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.

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.