Eschatology: Protests and End Times

It is a strange moment in history--or maybe it won't be at all.  Let me capture some thoughts, so that in later years, when I wonder why I didn't write about _______, maybe I can reconstruct.

--It's been a week where more campuses across the nation join the protests that have been happening at Ivy League campuses.  From what I can tell from a distance, these protests are pro-Palestinian, but some of the protestors have tipped into ugly, ugly antisemitism, some of it tinged with misogyny (and some of it dripping with misogyny).

--I think of anti-apartheid protests on campuses during my student days.  No college commencements had to be cancelled, not any that I remember.  The demand to divest from South Africa seems more doable than the demands that today's students are making.  I do realize that I'm biased.

--I think of my history of teaching, and how few radicalized students I've had.  Far more common was the discussion that we had during the Iraq war in 2004, where a few male students decided to join legitimate companies that would send them abroad as mercenaries--what did we call them then?  Why can't I remember?  They didn't want to join the military because the pay as a mercenary was much, much better, and the time period required to commit was far less.  They were aware of the danger, and they were aware that their ability to earn really good money in a short period of time was very limited.  They saw it as an opportunity, and some of them took it; I have no idea if they survived.

--As I heard about various administrators at campuses making a variety of decisions, I have been so glad that I am not an administrator anymore, even though I've never been an administrator at a college where students were going to demonstrate and shut down parts of campus life.  As with the students who went off to be mercenaries, most of the students I've known have had to work multiple jobs and juggle family commitments.

--Last night, as I saw the news that USC (the USC in California, not my alma mater) had cancelled graduation, I was attending my last class meeting of Systematic Theology.  We were all on Zoom, and I thought about the fact that we were talking about the doctrine of Eschatology and all the ways we've interpreted the End Times both as Church and as individuals as the U.S. seems to be inching closer to all sorts of End Times.

--I was already expecting this summer to be full of bad news, but I was expecting hurricanes and other types of bad weather.  We've had about 420 days (13 months) of record breaking ocean temperatures, with 2023 being off the charts, and 2024 being even higher.  I am so glad that I don't own a home in a hurricane or flood zone anymore.

--I am also glad that I don't live in Chicago.  I am glad that I'm not going to be at the Democratic National Convention this summer.  Will it be a repeat of 1968?  Or by then, will we have issues with China taking all of our attention?

--Perhaps I have China on the brain because I just finished 2034, a book which has a confrontation with China as the apocalyptic trigger.

--My spouse wanted to experiment with glass etching paste and the tiles that we're using in our bathroom.  So yesterday we went to Michaels, got supplies, and spent a fun afternoon seeing what the supplies can do.  We did some experimenting with strawberries, creating a sauce for our grilled chicken.  It was delightful to have some creativity time on a sunny, Spring afternoon before my last Systematic Theology class in the evening.

Strawberries at the End of the Semester

Yesterday was the last day of in person classes at Spartanburg Methodist College; we still have final exams, but I don't need to be on campus for those.  It was strange to say, "Have a good summer!" on April 23 as we left each other.

It was also strange to hear about all the various pro-Palestine demonstrations on Ivy League campuses, who are on a similar schedule.  My campus was very empty, with many students not coming to campus.  It's hard to imagine them protesting.  Back in the fall, about a week after the October 7 Hamas attacks, I asked one of my classes if they felt distress.  Most of them had no idea what events I was referring to, and one of them wanted to know who was making money from it all.  We talked about war and munitions and who makes money, but we didn't spend much time on the historic conditions underlying the conflict.

I got to campus feeling frazzled yesterday morning.  I usually zip down the mountains and get to campus early.  Even if there's road construction early, it doesn't lead to the kind of congestion early in the morning like it does later in the day.

Yesterday was different.  Something had happened the exit before the one where I usually exit to get to campus, and the whole interstate was shut down for awhile.  Happily, I had phone numbers plugged into my phone, so I was able to call the office to alert them.  I got to campus minutes before class was to start.

I spent the day feeling tired and a bit off, in part because of the morning traffic troubles and in part because of the time of the semester.  Happily it was not a day that needed me to be my high energy self.  

As I drove home, I noticed the signs by the highway advertising fresh from the farm strawberries.  I decided to stop, and happily, the roadside stand was right at the exit.  

I bought a big basket of berries, along with some onions and sweet potatoes.  Today I'll make some sweet biscuits to go with them.  My grandmother always made a yellow cake to make a  strawberry shortcake, but I prefer biscuits or pound cake.

I haven't emptied out the basket yet.  Hopefully I won't discover they're all moldy.  I did ask the woman in charge of the farm stand about pesticides:  "Could I eat a few berries on my way home?"

She answered, "Yes, ma'am.  I eat them all day, every day, straight from the field."

I love having farm stands on my commute, even though my commute is done for the summer (summer!).  I love buying a big basket of berries for $16.00 and figuring out what to do with them.  I thought we might have berries alone for dessert last night, but we did not.

We will have berries today, as I move from into the grading portion of semester's end.

Systematic Theology Rough Draft Process

As is usual on a Tuesday or a Thursday, I have less time to write.  Soon I need to get ready to head down the mountain to Spartanburg Methodist College--but today is the last day of face to face classes for me this semester.

Yesterday, I wasn't sure what to expect.  I knew that the tile crew would return.  I knew that I had plenty of tasks to do at my desk, and my spouse has a wide variety of home repair tasks to choose from each day.  I sat at my desk and got to work.

I got grading done and e-mails done and a bit of writing revision, the tinkering just before a paper gets turned in kind of revision.  I went for a walk in the chilly Spring air--chilly, but in a crisp way, not in a kill the plants way.  The sky was so blue, and the landscape is filling in; soon we won't be able to see much beyond the roadside but green, green, green.

As I came to the end of the road by the lake, I had a vision for how to write my final paper for Systematic Theology.  I've had lots of ideas for what I want to say, but no idea for how to organize it.  I came home knowing what to do, and I sat down to do it.  I organized it by doctrines of the Church that have worked together in a less good way than they could have:  Soteriology (salvation), Ecclesiology (the Church), Eschatology (end times), and Creation.  To sum up:  our focus on salvation for individual sin coupled with our belief that we're just here as a holding place before heaven has left societal "sin" running rampant, putting all of creation at risk.  

I have a complete rough draft!  I just need to go back to add some quotes, and do some polishing.  I didn't think it would come together that easily.  I expected to have a skeleton at the end of the day, 4 pages that could be expanded later.  But I have nine full pages, so getting to the 15-20 page requirement will not be a problem.  

It's a relief.  In some ways, this should be an easy paper to write; we have a lot more latitude since it's our final paper for the two semester Systematic Theology paper.  But that latitude made me cautious.  I also have a paper to write for my Environmental History of Christianity (EHC) class, so I don't want to use similar ideas and get flagged for plagiarism--that, too, made me cautious.  

The paper I just wrote is not likely to overlap with the paper I will be writing for my EHC class, which is due May 11.  I'll be using different outside sources for each.

It feels good to have a rough draft.  I still have much work to do;  with all the classes that I'm teaching and taking, I have at least 5 deadlines to keep in mind, with smaller deadlines along the way.  But in some ways, that's easier than if they all came crashing to an end during the same week.  Steady, steady, and it will get done.

Hearing Voices--Or Not--A Children's Sermon Success Story

My day is quickly filling up as the various ends of semesters all come into sight.  But let me record a moment from yesterday's worship service at Faith Lutheran that went really well.

Yesterday's Gospel was John 10:  11-18, which talks about the sheep hearing the shepherd's voice.  For the youth sermon, I wanted to demonstrate how hard it can be to hear individual voices when there's so much noise, and how hard it can be to hear God's voice in the midst of all the noise.

Before the service started, I wrote statements on paper slips, like "Hey, sheep, come here and I'll make you a star."  "Hey, sheep, I can make you rich."  At a moment in the sermon, I orchestrated the adults in the background to say all their lines at once, and if they didn't have a line, they could say, "Hey, sheep, over here."  The youth would listen and try to decide which voice to follow.

I was surprised by what a cacophony happened when everyone spoke/shouted at once.  When I had the congregation stop, I asked the youth which voice they would follow, and then I asked if they could hear any individual voice.  They could not.

It worked beautifully to demonstrate my message.  And then, we were able to talk about how we hear God's voice:  in silence, in church, in songs, in reading, in being in community with people who want the best for you, in prayer.

I felt like my adult sermon went well too, and what makes me happier is that I was feeling very stymied on Saturday morning.  By evening, after much prayer and thought and writing and discussing with my spouse, I had two sermons that worked.

It won't always be that way, I know.  But I'm always grateful when inspiration comes, even if it's at the eleventh hour.

Spring vs. Autumn in the Mountains

The weather has shifted a bit here in the Southern Appalachians.  We had summerlike weather for much of the week, where I went for a walk amidst the dogwood blooms and azaleas and returned home dripping with sweat.

Today we're back to chilly rain.  It's much more autumnal than spring.

I went for a walk with a neighborhood friend, and we talked about which we preferred, autumn in the mountains (me) or spring (her).  We're both artists of varying types, so we have an eye for color and texture.  She loves the various flowers and so many shades of green.  I am partial to autumnal leaves.

But I love every season here so far.  I like the austere grays and browns of winter too.  Each Sunday as we've driven across the mountains, I've enjoyed seeing the face of the craggy rocks left behind when the interstate was created, the face that is often obscured by trees in other seasons.  It's wonderful to enjoy the lushness of summer without sweltering heat or fear of hurricanes.

Speaking of driving across the mountains, it's time to put on my church clothes and make that drive to Faith Lutheran, in Bristol, Tennessee.  If you want a sneak peak at the end of the sermon, head over to this post on my theology blog.

Communal Poetry Project

Two years ago, I was part of a seminary class that studied Jericho Brown's duplexes.  As part of my final project, I wrote some duplexes of my own.  I went through my poetry notebooks looking for lines that didn't make it into a poem, and I created a Word document of them.  I ended up with lots of abandoned lines in a big document, and I return to the document periodically when I need inspiration.

This week, I used those lines in a different way.  I needed something different to do with my English 100 class.  I decided to celebrate National Poetry Month with a communal poetry project.  Along the way, I talked about how doing different kinds of writing can make us feel refreshed when we return to academic writing, so it wasn't only a diversion.

I took the document that I created a few weeks ago as part of my internship.  I was trying to create a Mad Libs kind of thing to prompt people to tell their spiritual stories, and I modified it for the poetry project.  I knew that these students needed something to get their creative ideas flowing--or to have something to use in case they didn't get any creative ideas at all.  I created a fill in the blank document that would prompt them to make a list of nouns, verbs, emotions, and then a different fill in the blank document with words missing from lines from famous poems ("Hope is a thing with ______"), hymns ("Oh for a thousand tongues to _____") and pop songs ("You turn me round and round like a _______").

Before class, I cut up the lines from my abandoned lines document and put them in a bowl.  We had a time of taking those lines and adding lines.  If nothing came to them, they could use one of the items from the Mad Libs documents.  At one point, I collected slips with my line and the student line and gave them to a different student to write a new line.  Students ended up with 9-15 slips of paper on their individual tables.

Before class, I had rearranged the tables (I love a classroom with tables that are mobile!).  On the back tables, I taped blank paper, which created 9 blank documents for my analogue cut and paste.  I brought tape with me to class, and I gave students a piece of tape and had them go tape a slip to the longer sheet of paper.  It wasn't as chaotic as I thought it might be. 

We ended up with pieces of paper that were fairly full, but still had space.  I mention this because I wasn't sure how many blank sheets to create.  And as students walked back and forth, they had plenty of room.  Ten students participated, so I'm not sure how this would work with larger groups.  I'd probably have a few more blank documents.

I then read each of the communal poems out loud.  It was interesting to see how the lines spoke to each other.  I talked about the kinds of academic papers we might write if we were asked to write about poems like these.  I also asked about their process.  Only three students read the slips that were already there as they thought about where to tape their own slips.  The process for most students was fairly random, and I was amazed at how the poems held together.

At the end of class, I had students write about the process to tell me what they thought.  Three students said that their favorite part was when I read each poem; that made me happy, because I felt a little unsure of that part.  And the best part--one student talked at great length about how amazing the experience was, the whole process.  Hurrah!

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post confessing that I was failing National Poetry Month.  Yesterday, I feel like I succeeded.

Internship's End

Last night, my internship experience came to a close--it was a natural end, nothing dire.  But it does feel like an event worth noting.

First, some background.  Wesley handles internships differently than some  schools.  It's a part-time job coupled with a class where we meet each week to process our experiences together as a group.  The part-time position can be in a church, the typical learning to be a parish pastor kind of job.  But it could also be in any number of other settings, from prisons to hospitals to non-profits.  If a seminarian has a specific vision, as I did, she can file the paperwork to have her site considered.

I was lucky to have this flexibility.  When I was thinking about possibilities, I wasn't sure where I would be living.  The campus housing was slated to be torn down, and I was mulling over options.  I decided that an internship that I could do remotely made sense.  I had been impressed with the way the Southeastern Synod of the ELCA offered online options for spiritual growth, so I reached out to them.  They were agreeable, and happily, the paperwork was not too onerous.  I know that Synod staff are busy folks, and I hated making paperwork requests.

During my seminary journey, I've never been too worried about traditional classes:  I know that I can write, and I can read rigorous books and journal articles, and I have little problem meeting class deadlines.  But the internship process worried me a bit, with its additional parts:  class instructors, internship staff from the school, and Synod staff.  Happily, everything went smoothly.

When I first started at Wesley, the internship stretched over two years, with the class meeting every other week.  I prefer the more intense model that I just completed.  Much can go wrong over two years, and I would hate to have to start over.  Much can go wrong over one year, and I'm glad to have this requirement completed.

When I talk about much that can go wrong, I know that may sound like I'm being a bit of a drama queen.  But I've seen classmates derailed by events, like the death of the mother who was providing childcare or a pregnancy that turned problematic or any number of other health problems.  I know that internship sites that seem fantastic can change.  I feel fortunate that I didn't have any stumbling blocks.

I also feel fortunate that my internship journey has been filled with wonderful people, people I worked with directly and indirectly at the Synod level, faculty, classmates.  I have felt supported and nurtured at every turn.  I know that not everyone gets that experience, and I am so grateful that I have had the experience that I just completed.

Wednesday Wanderings: Spring Air and Step Counting

Another day of feeling a bit fragmented now, but better than past mornings.  Let me record some thoughts and see if I discern a thread:

--Last night is the first night where I didn't wake up congested and unable to breathe in the middle of the night.  I am a bit more rested today.

--I am also a bit more rested because I didn't go to Pub Theology last night so that I could go to bed early, and then I did go to bed early.  I was sleeping before the sky was dark, around 8:15.

--When the Indiglo feature of my watch failed, I decided it was time to buy a new Timex.  I got the one that counts my steps.  I am hoping to use that feature to get my health goals back on track.  I am still a bit distressed and depressed over how much weight I've gained in the past year, somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds.  In one year!  In some ways, it's a genetic gift, this ability to store calories.  But it's a genetic gift that would be useful in a very different kind of environment, one where food wasn't secure.

--I need to buckle down and just count calories.  I hate tracking calories.  I've used various apps.  This morning, I was thinking about giving myself permission not to keep track of calories if I hit 10,000 steps.  Of course, I don't hit that step goal until late in the day.

--This morning, I'm feeling less fractured because I have been hitting my step goal consistently for a week.  I have also made it up to the weight room twice each week, which is my goal.  But I've been wondering if perhaps I should just pop in during each walk that I take by myself.  Not worry about reps particularly, just do a round of arm exercises.

--I am intrigued by how many students don't come for conferences they signed up for.  In all my years of teaching, that hasn't happened.  Of course, the last time I taught face to face when I could cancel classes and have conferences was thirty years ago.  Still, it's odd.

--I did get a lot of seminary work done yesterday while waiting in my office for students.  That, too, has helped me feel better this morning than I felt Monday morning.  Even though I know that I can crank words out, I feel better for having done it.

--It's been so warm this week that we've slept with our bedroom window open.  There's a fresh, spring smell in the bedroom that I never had in South Florida, even when I opened windows, on the rare weeks that the temperatures were cool enough to open windows in South Florida.

--The tile work in the hall bathroom is going well.  We have spent some time wondering if we've chosen tile that replicates that linoleum that we had in South Florida that tried to replicate Moroccan slate.  It's beautiful tile in the same way that the linoleum was beautiful.

--Speaking of tile work, time to get ready for this morning's arrival of the tile guys.

Cutting Paper for the Process Project

Before we get too far away from a teaching success story, let me record it.  First, some background.  Long ago, to teach the process/how to essay, I had students create something out of Legos and then write instructions so that others could make the same creation.  It was never easy creating those directions.  Was it better than the typical process/how to essay experience?  I thought so.

Years went by, and I moved from teaching to administration.  The Lego bucket took up room in my closet, and I gave it away.  But now I'm back to teaching in person.  So, instead of the typical process essay, I returned to the variation of the Lego project that I documented in this blog post.  It involves cut up paper shapes.

I was feeling weary thinking of all the paper I would need to cut.  And then I thought, no, let the students cut the paper.  They would retain a bag of shapes for themselves, and with the extra shapes they generated, I required them to choose two more shapes.

It was meditative, watching them cut paper.  And I had them create a daily writing assignment about the process of cutting paper, so there was some writing involved.  It wasn't just a day cutting paper.

They didn't realize it, but the cutting of the paper was the easiest part of the project.  This batch of students isn't great at creating instructions that anyone can follow.  Maybe nobody is.  But it's a good experience for them, good to wrestle with language at its most basic level:  take this shape and put it in relation to these other shapes.

Today we will wrestle with the language of the trees, in advance of Arbor Day, and Thursday we will wrestle with the language of poetry.  Classes are winding down, but there are still a few days left.

Failing at National Poetry Month

Once again, I am failing at National Poetry Month.  Once again, it barely registers.  Occasionally I see that someone is hosting a reading or actually doing a reading--or just reading extra poetry.  Or any poetry.  People weigh in with their wonderful news of books being published or books being accepted for publication, and I feel like I'm in a distant country thinking, oh, yes, I used to do that.

Part of the problem, as I have said before, is that National Poetry Month is in April, which is not a good month for me, and probably for many academics.  All of the classes that I'm teaching rev into high gear as we race to the ending.  I'm taking classes too, and similarly, those classes will be over at the end of April.  And I usually have at least one retreat.

But I do want to remember that I haven't actually failed.  I have been revising one poem, "Cassandra Keeps Her Own Counsel" and drafting another, "Good Friday at the Mammography Center."  I am trying not to remember past years when I might have been creating a poem a day.  Most of those poems from past years, created in a daily rush, weren't very good.  I feel much better about the two I've been working on.

Once I filled sheet after sheet in my purple legal pads.  I wonder if I'll ever go back to composing that way.  When I broke my right wrist two years ago (two years ago this very day), I had to experiment with composing a different way.  I no longer speak my poems into a Word doc, but I'm still drafting them that way.

So, maybe I'm not earning an F for National Poetry Month.  Maybe a D or a C-.  

I am kidding, of course.  There are no grades.  The poetry and process--those are the rewards.

Sunday Snippets to Capture a Week in Home Repairs and Fiber

I am not sure what my writing morning looks like--but there are hard deadlines ahead, like needing to be on the road by 7:30 to drive across the mountains to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN this morning (the service starts at 10, and all are welcome).  Let me record some thoughts before they slip away:

--Yesterday for two of my online classes that I teach, I sent out an e-mail reminding them of their last assignments.  Their last day is Friday, April 19.  As always, when we get to the end, I think about how it feels like just yesterday that I was entering dates into the syllabus thinking about how far away April seemed.

--Yesterday we went to the big box home repair stores early-ish in the morning, around 8.  They were eerily deserted, very unlike South Florida stores would have been on a Saturday morning.  I'm relieved, don't get me wrong.  And I still had to wait to get my paint color mixed, but it wasn't because there were 10 people ahead of me in line.  The paint guy had gone off to do something else, and it took awhile to find him.

--We are making progress on the house.  We go in a spurt, get things done, and then progress lags for a few weeks (or more).  We could blame this cycle on all kinds of things:  supply chain issues, shortage in dependable workers for things we can't do.  But as I look back over our whole lives, it's always been this way.

--On Friday, I made this Facebook post:  "Carl is distressing paint, the tile crew is listening to salsa music, and I have workplace training videos about workplace discrimination and harassment playing through my earbuds. These laws are not new to me, although this year, it's a different company that has created the training videos--listening to them with salsa music playing is surreal."

--And then two of the training videos wouldn't load.  Sigh.  I tried not to think about the fact that the last time I had completed these kinds of training videos, it was for a different school (same group of workers though, working on a different part of the house), and I got paid for my time, and I was able to access the videos and take the quizzes.

--I am so tired of being subjected to these videos that show all the ways that humans can be awful to each other in the workplace.  But I am glad that I am no longer the administrator who must make sure that everyone has done the training.

--I have been feeling stuffy for weeks:  is it because of drywall dust or allergies or a cold or paint fumes?  Yesterday when my throat started feeling scratchy, I took a Covid test, just in case.  It was negative.  So that's good.  This morning I'm back to feeling stuffy, but not throat scratchy.

--I went to the computer this morning wondering if we were at war with Iran, if the electronics would be working.  Or maybe this week-end's confrontation between Israel and Iran will be that kind of little thing that looks like it will lead us all to apocalypse but doesn't.

--I was sad to hear of the death of Faith Ringgold, but happy that she had a long, productive life.  And I am so grateful for all the work that she did to make people take fiber and fabric arts seriously.

--I was lucky to see her work periodically, and once, in a small gallery, where I could get close.  But what I remember most about that trip is the Art Appreciation instructor telling her students to pay close attention to the work and saying, "And Dr. Berkey-Abbott is a fiber artist too."

A Different Approach to Responsive Readings

Last week at the Create in Me retreat, we did some worship planning. In a way, it's a familiar aspect of the retreat. But this year was different: we had one person who had done the prep work in advance (choosing texts and music, thinking about the order of worship, recruiting some leaders) and worship prep was an afternoon option, not a morning requirement.

We didn't have as many people who wanted to participate, so some approaches wouldn't work as well. For example, in the past, a Word team might have acted out the Bible reading, but with just one person, that's not as viable. In the past, the Movement group might have put together a performance or brought silks for the congregation to use, but not this year.

In some ways, the final worship service was more participatory, which I didn't anticipate. We didn't have a Movement group, so we adapted one song to have movements that the whole worship congregation would do--and it worked.

I was in charge of the Word team, which was one other person. She read one passage, which was fine. But I wanted to do something different with the other two Bible passages. I thought about drafting people to help me act out a scene, and there probably would have been people who were willing. But in the worship prep afternoon session, we came up with a different idea: a responsive reading.

Most of us probably think of responsive reading as something we do with a Psalm. But I was happy to experiment, and so I spent an hour with the Ruth and Naomi text and the David and Jonathan text (our retreat had a friendship theme this year) and created the following. I'm posting it here, because the responsive reading went well, and I wanted to remember that it worked:


The Story Ruth, Read Responsively


Right Side

All our men have died, husbands, sons, and we are left alone.

Left Side

I advise the women who married my dead sons to go to the house of their mothers. Perhaps they can marry again. We cry together.

Right Side

We know that I am too old to remarry, but they are not.

Left Side

I cannot give them new sons. They should find someone else to marry.

Right Side

Orpah leaves, but Ruth does not.

Left Side

Ruth says, “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live.

Right Side

Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Left Side

Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.

Right Side

May the Lord punish me severely if I allow anything but death to separate us!”

Left Side

If Ruth wants to come, I will not stop her. We go to the land of my people, Bethlehem. We get home just before the barley harvest.



The Story of David and Jonathan read responsively


Right Side

Jonathan loved David—the bond was immediate. They made a pact.

Left Side

To seal the pact, Jonathan gave David his robe, his tunic, sword, bow, and belt.

Right Side

David was successful in war—too successful.

Left Side

Jonathan’s father, King Saul, vowed to kill David.

Right Side

Jonathan warned David and came up with a plan to save him.

Left Side

David hid, while Jonathan reminded King Saul of all the good David had done.

Right Side

King Saul changed his mind and vowed that David would not die but live.

Left Side

In this way, Jonathan saved both David and his father.

Encountering the Text in New Ways

Before we get too far away from the Create in Me retreat, I want to make sure I record our experience with Bible Study, which was different from any we had ever done.  We had as our text Luke 5: 18-25, the story about a paralyzed man lowered through the roof where Jesus was teaching and healing.  We did some Ignatian types of meditation, imagining ourselves as part of the story.

Then we did a different kind of encountering of the text.  We were divided into groups, five to a table.  We listened to our leader read the story again, and we circled words that leapt out at us.  We listened to the story again, discerning the one word that was important.  Each member of the group shared their word, and we put them into an order.  It might have been a sentence that made sense or perhaps not.  Then we were given big sheets of paper and a stick of charcoal and we wrote the words over and over again.

My group's words were:  friend glorifying their faith friend.  My word was "their"--I was interested in faith as a collective action in verse 20:  "When he saw their faith, he said, 'Friend, our sins are forgiven you.'"

Here's the drawing on the first day:

I tried to fill up all the space, but we didn't have to do that.  I was interested in words on top of each other, but we didn't have to do that.  The member of our group that wrote words in a circle on the page ended up with a very different sketch that was also pleasing.  In fact, I liked everyone else's better than mine, but that's not an uncommon feeling for me.

The second day, we did a different interpretation of the story from Mark, and then we returned to our sketches.  We drew some more.  We were trying to be alert to see if shapes emerged, shapes or anything else.  I thought my paper looked like a big mess, so I did some smudging.  I took my finger and wrote the word "Friends" across the smudging.  Here's the result:

I wanted to play with color pastel, but those weren't the instructions.  In the future, I would add color.  I really enjoyed the meditative aspect of the work.  It reminded me of cutting paper, which I can find oddly soothing.

I thought this worked well as a group activity at a creativity retreat.  I wonder how it would work in other settings.  The charcoal can be very messy--a bonus and a drawback, depending on the group.

Did it provide deeper insights?  I'm not sure.  I preferred it to the Ignatian imagining.  But I do confess that today, just six days later, I couldn't remember which words we chose.  I remembered the word "friend" but not the others.

I am trying to come up with something to do with my English 100 class next week.  Maybe we'll try a version of this.  Hmmm.

Poetry Scenes and the Teaching Life

We had hoped the work crew would have made significant progress on the bathroom install, but rain has interrupted the plan.  You might wonder why rain interrupts the plan--the tile cutting is done outside. Happily the person in charge stays in touch with us.  And even more happily, I don't feel like we're in a race against time, the way I would in South Florida, where, as Brian McNoldy reports, "We're now at 400 consecutive days of record-breaking ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic."

I still have a bit of sadness left over from yesterday.  It is sadness that makes no sense to me.  Why be sad about past houses, past jobs, when I am happy now, too?  And the job that I had in 2017 no longer exists, and the school I was at exists in name only, so it's a different sadness than the house sadness.  Actually, between affordability and sturdiness and climate hardiness, I am much happier in our current house.

I have also been reading about the closing of colleges, most recently the announcement yesterday that Goddard College would be closing.  Even in schools that are staying open, so many liberal arts programs are being cut.  I feel fortunate to be at Spartanburg Methodist College, but also a bit worried--how long can all of these small schools stay open?

It's not a new worry.  Even decades ago, when I was finishing the Ph.D., we had these discussions.  It's disheartening to see how we have devalued education.  It's disheartening to see students who can't put the phone down for five minutes at a time--in some ways, the connectivity of the smart phone is more of a threat to a good education than all these closings and actions of state legislators.

Again, I'm glad we're in a more affordable place, where we can drift into retirement, if need be.  I think some of my sadness is fueled by thinking about the grad student I was and the world she thought she would be inhabiting.  I'm also seeing poets with books in the world this year and feeling sorry for my own work.

I remind myself that I'm working on an MDiv, and that with luck, there will be time to return to the pursuit of poetry publication later.  Maybe I will be one of those poets who burst onto the national scene much later in life, giving hope to everyone who feels that time has passed them by.

Or maybe I will continue to create my poems in this much more quiet way I've developed, no bursting onto any scenes, national or otherwise.  I'll drink my tea, craft a poem, and work on a quilt--it's the kind of life I've always wanted.

Eclipse Regrets

I now have eclipse regret.  Perhaps I should have gone on a quest for totality.  I knew we were going to be at 85% totality, and I thought that would be enough.  But now, seeing other people's pictures and reading about their experiences, I'm wondering if I should have made more of an effort.  After all, we won't have these opportunities often, at least not in driving distance.

I'm also feeling a tinge of sadness for other reasons.  I made this Facebook post yesterday afternoon:  "Strange to think about how much has changed since August 2017, the last time I viewed a solar eclipse. Back then, I wrote this conclusion to a blog post: 'Make plans now: August 12, 2045, my house will be on the path of full totality. If the rising seas haven't washed it away, you're all invited to my house. Full totality will be at 1:37 p.m.' That was my Florida house, now someone else's Florida house, and that post was just a few weeks before Hurricane Irma."

We stayed in that house for four more years, many of them years of trying to stay sane in the midst of home repairs from hurricane damage.  Sure, we were one of the lucky ones--our insurance paid for the repairs, with minimum struggle to get them to do it.  We thought it was going to be a struggle, with a need to send documentation about our contractor and to get said contractor to fill in reports periodically to get the funds released periodically--and then, out of the clear blue sky, the funds were released in one big check.

I spent the next four years expecting the insurance company to come and demand paperwork or demand their money back or somehow make my life more difficult.  Happily, they did not.

Thinking about 2017 makes me sad for all sorts of reasons.  Even though I didn't have the amount of leave accrued in my new job that would have let me go on a quest for totality, I was happy in that job at that moment.  We had just had a successful accreditation visit.  Our new president who was in charge of two campuses was still mostly at the Ft. Lauderdale campus, still mostly not concerned with my campus, the Hollywood campus.  It was all going to go badly in many different ways in the coming years, but if I had any sense of that fact, it was only a glimmer.

There's also some sadness because we spent that 2017 eclipse in and near the pool in our backyard; my sister and nephew were down for a visit, and we were having a marvelous time.  We still have a marvelous time together, but it's different now, in the normal ways that everything changes as we age.

I have spent time trying not to look back, but every so often, I'm stopped in my tracks.  Usually, I'm stopped for happiness.  If I could go back to 2017 Kristin and tell her how life has changed, she would be amazed:  a home in the mountains, almost done with an MDiv program, a part-time preaching position, and a teaching job at a small, liberal arts college.  That list represents lots of dreams coming true.  It also represents some severances:  something we don't always remember when we think about dreams coming true, that dreams coming true mean some dreams fade away.

It is time to get ready for that teaching job--off I go, soon, down the mountains to teach English at Spartanburg Methodist College.  I teach, while the bathroom install is happening here.  It will be good to be away.

Let me close with another Facebook post from yesterday:  "Today I looked at the sky and looked at the ground, hoping for interesting shadows during the eclipse. No interesting shadows, but I did realize for the first time that one of our spindly trees is a dogwood, one of my favorite trees."

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Preservation through Prose: Spiritual Memoir for Yourself or for Valued Elders

Instead of doing a big post looking back at the Create in Me retreat, I am much more likely this week to write a series of smaller posts.  This morning, we are hoping that our bathroom remodel gets underway, and I still have to go to campus this week.  In short, it's not going to be a week of lots of downtime.  I'm hoping for some downtime in May.

But before we get too far away from the retreat, let me remember my writing workshop on Saturday, a workshop called Preservation in Prose, a spiritual autobiography/memoir workshop.  It was a delightful group, even though there were only two people in addition to me and a person who came late.  And even more delightful--I got some writing done too.

What we did is adaptable for individual writers and for larger groups.  It's good to capture our own stories, and it's also a way to capture the stories of other people who aren't as interested in writing.

I began with a collection of objects on the table:  quilt squares (one old and tattered, one a take-away from Quilt Camp), a nail, a game piece, an Easter bunny sticker, a Scrabble tile--in short, anything I could find on various tables at the Create in Me retreat, plus some goodies from an Easter Egg hunt bag of treats prepared for kids.  We each chose one and wrote about why we chose it.  Then we discussed.

We moved to a different kind of imaginative writing.  First we imagined ourselves twenty to thirty years from now.  It's a variation of asking my students to imagine themselves as 80 year olds.  I had them write a letter from their older selves to the people they are now.  Then we did the same thing in reverse.  Have your late adolescent self write to the person you are now.

Then we made some lists like this one:

6 natural objects

6 humanmade objects

6 ordinary actions

6 art materials

We talked about metaphor, simile, and imagery--how can our concept of God change if we compare God to something on the list?  

From there, we filled in this list on one side of the handout that I created:

Detail of shift from one season to another ________________________________

Type of noise ________________________________________

Element of nature _____________________________________________

Type of emotion _________________________________________________

Favorite flower __________________________________________________

Something very tiny ________________________________________________

Floor or wall covering ______________________________________________

Something nourishing ________________________________________________

Favorite fruit __________________________________________________________

Element of self-care ______________________________________________

Something only found in a park _________________________________________

Something that oozes _____________________________________________

Favorite treat ________________________________________________________

Something that turns _______________________________________________

Favorite musical instrument ________________________________________________

Something that grinds ___________________________________________________

Something huge_____________________________________________________

Something only found in a big city ____________________________________

Favorite food made for you by an older generation ___________________________

Then we filled out this list with the items from the first list:

--A commitment to God helps us offer __________________________________.

--We yearn for the day when justice covers the earth like ______________________________.

--We are crushed into bits smaller than _____________________ by Powers and Principalities, by the forces of the world, by Satan.

--Truth rolls down through the valley like ________________________________________.

--When I work with God, it’s as if _______________________________________.

--When I think of redemption, I think of __________________________________.

--I first heard God’s call as __________________________________ .

--Evildoers cover their rotten foundations with _____________________________.

--We burn with __________________________________for the vision of new life that Jesus offers.

--I have seen the Holy Spirit moving through world like ________________________________.

--My spiritual history is like ___________________________________________.

--Injustice grinds us like a giant ____________________________________________.

--The____________________________ of justice turns slowly, but the turning does occur.

--The community of God is like _____________________________________________.

--The ___________________________of justice has found fertile soil in my heart.

--A partnership with God is like _________________________________________.

--_________________________grows in the garden of redemption.

My brain created some poem fragments that had nothing to do with the two lists--that was a delight too.

Sermon Conclusions and Unexpected Blessings of a Retreat

I will write more about the Create in Me retreat when I have more time tomorrow.  Soon I will need to put on my presentable clothes and drive across the mountain to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  One of the blessings of the retreat:  yesterday, it gave me a way to conclude my sermon on the disciples in the locked room and doubting Thomas:

God meets us where we are. I was at a creativity retreat at Lutheridge this week, and at the creative writing workshop I offered one woman said of her spiritual journey, “Jesus knocks on the door. All we have to do is answer it.” This week’s Gospel reading tells us that we don’t even have to open the door. If we’re too tired, too full of doubt and despair, Jesus doesn’t need us to do a dang thing. That’s the nature of grace. Before we even realize we need to open the door, Jesus appears, offering us what we need, getting us ready for what’s ahead.

Retreats and My Current Life

A few weeks ago, I was at Quilt Camp at Lutheridge.  This week I'm at a different retreat at Lutheridge, the Create in Me retreat.  Both of them make me happy, but in different ways.  Create in Me has a variety of activities, with workshops and Bible Study and much more involved worship services.  Quilt Camp gives us lots of time and space to work on our own projects that we bring with us.

When I'm at one, I'm missing the other.  Having gone to both for several years now, I know to expect this feeling.  I'm also missing past years, past people.  Again, I know to expect this, but it often makes me feel strange.

It's not a new revelation:  I'm happier when I'm not comparing experiences.  Still, it's so hard for me not to compare.

I've also been thinking about past years, about how sad I was as I made my way home to the flat land of Florida.  I've been thinking about how astonished past Kristin would be to find out that I had finally found a home in the mountains.

Of course, one of the disadvantages of a house here at Lutheridge is that I don't really feel like I'm on retreat, like I've been away, when I return to my house each night.  Of course, one of the advantages of my current life is that many of the elements of retreat life are present in my daily life.

Eclipse Glasses and Easter

I thought about crafting a sermon for the adults around the ideas of Easter and the eclipse.  But I decided to use the ideas for my children's sermon--in the church where I am Synod Appointed Minister, the adults listen to both the children's sermon and the one for the adults.

I ordered enough eclipse glasses for all, children and adults, and before the children's sermon, I gave each child a pair, had them put them on, and took a picture.  I've edited these pictures to protect the privacy of minors.

Then I had them take the glasses off.  For those of you who haven't gotten your eclipse glasses yet, these are very dark, as they should be.  If you put them on and can still see objects as you look through them, they won't protect your eyes when you stare at the sun.

I told the youth to be listening in the post-Easter readings, because people would have this same experience when they met the risen Jesus.  They wouldn't recognize him at first.  Then something would happen, usually involving food, and it would be as if they took their eclipse glasses off--suddenly they'd be able to see what was right in front of them.

Our lives are the same way.  God is at work in the world, but often, we can't see it.  Maybe we're wearing our eclipse glasses of grief, despair, or cynicism.  Maybe we're too anxious to look.  Maybe we're focused on the wrong thing, while something of celestial magnificence is happening.

Jesus appears, and gently, he reminds us to take off our eclipse glasses.  In the breaking of the bread, we recognize divine love.

Life in the Drywall Dust

Another fragmented morning.  Let me collect some fragments and see what mosaic might emerge:

--I sit here in the middle of drywall dust, trying to stay out of the way.  Those of you who have never seen a wall installed likely have no idea of the process.  A wall that is put together well has that inevitable feeling of having always been.  The seams are hidden away, the nails that connect the drywall to the studs blanketed beneath plaster.

--But it's good to see signs of progress.  I try hard not to think about how far we still have to go.  Those home remodel shows make it look so easy:  zip, zip, here's your new house.

--I have spent a lot of time this week feeling planted at a desk, both in a good way and a bad way.  I've gotten a lot done, as I sat at my desk trying to stay out of the way.  But I am feeling like I need to move more.

--Yesterday I stayed planted at my office desk at Spartanburg Methodist College.  I was meeting a friend for early dinner, so I stayed after my last class.

--I have gotten seminary writing done and other tasks too--tis the season for lots of grading.  I also did a bit of shopping.  I have enough clothes for teaching 2 days a week, but in the fall, when I go to five days a week, I needed one or two more sweaters to finish some outfits.  They are cheaper now than they will be in the fall.  If I got my order in before Land's End sold out of them, I should be set.

--Over the past two year, my apocalyptic gal's inner sense perked up at mention of bird flu getting into wild bird populations.  Now it's infected dairy cows.  Happily, there is a vaccine, although I don't think we know how well it works.  And it won't infect humans unless it gets deep in the lungs--that's what's kept it at bay this long.  But still . . . this is the pandemic I've been expecting for almost two decades.  It's not here yet, but it's closer.

One Last Look at Easter 2024

Before we get too far away from Easter Sunday, I want to record some memories.  It was a whirlwind day, in many ways.  But compared to other church folk, my day was laid back:  no sunrise service, no Easter egg hunt, only one service.  

In some ways it was like any other Sunday.  We got up early and got ready for church at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I had a decent enough Easter outfit, but as always, I didn't like my shoe options.  I decided to wear my special Easter socks that come just over my ankles with sandals.  It was warm enough for bare feet, but my feet are in rough shape--Maundy Thursday feet, not Easter feet.  It usually doesn't concern me, but Easter felt different.  In the past I've solved the problem with toenail polish, but I hadn't planned ahead.

I found a way to solve my sermon, did a bit of polishing, and printed it out.  We put our stuff in the car and headed across the mountains, which looked soft and furry in the early morning light.  I couldn't get a good shot of them, but this gives you an idea.

And later, when we stopped at the Tennessee Welcome Center where we always stop, I saw this glow in the mountains.  I knew it was a trick of clouds and sunlight.  But it had an Easter morning vibe that this view doesn't usually have.

We got to the church early-ish, before most folks, because we had no Sunday School.  The wooden cross sat outside, wrapped in chicken wire, empty.  But it wasn't long before people arrived and started filling it up with flowers.  When a parishioner offered to take our picture in front of it, we couldn't resist.

My spouse had suggested that in addition to unboxing the alleluias, we have noisemakers for everyone to shake when we say or sing an alleluia.  Faith Lutheran hadn't done that before, and it worked beautifully.  There was an energy in the church that isn't always there.

My sermons went well, both the children's sermon with eclipse glasses (more in a later blog post) and my sermon on the Gospel (if you want to read that sermon, I put it in this blog post).  There was a moment near the end where I felt like I might get a bit choked up at the idea of Jesus waiting for us further on up the road.  But I pulled myself together and finished the sermon.

After the service, several people told me I had done a marvelous job.  That might have just been the Easter energy.  Still, it was great to feel the Easter energy taking us all out into the world. 

And then we hopped in the car and drove back across the mountains--still beautiful, a subdued set of blues.  We stopped by the local grocery store just before we got home, and we picked up our Easter meal:  steak, potatoes, mushrooms, and red wine.  Not exactly traditional Easter, but we don't have traditional Easter meals in our house.

It was a good Easter, and I am guessing that in much later years, when I look back, I'll see it as one of the best Easters.

Easter Pre-Dawn: 2024

Easter Sunday:  soon we will go to the car and head over the mountains to Bristol, Tennessee, where I will preach and preside at Faith Lutheran.  I've preached many sermons before, but never the Easter sermon.  We are doing the passage from Mark, the last part of Mark, without the verses tacked on in the second century.  The women run away, amazed and terrified.

But that's O.K.  They are going to Galilee, where they will tell the men what they have heard.  They are going to Galilee, where Jesus will meet them.  Jesus has gone ahead.  Jesus has also gone back to the place where it all began.  From there, the next phase of ministry will launch.

Time is short.  Time to put on my Easter socks to hide my Maundy Thursday feet (such mangled toenails!) and white sandals.  Time to print the sermon.  Time to go, to proclaim the good news that the brutal forces of empire and hate do not have the final word.

Empire is so much more fragile than it seems.  Chaos always lurks at the margins.  But God has a larger vision and invites us to be part of it.

Today and every day, I hope we say yes.

Good Friday at the Mammography Center

I spent the better part of Good Friday morning at the Mission Breast Imaging in Asheville; it sounds like a pornography company, doesn't it?  On February 28, I had what I assumed would be a routine mammogram, and a few weeks later, I was told that I needed follow up, plus they hadn't been able to get my scans from mammograms that I had done in South Florida in 2019 and 2021.

Happily, I no longer live in South Florida.  My GP ordered the follow up scans that same day, and I grabbed the first appointment that worked with my schedule, even though it was Good Friday morning.  It was surreal to enter the medical-industrial complex the morning after Maundy Thursday service.

Unlike South Florida, the medical facilities here are much less industrial.  I realize that a certain amount of my different perception is that I'm only seeing part of it--much like an expectant couple sees the loveliest of birthing rooms when making plans.  Still, there aren't as many people in the waiting rooms, the pace is efficient, and I'm not the youngest one in the waiting room by several decades here in the mountains.

I thought about how much kinder I felt in this setting. We were all there, in our wide variety of bodies. Everyone looked beautiful to me. And even though we were in this medical-industrial setting, I felt that people were more relaxed than they would be if I saw them in the grocery store. Was it the lack of men? No male gaze judging us? Maybe it was the fact that we were existing out of time—our to do lists took a back seat to this task of finding out if we have cancer.

I noticed the strategically placed boxes of tissues.  I thought about how I do not have time for cancer right now.  I thought about all the ways I've been unkind to my body and harsh in judging my physical self.  I thought about how much I haven’t appreciated my health, especially when I’ve been focused on my weight gain or my arthritic feet or all the ways I’m not as strong and capable as I once was.  I felt weepy, and I thought, well, if you can't cry in the waiting room of a mammography center, then where can you?  I dabbed at my eyes, because I am always afraid that if I let myself cry in public, I won't be able to stop.

The mammogram itself was surreal, as it always is to me.  I confess that I dreaded this week's dentist appointment more than the mammogram appointment.  And I am happy to report that both visits sent me away with a clean bill of health.  I didn't even need the follow up ultrasound that was scheduled yesterday.

The radiologist thinks that worrisome image on my February 28 scan was just bunched up tissue.  Part of me wanted yet another follow up, but I reminded myself that I got 4 scans yesterday, two of which were very pinched in on a specific area.  I decided that I deserved a treat, but not alcohol.  Given the amount of cancer in my family, I've decided to stay as abstinent when it comes to alcohol as I can.  Some days that's easier than others.

So yesterday, I rewarded myself with cake and flavored coffee and a bit of chocolate.  Happily, the Fresh Market is on my way home.  I thought about how often the Fresh Market has helped me celebrate.  When I got notice that I had passed my PhD written Comprehensive Exams, I went to the Fresh Market in Columbia, SC and got whatever I wanted, much of which was chocolate and baked goods.  My friend who went with me remembers that trip as one of the most joyous expeditions ever.  I do too.

Yesterday was joy-filled too, but also a tinged with weak-limbed relief.  I walked through the store, dabbing at my still-weepy eyes, saying prayers of gratitude, praying for those that wouldn't be receiving good news on Good Friday (or any other day in a cancer screening center).

I thought about the Good Friday in 2022 when I went out for a pre-dawn walk, tripped, and fell.  I broke my wrist, although it would take me days to fully understand that I broke it.  It would take me even longer to realize what a horrible break I had.  I made this Facebook post:  "Some years on Good Friday, you trip and fall and break your wrist (me in 2022, although it took me days to understand that I had broken my wrist, not just sprained it). Some years on Good Friday, you go back to have a follow up mammogram and ultrasound, and the news is good: not cancer, just bunched up tissue in the first mammogram in February (me, today, feeling grateful and guilty-ish, because so many people don't get good news)."

This morning, I started a poem with these lines, which will have the same title as this blog post:

No one mocks us here.
Here our flesh is treated with the care
it deserves. We are bound,
but tenderly, so that the mammographer can see
beyond the surface.

It will be interesting to see what develops (a bit of imaging punnery, which I couldn't resist).

The Roads Taken

There was a moment last night, looking out across the congregation of Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee, when I was a tad overwhelmed by all that has happened in the past two years.  Two years ago on Maundy Thursday (which was in mid-April in 2022), I had been severed from my full-time job, and I thought we were headed to D.C. to live in seminary housing.

On Good Friday of 2022, I broke my wrist, although it would take me time to figure out that I had broken it.  By the end of April of 2022, we were in the process of buying our Lutheridge house.  

I was also thinking about a year ago, when I would have been having the conversations that would lead to my current work position, conversations about becoming the Synod Appointed Minister (SAM) for Faith Lutheran and my teaching job at Spartanburg Methodist College.  Last night I was thinking about how situations I thought would be temporary are being extended.  I am trying not to wish it could be permanent.

Of course, it might be more permanent than I've been thinking it could be.  In terms of Faith Lutheran, much of the future isn't up to me; the Bishop will have a say, and the church governing structure will have a say.  Likewise, my lectureship at SMC might be extended, or it might be transformed into something else, and that something else may be more permanent (a tenure track job) or less permanent (back to adjunct work).

Last night at the end of the Maundy Thursday worship service, we stripped the altar.  Almost everyone had a part to play, an item to carry out.  It was much more participatory than anything I've experienced before.  As I watched it happen, again I marveled at the circumstances that brought me to be in this position:  the expectation of closed seminary housing which led me to reach out to Bishop Strickland about a possible internship site that could happen no matter where I was located, which led him to ask about the possibility of me being a SAM, which led me to decide to commit to moving back to my Lutheridge house and finishing my MDiv degree from a distance.

It's a strange place to be in, here for now, the future unknown.  In so many ways, that's our situation much of the time, whether we realize it or not.  I've gotten good at doing my best for the people where I am, where they are.  Being a college teacher at a school that doesn't have degrees in my subject area (English) has trained me to know that we'll only be together for a short time and to be O.K. with that.

As we drove home last night, leaving Bristol as the last streaks of sun drained from the sky, I looked out across pastures and thought about all the different paths one can take in life, how much I am loving being a part-time minister at a small country church.  If someone started out at a small country church and stayed there for their whole career, would that someone wonder about the roads not taken, perhaps yearning to have experienced being part of a ministry team with much larger resources?

Of course, we assume that if we're at a place with more resources, we'll be able to use them.  I know that I've often been happiest in job settings with fewer resources which meant I was left alone to do my own thing.  The same might be true of small congregations from the point of view of church members.  In small churches, more people get to step up and do more--there's not a team of people who will do it, and we can't say, "Well, we pay the church workers to do these things, so I'm not going to."

And now we shift to Good Friday.  Here's the close to my Good Friday sermon, a good grounding for the day:  "For today, let us sit with Good Friday: the sadness, the horror, the wishing that our salvation did not have to look this way. Let us remember how much our societies want to break anyone who offers a different vision of a more just world. Let us stand in solidarity with those who are shattered by our societies. Let us trust in a God who gives us free will to make disastrous decisions, but who will also show us in spectacular ways that the forces of death and destruction will not have the final word."

Quick Maundy Thursday Post

Another Maundy Thursday, and I am writing later than I usually would.  I was finishing both my Maundy Thursday and Good Friday sermons, trying to connect the printer, getting ready to drive down the mountain to teach at Spartanburg Methodist College.

After I am done teaching, I will drive back up the mountain, stop at my Lutheridge house, and then my spouse and I will drive to Bristol, Tennessee, so that I can lead Maundy Thursday service at Faith Lutheran.  There have been many moments this morning when I wondered why I didn't just move my classes online.  Today will be more driving than many Maundy Thursdays in the past.

I am used to working my way through Holy Week, and I am glad that my seminary doesn't have classes--one of the benefits of a theological education, as opposed to other types of school I could be doing.

Still, my writing time today is short, so let me end with a good quote.  In her book An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor comments on the Last Supper: "With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he [Jesus] did not give something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do--specific ways of being together in their bodies--that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself" (43).  Jesus gave us all "embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet" (44).

Where We Are in the World

It is one of those mornings where I'll record some thoughts and see if I observe any connections.  Even if I don't, random thoughts are interesting too.

--This morning in an article in The Washington Post I saw a picture of the four Supreme Court justices who are female.  They are a diverse group, in terms of age, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of race, in terms of religion.  I feel so fortunate to have lived this long to see this diversity, even if I don't always agree with decisions from the Supreme Court.

--I find myself thinking about how hot the oceans are--breaking records for 10 months in a row.  If you want to see some charts, these are the ones that haunt my dreams (and yes, I've been having apocalyptic dreams about storms coming and relentless floods).  

--After apocalyptic dreams, I wake up so happy that we sold our house in South Florida.  My spouse continues to complain about how cold, damp, dark, and windy it is here, but in terms of climate change, it's about as safe a place as we could afford.  In terms of political chaos, I feel the same way.  The passages from the Gospel of Mark (chapter 14), which I've been reading for Holy Week sermon prep, resonate in ways they always have, that warning about seeing cultural collapse and the need to flee to the mountains.

--This line came to me yesterday morning; it's not much of a line, but I want to record it:  Meanwhile, the sea simmers

--I think about the lines I created last week, lines about needles.  I'm thinking about slender things like needles and lines on a graph, things slender enough to disappear, but can stab you when you least expect it.

--I'm also thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague at Spartanburg Methodist College yesterday; we were talking about our frustrations with research papers.  She has students write about a place or location that shaped them, and then they do some research on that place.  I really like that idea.

--I also like the idea of bringing in quilts to knot and having students devise a research project around that process.  They could research quilts or Lutheran World Relief or the places where the quilts are going.

--I've been thinking about what I want students to spend time thinking about, which is what they value, what they want to be as humans, not as parts of the capitalist experience.  

--I've also been thinking about where we are in the life of the planet, who we are in history.  I've been thinking of living history projects.  I've been thinking of journals, like the one that Dorothy Wordsworth kept, that have been important.  Could I devise writing projects that have students record the minutiae of their days and then look at what it all means?

--I love the idea of having them do a creative project and then have them write a process kind of essay, a meta/how I created this kind of paper.  I want to believe that there's less chance of cheating this way, but I could be sadly mistaken.

--It is great to feel inspired about teaching again.  My colleagues have such cool ideas.  But then again, I've been lucky to have always had colleagues with cool ideas.

Bridge Collapses and Modern Life

I had thought about various blog posts to write--and then I heard about the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore.  The video is dramatic, as are the pictures of the bridge in the water.  I suppose it could have been much worse.  The collapse happened at 1:30 in the morning, so there wouldn't have been as many vehicles on it as there would have been 5 hours earlier.

The collapse happened because a freighter crashed into it--many questions there.  I can't decide if I feel better or worse in knowing the cause.  On the one hand, at least it's not an infrastructure collapse.  On the other hand, how could a freighter go off course this way?  It's not like a recreational boater was being an idiot.  

Every time I hear of a bridge collapse, I wonder about the moments of collapse from the perspective of the drivers on the bridge.  At what point do they realize what is happening?  Or do they?  If the car leaves the bridge and falls, is that fall survivable?

I still have a little hammer in my car, a tool designed to break car windows, with a slicer on the other end that could help me get out of the seat belt if need be.  I bought them over 20 years ago, after seeing several news accounts of people going off the road into canals.  Even though my risk of going into a canal is much lower up here in the mountains, I keep one in the car, where I could get to it from the driver's front seat, if necessary.

[edited on 3/27/24:  in the articles in the aftermath of the bridge collapse, I read this one in The Washington Post that recommends not wasting precious moments trying to find any sort of tool to break the windows.  You've got about a minute where your electric windows will go down, and that's what you should do.  Here's the acronym SWOC and what it means:    

• Seat belts off.
• Windows open.
• Out immediately.
• Children first.  

It's easier to push people out of the sinking car than to pull them out.]

I thought about my route down to Spartanburg.  Do I go across any bridges?  I do, but they're not as dramatic as the Key Bridge.  If one of those collapsed, would it be survivable?

Hopefully, I'll never find out; hopefully the infrastructure will hold.  Every bridge I cross is not a bridge that could be struck by a freighter ship or anything big enough to cause a collapse--I think.

Let me bring these wonderings to a close so that I can get to work on time.

The Feast Day of the Annunciation

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, the feast day which celebrates the appearance of the angel Gabriel, who tells Mary of her opportunity to be part of God's mission of redemption. The angel Gabriel appears to Mary and says, in the older wording that I still like best, "Hail, oh blessed one! The Lord is with you!" Mary asks some questions, and Gabriel says, "For nothing will be impossible with God" (Luke 1: 37). And Mary says, ". . . let it be with me according to your word" (Luke 1: 38).

That means only 9 months until Christmas. If I wrote a different kind of blog, I'd fill the rest of this post with witty ways to make your shopping easier. But instead of spending the next nine months strategically getting our gifts bought, maybe we should think about the next nine months in terms of waiting for God, watching for God, incubating the Divine.

I find Mary an interesting model for modern spirituality. Notice what is required of Mary. She must wait.

Mary is not required to enter into a spiritual boot camp to get herself ready for this great honor. No, she must be present to God and be willing to have a daily relationship, an intimacy that most of us would never make time for. She doesn't have to travel or make a pilgrimage to a different land. She doesn't have to go to school to work on a Ph.D. She isn't even required to go to the Temple any extra amount. She must simply slow down and be present. And of course, she must be willing to be pregnant, which requires more of her than most of us will offer up to God. And there's the later part of the story, where she must watch her son die an agonizing death.

But before she is called upon to these greater tasks, first she must slow down enough to hear God. I've often thought that if the angel Gabriel came looking for any one of us, we'd be difficult to find. Gabriel would need to make an appointment months in advance!

In our society, it's interesting to me to wonder what God would have to do to get our attention. I once wrote these lines in a poem:

I don’t want God to have to fling
frogs at me to get my attention. I want
to be so in touch that I hear the still,
small voice crying in this wilderness of American life.
I don’t want God to set fire to the shrubbery to get my notice.

We might think about how we can listen for God's call. Most of us live noisy lives: we're always on our cell phones, we've often got several televisions blaring in the house at once, we're surrounded by traffic (and their loud stereos), we've got people who want to talk, talk, talk. Maybe today would be a good day to take a vow of silence, inasmuch as we can, to listen for God.

If we can't take a vow of silence, we could look for ways to have some silence in our days. We could start with five minutes and build up from there.

Maybe we can't be silent, but there are other ways to tune in to God. Maybe we want to keep a dream journal to see if God tries to break through to us in that way. Maybe we want to keep a prayer journal, so that we have a record of our prayer life--and maybe we want to revisit that journal periodically to see how God answers our prayers.

Let us celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation by thinking about our own lives. What does God call us to do? How will we answer that call?

(And yes, I realize the feast day might be moved because we're in Holy Week, but I'm writing about it today, before heading off to 9 a.m. Mass at Saint Barnabas for a Worship Immersion paper).

Down from the Mountain

Here's a curious thing I noticed this year:  even though I live at camp, even though I live on the mountain, I still have a coming down from the mountain kind of experience.

For those of you wondering what on earth I'm talking about, it's the coming back from a retreat experience, or some other time out of time experience, the kind where you think, why can't all of life be this way?  For those of you with church experience, you may recognize various mountain top experiences,  like the Transfiguration story, where Jesus takes a few disciples up to the top of a mountain, where he is transfigured and he has discussions with theological greats, Moses and Elijah.  Understandably, the disciples don't want to leave.  

But every mountain top experience ends in leaving the mountain and going back to regular life.  In the past, my mountain top experiences at Lutheridge ended in a 12 hour drive back to the flatlands of South Florida.  It took me some time to get my regular life groove back, in part because of the drive.

I had thought that now that I live at Lutheridge, some of my trouble getting back into regular life rhythms might disappear, and some of them have.  Quilt Camp ended at 11, and I made my way home, a 2 minute drive.  Yesterday afternoon, I was still able to walk around camp, which was a nice change to my 12 hour drive trip home of past years.  But I still felt this sadness that Quilt Camp was over.

Part of my sadness comes from the return to a house that's under construction, with cramped work spaces--so different from the past few days at the Faith Center, with a work station that gave me plenty of room to spread out.

I decided that we needed to do something besides diving deep into our to do list.  So I suggested that we get pizza and watch a movie.  And that's exactly what we did.  I love our local pizza place, Acropolis, and we got two pizzas to go with our movie.  We watched Road House, both the brand new version with Jake Gyllenhaal, and the original with Patrick Swayze.  The original had more nudity, both had lots of people beating each other up with very few broken bones, and lots of explosions.  Neither required much brain power, which was what I wanted.

So here we are, Palm Sunday, the launch into Holy Week.  Let me go to get the day started.  It's another week of schedule disruptions, but that can be a good thing.  It's good to be jolted out of our regular life experiences, good to remember that there's more than what we perceive on a daily basis.

Domestic Arts and Societal Collapse: An Overview

This morning, a line came to me: The sound of scissors slicing through fabric.  

Is it something different than the beginnings of a poem about needles?  Perhaps.  Maybe it's a poem about how we think that sewing is about putting pieces together, but it's really a skill that requires lots of cutting.  We think of piecing as putting together small scraps into a larger whole, but we lose sight of the process that makes the small scraps.

Something apocalyptic lurks in the background of my thinking this morning.  I like the idea of linking hobbies that we see as evoking a cozy domesticity to larger societal collapse--I have always loved that juxtaposition.

I also like the idea of something that most people see as useless--embroidery, for example--to some larger skill that will be needed in the future.  The woman who can embroider will be able to suture your skin together when the emergency room has collapsed when the power grid went down.  Too much?

I only have a few hours left of Quilt Camp, so let me return to fabric arts today--back to art with words tomorrow.

Theologian to the Algorithm: Inspirations from Quilt Camp

On Wednesday morning, I had 15 squares that needed finishing.  This morning, I have 8.  In some ways, I thought I was making more progress.  I thought I might be able to sew the whole top together, but I don't think that will happen this week.  I am fine with that.

I've gotten a chance to connect with old friends.  I've taken a look at their projects and heard about their lives.  That aspect is one of the most important parts of a retreat for me.

I've gotten a lot of sewing done, and a lot of sorting of scraps.  I have an idea for a next project, one that will be easier to pick up and put down as I keep my spouse company while he watches T.V.

I've gotten other work done too, seminary work and teaching work, done with scraps of time here or there.  It's a valuable lesson, and I'm glad that I learned it early--one can accomplish a lot, even if one only has 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.

I've remembered other truths too, like the calming effect of stitching straight lines by hand.  In our devotional time on Wednesday night, we took a deep breath in and a deep breath out.  We did it a few more times.  I thought, I know the power of deep breathing--why do I always forget to do it?

I've heard from several people who tune in to morning watch, the short devotional that I do each morning.  It's housed on my Florida church's Facebook page, and I link to it on my Facebook page each day.  I started doing it 4 years ago, as various church members were trying to keep our community sane and grounded and connected.  It's good for me, so I keep doing it.  I hear from a few people who leave comments, but there's no way for me to know the ultimate numbers of who views it.  I have never been able to decipher Facebook's metrics, and I'm sure that's by design.  Right now, it's free, so why not continue?

I say free, and I do realize that Facebook gets something out of it, or we wouldn't be able to use the site the way we do.  It's hard for me to imagine that my 12 minutes of devotional time is very useful to the algorithm creators who vacuum up all our data and content, but who knows.

Now I have a vision of generative AI learning by using my morning devotional time, which uses Phyllis Tickle's work in The Divine Hours, which uses an ancient lectionary.  That's me, theologian to AI and the algorithm!

I love retreats for the wide ranging inspirations they provide.  Happily, this one is no different.