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Telling time

12/19/2022

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If we’ve learned nothing at all in recent years – and there is an argument to be made that we have not learned anything – it’s that more than one thing can be true at the same time. That’s the challenge facing any thinking person during an election, watching the news or observing their own lives. For me, right now, it’s a challenge during Advent, the Christian tradition of anticipating Christmas.

I think often of a principle(pal) we studied in seminary, the idea that some religions consider time to be linear – with a beginning, a middle and an end. The notion that human experience is moving toward an end time and the consequences it will bring. Time marches on. 

In other traditions, time is considered to be cyclical, that life returns over and over again to a starting point. Time moves in cycles.

In my own life, facing abbreviated but still daunting to do lists for Christmas and a coming trip to Israel, I find myself searching for moments when time stands still. Quiet early morning or late evening moments sitting in the dark with my lighted Christmas tree. Catching glimpses of stars in the clear dark sky through the bathroom window. Staring at snow falling on a quiet Sunday morning. I am embracing those moments, knowing they will be rare in the coming days, but trying to file them away in hopes that their memories serve to slow me down, if not stop me in my tracks.

Time is complicated. It marches on, it cycles through, it stands still. All three can be true at once.

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Lesson in listening

11/17/2022

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​Early this morning,

I stepped outside my front door
to get the newspaper lying at the foot of the drive.

The air was cold, dry and still.
No traffic. No walkers, with dogs or otherwise.
My neighbors’ blinds were down,
the windows of their cars covered in frost.

I walked carefully down the driveway, 
remembering to bend my knees and keep my back straight
as I bent to retrieve the paper. 

As I stood, turned and started back up the drive,
I heard the smallest tap.
Not sure what it was.
Maybe a cat? Maybe a crow, like the one that had sideswiped me  
when I was out walking a few days ago.
Out of the corner of my eye, 
I'd seen a fig leaf fall from my neighbor’s tree: 
the size of a salad plate, 
yellow with scalloped edges.
I’d watched it land on the driveway.

I smiled to think I’d heard a leaf fall – 
in real time, as they say nowadays. 
And then I heard other taps, one at a time,
and noticed the red and gold leaves falling
from my cherry and dogwood trees.
​One by one they settled with tiny taps

on grass already covered with an autumn patchwork quilt. 

While I stood silent and alone in my front yard, 
I realized how many leaves had already fallen
without my hearing their tap, tap, tap. 
And I think of myself as a good listener.

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Tough, tender, torturous, touching

10/6/2022

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I just finished a novel that was heavy on heart-break and, thankfully, fleetingly hopeful. Why do I read books like this? Books that describe a world so removed and so much harsher than my own? Part of it is I am sporadically compulsive. Only rarely do I begin and then abandon a book. Years ago, when my book group chose The Trial of Socrates, I read part way through it and gave up. Three decades later, I still feel guilty.  

A friend of mine always reads page 50 of any book she’s thinking of reading, and if it doesn’t hold her attention, she casts it aside. Such discipline. Me, I finish books – and too many middling movies – just in case there’s something I might miss.

So, I just finished Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. I’d heard it reviewed on NPR, but I was probably half asleep, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was in for when I put it on reserve at the library. Now I know:  A Protestant named for the patron saint of Glasgow (odd, that), Mungo lives on the brink of manhood.  Questions about his identity, intellect and sexuality are as twitchy as his fuzz-covered cheeks. The plot leaps forward and backward in time – a challenge for linear me – from a hellish fishing trip with two “adult” strangers, whom his  alcoholic mom entrusts with her most loving son, to brutish hand-to-hand combat between Protestant and Catholic youths who aren’t sure why they hate each other but can’t overcome their addiction to violence. Poverty, ignorance and pervasive ill will set the stage.

Here is the opening paragraph:   “As they neared the corner, Mungo halted and shrugged the man’s hand from his shoulder. It was such an assertive gesture that it took everyone by surprise. Turning back, Mungo squinted up at the tenement flat, and his eyes began to twitch with one of their nervous spasms. As his mother watched him through the ear-of-wheat pattern of the net curtains, she tried to convince herself that his twitch was a happy wink, a lovely Morse code that telegraphed everything would be okay. F. I. N .E. Her younger son was like that. He smiled when he didn’t want to. He would do anything just to make other people feel better.” 

As unsettling as Young Mungo was to read, the book surprised me with sweet, though quick to disappear and often tarnished moments of grace, along with startlingly detailed descriptions of deliberate harm to loved ones and virtual strangers. It made me think in ways that pages of beautiful prose often don’t – about the roots of violence, hatred, fear and suspicion that thrive in overwhelming want, and how the phrase “working class” really does define all of us who struggle to understand who we are and why we are where we are. 

In some ways, my life has little to do with Mungo’s, his shattered family, the threat of where he lives, and the love of his life, James. But in other, even irrational ways, I find myself wanting to pray for this imaginary character. Stuart breathed life into this young man, faced his torment, discovered his surprising resilience and somehow, shook me into finding a little of my own. Mungo was so worth the struggle, and so was the book about him. 

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Caught up in memories

8/18/2022

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Like lots of people my age, I just attended my 50th high school reunion. My first one. Always before something else was going on – I had to work, was moving that weekend, or already traveling. This year I had no excuse. And this year, I had a friend willing to go with me. So, we went.

Memories – good and bad – came to me in the days before, during and after the reunion. In no particular order, I remembered the friend whose eyes teared up as she told me that she’d miss me when she got to heaven (a Presbyterian at the time, I had no chance in her eyes), another who often told the story of me bumping into a wall and immediately apologizing to that wall, my debate partner who had a weekend job minding the town dump so we sweated over our speeches beside the wood stove in his tiny sentinel shack. Of those three friends I remember so fondly, two have passed away. I missed my chance to laugh at myself through their eyes.

At the reunion events themselves, I talked to a handful of people. Some I’d known since grade school, others since our days as Camp Fire girls, some I’d known from my church youth group,  and one whom I’d never spoken to before.  She told me that night that she’d joined our class as a senior because her parents had moved. In three events over three days, I actually talked to about a dozen people – probably breaking my actual high school conversation record. I was a sorry teen-ager from a monumentally dysfunctional family. I suffered from that odd intersection of no confidence in myself most of the time and the occasional you-can-do-it blunder into embarrassment. As people passed by me, reading my name tag and giving me a glimpse of their own, I recognized a lot of names, if not faces. If memory serves, the beautiful people from my class are still beautiful, brimming with confidence and reveling in the friendships they forged a long time ago.

I had a few surprises over the weekend. I did a little hiking with a friend I’d known since grade school but know a lot better now. She has endured a lot with grace, humility and faith-shaped common sense. She inspired me. And there was a guy I remember as funny and kind and too handsome for me who came out of the blue to take my arm and make sure I boarded the lake cruise ship without falling. I am really not a doddering old woman trying to cross the street. But maybe the three gin and tonics I’d had before we met the night before convinced him I had a tendency to teeter. 

My friend since fourth grade and I took the time to drive past the houses we’d lived in (all of which seemed a little worn and much smaller than we’d remembered), the elementary school we’d attended where we swept fallen pine needles into lines, marking out houses and stables and pathways in our pretend villages. We stopped by the beach where we swam every summer day.  These days an iron fence runs from the private yards of fancy houses down into the water. It seems that after years of beaches being public property, as they continue to be in more enlightened communities, this stretch of lake shore now may be owned, fenced off and buried in driftwood, trash and junk because their private owners don’t use or clean it. Apparently land-use laws are like good high school friends. The good ones die too soon. 

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Reading rambles

7/26/2022

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So lately, I’ve realized that I like to read books with my cell phone. No, I never have caught on to reading books online. I love the smell of paper, ink and a hint of dust or must. No, as an old-school reader, I love books. But I also love the luxury of Googling about whatever I might encounter in a book. A while back I read The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson and Googled the blue people of Kentucky.

And when I read Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, she argued that first contact in North and South America resulted in the death of 56 million lives, by violence and disease. That accounted for 90 percent of all the lands’ original inhabitants, actually changing “the amount of carbon in the atmosphere,” an outcome no one could have imagined then. That was hard to believe until I Googled her source, Alexander Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the America after 1492." (I admit it was just an astract, but the actual report would probably have been over my head.) 

When I read The Brutal Telling, another of Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache mysteries, I wondered whether Emily Carr was a real artist. I Googled her and found that she was. I also discovered that her paintings of British Columbia and its indigenous villages were mesmerizing. So I bought a novel based on her life and a jigsaw puzzle of one of her paintings – so this winter I’ll have more projects. 

And this week, as I renewed my practice of reading, my cell phone has also played a role. Reading The Other Bennett Sister, Janice Hadlow’s account of Mary, the reticent and plainest of Elizabeth’s sisters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, I found myself in the midst of a conversation about poetry. I Googled William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which I hadn’t read since college (remember the Norton anthologies of poetry?). And that prompted me to pull a couple of books of poetry off my shelves, reread some favorites and a few new ones.

I may be the last reader of physical books who refers regularly to my cell phone as I turn the paper pages before me. But now, with a couple of clicks, I can illustrate and footnote every book I pick up. That’s another way to reinvigorate my reading habit! 

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'Unremembered pleasure'*

7/21/2022

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Forgive me, but I feel like boasting. I got up early this morning, savored half a grapefruit with my almond butter and toast. (That’s a rare treat because I’m not supposed to eat grapefruit because of a medication that I take. Occasionally, I cheat.) Once the neighborhood was awake, I washed my ancient car. I do it once a year and, while I know it’s more ecological to take it to a carwash (and I’ve done that), this year, I did it in my driveway. I tried to be conscientious about the water. I used it sparingly and I rushed to finish. I set a record for my 67-year-old self: I washed the car, using a toothbrush to scrub off some of the mold and mildew, in 45 minutes. I pulled the car into the garage and decided to vacuum it out as well and managed that in 15 minutes. For some reason that I don’t want to dwell on, I take a perverse kind of pleasure from accomplishing tasks that sometimes surprise my adult children.

But that’s not all. As I put away the rags, brushes and bucket I’d used on the car, I noticed that my backyard was shady and peaceful. By late morning, it’s usually sunny and often hot and the sounds of kids playing, lawn mowers and leaf blowers disturb the early morning peace. But while I was still in bed this morning, I had read a good piece by Alissa Wilkinson in VOX, “How to fall back in love with reading,” with the subhed, “Even when your brain feels like mush.” 

Apparently, in 2021, almost a quarter of Americans said they hadn’t read a book in the past year. Yikes! I have kept track of all the books I have read since a friend gave me a journal for just that purpose back in 2001. Over the years, I know that I’ve read fewer books than I once did and that sometimes depresses me. But I’ve never not read a book – for a few days or a month or a year. 
The article includes several reasons for readers to pick up books. This was my favorite one: Research revealed “a short-term decrease in the need for ‘cognitive closure’ in the minds of readers of fiction.” In other words, “those with a high need for cognitive closure ‘need to reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion,’ and thus, when confronted with confusing circumstances, tend to seize on fast explanations and hang on to them.” The point being that such readers are “more susceptible to things like conspiracy theories and poor information, and they become less rational in their thinking.” And here’s the bottom line, “Reading fiction . . . tends to retrain the brain to stay open, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to sort through information more carefully.”

So, this morning, after washing my car, I dragged my Adirondack chair to the back corner of my backyard, filled a glass with ice water, set my cell phone timer for 30 minutes and, in the middle of the day, in the midst of a sizeable “to do” list, read a novel. With only the birds and one low flying airplane to keep my company, I enjoyed a few chapters of The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. Prompted by the plot, I did take a few minutes to Google and read William Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey.” But more about that next time.

If you are a reader whose dedication to reading has been lagging during the pandemic and in the course of the world going to hell in a handbasket, I urge you to read Wilkinson’s piece and take a few minutes to resume your reading practice.

*A phrase from "Tintern Abbey"

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A work in progress

5/30/2022

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I am a knitter. I have a project going most of the time and work on it almost daily. It saves me, keeps me company, creates gifts and, these days, is helping me reduce my stash – the skeins, balls and bits of yarn that I have collected over my 67 years.

Right now, I am knitting a scarf, using a couple of skeins of fine, dark blue silk that I bought years ago. I wound one skein into a ball and gave up. This yarn knots when I look at it. But recently I found a simple pattern. The yarn is perfect, the stitch – once I practiced it a while – is absorbing – almost hypnotic. There’s only one catch – aside from winding the second skein into a ball.  

This pattern, with regular yarnovers and pairs of stitches knit together is impossible – for me – to tink or frog (technical knitting terms that result in undoing a piece of knitting in order to recover a dropped stitch or correct another error). I’ve tried over and over and the results are unsightly gaps, but I’ve decided to keep knitting. I don’t think the mistakes will be obvious when this soft scarf is wrapped around my neck. And I do believe that errors in human creations are reminders that none of us is perfect.

But just now, knitting my way through my morning coffee break, I was looking at my work so far and thinking about the image of Mary, the undoer of knots, and realized that this imperfect scarf is a metaphor for my life right now.

I am at the point in my life when I am trying to use up the mountainous stash of yarn I have accumulated. So I search to find projects suited to the limited amount of a particular yarn that I have (I’ve knitted linen table-runners that use up one or two balls of yarn, for example). In this project, there is no going back to correct mistakes – just efforts to restore the pattern and move on. I’m not paying attention to measurements or sizes or whether the resulting garment will fit. I am just determined to knit until there is no more yarn left. One of these days, I will need to take a break – I have a Christmas stocking to knit for a new niece and a few holiday gifts to finish. But for now, I am knitting a metaphor, surprised that it so suits my life.

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Women, War and Water

3/12/2022

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Glimpsed last night as I carried compost from my kitchen, across my driveway, to the recycling bin.

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. 
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Better late than never

2/22/2022

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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. 

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Half full, half empty, or a third option

2/15/2022

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Locks along the River Seine in Paris.
I am still here. It has been six months since I posted, and I’ve probably lost all but one of my regular readers (bless your heart, Nels). In fact, the poem I posted last was written months before I added it to this blog. Where have I been?

Like most people in this pandemic world, home. My writing partner and I finished revising a manuscript and sent it off to the publisher. I did travel a bit – visited my nephew’s family in Paris in early December. That was lovely. Celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with my own family. Read some books. Knitted some mittens. Revived a book idea and am trying to nurture it back to life. Struggled, like most people, with hope and despair as I read the news. But I am back. 

As a former newspaper writer, I am used to thinking about who is reading my work and what they need to know about a subject. But writing a blog is different. I have no idea who is reading this, whether they need to know – or want to know – anything about my subject. And my subject changes faster than the climate-challenged weather outside my window. But people tell me – and I must agree – that I need to write. Whether I know my reader(s) or not. Since I no longer have an assigning editor, here goes.

I am still jogging/walking around my neighborhood, relying on podcasts to distract me from my minor aches and pains. Sunday I listened to David Tennant, the British actor, interview Stacey Abrams. It was almost like going to church. If you like Dr. Who, liberal politics and the sound of well-used English, I heartily recommend it. You can find David Tennant Does a Podcast on several lists. This particular episode was recorded on April 17, 2020. Here is one highlight.

Asked whether she is an optimist or a pessimist, Abrams says she is an ameliorist. The proverbial glass is half full, she says, but it is probably poisoned. It’s up to her to find the antidote, so that we can drink from the glass and not perish. It’s the perfect metaphor for her philosophy that democracy requires active and unrelenting participants. A perfect spark that can light a fire in someone searching for hope.

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Sacred Seven

6/3/2021

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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.

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Homemade pie

5/17/2021

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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.”

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Praying with the saints

4/8/2021

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
As the pandemic grinds on and ordinary human life proves relentless, my personal prayer list may be the longest I’ve ever wrestled with. I know and love so many people who are grieving right now. Each person exists in a separate world of loss, fear and very fragile hope. It is hard to know what to pray for. I know miracles sometimes happen. I know they don’t always. And I know that what looks like a miracle may actually turn out to be another, often higher hurdle, one that causes us to stumble again. I often pray my own litany, reciting and reflecting on each person by name. I ask God to be with each of them and with those who love them, using their names if I know them, too. But I must be honest, sometimes even that simple prayer is hard to put into words.

This morning I read what Pope Francis said at his private audience in Rome yesterday. He talked about the connection between prayer and the communion of saints. As a convert to Catholicism, I have always loved this idea, that we do not pray alone, that those saints -- the ones recognized by the church and many who are not -- pray along side us. And, as we pray together, Francis said, “we are immersed in a majestic river of invocations that precede us and proceeds after us. A majestic river.”

I loved that Francis went on to connect our prayers with those that fill Scripture. The stories we read there are prayers, he said, “that often resound in the liturgy, , , traces of ancient stories, of prodigious liberations, of deportations and sad exiles, of emotional returns, of praise ringing out before the wonders of creation.”

Francis says that good prayers are “expansive" and he elaborates: "they propagate themselves continuously, with or without being posted on social networks: from hospital wards, from moments of festive gatherings to those in which we suffer silently . . . .  One person’s pain is everyone’s pain, and one person’s happiness is transmitted to someone else’s soul. Pain and happiness, all a story, stories that create the story of one’s own life . . . .”

He reminds us that prayer is powerful, even when it’s spurred by conflict: "A way of dissolving the conflict, of softening it, is to pray for the person with whom I am in conflict. And something changes with prayer. The first thing that changes is my heart and my attitude.” (The emphasis is mine.)

And finally, the pope notes that the “communion of saints” involves not only those who are canonized formally, but all those who already have passed away and those of us who struggle to be pilgrims on earth. Some, who have made more progress than I have, may live next door, shop at my grocery store, pass me on the street. Although finding the words for prayer is sometimes hard for me, I am not praying alone. I am buoyed by a magestic river. 

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Ready and waiting

4/5/2021

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Image by FelixMittermeier from Pixabay
I have been reading, thinking and writing about darkness throughout Lent, but recently I’m contemplating candles. A friend’s wife passed away, and those who grieve for her -- and for him -- are lighting candles in her memory. The neighbors placed luminarias on the couple’s front porch so that her spirit can find her way home. And I’m struck that in this modern age -- when we don’t rely on candlelight to see, we still light candles to help us see better. 

Candles themselves may be 5,000 years old, originating, perhaps, in ancient Egypt and perfected by the Romans. Through the centuries, candles have been made from oils or fat  derived from plants, animals, insects, and sea creatures. Depending on what candles were made of, they sometimes smoked or emitted noxious fumes. But their essential light outweighed their material shortcomings.

In the Middle Ages, candles made from beeswax burned cleanly with a pleasant scent, but they were expensive and rarely used in everyday life. In the 19th century, paraffin, made from petroleum, resulted in clean burning candles. Now, soy candles are all the rage, often infused with strong (sometimes still noxious) fragrances. I’ve burned some scented with balsam pine that made my eyes water. The one on my fireplace now, fragrant with “bergamot, Cuban tobacco leaf and ylang-ylang,” clears the air and the living room after only five minutes.   

What was once necessary for everyday life (and still is in many parts of the world) has become more than a means to an end: more than a way to see the sock I am darning, the writing on a page, or the faces of a family gathered around a table. For many of us these days, living with the luxury of electric lights, we still light candles to add warmth to a room or a dinner table. Candlelight is also a companion in times of loss or worry, meditation or prayer. 

When we are sitting vigil, for someone who is lost or ailing or for a holy day or even out of fear, we may sometimes use our cell phones, but the staunch standby is candle light. A good friend of mine, whose nightly ritual involved Reese’s miniature peanut butter cups and Anderson Cooper, used to light a candle after her snack to ease her into prayer. Sometimes, I light one to keep me company as I knit my way through Law & Order: UK.

Like faith and fear, life and hope, the flame of a candle is not steady or unchanging. It flickers. And it does not last forever. We blow out a candles before we head to bed. A breeze or draft may extinguish it, leaving behind a wisp of trailing smoke. Sometimes a candle drowns its own wick, burning itself out. And still we light them. Flash lights, cell phones and gas-fired eternal flames require batteries, charging time or a steady fuel source. Their light requires more than the quick scratch of a match against a rough surface. Candles, whether they are holiday leftovers that fill the drawers in my dining room or the ones stashed safely away for when the big earthquake strikes, always lie ready and waiting.  Like faith itself. Ready when we need to remember a loved one, create sacred space, send forth a prayer, or rekindle hope. We still rely on candles. 

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Inevitable but not eternal

3/28/2021

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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. 

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The treasure of darkness*

3/8/2021

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Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

​As someone who used to give up chocolate or ice cream for Lent, only to spend 40 days obsessing over sweets, I have tried in recent years to take on something that will improve my understanding, spark better behavior on my part, and be worth a little obsession. This year I’ve stumbled onto an amazing book. 

I have been reading and thinking about Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2015). She describes herself as a “spiritual contrarian.” I like that. She is an Episcopal priest, who embraces the natural world and whose vision of holiness encompasses more than church pews, public relations, and politics. She’s written many books, including An Altar in the World, and has a gift for living a deeply spiritual, well-grounded life. I was drawn to her book on darkness, because that’s often how the world looks to me in these days of pandemic, economic strife, and guerilla politics. Darkness is also what I encounter several times a week, when I open my eyes at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m., unable to sleep and unwilling to get out of bed.

Taylor’s proposition is that darkness is not a bad thing, not a state that should rattle or terrify us, but one that brings insights of its own, if only we are open to perceiving them. 
She writes about living in the country where true darkness visits every night -- as opposed to the city where streetlights assure that we can always see what is happening on our streets, if not the actual stars. She writes about human beings’ essential need for darkness and our seemingly innate dread of it. She writes about people who could see and now cannot, struck by blindness and then by the power of what she calls “dark angels . . . the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.” 

She mentions my favorite story from the Hebrew Bible. Genesis describes Jacob, who had cheated his older brother, Esau, of his birthright. The story is a Sunday School staple. Isaac, the son of Abraham, had twin sons. The older of the two was Esau, the younger was Jacob. When their aging father was ready to bless his oldest son, Esau, Jacob and his mother plotted to fool the blind Isaac. Jacob put on Esau's clothes and wrapped his neck and arms with a hairy goat's hide. When the blind father grasped Jacob's hands, he mistook him for Esau. Once the trick was revealed, Isaac couldn’t take back his blessing. Instead, he sent Jacob away to a neighboring land to find a wife (perhaps to remove him, too, from the wrath of his older brother). 

Jacob lived apart from his family for more than 14 years but decided eventually to take his two wives and children and return home, despite the fact that he was wary of seeing Esau again. On the way back, Jacob’s family camped on one side of the river Jabbok,  and he went to rest on the other, perhaps to avoid the noise of his two feuding wives, their maids and his 11 children (another story altogether). In the darkness, Jacob awoke because a man was attacking him. The two wrestled through the night. At one point, the stranger struck Jacob, knocking his hip out of joint. The fighting continued until daybreak.

“Let me go for the day is breaking,” the stranger said. 

“I will not let you go unless you bless me,” Jacob responded.

“What is your name,” the stranger asked. Jacob gave his name, and the stranger replied, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”

When Jacob demanded to know his attacker’s name, the stranger blessed him and disappeared. Jacob stumbled back to his family with a limp that would last his lifetime.

Since I was a child, this story has fascinated me -- that it happened in the dark, that Jacob didn’t know with whom he wrestled (some English translations render the attacker an “angel,” but the Hebrew word means only “messenger”), that the wrestling would mark Jacob for the rest of his days,  but he would emerge with a new name, one that reflected his struggle. 

“Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there were any chance of escape,” Taylor asks. “The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.”

(It strikes me as slightly ironic that Jacob/Israel becomes a patriarch of the Hebrew people, a man whose ten sons included Joseph, the dreamer. But I digress.)

Taylor writes about dining in the dark, spending time in a cave that no light or outside sound can penetrate. She draws from science, biology, sociology, philosophy, poetry, and even an all-too-familiar Christian theology that invariably connects evil to darkness and faith to light. But she’s also read and wrestled with the church’s mothers and fathers, and draws them into the discussion from time to time. And, fitting for a Lenten read, she connects darkness to Easter.

“Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way,” she writes. “If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air. . . . new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”  

Now, I don’t really know whether the nighttime wrestling I have done has been with my subconscious or the worries that spill out of my overstuffed heart. In other words, I am not sure that I’ve wrestled with God very often, or ever. But If I had, that would redeem some of the wrestling, I suppose. It’s also true that I haven’t always welcomed the darkness (real or spiritual) and that I have often dreaded wrestling altogether. But this story of Jacob gives me hope. It may be that I will emerge from this present darkness with a limp, but also with a new name, a better way of living, even in the dark.

*Isaiah 45:3 "I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name."
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When the first Tweet you read in the morning is a Catholic bishop declaring that "Biden is not a real Catholic"

2/22/2021

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​Forgive me, father, for I have drifted.


It has been almost a year since my last Mass.

In these many, many Covid months, I have kept close to home. I have read and prayed on my own. I have listened to the online journal of a friend, who is a priest --  a wise, thoughtful and compassionate one who has been dear to me for 30  years. 

I confess that I have not listened to an entire virtual Mass. Last week I caught a few minutes of the one broadcast by my son’s parish. The readings, the sung responses and the prayers filled me with a longing that surprised me. I do miss the community of Mass, the feeling that I am not in this alone. Still, I felt that distance in me that makes a virtual Mass less than virtuous.

And then a friend sent me the following article from the National Catholic Reporter, a thoughtful attempt to explain the psychology behind the fact that the Catholic vote was almost an even split in 2020’s presidential election. Reading this piece reminded me that, if I am truthful (and confessions should always be truthful), the distance that I have been wrestling with these many months began before Covid-19 devoured normal life. I felt out of place at Mass before and since Trump’s election in 2016. I remember sitting in the pew, wondering who in the congregation had voted for him. Back then, it was about 52 percent of Catholics. And this year, the vote was almost evenly divided between Biden and Trump.

In theory, Catholics believe in the sanctity of life -- not just for the newborn, but for all the clay containers, made in the image of God, who hold it. We believe that racism, sexism, classism, any -ism in conflict with Saint Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3 that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" is a sin. On the other hand, we do not believe that poverty is a sin, but enabling and tolerating it is. We try not to judge, but work for justice. Yet half of us chose a leader whose commitment to these ideas is self-serving fiction.

I understand that I am teetering on the brink of judgment here -- perhaps sliding into it altogether. But this is a confession, after all.

So, father, I confess to judging others, harboring anger, and condemning them for their beliefs. But what, I ask, is faith if it is not testing one’s “beliefs” against the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.  And when we discover a conflict, shouldn’t we be the ones who own it, confess it and change our behavior accordingly?

Please, God, let me be guilty of that.

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Win some, lose all the rest

2/6/2021

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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. 


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Bibliography

2/1/2021

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I’m working on a 13-page bibliography for a biblical commentary that I am writing with a friend. Hours spent scrutinizing every entry, every comma, colon, period, and parenthesis; searching out missing publishers and page numbers; and remembering the hanging indent has taught me the following truths about myself.

Last name, first name, period. This is the way I grew up. Every adult was Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. LastName. And I followed this convention for all the years that I worked at a newspaper. Which often surprised the person I was addressing, as well as any of my colleagues within earshot. I think I imagined that the person I was speaking to was mildly flattered, even grateful, and would respond with courtesy. Today it’s FirstNames, often as OnlyNames. I kind of Ms. That  Formality.

Title of work in italic, unless it’s part of a larger book. Then, it’s in Roman type, “enclosed in quotation marks,” followed by a period. Then comes a fragment in Roman and italic type: In Title of Larger Work. I’m thinking this is like my life -- “A Series of Smaller Lessons and Discoveries.”  In What I’ve Learned in a Lifetime.

But, if the larger title was edited by someone else, which -- let’s face it -- most of our work is, the Title is followed by a comma, and then the phrase (in Roman type): edited by first and last name of editor(s). As in, What I’ve Learned in a Lifetime, edited by My Parents, My Teachers, My Mentors, My Family, et al. Et al., is an abbreviation used for multiple editors.  Then the Title-edited-by phrase ends with a period.

City of Publication: Publisher, year. After wading through the first part of an entry, especially when it includes multiple languages, both ancient and modern, this is like a reward. Every detail is pretty easy to track down if the writer hasn’t included it in a footnote. I have, on occasion, been guilty. Thank heaven for Google. My publication information: Tiny Idaho Town: Haughts, 1954.  

And finally, the hanging indent. The first line of an entry starts flush left and runs across                the page. Subsequent lines of an entry are supposed to be indented, like this one. 

I have no idea how I just did that. 

Hanging indents are a ridiculous, multi-step process on this friggin’ computer program, which has threatened my last shreds of patience and concentration for the past four days so that I finally had to take a break or brake. There now. That is all. 


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Advent voices

12/22/2020

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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? 

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    Sometimes our fear of strangers keeps us from becoming the people we want to be. "Sacred Strangers" is a guide to six Bible stories about outsiders who are holy examples for the rest of us. Published in October 2017.

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