Writing Later in the Morning

So, here I am, blogging at a later time than is usual.  I've been up for hours, but I decided it was time to write in my offline journal, so that was my pre-dawn writing.  I'm done with both the classes I've been taking and the classes I've been teaching, but home repair has moved right in to take up the time that semester endings freed up.  

This morning I went back to Lowe's to get more of the tile we got last night.  I was happy to do it.  We've changed the design of the second shower, and these tiles will look better for the small corner bench.  Soon I will do the daily grocery run.

A quick zip to the store is so different here than in South Florida, although the distance traveled is similar.  The wait to check out is shorter, and the parking feels easier.  Of course, I'm also not in an office 45-60 hours a week, so maybe it's my perspective that has changed.

I've been hearing about heat indexes in South Florida this week:  115 at Key West yesterday.  Yikes.  And the ocean temps are the same as they were in mid-August last year, but it's May, now, not later in the year.  I just looked up the weather for Hollywood, and the heat index is 95 right now, at 9:42 in the morning.

I am so glad not to live there.  If I lived there, I'd be dreading hurricane season, and with good reason.

I got up this morning after having a series of apocalyptic dreams, needing to get to a safer place, trying to make sure we'd packed what we needed.  I had a similar dream 4 times, and in each dream, I was trying to remember to take the baking sheets.

Really?  Not the computer or the guns but the baking sheets?  My baking sheets are not that special.

Well, as a first attempt of blogging later in the morning, I'm not thrilled with this entry.  But I'll post it anyway.

Music Men and Women Writers

It's the kind of morning where I have a variety of much shorter thoughts.  Let me record them and maybe a pattern will emerge.

--I am not one of the people on social media talking about how much the stories of Alice Munro meant to me.  I remember reading her short stories long ago and being impressed.  But I don't read them now.  She's not one of my touchstone authors.  I am sad that she's gone, but she was in her early 90's, so it's not unexpected.  She did win the Nobel Prize in Literature, so it's not like she was as unknown/unappreciated as some of those social media posters make it sound.

--I feel similarly about David Sanborn, who also died this week.  I have several of his CDs, or once I did.  I might have seen him play at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival.  But he's not a musician who provided the soundtrack of my life.

--On Sunday, we started watching The Music Man, the movie with Shirley Jones and little Ronnie Howard.  I was surprised by how many of the songs I could sing from memory.  I remember watching the movie long ago, in elementary school, when it aired on TV.  I probably went to an amateur stage production along the way. Why do I know this music?  It is a great soundtrack, and I do remember that my parents owned a copy (on vinyl).  But I don't remember them playing it often.

--Yesterday, we started watching Station Eleven, on a DVD copy I got from the public library.  Was the sound quality this bad on streaming?  We watched two episodes, and I don't know that I can keep watching.

--I wanted something easier to watch last night, so we watched The Blues Brothers, which I've only seen once.  I enjoyed it more this time, but I still wasn't blown away.  The music was great, but the plot was a bit thin--and so much destructions of police cars and plate glass windows!

--We are both fighting off colds.  Mine wants to take root in me, and my spouse has been under the weather for almost a week, with lots of rib rattling coughing.  I'm mainly congested, but I've been stuffy for weeks, so mine may just be allergies.

--Happily, most of my work for Spring 2024 term is done.  I've still got one paper to turn in, and I'll do that later this morning.  I'll also do some errand running; I checked out two physical books from the Wesley library, and now I need to mail them back.  I did use them in my final paper, so that's good.  I remember when I was first accepted to Wesley back in 2021, and I imagined having the library send me books by way of mail on a weekly basis.  But this term has been the first time I needed to take advantage of that perk.

--I hope I still see it as a perk when I find out how much I have to pay to ship the books back.

--The tile guys will be here soon.  Let me get ready to move the bigger car out of the driveway.

Blogging in the Anthropocene

My blogging has dropped off a bit, but I'm hoping that will change, as I shift into summer.  I turned in my last big paper on Saturday; I still have a small one to write, but that shouldn't be a problem.  I could blame my drop off in blogging on all the end of semester stuff I had to do (endless grading, lots and lots of papers to write), and that would be partly true.  My blogging drop off is also in part because of housing renovations.  We get up early to get everything ready for the tile team that appears at 8 a.m.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to wonder why I feel that I have to get my blogging done by 8 a.m. or wait until the next day.  It's probably because I started blogging in 2008, where each week day I needed to be shifting to getting ready for work by 8 a.m., if not earlier.  So, now I am resolved to feel free to blog even if the morning has gotten away from me.

It's also occurred to me to wonder why blogging continues to feel so important to me.  After all, my poetry writing has dropped off, and my fiction writing is non-existent right now.  But I've been doing that kind of writing longer, and I recognize cycles.  Blogging has been a consistent form of writing for me, and the cycle has been that I get up and write before the day gets underway.

I like having an online journal and an offline journal.  Keeping a record of what life was like in the 21st century feels essential to me.  I've always loved the journals of other people, particularly women (particularly Dorothy Wordsworth), and their writing inspires me to do something similar, just like the writing of poets and novelists and short story writers inspire me to want to do something similar.

In pre-blogging days, I used to wonder what would happen to my journals if I died before achieving literary fame.  In these blogging days, I wonder what will happen if Google decides to charge a fee.  I like having an online journal, but what is it worth to me?  And why do I like having an online journal?  I like the idea that it might outlive me, but more importantly, it makes it easier for me.  It's much more searchable than my offline journal.

I've always been a person who goes back to my journals to see what was happening x years ago.  I like my blog because it's a bit more polished, a bit more edited.  I realize I'm biased, but it makes for good reading if I just have a bit of time to kill.  I often go to look up something, like a recipe or what was happening in my work life or a poem, and I find myself reading through a whole month of past posts.

So I'll keep blogging, and I'll look for ways to be more flexible with myself.  I'd like to get back to blogging once a day, and I'd like to get back to working on poetry daily too.  I have some weeks before my summer classes start, so it's a good time for a re-set. 

Mother's Day Sermon with Julian of Norwich

 

May 12, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


John 17:6-19


For many reasons, I’m always intrigued by depictions of Jesus praying. My brain first goes to Trinitarian questions: who does Jesus pray to? Himself? As we say the Nicene Creed later, let your mind think about the Trinity—really think about what we proclaim. And then next week, we’ll talk about the third aspect of the Trinity as we celebrate Pentecost.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent time with a friend who is creating a progress report for her department chair, but today I’m struck by the HR aspect of this final prayer of Jesus. Just before his death—and in the Gospel of John, more than any other Gospel, Jesus knows that death is coming for him—he reports back to the boss. He explains how he’s trained the disciples and now they are ready to be on their own. Our first reading from Acts has the same kind of effect, with Peter explaining how the ministry came to be.

But today is Mother’s Day, and I’m also struck by the idea of Jesus taking a nurturing role in praying for those he would leave behind—it’s definitely less an HR document than a parental kind of tone. As he prays to God as Father in the Gospel of John, it’s intriguing to look at Jesus as a mother.

I’ve spent many decades contemplating God as Father images, and trying to enlarge the concept we have of God. I’ve searched the Bible for images of the Creator that are female, and they are there, but they are fewer than images of God as male. Often when we get a female image for God the Creator, it involves mothering, like a bird sheltering little baby birds under her wing.

I haven’t ever thought about Jesus as a mother. He has a definite gender, after all. It’s harder to expand our metaphors for Jesus—at least it is for me. For some of our mystics, it hasn’t been.

This week on May 8, we celebrated the life of Julian of Norwich, who lived in the 1300’s. She was an anchoress, which meant she lived in a small cell attached to a cathedral, in almost complete isolation, spending her time in contemplation. She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She is likely the first woman to write a book-length work in English.

And what a book it is, what visions she had. She wrote about Christ as a mother--what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She compared Jesus’ agony on the cross with the agony of bearing a child, lots of bleeding and ripping of flesh. When she talks about the Eucharist, she uses imagery of Jesus breast feeding us.

She also stressed God, the creator, is both mother and father. Her visions showed her that God is love and compassion, an important message during the time of the Black Death.

The idea of a deity that is mothering goes back even further than a 14th century mystic like Julian of Norwich. Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson traces imagery of birth in the book of John, and she traces words that evoke birth imagery, and she looks at words that derive from the word from “womb” and how these words are used both to talk about God in the book of John and the birth process of becoming a believer.

I do realize how problematic the imagery of God as parent of either gender can be. Our own human relationships are complicated, and that can affect how we see these metaphors. Not all of us have a good relationship with our parents or with our children. Some of us have pain surrounding our parenting choices or our lack of choices. Happily there are other options for metaphors for how we see God. There are other lessons for how we are to live our lives as believers. If not children, if not subordinates, then what does today’s Gospel teach us?

Let’s return to today’s Gospel text that shows Jesus praying. This passage reminds us that we are sanctified, consecrated, and sent out into the world. The not yet message of the Gospel reminds us that we have work to do. And this Gospel passage reminds us of the stakes: Jesus prays that we will be protected from the evil one.

In many ways, our most basic task is to confront evil. Everything we do, everything we create, needs to be a challenge to evil. Perhaps it is evil, the way that horror movies show evil, as a force that is out to undermine us or even kill us. Perhaps it is a more mundane evil, the kind that whispers in our ear that we don’t really need to concern ourselves with the troubles in the world that we see. Perhaps it is the soul sapping evil of despair that tells us that nothing will ever be different.

But Jesus tells us over and over again, we are not to go through the world with our business as usual selves. We are not to have a self that we bring out on Sundays, in church, and our week day self, and our Saturday self. Our task is to live an integrated life, a life that lets the message of the Good News shine through us and our actions.

How do we do that? Here again, Jesus shows us the way. We are to care for everyone, and we can start by praying for them. If we read the Gospels, we see Jesus modeling many types of prayer, from the familiar Lord’s Prayer that we’ll pray just before communion to the less familiar prayers that he offers as he withdraws into solitude.

Here we have another prayer, one that we can offer too. Each day, pray the prayer that Jesus prayed so long ago, that his joy may be fulfilled in you (verse 13). Each day, look for ways to bring that joy to others. Each day, work for beauty and peace and the defeat of evil. In this way, you’ll be a force that helps create the new world that Jesus proclaims is arriving, the Kingdom of God that is both here and not yet born.

All of Our Cells

Yesterday's thoughts about Julian of Norwich made me think about her small space, called a cell, which then made me think about other uses of that word, which led me back to a poem that I wrote years ago. It holds up well. It first appeared in The Innisfree Poetry Journal, an online journal.  I included it in my third chapbook of poems, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

 
I got the idea for this poem when I was at Mepkin Abbey. I read a brochure that asked us to consider turning our cell phones off--not just to vibrate, but completely off. The word cell leapt off the page, and I immediately thought of the biological definition. Since I was at an abbey, I also thought of the definition associated with monasteries and abbeys. At the time, I didn't think of Julian of Norwich.  But I still like the poem.



Lectio

Some monk once said that we should return
to our cells, that our cells
would teach us everything we need to know.

She thinks of that monk
every time a cell phone interrupts
her class, that jarring, reproduction
of a ring tone, the student's rush
to return to the hall to take a call,
leaving the class behind to try to gather
the fragments of their scattered attention
to return to the task at hand.

She thinks of that monk
as she tries to declutter.
She chooses a different closet
each month. She tries to be ruthless
as she sorts, but she lapses
into sentimentality and maudlin tears.

She thinks of that monk
each month as she returns
to the doctor to do battle
against her own traitorous cells.

The doctor shows her scans of her invisible
insides. She sees the clumps that will kill
her. She thinks of terrorists plotting
their dark revenge, of a coven practicing
dark arts, of all the ways a cell
can go bad and destroy all it touches.

She returns to the church lit by candles.
The smell of wax and chant
of Psalms sends her back to childhood,
that original cell, still so much to learn.

Feast Day of Julian of Norwich

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, at least for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Anglicans; Catholics will celebrate on May 13.  I thought of her today as I maneuvered around my tiny writing space, my grandfather's desk wedged in between house remodeling supplies and tools, a drying rack, and the contents of a closet that's under reconstruction.  Of course, once I get around the desk, I have significantly more space than Julian of Norwich did, in her small cell off of a cathedral, where she was an anchoress, a type of monastic.

I've been interested in Julian of Norwich for a long time.  When I first started teaching the British Literature survey class in 1992, the Norton Anthology had just added her to the text used in so many survey classes.  Why had I not heard of her before?  After all, she was the first woman writing in English, at least the first one whose writing we still have.

My students and I found her writing strange, and I found her ideas compelling.  She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She wrote about Christ as a mother--what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She also stressed God is both mother and father. Here in the 21st century, we're still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife--and it's not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.

Her visions showed her that God is love and compassion, an important message during the time of the Black Death.  She is probably most famous for this quote, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well," which she claimed that God said to her. It certainly sounds like the God that I know too.

Although she was a medieval mystic, her work seems fresh and current, even these many centuries later. How many writers can make such a claim?

A few years ago, I read her complete works, which I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would.  The writing seemed circular, coming back to many ideas again and again, with lots of emphasis on the crucified, bleeding Jesus, lots of focus on suffering and sin. The excerpts that most of us read, if we read her at all, are plenty good enough.  I was both disappointed to discover that, and yet happy.

Not for the first time, I wonder what's been lost to history in terms of writing. If she was thinking about some of these explosive ideas, might others have been even more radical? What happened to them?

I'm grateful that we have her work--at least there's something that gives us a window into the medieval mind, which was more expansive than we usually give credit for.  And I'm grateful that so many people have discovered her in the decades since the Norton Anthology first included her.

Paper Progress

I did not expect to start writing my last paper for the term yesterday.  I thought I would read/scan a few more books and then start.  But yesterday morning during my walk, I had an idea for how to start, so I did.  And then I kept going.

I'm far from done, but I have time; it's not due until Saturday.  I'm in that phase of writing where I'm scared to go back to read what I've written, for fear that it's all gobbledygook.  Of course, I've been writing long enough that I know that even if it is gobbledygook, I can revise it into something workable.  And it's rarely all gobbledygook.

A few weeks ago, on a Monday walk, I had an idea for how to organize my final paper for Systematic Theology, and I came home and got right to work.  And it turned out to be very good--I got an A.  I looked at four church doctrines:  Soteriology, Ecclesiology, Eschatology, and Creation.  I did look at them somewhat systematically, using texts from the Bible and from theologians to help understand a new approach.

My last paper, the one I'm currently writing, is for the Environmental History of Christianity (EHC) class.  I'm looking at some of those church doctrines as being part of what got us to this climate crisis.  I'm trying not to repeat what I wrote for my Systematic Theology class, and when I was writing for Systematic Theology, I was also trying not to go too far into the topic that I planned to write for the EHC class.

Often my scholarly writing does not delight me in the way that poetry writing does.  But last night, I created this paragraph, which had inspired the kind of reaction that I usually only get when writing fiction or poetry:

How different our lives would be if we had a faith focused on the beginning of Christ’s life, not his death and resurrection. In some ways, the incarnation is more miraculous than the resurrection. A God who creates a cosmos out of chaos would find resurrecting a body to be ridiculously easy. But a God who chooses to come and experience human life alongside of us? That’s rare enough to be a miracle.

I liked the way it sounded, the repetition of c (cosmos, chaos) and r (resurrecting, ridiculously).  I was surprised by the idea:  resurrection is easy for God, but going through a human life is much more miraculous.

I've read enough to know how the idea in this paragraph borders on heresy, or maybe it's outright heresy, the idea that incarnation is more important than resurrection.  I will likely keep the paragraph in the essay.  It fits with what I'm trying to say.

I'm intrigued to continue with this writing.  Will I find more surprises?

World Labyrinth Day 2024

Yesterday was World Labyrinth Day, a day when we were encouraged to walk our local labyrinths at 1 p.m. local time in hopes of unleashing a "a rolling wave of peaceful energy."  A few weeks ago, I thought about organizing something, but my various semester endings submerged me, and before I knew it, it was Saturday.  

So, even though it was too late to invite others to walk with me, it wasn't too late to walk it myself.  So up the hill I headed to the Lutheridge labyrinth, created on an old tennis court where my mother played tennis when she was a counselor in the 1950's.

I thought there might be others, but no, I was on my own.  But that was O.K. too.  It was cloudy, the kind of cloudy that means rain is coming soon.  But that, too, was O.K.  I walked, thinking about labyrinths I've walked, people who have walked them with me, and the times I've walked them alone.  

As I walked home, I thought about the first time I read about labyrinths and yearned to walk one.  It was probably 2000 or 2001.  One of the earliest books was Nora Gallagher's Things Seen and Unseen.  Back in the early years of this century, I wasn't able to find as many labyrinths; there was only one in Broward county, at the local U.U. church.  It was a beautiful outdoor labyrinth, but I didn't walk it much, because it took me over half an hour to drive there.

Now I have a labyrinth in my own neighborhood, and in the past year, yesterday was the first time I've walked it.  In the coming year, I'm going to walk it more often.  What a gift it is to have a local labyrinth!

Sowing Seeds

Yesterday after my walk, I went to the library, where I picked up two apocalyptic books:  Parable of the Sower by Octavia Buter and Five Years After by William R. Forstchen, the fourth novel in the series that started with One Second After, about an explosion in the earth's atmosphere that creates an electromagnetic pulse that wipes out electronics, electricity, and most of the conveniences of modern life.

Part of me just wants books I know I will enjoy, which is why I return to books I've already read and enjoyed, like Parable of the Sower.  But yesterday, I started Five Years After, which is not a book I've read before.  I did read the other books in the series and enjoyed them immensely.

I went back to the 105 pages of my own apocalyptic novel.  I started it in summer of 2019 and picked it up again in winter of 2021.  I stopped writing it for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I wasn't sure where it wanted to go.  I still don't--but I do think it has a lot of potential.  Maybe I'll play with it this summer.

As I'm thinking about the novel today, I see that there are 3 characters from the protagonist's past, and each one will offer the protagonist a choice about the future--and because it's an apocalyptic novel, the future is rather bleak already.  Will she choose creativity or love or working to overthrow the government?

I came across this line in the manuscript:  "Older feminist activists kept records about which doctors would help, back when abortions weren’t legal."  I wrote that line in 2021, back when I thought the abortion question was mostly settled.  It makes me wonder what else I think of as mostly settled that might be suddenly restricted.  Sigh.

We're supposed to have more rain in the coming week than we've had in the past month, so I decided that yesterday was a good day to sow the quarter pound of wildflower seeds that I bought last year.  For the most part, I simply scattered them across the yard.  When I say yard, I really mean our patch of dead leaves and pine straw and forest floor.  Some parts get more sun than others.  We'll see what happens.

As I sowed the seeds, I thought about the parable of the sower, both the one in the Bible and the one by Octavia Butler.  I thought about seeds and soil and the fact that most wildflower seeds swept away by the wind aren't going to land in perfect potting soil mixes.  

I'll be intrigued to see what develops this summer:  with seeds, with reading, with writing an apocalyptic novel.

Semester's End (Almost)

I have turned in my paper for my Systematic Theology class--one more paper left!  It's due May 11, and I have some ideas, but I haven't started.  Yesterday I took some of the books for that paper out on the deck to read.

The class is the Environmental History of Christianity (EHC), so I was reading a book on climate change and Systematic Theology.  Happily, my idea for my paper hasn't been done to death, based on my research.  It was a bit surreal feeling, reading about the death of the planet, while I was out on the deck in the bright May sunshine, with birds singing, and all the trees in various shades of green.

It is strange to be close to being done, but not quite done.  I will be doing the last grading for 2 online classes this week-end, in addition to working towards the end of the EHC class.  The EHC class I took through the Consortium (a Wesley requirement), and it won't be done until May 17.  I'm done with my Spartanburg Methodist classes that I taught and with my Wesley classes that I took.

Still, I'm glad for staggered endings.  I wouldn't have wanted to finish everything in the same week.  Now it's off to the library to get some pleasure reading, which is a way that I celebrate semester endings from way, way back.

A More Welcoming Church--The Methodist Edition

Long, long ago, during grad school days, one of my friends came home quite angry.  "Do you know that you can't be gay and be a Lutheran pastor?"

I replied, "You do know that I'm not in charge of that, right?"  At that moment, I would have described myself as non church going, even though I was part of a Lutheran group that met on the campus of the University of South Carolina.  That student group was more inclusive than I imagined the larger church could ever be.

Decades have passed since then, and the Lutheran church, the ELCA variety, is more inclusive, although there is still a way to agree to disagree.  Pastors who are not white, male, and heterosexual may still find it tough to find a church willing to have them as a pastor.  Individual churches still have latitude to discriminate, and that doesn't make me happy.

I thought of these decades of changes that seem impossible and then seem to happen in a flash.  I was paying some attention to the national gathering of United Methodists in Charlotte, NC.  I knew that they hoped to resolve the issues that have been tearing them apart for the past several years when they couldn't meet in person.  And so, yesterday, I was happy to hear that the UMC voted to become a more inclusive church.

I know a bit more about the background because I go to a Methodist seminary, and last year, I attended an information session that occurred after chapel during lunch.  A year ago, as some of my fellow seminarians were graduating and taking calls in Methodist churches, I listened to their fears of what would happen if this vote went a different way.

I am so glad that my former classmates aren't waking up this morning with difficult decisions to make.  I am so glad that the United Methodist Church voted to become more inclusive.

Happy May Day!

Happy May Day!  Or Happy International Workers' Day!  Maybe we should dance around a Maypole singing "Solidarity Forever."

I imagine that most of us will go to our jobs on this fine May Day. Well, those of us in the U.S. will go to our jobs, if we still have jobs. May Day is a holiday in many other parts of the industrialized world.

In my elementary school in the 1970's, we had a May Day celebration that focused on flowers and Maypoles, not on workers. Looking back, I'm amazed that our teachers were able to rig together a Maypole. We spent weeks practicing the weaving of the ribbons in the Maypole dance. We had a whole Mayday festival. Parents came. There was a Mayday king and queen.

Ah, those good old pagan school days!

When I was a child, I liked the idea of leaving flower bouquets on people's front porches.  These days, I'd be hesitant to do that, even though I am up before the dawn.

I have rarely lived in a place where May was more springlike than summerlike.  But the nights cooled off, so May has often been the most tolerable month of the year, regardless of where I've lived.

Here in the mountains of North Carolina, we've had a fairly mild winter and a normal spring.  We're moving from flower season to green season.  I keep thinking of the strawberries that I bought last week on my way back from Spartanburg, and I'm fighting the temptation to drive back to South Carolina to get some more.  Maybe next week, when I don't have quite as much to do.

But perhaps I'll buy some flowers today when I go to the Fresh Market.  It's not the same as a surprise bouquet, but it will bring me joy.