Woke up this morning to a radio report, another in a long line of stories about the courage of Ukrainian women as Russia invades their country in an act of war. Retelling the story of the old woman who scolded Russian soldiers and then offered them sunflower seeds to put in their pockets so that when they die and are buried in Ukraine, something good will come from their abhorrent presence.

Reminded me of a story I read years ago about Russian mothers traveling to Chechnya to reclaim their soldier sons, rather than sacrificing them in another stupid war.

Scrolling through Twitter, I came across an excerpt of Samantha Bee on her television show, Full Frontal, where she manages to infuse the facts with a mother's sarcasm as she lambasts the Russian leader. 

Sitting with Diana Butler Bass’ daily online reflection, part of A Grounded Lent, I see more clearly the connection she is making, the Bible is making, that Jesus made. “Jesus gives water, and he is water,” she quotes her book Grounded: Finding God in the World -- A Spiritual Revolution. Today Bass revisits the story of the woman at the well in John 4:10. Jesus says to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’”

Sifting through my own writing, I found a piece I’ve written about Miriam, the sister of Moses. Many who know her name think of her saving her infant brother by putting him in a basket and setting it adrift on the River Nile. Some also know that she sang and danced after the Israelites passed through the Red Sea. A few know that later, when she and her other brother, Aaron, questioned why Moses thought God only spoke through him, she was struck with leprosy and forced from her community for seven days.

A handful of feminist Bible scholars know the powerful end of her story: When Miriam died and was buried at a place called Kadesh, “there was no water for the congregation” (Numbers 20). Water had flowed in and out and over Miriam and her people for years and years, sometimes summoned from the ground as Moses struck it with his staff. But without Miriam, there was no water. It was if the earth itself felt the need to mark her passing.

Still thinking about and women, war and water. 
​

The magi finally made it. The thousand pieces of my holiday jigsaw puzzle took some time to assemble this year – two have gone AWOL in the past decade and one reminds me that our golden retriever Klickitat used to like to chew on bite-sized bits of cardboard. Anyway, I finished the puzzle and, after I write this, I’ll tuck it away for another year. Yes, I know pieces are missing, but I’ve had this one a long time. Its pieces are smaller and larger than in other puzzles  and cleverly cut so it isn’t easy to fit them together. It’s a challenging task. Completing it – as best as I can -- is satisfying. I won’t part with this one.

Today I read a piece in America, the Jesuit magazine, that has given me new ideas for my devotional reading. “The Black Writers All Catholics Should Read” caught my eye because some of the authors mentioned are familiar to me and others I’ve not run across before. James Cone was one of my professors in seminary. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation and his more recent book The Cross and the Lynching Tree have confronted, convicted and challenged me. If The Lynching Tree had what we in newspapers called a “nut graf” (a concise answer to the "so what" question) this might be it:
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“Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on the American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the re-crucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America.”

I know of Bryan Massingale because his work was quoted in Alison Benders’ Open Wide Our Hearts, a study guide on the U.S. Catholic bishops 2018 letter on racism – yes, they did issue one that year. This essay reminded me that I want to read one of Massingale’s books. I think I’ll start with Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.

Through the years, I have prayed and read scripture for as my devotional time. But now I find myself – quite literally – by focusing on books that break me open, scatter my pieces and slowly help me put them together again. The magi were strangers, even outsiders, who contributed wisdom to the story of Jesus’ birth. Better late than never. 

​

Seven is a sacred number, 
signaling perfection in an imperfect world:
Seven days of creation, seven loaves and a handful of fish,
Seven deadly sins, seven virtues, seven gifts of the Spirit,
Seventy-seven times we’re called to forgive.

Seven times today my granddaughter 
stops dead in her tracks,
a full-throated gasp escaping her lips. 

As she hunts for hand-me-down toys,
she surprises a vacuum cleaner,
standing upright just inside the bedroom door.

“Whoa!”

As she gazes from the front window,
white petals drift off the dogwood
and settle silently on the still wet grass.

“Whoa!”

As she struggles to separate two plastic bricks,
she squeezes one in each chunky hand and pulls,
pulls harder — until the pieces pop apart.

“Whoa!”

She seeks refuge in the walk-in shower, 
sliding down the tiles to sit in the corner,
and laughs as I splash water on the glass between us.

“Whoa!”

She picks through the clutter atop my dresser,
zeroing in on a tarnished pair of tweezers,
that stands alone in an old crystal glass.

“Whoa!”

She sorts through my jewelry box,
coaxing a string of bright green beads
out from the tangle in one dark corner.

“Whoa!”

She pries open a small metal box
that bears the image of ancient Irish stones
to discover again four smooth rocks gathered on last week’s walk. 

“Whoa!” 

Seven times today my darling Dot
makes sure her old Nana sees for herself:
surprises behind a door,
struggles that succeed,
refuge that allows laughter, 
tarnish that does not diminish usefulness,
brightness illuminating dark corners, 
and the joy of rediscovering last week’s wealth.

​

On a recent mid-morning, my three-year-old granddaughter, still wearing her white cotton nightgown faintly smeared with her strawberry snack, walks into the living room with a wicker basket slung over her arm. I look up from the newspaper.

“Hey, Nana, I am picking apples,” she says, moving behind the armchair and crawling over the sofa arm. “I am going to make an apple pie,” she announces as she heads back into the spare room to gather “the ingredients.”

Back in the living room, on a hastily cleared coffee table, she begins to make her pie. 

“Do you have a recipe?” I ask. 

“Yes.” She pushes her long brown hair away from her eyes. She rejects my offer to tie it back. 

“Will you share it with me?”

“Yes. First, you put 100 cups of flour in this yellow bowl that I like. And then eggs.”

“How many?”

“Three,” as she adds three smooth rocks she’d pulled from a battered egg carton and smacks them one by one on the edge of the plastic bowl. “And five spoons of baking powder.” She uses an orange plastic spoon to measure out the make-believe contents of an old baking powder can. “And I already put in the milk.” 

“How much?” I inquire -- I’d already begun to take notes on the back of an envelope. 

“Half a bottle. And then three spoons of sugar.” She is perplexed for a moment because the dented toffee tin she had opened was empty. “We don’t need sugar,” she says, dismissively tossing the tin aside.  “Now I have to make the apples.”

“I’ve heard that apple pie tastes best when it’s made from two kinds of apples,” I volunteer as a lifelong baker. Again, she seems perplexed.

“I mean two different colors of apples,” I explain hastily. “Red or yellow or green or striped.”

“Red and green,” she says. “Good thing I picked some green apples, too.”

“How many do you need?” . 

“Four,” she says at first and then is quiet a moment as she reconsiders. Her blue eyes focus on mental calculations. “No, eight.” 

“That’s all the ingredients. Now is the time to mix it up. Mixing is for grown-ups. You have to do it standing up, with one hand so it doesn’t spill.”  She blends all the fixings with a wooden spoon. 

“Now you pour it into a hot pan -- a grown-up has to do that part, too,” she adds as she -- clearly a minor -- empties the contents of her yellow bowl into a small metal pie pan that has seen better days. “And then you leave it in the oven,” as she slides it onto the fireplace hearth.

“For how long?” I wonder aloud.

“Eight minutes,” she says, without even checking her recipe. As she waits for the pie to bake, she picks up a plastic whistle shaped like a red and white chicken. She blows noisily into its hind end. A high squeak results. 

”Have you heard my chicken?” she asks, turning it around to blow into its beak to release a deeper cluck. Yes, I say to myself. That chicken and I go back at least thirty-three years. I’d  bought it for her dad and his brother a long time ago. 

“Why are you blowing into the chicken whistle,” I inquire out loud. 

“That’s the timer,” she says, rushing to take the pie out of the oven.

“Do we need to wait for it to cool,” I ask.. “Do we need to blow on it?”

“No, it cools itself,” she replies. “Let me slice you a piece.” She squats on the carpet, her knees bent sharply, her bum not touching the floor. My joints ache at the thought. She rises too gracefully, no need to hold onto a table or chair. She brings me a piece of pie, resting it on the flat of her hand.

As I savor the pie, she careens across the room to pull on the chain of a nearby floor lamp, turning it on. “Let’s pretend it’s Christmas,” she says. Her invitation is infused with wistful enthusiasm. She and I have agreed often in the past that Christmas is the best time of the year. 

“This pie is delish,” I exclaim. “So is this a Christmas Apple Pie?”

“No, nana,” she said, actually shaking her head at my feeble effort to catch up with her imagination. “It’s apple pie,” she explains patiently, again pushing her hair back. “And this,” she waves her arm to take in my cluttered living room, “this is Christmas.”

​

My husband used to say, “Life is suffering.” (Yes, I know that the Buddha said it early on, but humor me, please). Which is not to say that Fred was a pessimist or the least bit fatalistic. But when sorrow or struggle washed over us, as it did (usually when we were congratulating ourselves that “everything is good right now”), he would find a way to remind us both that suffering was inevitable. And somehow that was almost as comforting as him saying, “Things are going to work out.”

I thought of him as I finished Barbara Bradford Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, the book I have been reading for Lent. Near the end, she lists what she learned -- or relearned -- as she researched and rested in darkness. Here’s my summary (with my own emphasis):

First, in the creation story of Genesis, darkness existed before light. “God’s first act on the first day of creation,” Taylor writes, “was not to make light and darkness but to make light and separate it from the darkness.” Later on, we human beings imposed our knee-jerk declaration that darkness was bad and light was good. But both are far older even than evil. For my part, there is something comforting in knowing the primacy of the absence of light.

Second, darkness and light take turns. Neither lasts forever. Which reminds me of something else Fred used to say, “Never say never.” It is another human error that assumes -- when things are going well or unraveling too fast for us to keep up -- that our  lives will always be like “this,” the pain or suffering or loneliness that we feel at any given point.

Finally, it is fear that keeps our eyes closed to what we may find in the darkness. We have learned some unwritten rule that our lives should be safe. (Although I don’t remember any divine promise of safety. Nor was it one of Jesus’ expectations.) We tell ourselves that we bring light into the world. That we control the amount of light, even in darkness. That enough light will keep what frightens us at a distance. We think light keeps us safe.

“But, of course, we are wrong about that, as experience proves again and again,” Taylor writes.  “The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our reluctance to learn to walk in the dark.”

So, what  have I learned about walking in the dark? Or, more accurately, what do I hope I’m learning about walking in darkness? First, try not to be afraid of it. After all, I don’t walk alone -- even when it seems that way. In the darkness at the beginning, God was, is and will be present. And with practice, maybe I can learn to walk in the dark with love, compassion and courage. For myself and for others who are overwhelmed by darkness. Even if I stumble or fall, I can get up and limp along, maybe find a way to pull someone through. And finally, although darkness is inevitable, it is not eternal. 

​

Here’s a slightly pathetic, but deeply pandemic note. I order my groceries online and pick them up first thing on a weekend morning. I use the store app to let them know  that I am “on my way.” When I arrive at the store, I pull into a designated parking space and let them know “I’m here.” I wait a few minutes before a clerk wheels out my order to put the groceries in the trunk of my car. Often we just exchange a few words: “Did you check your substitutions?” “Yes, they’re fine.” “OK, then, thank you!” “No, thank you.” And I drive away, put my car back in the garage, carry the bags into my house, and put the food away.

But sometimes, I get the same grocery clerk. Young -- maybe in his 20s -- tall, very long dark hair. I can’t see his masked face, but his tone is always cheerful -- even in the early morning, at the start of what, for him, will probably be a long day. I don’t even know his name, though he always calls me by mine. (And, yes, I know he has a clipboard with my order on it, but still.) Lately, he lets me know that he remembers me. Today, I thanked him not only for bringing the groceries to the car, but for his polite, good humor.

“Oh, I love this job. I love bringing people their groceries,” he said. “It makes them so happy.” I was stunned as my mind filled with images of essential workers and then, immediately, by how poorly they are paid -- even as the pandemic reminds us of how necessary are their jobs. 

“I wish you got paid as happy as I feel,” I said, all understanding of grammar and syntax flying out of my head. His turn to act surprised.

“Now Nancy, I am a crier and right now I am just going to load up your groceries so you can go,” he said with a slight quiver in his voice. 

“Me, too,” I admitted to crying at the drop of a hat. He loaded the food into my trunk.

Driving home, I thought about how lucky I was. I have family members and friends and plenty of opportunity to talk to people from a safe distance or on the phone as this virus has so many of us sheltering in isolation. But these few words with this clerk -- I must ask him his name next time -- reminded me how much I miss personal encounters with strangers of good will. I miss that warmth-tinged-with-embarrassment feeling when someone I don’t know well acts in my interests with cheer and respect and then coaxes those emotions out of me. I hope that’s part of the “new normal” that lies ahead.

And now, some notes from the real world:

-- My grocery chain is closing stores rather than give workers a raise in this pandemic.

-- My alternative grocery chain is raising pay during the pandemic.

-- Last time I picked up groceries, I was heckled by a passerby, "What a f---in' lazy way to buy your groceries! Why the hell can't you shop?"

God help us. 


​

A few days ago, I ran across this quotation from Cole Arthur Riley, a black liturgist who works to incorporate into prayer some biblical themes that we often ignore -- dignity, lament, a sense of belonging, the struggle for justice, the need for rest, and the ultimate goal, liberation. She wrote,  “I take so much delight in the silence of the men in the Advent story. Zechariah can’t speak. Joseph doesn’t speak. While the words and emotions of Mary and Elizabeth take their rightful  place. The sound of Advent is the voice of women.” 

Like any good writer, she sent me back to the Bible, to remind myself of what, precisely, Elizabeth and Mary had said in their Advent stories. The first chapter of Luke quotes them both. Elizabeth was married to the high priest Zechariah. Both led righteous lives, but they were getting older and had no children. One day, the angel Gabriel visited Zechariah in the temple and told him that Elizabeth would bear a child, who would be named John and would bring others back to God. When Zechariah wondered aloud how that could be -- given their ages -- he was struck mute “until the day these things occur.” So, as Riley wrote, “Zechariah can’t speak.”

While his wife, Elizabeth was in seclusion, she said of her pregnancy (v. 25), “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.” Hold that thought. 

When the same angel visits Mary, who was engaged to Joseph, to announce her child, she responds by thinking first (v. 29) and then speaking (v. 34): “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Then she listens before she speaks again (v. 38): “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me, according to your word.” 

Soon Mary visits her kinswoman, Elizabeth, and the child in her womb leaps when he hears Mary’s voice (vv. 41-45). Then Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” exclaims, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Mary respondes, speaking at length (vv. 47-55): “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. 

“His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

A few months later, when Elizabeth’s child is born, people assumed he would be named after his father, Zechariah. His mother spoke one last time (v. 60), “No; he is to be called John.” When her hearers objected that that name didn’t run in her family, Zechariah responds -- in writing because he still can’t speak (v. 63) -- “His name is John.” Immediately. Zechariah’s  mouth was opened.

Imagine an Advent when we heard not the whole Christmas story, as it was recorded most probably by men, not the countless words explaining what Christmas means, written and spoken by men in the centuries since, but only the words of Elizabeth and Mary. We would hear Elizabeth express her own sense of awe and humility. We’d hear her acknowledge the disgrace she endured in her barrenness. We would hear her rush to bless her kinswoman, not once, but twice and, between those two blessings, we'd here her own wonder about her role in the story. 

And in Mary’s speech, one of the longest uttered by a woman in the Bible, we would hear her praise for God and her recognition of her own humility. We would hear her acknowledge what God has done for her. And we would hear her elaborate on what God will do for others:

          Show mercy to the fearful.
          Scatter the proud. 
          Bring down the powerful.
          Lift up the powerless.
          Fill the hungry.
          Send the rich away empty.

If ever there was a theological to-do list, this might be it -- straightforward, humbly to the point. Riley is right. “The sound of Advent is the voice of women.” Are we listening? 

​

Last week my three-year-old granddaughter spent a day with me -- we are in the same pandemic bubble. We had a great day together, the highlight of which was her playing with an old wooden nativity set that I’ve had for at least 40 years. Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus in a carved wooden crib, three wisemen and a handful of sheep/donkeys. Contrary to the nursery rhyme, these little sheep have lost their shepherds. At any rate, my granddaughter played with them throughout the day, introducing them to some Native Americans, Lego people, and one small, bedraggled, artificial Christmas tree.

The next day, as I gathered up the toys, I sorted the play figures -- putting away the plastic versions and scooping up the wooden nativity figures, setting them on a wooden tray that I keep on my coffee table. I went about the rest of my day, but the next morning, as I sat on my sofa, gazing at my seven-foot Christmas tree, also artificial, I noticed the nativity folk on the wooden tray. The tree stood in their midst. The men were gathered up together, as though they’d formed a football huddle. I smiled at what they might be saying to each other. “Great visit with the baby, Joseph, but where can we get a drink and a hot meal?” Mary sat by herself, removed, her back to the men, staring off into the distance at my blank television set. Scripture says (in Luke 2:19)  that while the shepherds were nattering on about the baby Jesus, “Mary treasured all these words and  pondered them in her heart.” Maybe my rearranged nativity set reflected Mary in a pondering moment. Meanwhile, as she’s got her back to the action and Joseph and the Wise Men are conferring, the baby Jesus lay across the tray, behind the tattered Christmas tree, in his manger, all alone.

Now, I have been known to read too much into little things, but my unintentionally alternative nativity scene has been much on my mind in recent days. Like Mary, I catch myself staring off into the distance, lost in my own thoughts, wondering about how to sensibly celebrate Christmas in the midst of a global pandemic. At other times, I am caught up in animated conversations about the latest political fallout of this nightmare presidential transition. “Have you heard the latest?”  Occasionally, I feel alone like the little wooden Jesus, wondering, perhaps, like him, about what my life means in this hostile world. And all too often, I think about how the adults in this nativity scene seem to be ignoring -- and I cringe to use this phrase --  “the reason for the season.” 

It’s been almost a week and I haven’t rearranged this unusual nativity scene yet. I think it is teaching me something, and I want to reflect on it a little longer. Here’s what I’ve come up with. That after more than sixty years of contemplating the Christmas story, I often get it wrong. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with thinking about Mary, or Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men or even Jesus. But sometimes I forget the big picture. And I think it is the big picture that promises hope. I think the point of the nativity story is to remind us that the birth of Jesus involved more than three people. A group of individuals, each with different perspectives, different lives, and different values, were present. Surely, the birth of Jesus did not affect all the witnesses in the same way. So removed from their circumstances, we can’t be sure whether or how the rest of their lives were changed.

The same is true today. As I sit in judgment of others who don’t “get” the Christmas story, I am reminded that there is a lot about an individual's or a groups’ mindsets, motives, and actions that I just don’t know. I pretend I can read their minds, but the truth is, I can’t. Maybe one miracle of Christmas is recognizing that hope may well reside in the inner lives of anyone who witnesses the birth of Jesus. How that hope expresses itself may not be readily, if ever, apparent to the rest of us. But for me, this difficult year, believing that hope exists when I can't see it may be the point of the nativity story. 

​

Mother's Day is complicated for those of us whose mothers left much to be wished for. Society's emphasis on good mothering calls attention to the best and worst that we have known or experienced. And I am mindful today that my mom did bless me in unexpected ways.

This morning I read this lovely piece on Mary, Jesus' mother, by Kaya Oakes. It made me think about what Mary has meant, does mean and will mean to me as I live out my days as a grandmother. Please take a few minutes and read it.

To me, it reads like a prayer for all the women working, sheltering, parenting, recovering, and loving from afar on the front lines of this pandemic. And I'm walking away with the reference to Mary as "the undoer of knots." 

​Happy Mother's Day. 



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​

I always dread Good Friday services. Somehow, it feels odd to me to gather as a community on such a lonely day. And, after years spent as a Presbyterian, I've never been comfortable with kissing the cross. I can't even bring myself to wear one.

Now, with coronavirus and its attending angel of death passing over us, I'm at peace with my solitary Good Friday. To be sure, there are services online. And there are moving photographs of  Pope Francis marking the way of the cross in a mostly deserted Vatican square.

But I took a walk alone through my mostly deserted neighborhood, reflecting on how lonely the family, friends and followers of Jesus must have felt on the day they saw him die. And I remembered an interview I read earlier this week with the pope for Commenweal titled A Time of Great Uncertainty. It's a good piece to read during Holy Week.

So, today, on Good Friday, I am carrying two of his thoughts with me:

First, that we all live next door to saints -- doctors, nurses, clergy, first responders, grocery clerks, shelf stackers, pharmacists, delivery people, mail carriers, and on and on.

And this quotation from Francis, which includes a line from one of his favorite novels, The Betrothed by Allesandro Manzoni: "'The Lord does not leave his miracles half-finished.' If we become aware of this miracle of the next-door saints, if we can follow their tracks, the miracle will end well, for the good of all. God doesn’t leave things halfway. We are the ones who do that."

Unlike those people who first followed Jesus, we know Easter is coming. 

Like many people around the world I have been keeping to myself these days. I've pulled myself away from the coronavirus news over the past four days to do some spring cleaning that I didn't get around to last year. Here are seven other things that I accomplished today -- all small, insignificant but somehow life-giving in a trying time.

1. I decided to leave the thermometer on my coffee table so I keep taking my own temperature. Otherwise, I forget because, thankfully, I"m feeling fine right now.
2. I've written and mailed a letter, long overdue, to someone dear to me.
3. I made a new list of new groceries so I remember to use everything up before I ask someone to go to the store for me.
4. I've set an alarm so I remember to immerse myself in a virtual viola concert by a friend's talented daughter.
5. I've cleaned up a few pairs of old earrings because, while makeup seems stupid, a sparkle here and there doesn't.
6. I've made a point of savoring both of my cups of coffee this morning -- one alone and one 10 feet away from my neighbors.
7. I've added one app and tackled some new software so I can "visit" others online. I will not let this devastating horror get the best of me.