Last Full Day of Quilt Camp

It's been a good few days at Quilt Camp.  I have two quilt tops I've been working on, and while I've made progress, they are still not done.  It looks like this one should be done when I stretch it on the design wall:

But stretched on the bed, it's not wide enough yet:

My other quilt top is similarly not finished yet.  Happily I have time and scraps and love doing the work.  Fortunately, we're not depending on the quilts I'm making to keep us from freezing to death in the winter.

At Quilt Camp, the projects of other quilters inspires me too.  Yesterday, I loved seeing these notecards made of scraps sewn on cardstock:

Here's the back of those cards:

And here's an abstract design:

Last night I came back to my nearby Lutheridge house because I have seminary class on Thursday nights.  I only have a few class meetings left, and this class which explores Christmas and Easter without the ministry in between, is one of the best classes I've ever taken in all of my student years.

Today is another day, the last full day, of sewing and socializing.  It's going to be wonderful, and I'm already feeling sad that Quilt Camp is soon over.  

Ways to Greet the Day: Lost Lenses or Fabric in Our Hands

It has already been a strange morning.  I put on my glasses that I use to read the computer when my contacts aren't in, and I thought my vision was odd.  I took them off and realized I didn't have as much trouble reading the computer screen as usual.  I thought it was my left eye that was strange.  Could I have left a contact lens in?  I touched my eye, and it didn't seem to be there.  The contact wasn't in the lens case.  Long story short:  last night, I took the lens out of my left eye, put it in the right side of the case, and left my right contact lens in my eye all night.  So I put the lenses in their proper case and later, I may or may not put them in my eyes.

I have that kind of flexibility today because I'm not driving down to Spartanburg; today is the first full day of spring Quilt Camp at Lutheridge!

Yesterday was also strange.  I did a lot of prepping to get ready for my time away, and then I headed over to the audiologist to get her help with my hearing aid.  It has a protective part at the end, designed to be removed, and when I took my hearing aid out on Monday, the protective part stayed in my ear.  Happily, it was easy for her to remove.  I didn't panic on Monday--well, after the first bit of panic--because I reasoned that the tip is designed to be in my ear canal for long periods of time.

Once I got back from the audiologist, it was off to work.  It was a good teaching day.

I drove back to North Carolina and stopped at the Faith Center on my way in.  I don't have as much to unload as the Quilt Camp folks who come with two sewing machines, a chair, and an extra table, but it does take me several trips back and forth to the car to get all my cloth around me.

I went to dinner with some friends; most Quilt Camp meals will be served at the dining hall, but meals don't start until the first full day, today.  I'm really looking forward to breakfasts that are much more than my usual bowl of enhanced oatmeal.

Since I am up early anyway, I'm the one who opens the Faith Center for those of us who want to greet the sunrise with fabric in our hands.  Let me close this post so I can get ready. 

Celebrating National Poetry Month with "Goblin Market"

This week will be unusual for Spring semester.  I'm only teaching two days this week, on Monday and Tuesday.  On Wednesday through Saturday morning, I'll be over at Lutheridge, at Quilt Camp.  I'll be returning to my Lutheridge house to sleep, but I'll be spending most of my time sewing.

Earlier in the semester, when we were missing so many classes because of snowy weather, I thought about trying to divide my time between Quilt Camp and Spartanburg Methodist College.  But my students can use some unstructured time to work on all the papers that are due in the next few weeks.  Will they?  If they are smart.  If not, they, too, can enjoy a few days off and then get back to work.

Today is the heavy teaching day, yet my heart is light.  We finish Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" today.  I had thought about canceling it, because it is long.  But we had space in the syllabus, and I didn't feel like devising a new plan.  I am so glad I went ahead with it.  I had forgotten how delightful it is to teach.

I taught the first part last week, and it made me so happy to hear students still discussing it on the way out of class; as two students tried to determine if the poem was really talking about bestiality,  I thought, I am so happy not to be teaching in high school.  I don't have to worry about angry parents coming back to demand that I be fired for teaching their students about this poem.

As the semester winds down, particularly in April, I sometimes feel a bit of despair about all that I am not doing, the poems I'm not writing, the journals that will be closing down their reading periods for the year without a single submission from me, the books of poems I'm not reading, the events I didn't organize to celebrate National Poetry Month.  It's good to remember all the ways I am celebrating National Poetry Month, by bringing poetry into my classrooms, by reading poetry to students and sparking interest.

The Tax Man Cometh

I did not go to one of the "Hands Off" rallies, although there was one near me.  I decided that I needed to get our taxes done, and I wasn't wrong about that.  I'm glad that so many people turned out.

Our taxes are a bit complicated this year, in ways I did anticipate and in ways that I didn't.  I'm working in three states, while living in a fourth.  For part of the year, I had health insurance through the ACA exchange, and for part of the year through my full-time job.  One of my part-time jobs, my Synod Appointed Minister job, has me as an independent contractor, so there are multiple tax implications.

I did TurboTax and hoped for the best.  I earned more money than I expected when I applied for ACA health insurance, and that meant what we owe was even higher.  Sigh.  But we have the money, and I am glad to have a job that pays more, even if it means we pay more income tax this year.

I don't have much writing time this morning--time to get ready to go teach Confirmation class and then to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol.  It's the last Sunday of Lent--wow.

A Great Teaching Day: Nuclear Apocalypses and Civil Rights Primers

Yesterday was a great teaching day, although I didn't fully savor it.  I had several seminary projects due last night, one of which was a presentation, so that stress was simmering in the background.  My commuting has gotten a bit nightmarish, with slow downs and stops that add an hour to my trip home.  By the time my seminary class started, I was more stressed than normal.

So let me savor the teaching day here.  In my Nonfiction Writing class on Tuesday, we sketched out the remaining class days--there are only 6 of them, or there were on Tuesday.  My students wanted to think about propaganda yesterday, so we began with the Daisy ad from LBJ's 1964 presidential campaign, the ad which combines a cute toddler pulling apart a daisy with a nuclear explosion.

I knew that we were going to discuss the ad, so I spent yesterday morning watching this video that compares The Day After to Threads.  It talks about The Day After as a form of propaganda/teaching.  We only watched the first part, because I didn't want to expose them to Threads, which is quite graphic and gruesome.  We had a good discussion.  The students had never seen either film, but the commentary was understandable (as we watched it, I wasn't sure that it would be).

Then I went to teach my American Lit survey class.  It was the day to discuss Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  I wanted to use some music to set the mood as they came in, so I cued up this album (by the magic of YouTube):

I had the CD cover on the screen, and one of my students walked in and said, "That looks like they're having fun."  Hmmm.  So I used it as a later teaching moment.

I've actually seen the real photograph--there was a display of Civil Rights photo at the Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art.  As I recall, it's part of a three part set.  I said to the class, "What you can't see on this side is the firehose of water being aimed at peaceful protestors."

We talked about protest, about the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, about the unjust situation that King described in his letter.  We talked about modern issues of injustice that need our attention and how we might affect change (write letters, protest, run for office, write a poem or a song).  I talked about how the Civil Rights protestors of the 50's and 60's came from a church background and what that meant.  And then to conclude class, I had them write about the best way to do that, while we listened to two songs from the album, "This Little Light of Mine" and "(Ain't Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Round."

It was a good mix of history, modern politics/issues of social injustice, civics reminders (your legislators will take notice if you write or call, and they may change their minds), literature, and song.  It was less a focus on literature than most class meetings, but it felt important.  And it will lead nicely to Claudia Rankine's Citizen:  A Lyric on Tuesday. 

A Week of Interviews and Contracts

It has been a whirlwind week, and I'm not talking about the "will he or won't he" tariff chaos.  It's been a week where I have multiple seminary assignments due--from here on out, they will be more spread out.  I do think that if I was smart, I would go ahead and get the final projects done, and maybe I will.

I had an interview this week.  On Tuesday, I interviewed to be part of the Summer 2025 cohort of the CPE program at the Asheville VA Hospital.  I wasn't sure what to expect--after all, it's not like a job interview, where people are trying to determine if they want me to be part of their lives for what could be a long time.  

My mom sent me this e-mail, which I thought was charming in so many ways:  "Hope all goes well. You are a dynamite young lady who can ace this interview. Keep us posted! Mom."  It's been a long time since anyone called me a dynamite young lady--I certainly don't feel young anymore.

The interview went well, I thought.  It was the kind of interview where I could tell that the three people on the interview team had read my extensive application materials and thought about them and come up with incisive questions.  I answered them honestly.  The interview lasted 45 minutes, so there could have been plenty of places where I stumbled.

For example, they asked me what I hoped to learn outside of skills, what kind of self development did I hope to experience, and I said that I wanted to learn more about how to be present to people with problems that aren't fixable. I felt like it was a good answer, but they might have found it problematic.

Happily, they must have found more about me to like than reject.  Yesterday, the day after the interview, I sent a thank you e-mail, and I got a reply offering me a spot.  I wrote back to say yes.  

You might be asking why I am doing CPE this summer--aren't I graduating?  Yes, I am on schedule to graduate with my MDiv degree, but I still have requirements to complete before I am eligible for ordination.  One of them is CPE, a kind of chaplaincy training.

I also got my teaching contract for next year, signed it, and made some inquiries about health insurance.  Happily, our health insurance continues through the summer, even though technically I'm between contracts for a few months.  It is so nice to be at a place where I'm treated well.

Here it is Thursday, and it feels like I should be done with my tasks for the week.  But I still have two papers due today to finish, and seminary class tonight,  along with teaching tasks--and it's time to start thinking about my sermon for Sunday.

Well, let me get to it.  The weather seems iffy, so I'll get a walk in.

Sketching Progress

Because my writing time is limited this morning, let me post about my sketching progress.  Back in January, I made three intentions.  One of them was this:  "I have lots of ways to improve my ability to sketch a lifelike human, but I want to concentrate on faces (both from the front and profile) and hands, and not in isolation, but as part of the figures that I draw."

I'm still not great at drawing humans out of my imagination, but I've practiced by sketching humans that appear in catalogs.  Here's what I did back in January:

Here's a close up of my sketch, done with a .3 tip black pen.

Here's the original:

And here's what I did last night.  I spent roughly the same amount of time on each sketch, the January one and last night's:

Last night I used colored pens.

I'm using pens with a .5 tip (black and red) and a .1 tip (brown and burgundy).  Here's the original:

I'm pleased with my efforts.  What pleases me even more is that I reached for a sketchbook last night, as I brought my busy day to a close.

National Poetry Month Begins

It is April 1--I am astonished that it is April, astonished that the semester at Spartanburg Methodist College is almost over, astonished that the year is one quarter over, astonished that I will be done with my MDiv degree in a month.  It is National Poetry Month, and this year, like many years, I will not be writing a poem a day.

In the early days of this year, I was writing a poem a day or every other day.  I felt ideas coursing through me, and I wrote them down.  I hope to experience that situation again, but it won't be in April.  At this point, most of my creative energy needs to be directed to my seminary papers.  I don't have regrets--that writing feeds my soul and energizes me in the same way writing a poem does.

Still, I would like to get back to poetry writing.  I haven't really written much poetry since mid-March.  Let me start jotting down some ideas.  Let me start opening a Word document alongside the other work that I'm doing. 

I would also like to read more poetry.  I've been doing well at doing that; my teaching life, I'm happy to report, has me reading poetry almost daily.  But that teaching ends in three weeks.  Let me plan now, so that I can be more intentional once my classes end.

Five Years of Morning Watch

I haven't spent much time thinking about where I was 5 years ago, as the pandemic launched itself into our lives.  People's photos of the AWP conference gave me a bit of a pandemic anniversary vibe--the last AWP I went to was in San Antonio in 2005, where I was more interested in Super Tuesday results than the early days of the pandemic.  That year, AWP was in early March.  By late March, life had changed dramatically.

I still went in to the office, me and 4 other people in the office who stayed far away from each other.  I still went to church on Sunday mornings, where, for a few Sundays, a core group of us gathered to do parts of the service live and stream it to our members at home.

We also brainstormed other things we could do, like a Compline service. I volunteered to do something in the morning. One of the brainstorming group suggested that in addition to some sort of reading, that we have time for something creative.

At first I thought about choosing the readings, and then I thought, why do this? I have Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours; she's done this work for me. I did the readings for the day, took a five-seven minute pause to do meditation, writing, sketching, yoga, whatever gets us grounded for the day. And then we came back for closing prayer, also from The Divine Hours, and I gave some closing thoughts, a benediction of sorts.  I did the first one on March 31, 2020, and I'm still doing it every morning.

The video is short enough that I think I can add it to this blog post.  Here's the very first episode of Morning Watch to air live, on this day in 2020:

It hasn't changed much. I do show the sketch I'm working on; my dad made a comment that he wanted to see what I was working on, so I started holding the sketch close to the camera.

I've continued to do morning watch, and it's interesting to scroll back through a selection of posts that Facebook gave me when I did a search. Here I am with much longer hair. Here I am in a variety of rooms (the house near the beach, the downtown condo, our Lutheridge house, my seminary apartment, vacation/travel destinations). Here I am with Christmas lights in the back, and here I am almost always with construction happening in the background. I won't link to all those posts, as I'm almost sure it's only interesting to me.

This blog post tells a more complete story of the early days. It also contains this link to the first day when I used Phyllis Tickle's work--on March 30, I had technical difficulties, so I didn't post that broadcast. It's gotten 187 views. Later broadcasts get much fewer views. But I hear from people who find it meaningful, so I'll keep doing it.

To be honest, even if I didn't get encouragement, I'd probably still do it. It helps me to stay faithful to this method of formation.

More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee.  I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell's one act play, "Trifles" and her short story that she created after the play, "A Jury of Her Peers."  We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.

Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90's, students had little to no experience with quilts.  I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students.  I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn't sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.

As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight.  Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren't.  Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had.   Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show.  Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.

I'm at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar.  Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I'm impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create.  I'm so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review.  I've worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious.  It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.

I was also happy that other students, faculty, and staff came by.  One young woman sat and finished the knotting on two quilts; on one of them, she did most of the knotting by herself.  I thanked her for her efforts, and she said, "I love sewing.  It reminds me of times I spent helping my auntie."

I have been here on a one year contract, and I'm happy to report that it's been extended another year.  I look forward to having the chance to experiment with ways to make teaching more effective--and since I won't be a seminary student, maybe I'll do more, like being the faculty sponsor for a sewing/fabric arts club.

A Week of Smoke, A Week of Encouragement

It has been a strange week, a wonderful week, a tiring week, a good week overall for me personally but not so much for larger communities.  Let me record a few snippets.

--It's been the week when we've learned that some of the highest federal government folks have been talking on unsecured networks; this week's scandal has been dubbed "Signalgate."  I've been shaking my head, as many people have.  Many of us have had to go through yearly trainings to remind/teach/train us of the importance of keeping secure information secure.  And one doesn't need these trainings--it's common sense.  Grrr.

--It's been a week of other kinds of smoke.  We've had lots of fire in the Carolina mountains.  So far my house is safe, but the smoke is visible, and the air quality is poor.  As I drive back and forth to Spartanburg, I can see huge plumes of smoke in the distance.  We need rain, a few days of soaking (but not torrential!) rain.  More than that, we need the downed trees cleared away, but I'm not sure how that will happen.

--We've had family members in town as one of the next generations scouts wedding venues.  It's been great to be with them.  It was too brief, but brief visits are better than no visits.

--My seminary schedule is a bit strange, with lots of due dates next week.  The good news is that by getting this work done now, I'll have less to do later.  But I am feeling loaded down.

--The two classes that I'm taking have been particularly good this week, so that's a blessing.  And I've gotten good feedback--much needed encouragement, encouragement needed because I'm tired, not because I'm doubting myself.

--It's also been a good teaching week, with encouragement and praise.  It's nice to feel appreciated.  And it's a marvel to be praised for all the things I do, like the quilting bee on Monday.  I've worked at many a place where people would have questioned what any of that had to do with writing an essay, with the insinuation that I should just do my job.  And it's nice to be in a place that has space to do a quilting bee.

--I had students who came to the quilting bee who wanted me to do it again, and one student who wishes I would teach a sewing class.  I wish I had those kind of sewing skills.  I can't take a pattern and cloth and end up with a shirt.

Even though it will be an intense week-end getting next week's seminary tasks done, it will be good to have a day when I'm not driving.  It will be good to have some time to get the work done.

First Thoughts and Pictures after a Quilting Bee

Tomorrow when I have more writing time, I'll write more about the Quilting Bee I arranged for Spartanburg Methodist College on Monday.

I planned to set up in the classroom that is mine for much of Monday, but I couldn't do much advance set up, because of a class in the room.  

At first, it felt like chaos; I didn't expect so many people to come at 10.  But the pictures taken by my dean reassure me that it wasn't as chaotic as it seemed.

After some instruction, students got to do some knotting.

They also had access to my fabric bin, in case they wanted to make their own projects.

Here's a supply table:

I also set up a slide show (which you can view here), but not many people watched it.

All in all, it was a good day.  

I didn't have a break for lunch, and there weren't times when the room was empty except for me.  But that was good too. 

My take-away:  more students were interested than I thought might be.  It was a great change of pace, and students asked me to do it again.

Poems for the Feast Day of the Annunciation

Tomorrow I will get back to blogging about teaching and commuting with a stray post about seminary classes.  I realize that I wrote about a feast day yesterday, but there's another one today, the Feast Day of the Annunciation, which celebrates the day the angel Gabriel visited Mary to tell her that God had a vision for her and for the salvation of the world and invited her to play a huge role.  She asked a question or two and then said yes.

I've spent much of my life thinking about this pivotal moment.  In my early years, I thought about consent.  In my childhood years, we didn't think much about consent as we discussed this story; we thought about the honor of being chosen.  In my teenage years, I thought about the burden of being the mother of the messiah.  I thought about consent--was God a rapist?  

I have since decided that Mary could have said no, which made me think about other women who might have said no along the way.  Was Mary God's first choice?  I've also thought about modernizing the story, which is a typical approach of mine.

Here's a poem I wrote some years ago now.  (for more process notes, see this blog post), which was included in the book Annunciation:

A Girl More Worthy

The angel Gabriel rolls his eyes
at his latest assignment:
a virgin in Miami?
Can such a creature exist?

He goes to the beaches, the design
districts, the glittering buildings
at every boundary.
Just to cover all bases, he checks
the churches but finds no
vessels for the holy inside.

He thinks he’s found her in the developer’s
office, when she offers him coffee, a kind
smile, and a square of cake. But then she instructs
him in how to trick the regulatory
authorities, how to make his income and assets
seem bigger so that he can qualify
for a huge mortgage that he can never repay.


On his way out of town, he thinks he spies
John the Baptist under the Interstate
flyway that takes tourists
to the shore. But so many mutter
about broods of vipers and lost
generations that it’s hard to tell
the prophet from the grump,
the lunatic from the T.V. commentator.

Finally, at the commuter college,
that cradle of the community,
he finds her. He no longer hails
moderns with the standard angel
greetings. Unlike the ancients,
they are not afraid, or perhaps, their fears
are just so different now.


The angel Gabriel says a silent benediction
and then outlines God’s plan.
Mary wonders why Gabriel didn’t go
to Harvard where he might find
a girl more worthy. What has she done
to find God’s favor?

She has submitted
to many a will greater than her own.
Despite a lifetime’s experience
of closed doors and the word no,
she says yes.

It's a topic I return to again and again, a question I continue to have.  What relevance does this Bible story have to our modern lives?  I am thinking of a nap I took years ago, when I woke up and looked at a palm tree, and a poem came to me.  I took this picture of the tree:

Look at the two browner fronds at the bottom, closest to the trunk--don't they look like a pair of wings?  That musing led to this poem:

Annunciation


In the early hours of this feast
day of the Annunciation, I listen
for God’s invitation, but all I hear
is the roar of a motorcycle speeding
away after last call. The rustle
of the palm fronds in the wind,
the only angel wings today,
as I lay enfolded in the arms
of my beloved of thirty years.

The Feast Day of Oscar Romero

Oscar Romero is now officially a saint, and today is his feast day.  On this day in 1980, he was killed, a martyr for the faith.  When I made this collage card years ago, I couldn't believe that he'd ever be canonized:

Many scholars believe that he was chosen to be Archbishop precisely because he was expected not to make trouble. All that changed when one of his good friends, an activist Jesuit priest, was assassinated by one of the death squads roaming the country. Romero became increasingly political, increasingly concerned about the poor who were being oppressed by the tiny minority of rich people in the country. He called for reform. He called on the police and the soldiers to stop killing their brethren. And for his vision, he was killed as he consecrated the bread for Mass.

I was alive when he was martyred, but I didn't hear or read about it.  I remember reading about some of the more famous murders, particularly of the nuns, and wondering why people would murder nuns or missionaries who were there to help--I had yet to learn of the horrors of colonialism throughout history.

In my first year of college, I was asked to be part of a service that honored the martyrdom of Romero, and this event was likely how I heard of him first.  Or maybe it was earlier that semester when our campus pastor took a group of us to Jubilee Partners.

Jubilee Partners was a group formed by the same people that created Koinonia, the farm in Americus Georgia that most people know because they also created Habitat for Humanity--but they were so much more, in their witness of how Christian love could play out in real practice in one of the most segregated and poor parts of the U.S. south.  In the early years of Jubilee Partners, when I went there, the group helped people from Central America get to Canada, where they could get asylum in the 1980's, when they couldn't get asylum in the U.S.

My consciousness was formed by these encounters and by other encounters I had throughout the 80's.  I met many people in the country illegally, and I heard about the horrors that brought them here.  Then, as now, I couldn't imagine why we wouldn't let these people stay.

Many of us may think that those civil wars are over, but many countries in Central America are still being torn apart by violence.  The words of Romero decades ago are sadly still relevant today:  "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ...In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression."

But his teachings go beyond just a call for an end to killing.  His messages to the wider church are still powerful:  "A church that doesn't provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?"

And even those of us who are not part of a faith tradition can find wisdom in his teachings:  "Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton... remember, there is the face of Christ."

If we treated everyone we met as if that person was God incarnate, what a different world we would have!

But for those of us who are tired from the work of this weary world, here's a message of hope and a reminder of the long view.  This prayer, while not written by him (it was written by late Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw, drafted for a homily by Cardinal John Dearden, and misattributed to Romero), is often called the Romero prayer:  "We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own." 

On this day that honors a man who was not always honored, let us take heart from his words and from his example.  Let us also remember that he was not always this force for good in the world; indeed, he was chosen to be Archbishop because the upper management of the church thought he would keep his nose stuck in a book and out of politics. 

In these days that feel increasingly more perilous, let us recommit ourselves to the type of love that Romero called us to show:  "Let us not tire of preaching love; it is the force that will overcome the world."

Rice Pudding and Metaphors for Abundance

Yesterday I made rice pudding.  We had an extra pan of rice we never got around to using for a meal, rice that was a bit crusty on the top.  We had milk and cream that were just past their pull dates, but not spoiled.  We had enough eggs, surely a metaphor for abundance in these days of avian flu.  I even had real vanilla extract to spare, another metaphor for abundance.

I tasted the custard and thought it tasted odd.  Could the milk and cream be closer to spoiled than I thought?  Did the extract add a metallic alcohol taste, an astringency?  

I put the pan in the oven, hoping it would taste better when warm.  After 15 minutes, I stirred it and tasted it again, and that's when I realized--I hadn't put in sugar.

Happily, it was easily fixed.  I pulled the pan out of the oven, sprinkled sugar over it, stirred it again, and tasted it.  Finally, the taste I wanted!

The rice pudding is one of the best I've ever made, and I'm sure that a large part of that is the added milk fat.  I more often make rice pudding with skim milk, which is not a metaphor for abundance.

I have all these metaphors.  Now to compose a poem that goes a bit deeper than these surface level significances.

Confirmation Bread Baking

Yesterday, I made this Facebook post:  "I have been down to Spartanburg, SC to teach, and now we're about to leave Arden, NC to got to Bristol, TN to help Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church with tonight's fish fry. If we cross the line into Virginia, I'll have been in 4 states today. If you're in the Bristol area from 5-7, come on by to get the best meal deal: $10 buys a great dinner along with delicious desserts and a beverage. All proceeds go to fund local charities. It's so many wins I can scarcely count them."

That post sums up my Friday; we did not drive into Virginia.  The post doesn't talk about the bread dough creating that was part of the fish fry.  I had this vision that the confirmands and I would make bread dough during the slow moments of the fish fry, from the proofing of the yeast to the mixing of the dough.  I calculated that there would be plenty of time for the bread to rise.

My plan did not take into account that two of them would have their horseback riding lessons rearranged.  I proofed the yeast and hoped they would show up, but no luck.  So, as the minutes ticked by, I decided to go ahead and mix up the dough without them.

The one confirmand who was there watched, but she didn't want to mix the dough.  The older teen who was confirmed two years ago watched even more intensely than the confirmand.  The adults divided their attention between bread dough and the baby that one of them has.  One of them said, "You really love doing this, don't you?"  Imagine it said in a kind way, not a sneering way.

We ended up with five chunks of bread dough.  I had four paper pans, four plastic bags, and baking directions--one for each confirmand and one I gave to the parishioner who first asked, "Would it be possible to have homemade bread like we did at my church in Wisconsin?"  I took one home with me.

This morning as the bread baked, I thought back to my own beginnings in bread baking.  My grandmother baked rolls every day for the big meal which was usually in the middle of the day, but the first person I knew who baked loaves of bread was an intern who came to our church in my 7th grade year.  Her name was also Kristin, and she seemed like the coolest person I'd ever met.  She was my confirmation teacher, and she brought bread for snack time, which she ate, while we ate the candy that we bought from the convenience store across the street.

I didn't start baking bread, though, until high school, when my mom suggested we try it for the seminarians who were coming over for dinner.  Kristin the intern had moved on by then, but we still had her recipe for Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread from the cookbook Recipes from a Small Planet by Ellen Buchman Ewald.  I don't have access to my copy, but I found someone else's photograph online:

The recipe used whole wheat flour and dry milk, with honey, oil, salt, warm water, and yeast.  I no longer make that recipe, but I bake variations of it, sometimes with liquid milk, sometimes without, often with butter instead of oil and brown sugar instead of honey, and oats.

I hope that the bread baking experiences that I've brought to Faith Lutheran Church take root.  I think of the intern who first expanded my notion of what bread could be, and I hope I'm doing that for the youth who are there.  At the very least, I hope I'm giving them good memories, even if they don't do bread baking of their own.

Friday Frazzled Fragments from a Hellish Commuting Week

What a week it has been, the kind of week where I have a bit of a meltdown because I'm feeling overwhelmed.  Luckily, I can have a bit of a meltdown and keep going with my brain coming up with alternative approaches even while I'm feeling sorry for myself.  Let me make a list of some bits and pieces from the past week so that I don't forget.

--One reason why I've been off schedule is the medical appointments.  Happily, my health is fine, but I had an appointment on Monday morning and on Tuesday morning, which wiped out morning writing and walking time.  

--It's been incredibly windy this week--and all of March.  Last night, the winds were 25 mph with gusts even higher; today the winds are 15 mph.  I hesitate to walk in the morning darkness when it's windy the way it has been.  We still have a lot of tree branches dangling overhead, and it feels dangerous when it's windy and dark.

--Of course, that's a bit of a rationalization.  It's cold and dark and windy, and I could deal with two of those elements, but I don't like all three together.  I also want to get my sermon written.

--It's been a hellish commuting week.  In fact, it's the worst commuting week since I started working at Spartanburg Methodist College.  On Monday, I 26 was shut down.  I thought I might be late because of my gastro appointment, but I got out earlier than expected, only to be rerouted because of interstate shut down. It was a lovely drive through country roads, but aggravating.  Each day after that, traffic has slowed to a crawl and then a stop because of tree trimming.  Yesterday there was a brush fire on both sides of I 26 near Spartanburg; I was able to drive by, but the interstate was later shut down.

--Happily, I took my laptop to work yesterday so I could get my homework for last night's class turned in before I left.  I usually turn in my work a day before it is due, or last ditch, the morning of.  I don't like waiting until hours before the due date time, but that's the week I'm having this week.

--Last night's class was marvelously amazing.  I feel so lucky to take 2 marvelously amazing classes here as I finish seminary.  

--I feel even more fortunate as I looked at the schedule of seminary classes for the fall.  The schedule may be incomplete, but if nothing else is added, it's a bit skeletal, especially for people who need to take classes from a distance.

Sonny's Blues and All Our Blues

Yesterday was a strange-ish day, an up and down day, but mostly up.  I got to the imaging center early for my follow-up ultrasound after the 3D mammogram showed something that they thought was a lymph node, but they wanted to be sure.  Happily, it was a lymph node; I am always deeply aware that for other women, it will not be good news.  For me, for now, it was good news.

I stopped at the Fresh Market, as I did last year.  In fact, when my radiographer asked me if I had anything fun planned after the scan, I said, "Well, I'll stop at the Fresh Market to pick up some treats, then I'll go to work, then I'll come back home and eat the treats.  That sounds like fun to me."  The radiographer said, "That does sound like fun."  The unspoken part:  fun for a day when one must work, fun for a day if the test results are good.

Then I went on to work.  It was a good work day.  I had a coffee with the mentor who was assigned to me as a new faculty member; we've been trying to schedule a coffee for almost nine months now, and it was good to connect in that way, good for me to move out of my comfort zone.

My nonfiction writing class is watching a movie this week so that we can write a review of it.  We had a bit of glitchiness finding Grave of the Fireflies for free, but my tech savvy students did it by using Internet Archive.  Why have I not known about this resource?

The movie is beautiful and profoundly moving, and also resonant in ways that I didn't expect, on a day when Israel breaks the ceasefire in Gaza and Trump is trying to broker peace in Ukraine.  I hope that he brokers a strong peace that deters Putin, but I don't think that Trump is able to do that.  I don't think anyone can do that.

Then I went to my American Lit survey class.  We did a deep dive into James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."  What an amazing story that is.  As always, I hope I did it justice, but I am aware that to do it justice, we'd need to devote a month to it.  One can't do justice to the literature in a survey class.  But I loved talking about why it is important.

I haven't taught the short story in such a long time.  Did I include it in the American Lit survey classes that I taught at the University of Miami in the early part of this century?  Maybe.  If not, I haven't taught the story in 30 years.  It holds up well, perhaps even better than it did in 1995.  Back then, it might have seemed that we had vanquished heroin.  Now, once again, we have work to do.

I drove home feeling wonderful, a feeling which fizzled as traffic slowed to a stop.  I'm glad that they are doing tree clearing by the side of the road, but I don't know why it has to be done in peak traffic time.  It took me almost an extra hour to get home.

My spouse had made amazing nachos, so we ate dinner and looked for something to watch.  We happened upon a documentary on the Avett Brothers which was much better than I thought it might be.  It's the classic kind of documentary that explores the creative process along with the history of the group.  I did some sketching and some writing to my senators and congressperson, asking to save NOAA.  Today it's NOAA, and later this week--well, I'll figure that out later.  Social Security?  Voice of America?  Some other institution that is decimated between now and Thursday?

We live in strange times, strange times that seem tilted towards evil.  But James Baldwin shows us that all times are this way, and we cope as best we can, whether that be with the blues, with our family love, with heroin, with our other connections.

Preventative Care

I feel like I have been spending much of my free time at doctors' offices, and I'm not even sick.  Preventative care seems to now require a pre-procedure visit, the procedure itself, and then, often a follow up.  And let us not forget the time on the phone, doing pre-procedure intake and checking of information.  In some ways, it makes me feel like I'm getting better care than I once did.  In other ways, it's so exhausting that I just want to forget about it all.

Yesterday I met with the doctor who will do a colonoscopy on me at some point, and this morning, I have a follow up scan to my mammogram, exactly the same as last year.  I don't want to believe it's about getting more money out of insurance companies.  I also know that the quality of the scans is better, which means more might be seen and need to be checked, just to be sure that it's not cancer.

Let me remind myself that I'm also feeling lack of free time because I've been at retreats two week-ends in a row, and they've been nourishing.  For both Wild Women Week-ends at Lutheridge, I've offered an optional afternoon activity, a writing workshop.  Instead of talking in general about writing, but I walked us through several writing exercises designed to get us to a deeper level more quickly (writing letters to ourselves, from the point of view of ourselves 50 years from now and/or from our younger selves) and designed to help us make interesting connections we wouldn't have made otherwise (starting with an object and freewriting).

Saturday's workshop went so well that people who didn't attend came to me and asked for my handout which I was happy to give them.  On Friday night, I went to the opening Bible study and felt so overwhelmed:  all these people, so few of them known to me.   By Saturday, I felt a bit sad to leave.

I knew this would be an intense stretch of the semester, with the two retreats, the fish fry at Faith Lutheran this Friday, and all the commitments which haven't lessened.  Let me take a deep breath and keep working through the things that must be done.

Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick's Day

On Sunday afternoons, we often watch recordings of livestreamed church services from churches where we have been members.  Once we've done that, we often go to the recording of the Sunday service at the National Cathedral.  

Usually, each pastor is preaching on the day's Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary.  But yesterday, the sermon at the National Cathedral was delivered by The Most Reverend John McDowell, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland and Metropolitan, Church of Ireland.  His stole and cope did not match the purple of the others.  No, his had gold shamrocks.  He preached about Saint Patrick and Jesus, and what we can learn.  I had not realized that Patrick and Augustine were alive at the same time.  

The sermon made me think of a poem that I wrote long ago, "Coracle of Hope."  Yesterday I went to look it up, and happily, having much of my writing online makes it easy.  I think it holds up well, and I'll post it below.

The poem was inspired by Dave Bonta's experience with coracles in Wales, which I wrote about in this blog post years ago:  "I found myself captivated by this post of Dave Bonta's about his experience with coracles on his recent trip to Wales. He reminded us of the ancient Celtic monks, some of whom set off without even an oar. Somehow, my brain made some connections to the modern workplace, and I was off, composing a poem."

This poem is part of my latest chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction .  It seems like a good choice for March 17--happy St. Patrick's Day!

Coracle of Prayer


As my computer dings
its constant reminders
of meetings and appointments,
I think of those ancient
Celtic monks and their coracles,
their faith in fragile canoes and currents
and a God who will steer
them where they need to go.

Having given over my free will
to Microsoft Office, I allow
the calendar to steer
me. I rely on my e-mails as a rudder,
although I often feel adrift
on this sea of constant communication.

Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.

The Ides of March

It is March 15, a date that might not have much meaning, had it not been the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated, stabbed multiple times on the Senate floor, an act justified as a necessary defense of the Republic.  It set Rome on a different trajectory, but of course, Rome might have headed down a different path had Caesar lived.  I will resist the temptation to make modern correlations.

I was in high school when I first heard people say, "Beware the Ides of March," but as I reflect, mid to late March has always been good for me.  OK, not always, but my mind is on two recent events.  

The first is my phone interview with the department chair of the English department at Spartanburg Methodist College.  For the purposes of this blog post, it would have been convenient had it happened closer to mid-March, but the actual interview was April 1; I got the e-mail asking about a phone conversation a few days earlier.  I'm so glad that phone interview went well, and I'm so glad I said yes to the job.

A year ago, I'd have spent the last few days interviewing for the one year lectureship.  I did a teaching demonstration on Tuesday, a day of interviews on Wednesday, and on Thursday, the Provost offered me the job.  Again, I'm glad I said yes.  There are days when I'm tired:  extra days of driving back and forth take their toll.  It's easier teaching 2-3 classes than 5.  But I'm still glad to have the job and all the opportunities.

It's been a good teaching week:  I got caught up on grading, and most of my teaching went well.  On Thursday, I didn't have much of a plan for my Nonfiction Writing class of 4 students.  We're talking about writing reviews, so we're going to watch a movie together next week.  I had each one choose three possible movies and write mini-reviews to try to persuade their classmates to choose one of their movies.  I had thought about bringing in professional reviews, but then I had them go to various sites and look up reviews about 12 movies under consideration.  They did that, and then I had them write their top 3 choices on the board.

Happily, one movie made it to everyone's list, the animated film Grave of the Fireflies.  From there, we had a great conversation about animation, about film, about documentaries, with a side detour of talking about Paris Is Burning.  It was the kind of conversation that I always hope will happen, a conversation both deep and wide ranging, a conversation that made me think, yes, this is what college should be.

I told my students that I would bring them treats:  popcorn and movie candy, and yesterday, I did just that.  My spouse said, "You'll have record enrollment the next time you offer this course."  I said, "That would be wonderful!"

Last night my spouse and I talked about my sermon, which he edited and revised.  We talked about all the ways that I may be trying to do too much, thoughts that I've been having too.  My spouse said, "At least all of your activities are things you like to do."

Indeed.  I am also thinking of another March, 5 years ago, when my work life was about to take a turn for the worse, when I would be training people in all sorts of areas that were new to them, like how to take an onground course and take it online.  I would be training myself in all sorts of disease mitigation.  I would be thinking about how to survive if things got even more dire.  Living in a hurricane zone was good training for that, but also a sobering reminder of how interconnected we all are, how hard it will be if the power grid goes out, if supply chains are disrupted.

I hope future months of March are less like that one and more like this current one. 

A Raisin in the Sun, A Tree Out of the Ground, and Technology For the Ears

The last few days have not been good blogging days for me.  I haven't been sleeping well or long.  I have felt the pull of other work that needed to be done.  I got distracted by tasks.  This morning feels a bit better, so let me collect some fragments.

--Yesterday my American Lit class watched part of "A Raisin in the Sun."  My students seemed more engaged with that play than they did with "Long Day's Journey into Night," "Death of a Salesman," or "A Streetcar Named Desire."  Is it because of the racial themes?  Better acting?  Production values that seem more modern?  I showed part of the movie of "Streetcar," and that really shows how production values have changed.  Vivien Leigh as Blanche was almost incomprehensible.  Part of it was her weird Southern accent, but part of it was the breathiness.

--Watching "A Raisin in the Sun" for the first time since the 1990's was sobering for me.  In the 1990's, the film felt like a historical artifact, like problems of racism and sexism had been solved.  Yesterday, watching the film almost took my breath away with how much sorrow I felt over how much ground we seem to be losing, in terms of human rights.

--I got up to see the lunar eclipse last night and never fell back asleep.  It was not as stunning as some in the past.  The moon seemed very distant, and if I hadn't known there was an eclipse, I might have assumed the shadow across the moon was a feature of light or cloud or my eyes being weird.  It didn't glow red the way it has in past eclipses, at least not when I was noticing.

--We had a huge tree removed yesterday.  A tree guy was in the neighborhood, and he knocked on the door to ask if we had noticed that the tree was dangerous.  We had been worried about it, but as we looked at it, we saw that the rootball was rising, meaning the tree was leaning even more.  As it was, it was supported by some of the trees beside it, but those trees are shorter and thinner.  So, since the guy was already doing neighborhood work, we paid him to remove ours too.

--Once I might have shrugged and said, "Let's wait for it to fall so that insurance will pay for it."  Now I know how long it takes to put one's life back together after anything that crashes into/through the house.  

--I got my hearing aids yesterday.  We spent time looking at colors for the metal part, trying to match my hair.  The audiologist said, "You have great hair, by the way."

Here's how the wire looks going into my ear:

They are almost invisible given the way I usually "style" my hair:

--I am going to be patient as I adjust to being able to hear better.  I thought the car radio would be a different experience, and it is, but not what I expected.  I hear the road noise more, so I need to turn up the volume.  Without the hearing aids, I don't hear as much road noise, but I can't hear the radio as well.  As I got out my keys at my office yesterday, I was struck by how I could hear them jangle together.

--Here's how I think of it so far:  the sounds are rounder with more dimension and tone.  I am also having trouble with ear wax and equalization of pressure as I go across mountains.  Sigh.

Fragment of a Blog Post

For the second night in a row, I have snapped awake at 1 a.m. and not been able to fall back asleep.  You might ask if I'm worried, and I would say yes:  about the state of the U.S., about my work load, about the tree removal that's scheduled to happen today.

I have a seminary paper due today, and I am only just now finishing a draft.  I have hopes that I will be able to sleep tonight--hopefully the tree removal will be done (with no damage, please, please, please), and my paper will be turned in.  I also get my hearing aids today--hopefully this will be a good experience.

Moonset

The moon is beautiful as it sets to the west right now.  It is still quite dark outside, with the shift to Daylight Savings Time this past week-end.  I have that scattered feeling that comes from having too much to do, or maybe it's just the knowledge that I have a seminary paper due tomorrow, and I don't have a rough draft yet.  I've been awake since 1:30 or so; I feel like I should have more done right now.

But I did get a start on my paper, and even better, I know where I am headed.  I do have time to get everything done, even though it feels overwhelming.

I think I'm also feeling overwhelmed because this week I cover two hours in the Writing Center; that obligation shouldn't feel onerous, but those two hours are hours that I don't get other tasks done.

Let me remember to enjoy this week of warm weather, the new growth that I see at every turn.  We've gone from having a daffodil here and there to whole fields of them.  Each time that I make the drive to Spartanburg, I see a new tree in bloom.

Teaching Poe in the Twenty-First Century

Yesterday, I made this Facebook post:  "I had great fun teaching Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Black Cat today.' Because it's Poe, I can say outrageous things, like, 'Let's take a class survey to see how normal our narrator is, like he says his actions are. Anyone in class gauge out the eye of your pet? No?'"

In the past, my students, at least the ones who have an opinion when I ask them what they want to read, have professed a great love for Poe.  I do realize that it may be because it's the name they remember from high school literature classes.  "The Black Cat" is the only Poe story in our anthology, so I chose it.

As I read it yesterday morning, before getting ready for the drive down the mountain, I was a bit shocked by the goriness:  not one but two dead cats, and scooped out eye socket, and a hatchet buried in the head of an interfering wife.  It made for a great teaching day, and it will make for a good writing prompt--is this material really that gory?  I realize it may be to me, because I don't watch much modern horror, precisely because it is too gory.

I don't have as much blogging time this morning because I'm a bit behind in my grading.  I'm trying to get the American Lit tests graded before I leave, and I need to leave a smidge early, because I'm covering the Writing Center shift today.  One of our Writing Center student interns left suddenly, and now we have to cover 6 hours each between now and the end of the term.  In some ways, it's not that huge a deal, but when we found out yesterday, I did feel a bit discombobulated.  Staffing the writing center is not my favorite thing, although as I'm doing it, I find myself thinking, O.K., this is not that bad.

Week-end Recap: Wild Women and Sedate Sketching

Well, Spring Break is over for me as a teacher.  For me as a student, Wesley Theological Seminary has reading week this week, a sort of week off.  Unlike last semester, I don't have an onground intensive at the campus this week, so I'm hoping to make use of this time off to get some work done.

I am realizing that I am in the time of the semester when I will always feel like I am never going to feel caught up.  I am tired, and I am wondering what it would feel like to only have one job for pay.  I've rarely had that.  It's been hard for me to give up part-time teaching because I can't be sure that my full-time job, whichever one I've had in the past, will last.

Given the state of the country, I don't think I will ever feel sure that my full-time job will last or that I can count on Social Security or that my retirement funds will be safe.  But let me not focus on the things I can't control.

Let me do a quick recap of the week-end.  I spent much of it helping with a retreat, the Wild Women Week-end at Lutheridge.  I had a much easier commute than the last time I was here for the Wild Women Week-end back in 2003, the first one I ever attended, the one where I heard about the Create in Me retreat, which became my retreat of choice.

I was on hand to offer an optional workshop during the time right after lunch that had several optional options.  

I planned a few writing activities, like the free writing after choosing an object from the table, and the writing letters to ourselves from the point of view of our younger selves and older selves.  I tried to structure the time as a drop in kind of opportunity, and about 15 people came by.  They seemed enthusiastic, and I was happy to be part of their options.

The retreat itself was good, but it didn't tell me anything about Mary Magdalene that I didn't already know.  I am fairly sure that most of the retreat participants learned a lot; most of them likely haven't spent time researching the subject.  But it's the kind of topic that I don't mind revisiting.

Yesterday after I got back from a good day at church, preaching and presiding at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee, I went over to one of my good friend's house in the neighborhood.  We sat in her downstairs studio and did some sketching and painting while we caught up with each other.  She has more art supplies (of the painting and paper variety) than I do, and she's happy to share.  It was very satisfying.

And now, back to a more regular schedule.  Let me try to get a walk in this morning.  It will be dark, which doesn't make me happy, but it will be better to do it this morning while my spirit is willing, as are my feet.

International Women's Day, 2025

March is the month designated to celebrate women's history; March 8 is International Women's Day. We might ask ourselves why we still need to set time apart to pay attention to women. Haven't we enacted laws so that women are equal and now we can just go on with our lives?

Our current administration seems to think so--no need for equity or diversity or equality anymore.  With some in power, the picture is much more bleak, with an apparent desire to strip away some hard-won rights and liberties for women, for minorities, for everyone who is not white and male.

Until recently, I'd have assumed that rights that had been awarded by the Supreme Court were ours forever.  That belief is gone.  Yet I also know that I'm living in a better place than many women across the globe.  Part of that reason is because of my race and age and class.  But part of that reason is that women across the globe face much more bleaker circumstances than women on the lowest rung of U.S. society, even the ones who live in states that have greatly restricted health care for women and other protections that women need that men don't.

So, it's a hard year to be thinking about the status of women and celebrating accomplishments.  But it's important to remember that there have been accomplishments.  Women have been doing the work that needs to be done.  And in some years, surviving to fight/live another day is accomplishment enough.

It's also important to remember how bleak life has been in the past, in the not too distant past.  We have not slid all the way back to bleaker days, and it's important to remember that.  We do have rights, we do have opportunities, and we can move fairly freely in the world if we're careful.  Of course, even as I type those words, I think about all the people who don't have rights, who don't have opportunities, who cannot move freely--that's especially true in countries like Afghanistan and Iran.

In my various seminary classes, we've done a lot of analysis of oppressive social structures, of what we might call Powers and Principalities if we used theological terms.  We've talked about how these structures are self-perpetuating, about how hard it is to defeat them because they have power and accrue power simply by existing and because they have existed for so long.

No one said defeating them would be easy.  But many people have seen the vision of a better life for us all, and they can assure us the struggle is worth it, even though it's hard.  Future generations will thank us, even if we leave them tasks to finish.

And let me end on a positive note, even if I'm not feeling particularly positive.  

We know that the world can change very quickly.  I have often thought about how my 1987 self would be astonished at the fact that Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and went on to be elected president of South Africa and how there is no longer an East and West Germany. We are called to be part of the movement to change the world in ways that are better for all--and particularly for the vulnerable and powerless. We have made great progress on that front. But there is still more to do.

So, today, let us continue.

Teaching Assignment: Top Five

In our seminary class last night, we did a review and synthesizing process that I think could be useful with my undergraduate classes that I teach.  Let me record it here so that I remember.

Before we came to class, we had to complete this assignment, called the Top Five:  

On any given topic there will be more than five important things to know. That being the case, this assignment asks you not only to identify important pieces of information but also to rank and order that important information.  Each piece of information should be clearly presented in a brief sentence with a number corresponding to it.  Under your bolded numbered sentence should be a brief explanation (no more than 100 words) of the piece of information you provided and a brief explanation about why that piece of information is important. This explanation should not be bolded.

Back to me.  I found the exercise itself useful, to go back across half a semester to figure out the five most important things we've learned.  But to make the exercise even more valuable, we did a group assignment in class last night.

We divided into four groups of 3-4 students.  We took our individual lists and then by a process of consensus, we had to decide on a group list.  And then, the four groups were consolidated into two, and we did the same process.  We ran out of time before we could create a top five for the class.

I think it could be very useful in a variety of classes, but my mind most immediately goes to literature classes.  The assignment itself could make a great final exam or midterm.  And I am always on the lookout for ways to use small groups, even though for the most part, I hate small groups.

I hate them, and yet, I understand how they can be useful, at their best.  And as an exam review, the small group element could really work.

Stay tuned!

That Year When Jesus Came to Your High School

When I was at my mom and dad's, my mom showed me various books that she had used as devotional texts for Lent.  One book, Forty Days with Madeleine L'Engle, had all sorts of scraps of paper in it, including some of my poems.

We couldn't remember whether or not we were using the book together, but across a distance, or whether she was using it to lead a local church group.  I was happy to see that I still liked the poem.  It was first published in Chiron Review, back in 2009.  I'm almost certain that I wrote it earlier.

I've now written a variety of these kinds of poems, the ones I think of as Jesus in the modern world poems.  They are an attempt to answer that old Sunday School question of how the world would react if Jesus returned again and what would Jesus do and how would we recognize him?

I think of my Sunday School teachers of long ago, asking those questions, and I imagine that they would be scandalized by my poetic answers.  Of course, they may have been secretly radical themselves, as they taught us about the Jesus that the Church wanted us to know.  They may have planted these seeds that have bloomed into poems, decades later. 

New Kid

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd be that boy with the untuned guitar,
which most days was missing a string.
Could he not afford a packet of guitar strings?
Did he not know how to tune the thing?
Hadn't he heard of an electronic tuner?
Jesus would smile that half smile and keep playing,
but offer no answers.

If Jesus came to your high school,
he'd hang out with the strange and demented.
He'd sneak smokes with the drug addled.
He'd join Chorus, where the otherworldly
quality of his voice wouldn’t quite blend.
He'd play flute in Band.
He'd spend his lunch hour in the library, reading and reshelving.

You would hear his songs echoing
in your head, down the hallways, across the years.
They'd shimmer at you and just when you thought you grasped
their meaning, your analytical processes would collapse.
Instead, you write strange poems
to delight your children who draw mystical
pictures to illustrate your poems inspired
by Jesus, who sang the songs of angels,
that year he came to your high school.