To see takes time

When I was seven or eight years old, my mother took me to the eye doctor. I’m not sure who figured out the necessity; probably a teacher realizing I couldn’t read the blackboard even from the front row of chairs. (That will tell you how long ago 7 or 8 was; it was an actual blackboard. There were actual chairs and desks, in actual rows.)

Mom took me to see the doctor she and Dad had been going to; Dr. Frugé. I was aware of the accent, and the effect it had on the word that was his name; curious and word-loving child, I had asked why it wasn’t pronounced “froodge” but was instead “froojay.” It’s a French name, came the reply. Like ballet. (As if that explained anything.) I was already learning that words didn’t always follow the rules or make sense; it was part of their charm.

But I digress. The visit to the eye doctor was thrilling; mystery on mystery. Dr. Frugé was kind, although I was surprised that he was Nordically tall, blond and blue-eyed, wearing gold aviator-framed lenses, rather than Frenchly short and dark with rimless pince nez glasses. (Bookish child. Can you tell?) I was nervous when he swung a big bug-faced machine in front of my face. “What’s that?” I asked, backing away.

“A phoropter,” he said. “It will tell me what your eyes are doing.” He made the exam like a game. “How about this?” he’d say. “One or two? Two or three? Three or four?” I’d get confused and start guessing, and he could always tell. “No right answer,” he’d say. “Just good or better … better? or better yet …”

We came back a week later, and the serious little-girl frames I’d picked out had lenses in them. Dr. Frugé dipped the earpieces in a small vat of what looked like glass beads, stirring them around and warming them. When he pulled them out, he bent the earpieces, putting a slight curve in them, and then placed them on my face, his fingers cool behind my ears as he tucked the still-warm earpices into place.

He looked at me intently; I looked back. He took the glasses off and informed me with a small grin that I had my ears on crooked. After a minute I grinned back. Finally, the glasses were fitted and I was up and out the door.

Which is when the miracle happened. As I walked into the waiting room, I noticed its enormous light-flooded picture window — how had I missed it before? — and the oak tree across the street, framed perfectly in the window’s mullions.

“Mom!” I exclaimed. “What?” came the exasperated reply. I wasn’t supposed to yell in public.

“That tree! I can see every leaf!”

“Yeah …” came the reply, in the tone mothers use to acknowledge the obvious. But I was stunned. Transfixed. Trees had been green blobs, except when I climbed them. Now there was more to them than I could even take in. I wandered outside.

It was a whole new world, one that was renewed every year, on the anniversary of those first glasses, because every year my vision worsened. Most years, I’d outgrown my frames, too, if they lasted that long. I was rough on them. My school pictures evidence the changing styles and thickening lenses.

When I turned 13, Mom surprised me by asking if I wanted to try contact lenses. “You’re going to start basketball; it’ll be easier than worrying about your glasses coming off or sliding down your nose or getting broken.” I was nervous and excited all over again. Back to Dr. Frugé’s wonderlab, and I came out that same day with contacts that I was allowed to wear for an hour. Then two the next day, and so on. Of course, I overdid it; who wouldn’t? Peripheral vision! No limits! No blur!

And so it has gone, for 40 years. From glasses to hard lenses to soft lenses to gas permeable lenses back to soft lenses, to monovision (one lens for up close, one for far away) and finally to toric lenses tuned to deal with my astigmatism, and to give me sharp distance vision, with reading glasses for up close.

But then last year, a new wrinkle. Cataracts, in both eyes. And so, this year, surgery, first on the left eye, and then on the right, to remove the cataract and implant permanent replacement lenses.

In the weeks between surgeries, I had to do some hard thinking. The vision in the left eye was good — indeed, had tested as 20/25 the day after surgery — but not “better yet” than the right eye with its contact lens. That eye was super sharp — corrected. Of course, the more accurate comparison was without the contact lens in, when it was blurry in the extreme. But I couldn’t help comparing the cataract-less eye with the contact lens eye, and scaring myself. In accepting the lens implants, was I condemning myself to less-than-perfect vision?

#Firstworldproblems anyone?

It’s all in how you look at it, I told myself. Are your cataracts gone? Yes. Can you open your eyes in the morning and see? Yes. Can you hope that over time your brain will learn to interpret the data streaming in and “see” better? Yes. Are you going to preach and teach without reading glasses, and climb out of a swimming pool and onto a bike later this year in your first triathlon? God willing, yes.

Perfectly sharp vision was mine for a time, and it came with a cost, one that I had become accustomed to, and was privileged to be able to pay. Less-than-perfect vision is mine now, but it is vision; I can see. And I can hope that with time this vision will actually improve, which never happened before in my life.

This less-than-immediate, less-than-perfect miracle is bringing gifts: I am forced not only to look, and look again, but to think, and think again. The only thing stopping me from being more loving, more patient, more compassionate is me. I am already free to be more of what God would like me to be, to do more of what needs doing in the world. That’s easy to see. What I need, like the blind man at Bethsaida, is Jesus’ second touch, which for me would be a healing that spurs me to do all that I can already do, love everyone God has already put in my path.

Red Poppy, Georgia O'Keefe, 1927. Private collection.

I think often these days of Georgia O’Keefe’s words on this topic, written in a letter to a friend: “Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

Perhaps I am slowed down, in my vision and in my life. But down is where the flowers are, along with everything else that I can reach to love. Let me see slowly, then, and learn to give and receive the gifts of this sight.

What comes next will come, in its own time. I can see that, clearly enough.

Slow words

Someone who loves me has gadgeted my life, moving me from a cell phone to a Blackberry to an iPhone and now to iPad augmentation. I’ve come to play willingly enough, reading and blogging and Facebooking and even tweeting now and then, as both my writing and church worlds urge the Must of social media.

The bright and shiny is addictively easy; I can too quickly pick up the gadget instead of the pen. It takes more discipline now to turn to my morning pages before checking the morning mail or nytimes.com. But, as poet William Stafford made clear in a lifetime of early rising to commune with whatever came, attending to what is bubbling in my own pots is a listening no one else can do. The first catch of the morning is unlike any other, and not available elsewhen.

This morning, I was curmudgeoning about not being as quick on the draw as some; when I try to move quickly, I am rarely satisfied with what I have to say or what I accomplish. And there are So Many Words rushing into every void, now. It wasn’t so long ago that words took effort to find; now it takes effort to shut them off.

There’s slow food, I thought. Why not slow words? Accept that I’m not going to be fast, or ubiquitous; I won’t have the first word, or the last word.

But.

I can reach a little deeper for meaning. I can recommit to my own words first, such as they are. I can struggle to accept and use this one gift, with a little more dedication. To be open, as Stafford says; to receive what comes, “to be ready … susceptible to now.”

Slow food has principles. For instance, Slow Food USA supports good, clean and fair food, linking “the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”

Slow words can be principled, too. If I were to become a more intent writer, what would my intentions be? I like what happens when I plunk my task into the latter part of Slow Food’s slogan: linking the pleasure of writing with a commitment to community and the environment. I think I have had that intention, for the last dozen or so years: for my writing to accomplish something either for my community, or to help create my community, and the environs in which I live, play and work.

But there’s always more to do, deeper to go in such a vein.

Here we edge closer to commitment. “Slow Food supports good, clean and fair food.”

“Slow Words supports _____, _____ and _____ writing.”

Or maybe it is …

“Slow Words supports _____, _____ and _____ living.”

How would you fill in the blanks?

I like good. I like fair, too. I have been thinking a lot about fair … more on that later. Clean? Well, yes, it’s an adjective often applied to good writing. “This is some good, clean writing,” an editor might say.

But I think there might be other words to put in those blanks.

I was still mulling over these questions, as I finished my morning pages. After some brief morning prayers, I picked up last year’s devotional, A Year with Rilke, featuring readings selected and translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. I had not read every day during the holidays, and wanted to peruse the last few daily readings. There was a long selection for December 23rd, continued onto December 24th. Parts of it were apropo:

Poems don’t come to much when they are written too soon. One should wait and gather the feelings and favors of a whole life, and a long life if possible, and then, just at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people suppose, emotions — those come easily and quickly enough. They are experiences.

For the sake of one line of poetry, one must see many cities, people, and things. One must be acquainted with animals and feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures of small flowers opening at the first light. One must be able to think back on paths taken through unknown places, on unanticipated meetings, and on farewells one had long seen coming ….

Rilke goes on, in Macy and Barrow’s selection from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, a semi-autobiographical novel. But this scrap is enough; words take time, because seeing takes time, and the fermentation of thought even longer.

Worth the wait

Slow words.

Slow words are thought-full. Slow words are heart-felt. Slow words are worth the wait. Slow words are like wine, and cheese, needing full fermentation and ripening.

Slow words are like the blue light at dawn, that takes long minutes — every one making a difference — to transmute into rose, gold, and day.

The Coke-and-fries words have their place, too, but I recognize it’s the slow words I want, to make and to read. There may not be many, because I’m slower and slower these days. But I will strive to make a virtue of this reality, rather than a regret.

It begins with clay

In the beginning ...

It’s a time of year when flowerbeds are mostly just dirt. Even the pansies have wilted back to leftover greens, flat and withered. You’d have to be a gardener to be inspired. The rest of us just see bare dirt.

It takes a lot to look at nothing and see something. The gardener looks at bare dirt and sees sprouts and blooms, vines and vegetables. The astronomer looks at space and sees the possibility of life, long ago or someday, or in a shape we’d hardly recognize: sulfur-based instead of carbon, single-celled or colonized instead of humaniform. The Author of all that is looks at a young girl … and sees a heart with room for more life. How did life come to start within her?

Somewhere hidden in the stories we tell might be the germ of truth. In the beginning, according to Genesis, God took clay, and formed adamah (a dust-person), and breathed life into its nostrils. In another story of beginnings, Nobel-winning scientist Jack Szostak tells how clay makes a way for life to happen. In his current studies, Szostak says “We’re interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.” If the building blocks of life are in place, and all you need is for those chemicals to “act something like a cell,” then they need to grow and divide, which means there needs to be “a cell membrane that can be a boundary between itself and the rest of the earth” … and genetic material to be replicated and inherited — the job of the RNA molecule.

As Szostak and his team researched the question, they found “a common clay mineral, montmorillonite, might have played a role in helping to make RNA … it could help membranes to form and bring the RNA into the membrane.”

Kind of like, as Szostak says, “In Genesis, it begins with clay.” Something both sticky and slippery, at the molecular level, to give a boundary to insides and outsides, so that the work of the cell could begin to be done.

And once the clay has come together, apparently it never completely comes apart. Irish philosopher poet John O’Donohue supposes that when one meets a new friend, who immediately feels like an old friend, it is because we arose from clay that once lay together, but then divided and separated into unique persons. It’s an idea that resonates with one I first read about in Joan Borysenko’s A Woman’s Journey to God. She was in conversation with a young scientist, who explained to her

how particles once in association continue to respond to one another across time and space. When you salt your food and the sodium chloride breaks down to a molecule of sodium and a molecule of chlorine, the two halves of the molecule still respond to each other. If the sodium ends up in New York, it will adjust its spin to the chloride, even if that molecule resides in Czechoslovakia. Theoretically, every atom in the universe is part of a great network, in constant communication.

This idea is still inspiring thinkers way outside the field of physics; process theologian Catherine Keller is working with the same notion, referred to as “quantum entanglement”:

a kind of influence that seems to be instantaneous and seems to take place between two connected particles, no matter how far away they are. So, rather than become more and more indifferent to one another the further away they are, these particles will forever respond to each other instantaneously as though you are effecting [sic] both of them in the same way, at the same moment.

Quantum entanglement means that nature violates the “rules” in a classical universe, where physics argued that nothing could happen faster than the speed of light. But now it’s beginning to look like this cosmic speed limit can be broken, along with other rules.

Cue Mary. “How can this be?” she asks an angel about an apparently rule-breaking God, and the angel’s explanations are as clear as … well, muddy clay, maybe.

But then the angel’s last words give Mary a keeper: “For nothing will be impossible with God.” How often Mary must have recalled these words, in doubt, in disbelief … and in letting it be.

When your body is doing something you don’t fully understand — building a whole other human being out of bits of you and Something More — there is a lot of letting be to be done. And when the life you love more than your own is ending … well, it may feel like there’s not much left but letting go. Even in doubt. Even in disbelief.

This would be a great time to have something profound to say. But I’m kind of still stuck on plain old dirt. And the miracle of a God who can look at not much and see everything. And hoping that when God looks at me, God sees … something more.

Somewhere hidden in the stories we tell might be the germ of truth. In that case, I want this story: In the beginning, and then over and over again, God takes clay, and forms cells that cling together and transmit to each other the messages of life, messages that reach us still, as we travel together, and as we travel apart, forever responding to each other as though we are still together, in the same way, in the same moment … in Love.

Hugo: the soul in the machine

In Martin Scorsese’s new film, Hugo, clockworks tick and clank and grind all around a grimy boy, hidden in the heart of a train station. A long camera shot zooms from outside Paris all the way into the station, pulling us through and into the action, all the way up to the face of a clock, through which Hugo is watching. Scorsese had me from that moment: I was a watcher, too, as a child, often peering down on the world from the safe height of a tree.

As the movie unfolds, so does the child; we learn more of his story and motivations, particularly as he makes a new friend and they begin to unravel old and new mysteries.

The metaphors and visual plays of the film sound trite in words, but Scorsese does with pictures what words can only dream of … and somehow in this season of Advent — and of prolonged waiting and longing in my own life — this film has sunk deep into my own heart.

In one scene, Hugo is maintaining a clock, oiling and adjusting the gears. His friend, Isabelle, is curled nearby, watching and listening as Hugo thinks out loud about Isabelle’s godfather, who is by turns sad and angry. They have recently discovered what the older man has lost, and are trying to figure out what restoration might look like. Hugo says,

Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason? Maybe that’s why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn’t able to do what it was meant to do. … Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose … it’s like you’re broken.

These words struck me so hard I almost missed the next bit of dialogue, where Hugo and Isabelle wonder about their own young lives, and what their purpose might be. Both children are orphaned; although Isabelle has landed more softly than Hugo, he at least has memories of his parents to guide and inspire him. Isabelle does not. Seeking to give her the little bit of comfort he has, he takes her to one of the glass-faced clocks overlooking the city. Together, they gaze out, the lights of Paris glowing and whizzing before them.

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I’m not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

Hugo is making a leap of faith. His life features nothing of what a boy’s should: parents, safe shelter, healthy and consistent food and care. And yet, he believes there is a purpose to his life, which means he belongs. He doesn’t know to whom or to what yet; but the cruel accidents of his life — even the meticulous and hidden work that he does — are not the whole story.

Sometimes, even with all the work I am doing and all the care I am giving, I feel as though my life has skidded to a stop. I stepped off a moving train some years ago, you could say to figure out some of these questions, of purpose and belonging, having to do with family and vocation. But I’ve discovered as Hugo did that time does not stop, not even when you really want it to. And getting back on that moving train can seem impossible.

I don’t believe in a clockwork universe; I don’t believe in a puppeteer (or movie director) God. But I do believe that none of us are extras. We are all integral to the scene; we are here for a reason, even if all the details are not quite clear yet.

Like Hugo, I can feel frustration and even anger when I can’t make things work right, when I don’t get the messages or results I want. I can feel like the beautiful thing I have worked on for years is broken now and beyond repair.

And yet … and yet. Here in the second week of Advent, these words come:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

God tells the prophet to comfort the people, that God is coming, and will bring reward and recompense, feed God’s people like a shepherd, gather the lambs in God’s arms, carry them in God’s bosom, gently leading the mother sheep.

This hits me, too: I feel like a mother sheep sometimes. The other morning, driving my son to school, we passed Tiny Farm, a direct-to-market grower of vegetables. They began keeping sheep a couple of years ago, and year by year numbers are added to the flock. On this morning, all the dozen or so sheep were gathered in the middle of the pasture, gazing east where the sun was just beginning to glow through the pines.

What do sheep know about sunrises? What do I?

Do I at least know what direction to look? Sometimes. Sometimes I forget. Especially when God’s timing is involved. The author of 2 Peter says that one day can be like a thousand years to God, and a thousand years like a day. That’s not really helpful, is it. I try to hear what the author says next: that God is not being slow, but rather patient, so that all can be worked out.

What are we waiting for now, I wonder. I just want to do what I was made to do, with all the purpose and belonging that entails. How hard can that be?

Long pause. Catching breath.

Well. I need to remember which direction to look. I need to remember that I have my part of the work to do, leveling mountains and building roads for God’s future to travel on.

And in the meantime, I have my equivalent of clocks to wind. Gears to align. Hands to move into place. Peace to make, if not for myself, at least for those around me, whose brokenness is more apparent. If I cannot find the overarching long view and grand purpose, at least let me love what is, and comfort those I can.

Hope is the shape that love takes, waiting.

I confess. I love Advent. It’s my favorite season, of the church calendar or any other calendar for that matter.

Having been raised Southern Baptist in a not-remotely liturgical church, I came late to the Advent party. But I am oh-so-happy to be here now. The music, the purple, the waiting that is more than counting down the shopping days till Christmas … if there was an Advent geek club, I’d be a charter member.

On this first Sunday of Advent, we have lit the candle of hope … makes sense. When we start something, it’s often with some degree of hopefulness. Reminds of me of that great Emily Dickinson line:

Hope is the thing with feathers,
that perches in the soul,
and sings the tune without the words,
and never stops at all ….

So here we are, wearing our purple and decorating our tree and lighting our candles, and WHAM comes Mark with the Little Apocalypse. Not exactly a little-bird kind of text, is it. Feels more like a sledgehammer than something perching in our souls.

Well, starting Advent here actually does make sense … and we’ll get to that.

But let’s start with our Hebrew Bible reading, in Isaiah. It’s a long text, a prayer, really, and if we break it down, we can see that it has three parts.

The first part is petition, and remembrance:

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …” just like the good old days, God, when you used to come down from heaven and the mountains would quake. Oh, no one’s ever seen a God like you. You’ve always taken care of your own.

We can just hear the longing, can’t we. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down ….”

But … no.

This is where we come to the second part, a confession of the hard reality we find ourselves in. Apparently you’re angry, God, because you have hidden your face. We can’t see you. Nothing we do matters. All we can do is sit here in the mess we’ve made.

And yet … and yet … we come to the third part. The plea: And yet, O Lord, you are our Parent. We’re just the clay; you are the Potter. We are the work of your hand. We are all your people. You can’t just forget about us; having made us, surely you will repair our brokenness.

Which brings us back to the beginning:

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …”

In this prayer, the prophet has a very real sense of place when it comes to God: God is in the heavens. Up there. But when we look, all we see is blue. Or clouds. Darkness. It’s like there’s a veil in the way that keeps us from seeing the One we love. “Tear the veil away,” we plead. “We want to see you.”

What Isaiah’s prayer gives us is one clear taste of what hope is made of: longing. If we are hoping, then there is something – someone – we are longing for.

But what’s the difference between longing and hope?

Some degree of assurance, some confidence, some faith that what we long for … we can actually have.

To hope, then, is a deeply faithful act. When what we long for is not present, our very hoping is itself an act of faith. Which is what Jesus is calling for, in this weird and scary word from Mark’s time plopped down in the middle of our post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas, somewhere-between-Black Friday-and-Good Friday Advent season.

But maybe it’s not all that weird. After all, which one of us has had a holiday season with nothing painful in it? How’re the headlines treating you these days? From unemployed people dropping out of the job search to Occupy Something, from wars around the world to children sick to death here at home, signs of loss and even hopelessness are all around us.

We don’t have to look too far to feel the little Apocalypses popping up everywhere and everywhen.

And yet, Jesus says. And yet ….

When the world is falling apart all around you, such that even the sun and the moon and the stars are not doing what they are supposed to … Don’t give up. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t lose hope.

This is what Jesus was saying to his disciples; and it’s what he is saying to us.

But the disciples don’t get it. They’re looking at all the wrong things in all the wrong places. Right before our story today, Jesus and some of the disciples are walking around the temple compound, Jesus is extolling the widow who gave her all, and one of the disciples says, “My, my teacher. What large stones and what large buildings!”

I can just see Jesus pulling his hair out.

Especially since he knows his time is growing very short. So, he cuts right to the chase. “These fancy buildings? They’re all going to fall down, you know.”

The disciples have a four-alarm come-apart. “When? How will we know? What will we do?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” Jesus says. “When everything you have come to depend on is falling apart, then you’ll see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.”

In other words, Advent. God coming to us. In our darkest moments, when the world makes the least sense, that’s when we can know God is coming to us. It might be overwhelming, with great power and glory, or it might be subtle, like the first fuzz of green on the fig tree in spring. But we can know … God is coming to us.

So, what are we to do? We ask, as the disciples did. And what does Jesus say?

Keep watch. Keep awake.

Which sounds … not very helpful.

And yet. And yet …

What does it mean to keep watch? Why keep awake?

If means you believe that what you are longing for will actually come. It means you are being faithful. It means you have … hope. Hope is the shape that love takes, waiting.

It means you remember how the story comes out. That Isaiah’s prayer was finally answered … God tore the heavens open and came down. God came into our lives and into our hearts, not with clouds of power and glory, but with the cry of a newborn child. God came into our lives, with care and compassion and healing and hope.

God came into our lives through the valley of the shadow of death, which we need never fear again, because the God who has been there promises to bring us through it, too.

Thinking about our God of the mountains and the valleys reminds me of a particular time of waiting …

I grew up in South Texas on a farm, the country mouse to my city cousins. Every Christmas, the whole family would gather back on the farm, and I would sit in the front room of the house looking out over the flat fields watching for the headlights that signaled my cousins’ imminent arrival. I could see a car coming over a mile away … closer it would come, closer … and then on it would go. This would go on forever, it seemed. Waiting, waiting, finally a car, is it going to turn … and no.

But then finally, the car I’d been watching for would come to our drive, slowing, slowing, and turning, and the lights of the car would shine down the driveway and YAY, it was about to be Christmas, all over again.

I waited … I watched … because I believed those lights were going to shine toward me once again.

Sometimes, like the prophet Isaiah, we think God must be mad at us, when things don’t go well.

But that’s not really how it is. It’s more like, we have hidden ourselves from God. We are looking everywhere for our lives’ purpose, in every big building and behind every big stone … we are looking everywhere but toward God.

And yet … like a child sitting in the window of our hearts, God is already here. Watching. Waiting. Hoping we’ll come home. Knowing that what God waits for is worth waiting for.

In truth, nothing separates us from the love of God. In this time of Advent, we celebrate that God has come God’s own self, tearing away the veil of what we imagine separates us from God, coming down right here to where we are.

Do we see? Keep watch. Have hope.

God is the One who has come, God is the One who is coming, God is the One who will always be coming toward us.

Amen.

====

Advent 1B at Bricks Reformed UCC, Burlington, NC.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Sophia
the wisdom of God
created at the beginning of God’s work
the first act of God
long ago

Sophia
feminine by name
playful by nature, daily God’s delight
a master worker, rejoicing always
in the inhabited world, the human race

Sophia
become the Word of God,
Logos … Christ … Christa?
Love incarnated, God’s womanwisdom, God’s masterworker
in the body of a man, Jesus,
in a carpenter’s hands, in a healer’s touch.

SophiaTransChrist
here on the edge of advent
I am seeking you
in the eyes of all I love
in the eyes of all I have not loved yet

You inspired a Jewish radical
to proclaim more than he knew:

no longer Jew nor Greek
no longer slave or free
no longer male and female
for you are all one in Love

and yet
we’ve been trying
to take ourselves apart
ever since.

Put us back together, Sophia
like wine in water
like bread in bodies
like love incarnate
like whole spirits in whole flesh.

You are God’s masterworker, after all.
You stand at the crossroads and call.
Draw a circle on the face of our deeps
that inscribes love
and casts out fear.

Sophia, you say that those who miss you
injure themselves. Those who hate you,
love death.

In our fear, misgiving, mistrust, ignorance,
we have proven you right. We have killed our own –
not recognizing ourselves in them.
Not seeing you in their eyes;
not feeling you in our hearts.

Forgive us. Make us to do better than we have done.

Sophia, you promise that whoever finds you
finds life.

Help us, now. Help us to no longer love death,
but to find life: to see it in each living thing,
striving to grow into all that can be.

Help us to remember
we are made in the image of a God
who translates Godself endlessly
in an unending stream
of Words of Love.

Coach? #epicfail

Illegal receiver.

I get that athletics at any level takes a lot of commitment, dedication, and focus. And the higher you go in terms of talent and performance, the sharper that focus. Of course, that tight aperture can create a narrow or warped perspective. You can miss things … or let some things loom too large, and others too small.

The same is true of any field of endeavor; but athletics is particularly familiar to me because my parents were dedicated athletes, passionate fans — and because my mom was a coach. She inspired such affection and respect in “her” athletes, they would have done anything for her.

I hope they didn’t.

Will organized athletics now take seriously what the church has been learning for too long? The only way to ensure the safety of an organization’s most vulnerable participants is to enact and enforce safeguards: current background checks on everyone who works with kids and youth, and orientation to and use of safe procedures, including having at least two unrelated adults supervising children and youth activities.

Of course, even these safeguards can fail, if you put pastors — or coaches, or programs — on too high a pedestal. Pedestals are a problem. You can’t really know what’s going on up there; and someone up there won’t really know what’s going on down here.

Maybe that’s part of why my mom never noticed the abuse going on right under her nose.

Yep. I’m one of those 30% (or more) of girls sexually abused as children. And it’s not just girls; estimates are that at least 15% (or more) of boys are sexually abused as children, as we have now been graphically reminded.

Even when the abuse is stopped, damage has been done. And even with good post-abuse care, therapy, and loving relationships, there are lingering effects.

I can’t read stories like the ones circulating now about Sandusky — and all the boys he abused, and all the men who protected him in order to protect their Program and the millions of dollars it produces — without feeling sick at my stomach, and feeling my heart begin to race. Multiply my feelings by millions of kids.

* * *

There are three side notes I want to mention.

One, some might argue it looks like the Penn State coaches and administrators are being railroaded before due process takes place. I suppose that’s something to be concerned about. But from where I sit, it looks more like law enforcement did a difficult job with very little help from Penn State coaches and administrators, and the investigation therefore took longer and had to be more carefully constructed over years of time. Which allowed more kids to be abused. I’m glad that now — for once — it looks like Penn State is putting its ethical foot down. Would that they had done so years ago.

* * *

Two, just because Sandusky was sexually interested in boys does not make him a homosexual. It makes him a pedophile. There’s a difference.

Gay people are attracted to adults of their own gender, and in those attractions can have all the same blessings and problems straight people have: fidelity and infidelity, strong unions and broken hearts, children and infertility, etc. The most important thing gay people and straight people have in common is the possibility of mutual relationships founded on shared respect and love.

Pedophiles are adults who are attracted to children in a way that is not and cannot be healthy, and that does harm to children. There can not be a mutual relationship between an adult and a child that involves sexual contact of any kind, because the power differential between adult and child is always and already there, to the adult’s advantage. Pedophiles have no more in common with gay people than they do with straight people.

The only healthy relationships between adults and children are ones where the adults are safeguarding the vulnerability of the children. This is something almost everyone involved at Penn State apparently lost sight of — not just the pedophile among them.

* * *

Three, let’s not lose sight of the rest of the children at risk around us. I am remembering the words of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Ella’s Song: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest … until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons is as important as the killing of white men, white mother’s sons.” What hurts any mother’s son hurts me. Let me not lose sight of that.

In the larger picture of life in these United States, where more than 16 million children are living in poverty with all its attendant harm, we are ALL to blame.

* * *

I remember a time when I read Matthew 18:6, and felt it as a great comfort, that even if the adults around me had completely dropped the ball in allowing years of abuse in my life, that God had seen, and God knew, and God was pissed. As Jesus put it,

If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Sandusky and Co. may think they are in hell now. But then again, maybe this is just the wake-up call that they need, one they finally have to answer. It may be the hardest good news they ever got … but it’s better this than God’s millstone. And while we contemplate that picture, let’s not lose sight of our own: what are we doing about the kids who are hungry tonight?

In closing, sports fans, and people of faith, let’s review:

There is no institution — not any church, not any sport, not any school, and not any nation — with any value or importance above the well-being of a child. When we lose sight of that, we have lost sight of our own humanity, and what safeguards it. May God help us to do better than we have done.

This one soul …

Lloyd George Brotzman

That’s my dad’s high school graduation picture. I love it, because he looks like the banty rooster he was. He played basketball and football in high school, and was without a doubt the toughest 5’4″ 140 lb. player the Rio Hondo Bobcats ever fielded. Lloyd played baseball, too, with a bunch of roughnecks old enough to drink beer and smoke. Lloyd’s parents were concerned enough about this poor company that they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: if he’d quit the baseball team, they’d spring for flying lessons. Lloyd soloed the day he turned 16. Banty rooster, indeed.

He was still flying planes and sharing ownership of them when he met my mom; he’d dated a few women before, and gotten serious enough to propose to two of them. One of them bent his heart; the other broke it, badly. He didn’t mess around when he met Sis; well, not in the courting department. But he did play a few tricks, like the time he told this Beaumont girl that that green thing she was holding was a pickle. Turned out it was a jalapeñ0.

Then there was the time Lloyd asked her if she wanted to go for a ride in his plane. She thought he was kidding, maybe finding a new place to go parking. Until she saw the little airplane parked at the other end of the field. Her favorite ride was when he would head east to South Padre Island and fly down the coast, chasing dolphins and sea gulls.

Dad loved her, that was clear. All the way to the end.

But along the way there was a farm to work, and work it he did. I grew up underfoot, watching him build things in the wood shop, fix things in the metal shop, weld things that were broken — or that hadn’t existed a few minutes ago. He was a wizard with a torch.

I loved riding in his arms, on his tractor fender, on his back, in his truck. He smelled of Kent cigarettes (until he quit, after 2 packs a day for 40 years), Old Spice, and dirt. He dressed in khaki work clothes and wore a straw cowboy hat every day, until blue jeans and gimme caps came along. He was smooth in the morning, frying bacon while Mom got dressed, and whiskery-cheeked in the afternoon when he came in from work.

Some of my favorite times were when he’d stop by the house in the late afternoon, and — finding me home alone — take me riding with him. We’d check on the water if he was irrigating, take cottonseed cubes to the cows if it was time for that. He showed me how to hold a cube out on my palm for the bolder calves to take; their leathery-wet tongues gave me the willies, especially when the littlest ones would take your finger for a faucet and try like the dickens to get some milk out of it. The only cost for those perfect afternoons was a willingness to practice my multiplication tables as we rode down the road.

Dad taught me to drive, first in the pastures and then on the farm roads, my right thigh aching with the unfamiliar strain of how to run the accelerator and brake. He practiced basketball with me, threw a football with me, rode motorcycles with me, and — when he took up golf, and became obsessed with it — tried to teach me to play that, too. It was the most fun thing I was bad at … I would do anything to have those four hours alone with him, even chase a little white ball.

So many memories. The times I disappointed him hurt like hell. The times he disappointed me … well, those hurt, too, in a different way. But when it came down to the end, one of the things I am most proud of in my life is that he trusted me with what was left to do. He believed I would take care of things.

And on the last day, it was my honor and my privilege and my sad-but-happy blessing to be at his side, to hold that rough hand once more, smooth the calluses and rub the fingers, and ask the nurses to take away this and pull away that, and please, yes, give him the morphine so he can rest a little easier. When his breathing slowed, and that mighty heart along with it, well, there was this moment. He’d been laying with his eyes closed, his mouth open and working hard, running this last race. And then, his eyes slowly opened … and I could swear he was looking at something … looking somewhere … as he gazed over my shoulder. And then his eyelids came down, and the last breath … and then the very last breath. And he was gone.

And yet … not. I could feel his presence in the room, closer now even than before, as though his spirit had been loosed from the failing body and he was free to be as close as the whisper of the wind in the pines he had planted in our yard. I continued to feel him nearby, over the next few days, as I helped his wife, my mother, make the arrangements and decisions that were needed.

Over time, I felt him less often. But there have been times … like when Mom was dying. I had the distinct sense of his presence with us in that room. And then … when she was gone, he was too. Like he had finally taken his love home.

I do hope that’s how it is for them. I believe it is. And I also believe that he and his memories and his life are all bound up in an infinite Memory, tendrils of which reach out to hold me sometimes, when I miss this one soul.

All (my) saints’ day

In the season when the leaves explode with color and then litter every path, I settle in, layering clothes, listening longer, battening down my own hatches for the long nights ahead. I have turned into an autumn kind of woman; I love this time of year.

Just as Advent has become more meaning-full than what the world has turned Christmas into, I am finding more each year to treasure in what Halloween trivializes: a time to mark the continuing presence of those we love but cannot touch.

Today is All Saints’ Day by the church’s calendar, a day to mark Christian saints and martyrs; tomorrow is the Feast of All Souls, when we honor the rest of our Christian dead. Feels rather exclusive, somehow, which most specifically Christian things do these days. Somehow the Mexican celebration of these days — Día de los Muertos — feels both more dramatic and democratic; but these days are not mine. Neither are the Catholic saints.

But if we are fortunate to live another year, and if we are paying attention at all, as we begin to lose those we love, we may find that death begins to change shape, to mean more and different things. So, I will take tradition’s gift and bend it to my own purposes: today I will remember those who are saints to me, and tomorrow I will remember those I’ve lost in body but not in soul.

John O'Donohue, 1956-2008

John O’Donohue has been on my mind of late; I have been thinking of his Celtic assertion that “fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form.” Our earthen, earthly bodies are embedded in our souls, which reach out around us, mingling with other souls. When we meet someone who immediately feels like a soul friend, he argues poetically that it is because we arose from clay that once lay together, but then divided and separated and became distinct persons.

“Your body is your clay home,” O’Donohue says. “Your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.” Like clay, a body-life that dries out — from lack of love, thirst for the waters of life — hardens and cracks, shrinks and fades. We need what is wet to soften us, to cause us to darken and swell with life.

It occurs to me that the only difference between the clay of our bodies and the dust from which we are made is this water of life; some day the water goes from us, and we return to dust.

The womb of the earth … is receiving back the individual who once left as a clay shape to live in separation above in the world. It is an image of homecoming, of being taken back completely again.

For now, though, O’Donohue speaks of what a miracle it is to be alive at all, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, another of my saints, who said “Being here is so much.” And Rilke returns the favor, it seems: in one of his poems (fittingly, used in the reading for October 31 in A Year of Rilke), he begins

Oh, the pleasure of it, always emerging new
from the loosened clay.

That’s what really lived life looks like, doesn’t it: “always emerging new, from loosened clay.” Reminds me of Georgia O’Keefe, who says “Words and I are not good friends at all except with some people,” and that she has gone “color mad,” working in and laughing at aloneness, treasuring what is big: sky, open spaces, night-time, her friends’ souls and talents. My favorite of her words, though, are these:

It belongs to me.
God told me
if I painted it enough,
I could have it.

This belonging is not possession: it is the irrepressible togetherness that comes of shared clay and the life growing in it and from it.

Georgia O'Keefe, Red Poppy, 1927, private collection

O’Keefe changed shape over and over again, spreading and shifting and aligning herself with light and earth and place.

And O’Keefe reminds me of Emily Carr, who some call the Georgia O’Keefe of Canada, although that can’t be fair or right. Over her long career, she moved from conventional representation, to an appreciation of indigenous carvings in the Pacific Northwest that held perhaps a little too much re-presentation, to a body of work that was truly her own. Carr gets trees like no one else does: their mystery, their movement, the way God is in them.

Emily Carr, Dark Forest (circa 1935)

Of one work session, she mentioned:

I have done a charcoal sketch today of young pines at the foot of a forest. I may take a canvas out of it. It should lead from joy back to mystery — young pines full of light and joyousness against a background of moving, mysterious forest.

I found Carr’s work and words while living in the city, the experience of walking in living woods and moving into ancient mystery a rare treat. Now that I am surrounded every day by whispering pines and transforming hardwoods, the experience of tree-life is more frequent, but just as apt — like a sudden wind in the pinetops — to bring me to a halt.

Go out there into the glory of the woods. See God in every particle of them expressing glory and strength and power, tenderness and protection. Know that they are God expressing God made manifest. Feel their protecting spread, their uplifting rise, their solid immovable strength. Regard the warm red earth beneath them nurtured by their myriads of fallen needles, softly fallen, slowly disintegrating through long processes, always living, changing, expanding round and round. It is a continuous process of life, eternally changing yet eternally the same. See God in it all, enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own [silent] magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.

Soul words, earth words — the words that take breath but make no sound. I have wondered often what the trees would be saying if I could live slowly enough to match the pace of their long breath.

My St. John, St. Rainer, St. Georgia, St. Emily. What gift do you give me this day? A remembrance that I too am made of this good earth; that separation — whether caused by the world’s ills or physical transience — is never as durable as it seems; that I should remain soft and slippery in life, transformable; that what I love is mine, in the only way that “mine” means anything: that what I love can not be lost; that the earth is singing a song today, inviting me to a slow dance that never ends.

Steve Jobs: Visionary, capitalist, otter

Apple announced today that Steve Jobs has died. The envelope he kept pushing — the one that had our future tools and toys sealed inside it — is it finally open? Or finally closed …

My first Mac (too)

The first Macintosh changed my writing and professional life, as it did for countless others, enabling new jobs and careers even as it helped grease the skids for the disappearance of others. But before the Mac came along — as the news stories will recount — there were the ugly years, between one whiz-bang career and another. Apple seeded schools with its first generations of computers, until Big Blue IBM took over the personal computer market. Steve was pushed out of Apple, but kept dreaming and building and innovating, after the Lisa years and through the NeXT years, until Apple finally took him back.

And then the fun really began: iPods, iPhones, the iPad. Who knows what else he would have dreamed up for us to want. And love. And believe we need.

I don’t want forget the ugly years, though. There was a time between dreams. How did Steve manage to reinvent himself as more than a visionary? As someone who could lead an organization? And still keep the spirit of play alive?

I wish I could ask. I’d like to know. We all could use some of that.