.  I know of blues and success, of failure and grace. And I know the wonder of my own Blues Highway on which I have been found by Grace and saved again and again and again. I want that same small triumph for all those who find themselves stumbling into life, scraped up and unheld. I want that for those who find no solace in church, no news at all in Christ, the roving evangelist we follow.

                        “You keep on praying,” the man in the blue flannel shirt said. “You’ll get one.” 

                        And so I rove on.

Broken Eggs

The year was 1979, deep summer in Alabama.  It was lightening bug weather and the rolling lawns of the homes along Highland Avenue looked photo-shopped green. Ratchety sprinklers filled the air with their rat-a-tat-tat sounds. Mimosa trees opened their pink skirts and closed them again.  Magnolias left their lemon scent on your nose long after you moved in for a deep sniff.  I was wearing a nice pink suit with a striped silk blouse, dolman sleeves and tiny cuffs.  The skirt swept nearly to my ankles and the jacket was cut asymmetrically.

            The women of St. Mary’s on the Highland Episcopal Church had invited me to tea.  They wanted to take a look at me.  I was, after all, getting ready to enter the seminary and they were not at all sure about it.  So I was summoned.  I don’t mean to imply that it was a particularly hostile audience.  It wasn’t.  It was a curious one. 

            In the reception room large vases of flowers sat on the mantle and the serving table.  The silver service was polished and the cut glass punch bowl had an ice ring with raspberries and mint frozen in it.  Lemon squares and pecan tassies filled silver trays.  Cucumber, cream cheese and olive and pimiento cheese finger sandwiches lay under a damp towel that was whisked off only when the trays were passed.  The women all wore their Sunday dresses.  No hats or gloves that I recall, but you could tell that some of the women pondered that decision hard before they came….phone calls back and forth…”What about gloves?” “I don’t think so.  She’s so young she probably doesn’t even own a decent pair of gloves.” (I, by the way, did too own a decent pair of gloves back then.)

            The bishop was there and everyone deferred to him sweetly.  He greeted each woman with a warm two-handed clasp.  I paddled in his wake as he introduced me to first this one and then the next.  He prayed over our refreshments and for the next hour I mingled.  Mingling is one of the things at which I am totally inept; an occupational deficit to be sure.  But I girded up my loins and proceeded to be as charming and respectful as I could possibly be. I was both wildly uncomfortable and deliriously joyful.

            After the mingling time, the bishop asked me to say a few words about my sense of call and why I was pursuing the priesthood.  So I did.  It all started, I told them, with my very first memory.

            The memory goes back to my grandmother’s funeral.  In those days in south Alabama, people were often buried from the home.  Such was the case with my grandmother.  She and my grandfather bought the home on College Street when they were first married in 1903.  Built in 1855 it is a wonderful old home with high ceilings and heart pine floors.  It is the home in which my father was born and in which he died 88 years later.  But I get ahead of myself.

            Somehow the decision was made that I was too young to stay home for the funeral so I was taken across the street to my cousins’ house to play with their new electric train set. 

            Here is where my memory comes in.  Just after crossing the street, I turned to look back at the house.  I remember the mourners coming up the sidewalk and across the porch to the open front door.  Both the men and women wore black suits and hats.  A few had plates of tomatoes or deviled eggs.  I watched them for a moment as they entered the house.  Then suddenly I saw an indescribable bright golden aura around the house.   I knew instantly that it was God and my journey toward ministry began right then. 

            I went on to tell them other moments that had led me to be there in a pink suit sipping punch on a Tuesday afternoon.  They regarded me quizzically.  Asked only a few of the questions so obvious on their faces and then began to collect their handbags and cake plates to go on with their summer lives.

            As I stood at the door and thanked each woman for attending, one grabbed my hand and would not let it go.  She was small and wiry.  Her nubby suit smelled faintly of closet and her salt and pepper hair was wound in tight curls all over her head.  Her eyes were a nearly invisible blue.  They looked like fire in ice, like an opal in the right light.  “Eugenia,” she said.  “Don’t blow it.  All our eggs are in your basket.”  It took my breath away. I gasped, audibly I think, and took a frantic breath like the way it is when the door closes one of those machines for lung testing.  “I’ll do my best,” I said, thinly, afraid.

            For years I dreamed of her, felt the weight of those words, the weight of ‘firsts’.  I tried so hard to be the best at everything.  I wondered what it would take to ‘not blow it.’  I wondered what the ‘it’ was that I had been so prophetically ordered not to blow.  I got an ulcer.  I changed my hair. I hid.

            As it turned out, no matter how hard I tried to live up to a those hope-filled expectations of me, no matter how hard I tried to juggle that basket, I rather spectacularly broke all the eggs in it eventually.  A broken marriage, a feminist bent.  There were lots of reasons, but suffice it to say the Episcopal Church and I disappointed each other and moved on.   I found my happy tribe among the Presbyterians…a stalwart sticky fingered lot who for thirty years have sweetly picked out the broken eggshells of my life’s messes and made a yummy omelet of it all. 

            Theologians talk about the upward fall.  In short that seems to mean that it was a great and wonderful thing that Adam and Eve screwed up so badly because that meant we got Jesus.  I cling to that.  My life has been one wonderful and ragged upward fall, each crashing moment leading to an unexpected grace that could have arrived no other way.  Broken egg by broken egg.