Snippets in a Mid-Summer Tone

Summer has arrived, but not necessarily in a good way.  It's hot and humid across most of the nation, and yesterday was one of the first days up here in the mountains where I thought that maybe I should limit my outdoor activity in the middle of the day.  Let me record some snippets.

--This morning I heard a car alarm, which made me think about how seldom I hear car alarms these days.  This morning's car alarm kept sounding for over 10 minutes, which made me think about how an alarm that doesn't stop just becomes background noise that's easier to tune out.  

--Could I make that car alarm a symbol in a poem that stayed away from the obvious?  A blaring car alarm that wasn't a signal of the end of democracy?  A blaring car alarm that wasn't pain from the body?

--Another possible symbol:  a carrot cake that doesn't taste of carrots or spice or cream cheese frosting.  I bought treats yesterday when I went to the Fletcher Village Bakery for day old bread. The lemon raspberry swirl cheesecake was a win.  The carrot cake was not.  Happily, it didn't have raisins.  It also did not appear to have many carrots or a traditional cheesecake frosting.  We could taste the toasted coconut and the walnuts, so it wasn't unpleasant--but it wasn't carrot cake.

--Last night we watched The Last Showgirl, in part because my spouse hadn't really heard about the reinvention of Pamela Anderson.  I was mildly interested, much more so in Jamie Lee Curtis and this role for her, not as much for Pamela Anderson.

--The movie could have been so much more of an exploration of creativity.  There was a bit of that, which I didn't expect, which made me want more.

--On Sunday night, we watched a much older show, some sort of compilation of clips from all the Comic Relief shows.  For younger folks, Comic Relief was a show done in the age of shows and concerts that raised money for some specific cause.  It was fascinating to see so many comics from a different age, most of whom I vaguely recognized but couldn't name.  Some of that material didn't age well, but since it was a show on a major network in the days of network censoring and a much more powerful FCC, it wasn't really transgressive.

--A week ago, I'd have been just starting the car to drive west to Indianapolis.  This morning, I'm headed out for my walk and a bit of breakfast berries--both wild blackberries and the blueberry bushes a neighbor can't harvest while she's at the beach.

A Week Ago, Getting Ready for TEEM

A week ago, I was thinking about how I might be feeling in one week, when I was back from travel, back from my first time at a TEEM intensive.  I am feeling the way I hoped I would be feeling.  I am feeling relieved and hopeful--and not too exhausted.

A week ago, I was getting ready to pack.  One of the benefits of driving is that I can overpack.  I ended up with three extra tops and sweaters/overshirts, which was fine with me.  I decided not to bring long pants or skirts; I assumed we'd be in a casual mode, and happily, I was right.  The tops I brought were dressier, so if I had gambled wrong in either direction, I wouldn't have felt too out of place.  Including me, we had 6 females, and none of us wore dresses or skirts; only 3 of us wore shorts, and I was the only one who wore long shorts each day.

Why do these sartorial choices still seem so important?  Because they are, in so many ways.  Why did I spend so much time planning?  Because I was going to be far away from home, and I have the type of body where I can't just go to Target and find clothes that will fit me.

I felt comfortable in my own skin, and that doesn't always happen for me, even at this relatively late age of almost 61 years old.  We were a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds--that also helped.  It was so different from some of my seminary classes, especially the in person classes that happened during the day, where I was the oldest student and often the only one who had already had a career.

I was the only one with a PhD, but I'm O.K. with that--it's always been my situation in many different phases and parts of my life.  I did try to be conscious of how much I was talking--I wanted to give everyone a chance.  I think I was successful.  Late in the day, one of my fellow students said, "I'm really glad you were part of this week.  You've added a lot to the class discussion."

I was especially grateful for that comment, because earlier in the day, after a discussion of procreative sex (the only kind of male-female sex valued by the ancient world) and the texts that have been read as anti-gay, I said, "Paul thought that we'd all be better off celibate.  I'm not taking relationship advice from any of these people."

It was a good week, and I'm glad I went.  It puts me that much closer to ordination.  But it also gave me new experiences and new friends and some new information about Paul (see this blog post).  As I age, I want to keep doing things that move me out of my comfort zone--nothing crazy, like sky diving, but experiences that keep my brain working in new ways.

Harrowing Drive Home

I feel lucky to be here, writing at the desk that came to me from my grandparents, safe in my mountain home.  It was a harrowing drive home yesterday.

At first it was lovely.  I put gas in the car and was on the road by 7 a.m., which was 45 minutes later than I wanted, but finding a luggage cart and checking out of the hotel took more time than I anticipated.  Still, it's summer, plenty of daylight, so I wasn't too worried (I try to avoid driving in the mountains in the darkest part of the night).  I thought I might even stop along the way, maybe have lunch in Berea, Kentucky, see if I could discover some places where I might support local artisans.

I was in that part of Kentucky by lunch time, but I was in the beginnings of the torrential rain that would leave much of Kentucky flooded.  My phone sounded an emergency alert:  flash flood warning until 1 p.m., do not drive, seek shelter.  The last time my phone alerted me about a flash flood warning, I was driving home from Spartanburg the evening before Hurricane Helene.  I said to myself,  "Flood?  I'm in the mountains!  I'm on an interstate!"  Twenty-four hours later, that part of the interstate was indeed under water.

Yesterday I decided that the safest option was to keep driving.  Mind you, it didn't feel safe:  so much water both on the interstate and falling from the sky, such reduced visibility.  But I knew that if I left the interstate, I might drive to some place less safe.  So I kept going at 45 mph on I 75, thankful that everyone else was driving slowly too.  And I did drive out of the weather.  At my next gas/rest stop, I checked the radar to make sure there weren't additional weather surprises ahead.

Even though I checked, I knew I was traveling through a very unstable weather pattern so I kept going.  As I got close to the Virginia/Tennessee line, the phone wanted to take me on US 70, so I pulled over, just to check before I proceeded.  I wanted to make sure the phone wasn't taking me back to I 40, which I wanted to avoid, if the weather turned bad.  I knew that US 70 would be twisty, but I decided it would get me home faster than other routes.

It was indeed twisty.  A storm had already been through; at one point, I had to stop, wait for oncoming traffic to clear, and then drive around a downed tree.

I pulled into the driveway just before 4, almost weeping in gratitude.  We were expecting heavy weather in Arden, so we unloaded the car, watched a bit of TV, and collapsed into bed.  I made this Facebook post late in the day, and it seems as good a way to end as any other:

"I am safe at home in Arden, having taken many scenic routes on my way back from Indianapolis. Whenever I feel fretful about the state of the nation or our place in the world (either me individually or some collective we), I should take a drive through some part of the Appalachian mountain range to get some perspective."

Kristin in Indianapolis, Paul in Spain

In another hour or so, I'll put the last of my stuff in the car and head back to the mountains of North Carolina.  I've been in Indianapolis, taking a class on Paul, another task done on the path to ordination in the Lutheran church (ELCA, the more progressive expression of Lutheranism in North America).  

It has been a great class, full of deep dives into Greek words and church history and Paul's theology, which can be summarized as Proclaim Christ Crucified.  We even had a fun digression into what we would proclaim--I find it problematic to proclaim Christ Crucified.  Christ incarnate, yes.  Christ risen from the dead, yes.  But crucified?  That's the most important thing?

The cross means something very different for Paul than it does for me.  The cross as a symbol/shortcut does something very different for Paul.  I get that. 

We talked about not knowing how Paul died, not for sure.  Church custom/tradition posits that it's likely that he died in Rome, executed by Emperor Nero.  But it's also possible that he left Rome and continued onward to Spain.

A random thought floated through my brain on Thursday:  that would make a good poem, Paul in Spain, late in life.  By yesterday morning, I decided to jot down some lines, and voila!  A poem emerged, mostly formed.

Here's how it begins:

Paul slices citrus for sangria, 

oranges and lemons plucked

from trees in the lingering light

of a late October evening.

Who would have dreamed or demanded

such a soft landing?

This morning I thought, oh dead, when does citrus ripen in Spain?  I chose "late October evening" because Paul is in the late autumn of his life.  Happily, a quick search this morning shows the detail can work--and even had I discovered that it didn't, I'd have probably kept it.

The poem ends this way:

Safe for now, he pours the sangria

and waits for the sun to set.

I do worry that the poem is cliched, and I also worry that it won't be interesting to non-Christian readers.  But we all age, and this poem looks at aging.  By using Paul as the vehicle, maybe it does say something new.

I'll put it away and look at it again later this week.  But I am happy to have created a poem the way I once did:  an idea comes and within 24 hours, I'm attempting a poem and seeing it to completion.  Hurrah!

Rethinking Paul

Yesterday was our first TEEM class on Paul.  It was riveting.  I'm still not much interested in preaching using Paul's letters, but because Paul has been so influential and so misused, it's good to find out what's really there.

The most interesting way of thinking about Paul that was new to me is to see him as a Jew framed by apocalyptic thinking, the apocalypse being when God comes to earth to judge the living and the dead, an event which will begin with the dead rising up from their graves as they come back to life to be judged.

So when Paul meets Jesus on the Damascus Road, a man who has been dead brought back to life and speaking to him, he assumes that judgment day is under way.  Being a good Pharisee, he would assume that Jews will be O.K. on Judgment Day--as people of the Covenant, God has chosen them.  But Gentiles are in danger.  Thus, off he goes to tell them how to be saved.

I asked the question that some of you might be asking.  Did Paul see a human Jesus on the Damascus Road?  I have always thought of that event as the heavens splitting open and the voice of Jesus speaking to him, not as an encounter with Jesus in his human body.  My professor talked about the different depictions of that event, including recountings of that event that we find in Acts and the letters of Paul.  In some of them, the encounter does sound disembodied, the voice from the heavens.  In others, we could interpret it as an encounter between Paul and a human-appearing Jesus. 

I still maintain my long-standing approach to Paul.  He wrote letters to specific churches/communities with specific problems.  Taking those letters and applying them to twenty-first century life makes very little sense--unless we're experiencing similar problems.  We had an interesting session looking at 1 Corinthians, the passage where Paul excoriates the Church for eating the good food before the whole community arrives and connecting this behavior with Communion.  How do our own Communion practices exclude or include in similar ways?

I still can't see myself preaching on Paul or even having the kind of Bible study that would interest most people.  But I'm very glad to have had this educational opportunity.

A Short TEEM Report

This morning has less blogging time, but I have finished my movie review, the first assignment for my TEEM class on Pauline letters.  I have done the practice quizzes one more time--I've been doing them over and over in the hopes that I'll do well on the quiz that will begin today's class.  

We have another quiz tomorrow, and I haven't done any practice for that one.  So tomorrow may be a light blogging day too, as I practice and practice.  I have not taken a quiz for course credit since undergraduate school.  Of course, I've taken quiz after quiz as part of HR training--those quizzes that you can take over and over again so that you can continue to be employed.

Each quiz counts for 10% of the course grade.  My inner good girl wants to make an A.  My pragmatic older self knows that whatever grade I make will be fine.  I'm not even sure if TEEM classes show up on a transcript.

And then, part of me wonders why I care about my official record.  Am I going to do more graduate work?  Maybe--and that's why I care.

Yesterday's TEEM training was a workshop on stewardship.  When I first heard about the workshop, I felt a bit of despair.  I've already had so much stewardship training.  But it was a great workshop.  We talked about a much broader vision of stewardship:  what do we value?  How do we protect what we value?  It's far more than money, budgets, and a finance team. 

I've been part of small churches, with attendance below 50 members, so these are not concepts that are new to me.  In a very small church, one can't assume that others will pick up the slack, unlike in a church that has over 100 members in the pews on Sunday.

Our workshop leader, Tim Brown, was both compelling and entertaining.  We had worship in the middle of the day, followed by Indian food.  It was good to have that long break.

Let me bring this writing to a close so that I can get some breakfast before the day begins.  Onward!

TEEM Work in Indianapolis

For a woman with a reduced summer schedule, my blogging gets off schedule more than I would have expected--I did not plan not to write for the past 2 days.  On Monday, I did some intense grading and got grades turned in for the online class that ended this week.  Yesterday, I wrote the rough draft of a paper for the class on Paul's letters that I'm taking this week.

Then I hit the road, heading out to Indianapolis.  I am doing part of a week-long intensive as part of the TEEM program that meets there 3 times a year, staying in the Drury hotel and doing classes at the office of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod.  It's part of my ongoing journey to be ordained in the ELCA.  So far, the pre-intensive materials are inspiring, and I have hopes as I shift to a different approach towards ordination.  A side benefit will be learning more about how the TEEM program works.

The trip to Indianapolis takes longer than it did before Hurricane Helene:  part of I 40 is still 2 lanes, one in each direction, for about 20 miles.  There's also a long stretch of I 74 which is under construction and 2 lanes.  Happily traffic kept moving.

Most of the roads I traveled yesterday were surprisingly empty, and in the morning, that made the construction zone across the mountain into Tennessee easier.  I've never liked that stretch of I 40, even before part of it slid down the mountain in the storm.  Shortly after that passage, my phone directed me to take an older highway up to Kentucky, a route which took me through the Cumberland Gap.  The mountains were gorgeous and the roads not too winding or steep.  Even the Cumberland Gap tunnel wasn't as claustrophobic as I feared it might be.

The weather was overcast when I started, and happily, the worst of the rain had moved east.  I still drove through a bit of rain here and there.  I had a front seat with food, baby carrots and 2 kinds of homemade bread, so I didn't need to stop for food.  It does feel weird to be so close to family and old friends who moved and not feel like I have time to stop.

I left my phone on for the whole trip so that it could dictate directions to me; I didn't plug it into my phone's USB port until halfway through the trip.  My car's USB port doesn't charge very well, but it kept the phone from losing charge quite as quickly.  Still, by the end of the trip, I was worried that my phone would die before I got to the hotel, and unlike other trips, I had no idea where I was going, in terms of what exits to take and which roads I needed to find.  Happily I was able to find my way before the phone died.

I got checked into the hotel with no problems, and unloaded the car easily.  I mention the ease of it all because I don't travel light, so I'm always grateful for available luggage carts, especially in a hotel with 9 floors.  My 7th floor room is spacious, bright, and clean, and so far, it's been quiet--all qualities which make me profoundly grateful.

I've met some of my TEEM cohort last night.  The hotel offers a 5:30 Kickback each night, with 3 drinks per adult and a light dinner buffet.  Last night, the buffet included hot dogs, nacho chips and fixings, flour tortillas and fixings (including "fajita chicken"), and a small salad bar, with lettuce, grated cheese, and cherry tomatoes.  The soup was roasted red pepper tomato--delicious.  To think, I had been expecting some cheese and crackers and some Chex mix.

I brought my book on Paul with me to dinner.  I figured if I didn't find the TEEM group, I'd have something to read.  But I did find the director, whom I had met on a Zoom call last week, so I knew what he looked like.  I had dinner with the cohort members who were there, and as I expected, we have a lot in common:  we're serving churches in a variety of contexts, but there's so much more to us than that.  

They've had 2 days together, but they were warm and welcoming, and we lingered over dinner.  Delightful!  I was not awake much later, since it had been a long day.

We have some long days ahead, so let me bring this writing to a close.  Today we have a workshop on stewardship, which is great because I can use another day to catch up on my reading.  I joined the class late, just last week, so I am a bit behind.

Father's Day and the Summer Solstice

Today we have a variety of holidays to celebrate. People who have good relationships with their fathers, or people who have children, may be celebrating Father's Day. Others may be observing the Summer Solstice, in any variety of ways. Some of us will go to church, as we normally do.

I will be preaching, but at this moment, my sermon doesn't mention Father's Day.  The Gospel for today is  Matthew 10: 24-39, the text about Jesus coming to bring not peace, but a sword, to divide families.  So I'm taking a long view of all the summer liberation holidays:  from June 6 to Juneteenth to July 4.  Once I've finished the revisions, I'll give a link to the sermon which I always post on my theology blog.

Because it's Father's Day, my social media feeds will be full of people talking about their fathers.  I do feel lucky to have gotten the father that I did.  The older I get, the more impressed I am with how well he did as a father.  My dad was born in 1937, so again, I'm lucky that my father learned to adapt to the world his daughters were born into, a world with more opportunity for women, while at the same time, not fully liberated.

I think about my own generation, so full of absent fathers and abusive fathers. So many of us experienced divorce done badly, oh so badly, in the 1970's. I was lucky that my own father was different.

In fact, my father seemed more like the fathers we see these days. He could pack our lunches and brush our hair into acceptable ponytails and teach us how to be long-distance runners. He helped us with science fair projects and took the family on camping trips and in general, he was very involved in our lives. I haven't met many other people of my generation who were as lucky.

I'm glad that we've become a society of people, at least some of us have, who can be our best parents to children, whether we're fathers, mothers, or part of the village raising the children. We still have a long way to go before our culture is where I'd like us to be in terms of work/family balance. But that's a topic for a different blog post.

Today is also the summer solstice, the official start of summer.  Many of us live in places where summer weather comes early and never leaves.  But even in those places, like South Florida, the light does change.  In the northern hemisphere, we have the most amount of daylight today.  We won't really notice a difference tomorrow.  But by late August, we'll have darkness earlier.  Last night I got up briefly at 9:30 p.m. (after falling asleep at 8 p.m. with the sun yet to fully set) and noticed that we still had that not-dark, bluish twilight.  We won't have that for much longer.

We're at the midpoint of the year and in many ways, the midpoint of summer.  This might be a day when we want to think about our trajectory--are we on track for the year?  Or maybe we want to celebrate nurturing of all sorts.  Maybe it's a good day for self-care.

For me, it's time to turn my attention back to sermon revising.  One of the treats of summer is that I can also get a walk in before it's time to head across the mountain to preach and preside at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.

TEEM Work and Other Anxieties

It has been a strange week in terms of home renovations.  We're at a point where it makes sense to wait until the work of next week is done.  Hopefully by this time next week, we'll have an HVAC system installed and the house rewired.  Then we'll do the painting and the hardwood floor restoration.

It feels weird knowing how much work needs to be done, but not doing it.  Of course, I have plenty of other work to be doing, primarily grading and encouraging students.

In a way, it has been a good week to be pulling back on fixer-upper tasks.  I've gotten information about the next part of my path to ordination.  I will take three classes through the TEEM program, and the first class is next week.

The TEEM program has 3 onground intensives a year where participants gather in Indianapolis and take 2 classes, one on Monday-Tuesday and one on Thursday-Friday, along with a workshop on Wednesday.  I will be taking the Thursday-Friday class on Paul's letters next week.  I'm happy to be able to patch up some holes in my knowledge; I had wanted to take a seminary class on Paul, but it never worked out.

I needed this week to order books and get started on the reading.  I had missed the deadline to get the discounted hotel price, but happily, when I called, I was able to get that price. 

It's been an up and down week in terms of anxiety.  When I'm at the house in Spartanburg, I feel that we made a good decision.  When I'm not there, there's a bit more self-doubt rattling in my brain.  I've never driven to Indianapolis from here, so I feel a bit of anxiety in terms of a car trip, while reminding myself that I have relatives along the way who could help me if need be.  I'm headed there by myself, because my spouse needs to be here to oversee the HVAC installation and rewiring.  I'm looking forward to being away, but also a bit anxious at the thought of all the new people I'll meet.  I feel a bit of anxiety at the thought of all the money we're spending on home repair--if it goes well, I'll be glad we spent the money. 

I have some course work to do besides showing up for class next week.  There's reading to do, and a movie about Paul to watch, which I've done, and a review of the movie to write, which I haven't, but will soon.

But it's nice to feel I have time to do that work.  The last time I was getting ready to go to an onground intensive, it was October of 2024, and we were still dealing with Hurricane Helene aftermaths.  I'm sure there's some residual anxiety that my body is dredging up.

Hopefully, in a week or two, I'll be able to look back on this anxiety and smile because all the moving parts came together so well.

Liberation Holidays: Juneteenth

Today we celebrate our newest federal holiday:  Juneteenth.  Of course, many populations have been celebrating Juneteenth since the news of freedom first came to the last enslaved people in Texas in 1865.  This is the first year that I've been in a workplace that recognized the holiday.  In 2021, I was working for a small school that was very stingy with holidays, so we didn't have that holiday or MLK day or Presidents Day.

In 2022, I was no longer working for that school.  I was driving back across several states, coming back to Florida from the onground intensive at Southern Seminary.  I was already a certified spiritual director through their program, but I went back to take advantage of the education, to have a reunion with my small group, and to see a friend graduate from the program.  Two weeks later I would turn around to drive back up to Arden to buy the house that I'm writing in this morning.  So far, I have never regretted that purchase, which is not usual for me when it comes to housing or moves or jobs.

Or maybe it is becoming usual.  I don't have regrets about the spiritual direction certificate or my MDiv.  My main regret about my job at SMC is that I didn't have it sooner.  I love this house in a way that I haven't loved any other house.  Maybe my lack of regret is a pleasant part of being in late midlife.

I am tempted to tie these ideas back to Juneteenth, but I don't want to trivialize the holiday or the history.  While regret can enslave us, it's a very different enslavement than other forces and humans that enslave.

Wat are the forces enslaving so many of us? We think of iron shackles, but there are other societal constructs that hold so many back: debt, geopolitical forces, violence, educational systems.  And let's not forget that literal slavery hasn't disappeared. 

So on this Juneteenth, let us think about the captives who need our help to be set free. Let us also think about all the captivity narratives that hold us enslaved. Let us embrace liberation narratives. Let us envision what life would look like if all were truly free.

The Rethinking of Mary Magdalene Gets Wider Acceptance

I have been listening to a fascinating interview between Diana Butler Bass and Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer.  Several years ago, Bass preached a sermon using Schrader-Polczer's work, which Bass points out is one of 3 of the most watched sermons of all time; the other two were Bishop Budde's sermon at the interfaith worship service after the second inauguration of Donald Trump and the sermon preached at the wedding of Prince Harry and Mary Markle.

In that sermon, Bass presented the work of Elizabeth Schrader-Polczer, who was then a PhD student at Duke.  She did research on the Lazarus text and noticed that the word Mary had been changed to Martha.  Why would someone do this?  And how can we be sure?  

Bass published her sermon here.  It's worth the read, and it's got a link to hear the sermon.  Bass makes the case that it was likely a 4th century change, a change to disempower Mary Magdalene.

In the interview I'm listening to today, Bass and Schrader-Polzer review those ideas.  It's an interesting window into how research on ancient texts is done, and how this work was done.  It's got great information about issues of gender, along with church history.

Here are some highlights:

--At minute 28, they talk about the canon--which books made it into the Bible, which did not, and why.  Schrader-Polzer posits that the approach to Mary Magdalene, the changes made in the Gospel of John, might have happened in the 2nd century so that the book would be seen as more acceptable, so that it would survive. 

--In the oldest artwork, whenever there's a Lazarus, there's only one sister.

--Throughout the interview, there's lots of great information about translations of the Bible and how we come to have the Bible that we do.

--It is fascinating to me that there are changes to Bible commentaries and forthcoming changes to translations, including the master text, the "Novum Testamentum Graece (Nestle-Aland). The 'Nestle-Aland,' or 'NA,' is the source from which almost all versions of the New Testament are translated into every language around the world" (quoted material from Bass' newsletter).  These changes happened because of Schrader-Polzer's work and Bass' promotion of this work.  I'm inspired that academic work can have this effect.

--Bass points out that this kind of revision to Bible scholarship, a major revision like Schrader-Polzer's, doesn't happen often and usually about once a generation.

--In the first century, the town of Magdala didn't exist (roughly minute 1:08).  So using Mary of Magdala would be a wrong translation.

--"Reframing ancient questions" vs. "opening new questions"--Bass uses this language about the way that the Catholic church might approach these developments.  She posits that this research is the reframing of ancient questions kind of development.

--Just after 1:18, Bass and Schrader-Polzer talk about the Gospel as a piece of story telling, a cohesive narrative, that is not the way that most people think about a Gospel:  approaching it the way a creative writer/teacher would see it.

More Thoughts on Tiredness and Home Repairs

We had good news at the fixer-upper house in Spartanburg yesterday.  The kitchen sink had very low pressure, but the rest of the house is fine.  The plumber who came out to make sure nothing was leaking said we could fix that ourselves by changing the faucet.

I was doubtful.  Based on what????  I have far less plumbing experience than the plumber.  Happily, we replaced the faucet, and lo and behold, good water pressure.

I dread plumbing fixes for all sorts of reasons, chief among them, of all the projects we do, plumbing is most likely not to come together the way it should.  There's often unexpected leaks and trying to do the same fix over and over again, along with much cursing and bad feelings.  The kitchen faucet project did not have any of these issues.

Then we moved on to the next project:  painting all the walls, except for the kitchen, which we will probably cover with beadboard.  If you haven't painted the walls of an older house, you may not know how much prepwork is required, primarily filling in the holes with "mud" and then sanding them smooth.  Yesterday we finished the sanding.

We won't be doing the painting until the rewiring is complete, and we've got the HVAC in.  It was good to sand without having an HVAC system running to suck dust into the system.  But the painting will go more smoothly with an HVAC system working.

We headed back to our Lutheridge house after getting the sanding done.  In some ways, it was a short day, with 4-5 hours of work.  But I was just as exhausted as if we'd been working double the time.

Here's where I might say, "But exhausted in a good way."  I'm not so sure.  I did an hour or two of sanding--and that wore me out.  Hmm.  It's work that I never do on a regular basis, so in some ways it makes sense that I'm tired.  But it's not like we had to build a wall first:  no heaving lifting.

I am trying just to accept my body where it is, day by day, instead of trying to understand so I can outsmart it.  I am trying to give my body good nourishment and exercise each day, and it's important to remember that rest is an important part of both good nourishment and exercise.  Some days, I'll need more sleep than other days--and if it means I'm falling asleep by 6 p.m., that can be just fine.

Happy Bloomsday!

I only care about Bloomsday as a sort of cosmic accident. When I got to grad school and pored over the list of classes I could take, I discovered that most of them were full. As a new grad student, I was last to register. And so I found myself in Tom Rice's class on James Joyce. What a life-changing experience that was.

Several of the stories from Dubliners show up in anthologies, even first year literature anthologies, so I might have eventually discovered them in my teaching life that was to come. But would I have ever had the patience to wade through Ulysses all by myself? Absolutely not.

Bloomsday celebrates the day, June 16, on which all the action in Ulysses takes place. The book covers almost every kind of action that can take place in a human day: we see Leopold Bloom in the bathroom, we see Stephen Dedalus pick his nose, we see Leopold Bloom masturbate . . . and we finally get to the masterful final chapter, where Molly Bloom muses on the physicality of being a woman.

As with many books, whose scandalous reputations preceded them, I read and read and waited for the scandalous stuff. As a post-modern reader, I was most scandalized by how difficult it was. It's hard to imagine that such a book would be published today.

But what a glorious book it is. What fun Joyce has, as he writes in different styles and plays with words. What a treat for English majors like me, who delighted in chasing down all the allusions.

I went on to write my M.A. thesis on Joyce, trying to prove that he wasn't as anti-woman as his reputation painted him to be. Since then, other scholars have done a more thorough job than I did. But I'm still proud of that thesis. I learned a lot by writing it. At the time, it was the longest thing I had ever written--in the neighborhood of 50 pages. A few years later, I'd be writing 150 pages as I tackled my dissertation--on domestic violence in the Gothic. By the time I'd written my thesis, I had said all I had to say on Joyce.

So, happy Bloomsday.  Those of us who were born later than Joyce, who haven't read much of the work that came before Joyce, probably aren't aware of what a radical experiment he presented.  A work that takes place in just one day?  Revolutionary!  I could argue that Virginia Woolf did it more artistically with Mrs. Dalloway, but before the Modernists, most people would have thought of just one day as not worthy of documenting.  And Joyce's interior monologues capture like no other work what it's like to be inside a brain, to listen to thoughts without the scaffolding of traditional narrative.

I have read Ulysses several times, and I confess, I likely will never read it again.  But I'm grateful to have done it, grateful that it exists, grateful that I had guides to show me of its mastery.

Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

It's been a good week-end, with our attention shifting from home repairs to church work.  I usually have a rough draft of my sermon written by Friday, but not last week.  So my main writing task on Saturday was sermon writing.  Happily, by the time I sat down to write, I had already plotted it out in my head.

You can read my sermon in yesterday's blog post at my theology blog.

It's always interesting to see how the sermon changes from rough draft to preaching manuscript to actual delivery.  For example, I will occasionally reference the youth sermon, but since I don't write it in advance, it won't be in the written versions.

We're a small church, and occasionally in the summer, when families are on vacation, we have no youth, so there's no youth sermon.  When I announced that there would be no youth sermon, I asked the congregation to think about what had brought them joy in their own youth.  I referenced a popsicle in the park event that one of the members had made the subject of a Facebook post.  The recording of the sermon referenced that popsicle event; the manuscript does not.

You can view yesterday's sermon here, on my YouTube channel.

I've been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don't like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don't become a wandering tangent where I can't easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I'm going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it's time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, "A Song Both Familiar and Strange."  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it's done, but before I started last week's revisions, I thought it was done.  

Last week's earlier draft ended with this stanza, which I worried ended the poem on too melancholy a note:

By your bedside, as you sip
tea through a straw, I think
of Julian of Norwich
who insisted that all manner
of things shall be well.
I wish that I could share
the convictions of Julian,
but in the presence
of your shrinking
body and mangled speech,
my doubts blossom
into an orchard of hazelnut trees.

Now that stanza is in the middle of the poem.  Here's the last stanza:

Like a medieval priest
chanting words in a strange
language, I read scraps
of Julian’s work, her odd
metaphors for the Divine
filling the space between us.
You listen and sing
a song both familiar and strange.

Last week I even made some poetry submissions.  In some ways, it's easier in the summer when many journals aren't taking submissions.  In September, when most journals are "open," and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Home Renovation in Our 60's

We have been doing home repairs and remodeling all of our married lives.  It's interesting to think about how things have changed in the decades:

--We have so many more choices now.  Once we went to the big box store and chose from the 6-15 types of tile or flooring or other materials on display.  Now the displays are bigger, and one can easily special order from a variety of sources.

--Once my spouse could work 12 hour days; I have never been able to do that.  Now we are both tired and ready to call it a day after 5-8 hours.

--One of the most obvious reasons why we're ready to work more reasonable hours is that we don't have the physical stamina that we once did.  I am about to turn 61, and my spouse will be 62 in September.  Our 20-something selves could go and go, even as I wished we were doing something more fun.  We could get up day after day and do hard, physical labor.  Now we plan some rest days, in part because I have other work to do, in part because we need to recover.

--You would think that after doing this work for decades, we'd be better at communicating.  Actually we are better, in the ways of longly-wed couples who can recognize the dispute we're having.  It often boils down to me thinking we've made a decision and have a plan, and my spouse not seeing it that way or not remembering the details.

--My spouse still sees evidence of rack and ruin everywhere.  I am inclined to shrug and try to decide if it's worth fixing.  We've decided to have the house re-wired and to put in a new HVAC system.  I am less concerned with a crack in a wall or the ceiling.

--In part, I'm less concerned because we have more money to deal with issues.  We've also had much more problematic houses and had no trouble selling them, so I tend to avoid catastrophizing--which is strange, since my brain often goes to catastrophe in other areas.

All the Battles Worth Watching, One after Another

We spent a long chunk of time yesterday watching One Battle After Another.  It's a movie that's been out for awhile, but only recently free to stream on Amazon Prime.  I had forgotten how long it was, but happily, we started it in the late afternoon, not at 7:30 at night.

It wasn't until the later part of the movie, during one of the long (LONG) car chases that I became aware of how long it was taking to finish the movie.  It was compelling from the beginning until close to the end, compelling in ways that surprised me.

I was impressed with all the chunks of narrative that did manage to come together.  Paul Thomas Anderson deserved those Oscars for best director and best adapted screenplay.  There were moments when I did some math to try to figure out the revolutionary aspect of it all--if the daughter is 16 or 17, then the revolutionaries were active in 2008 or 2009?  The planting of bombs in government buildings and calling in bomb threats from a pay phone seemed so 1972 to me, but clearly, that timeline wouldn't work.  It was a nebulous revolutionary movement in the movie, so I was willing to suspend my initial disbelief.

There's another revolutionary movement in the movie, and it's the "Latino Harriet Tubman situation."  This movie has a lot to say about a great many issues, and one of the disadvantages of a vast movie is that some issues get short shrift.  I'd have liked more about all the Latino issues, especially the nods to the sanctuary movement that are hiding there in plain sight for those of us with eyes to see.  It's in the storylines about migration where we see revolutionaries who are working for social justice and working against a government that's against the flourishing of all people--unlike the other revolutionaries, the main characters who seem to be just blowing things up for the thrill of it all.

I try very hard not to fault movies or books or TV shows for not being the story that I wish they could have been.  In the end, I was happy to have a well-made movie to watch, a movie with much to mull over, a movie worth re-watching, as so few things are deserving of a second look these days.

Summer Reading Report Card

I am happy to report that I am managing to read this summer.  Once I took reading in the summer as a given--classes came to a close, and what else would one do?  Now I continue onward:  as one set of classes ends, I teach the next set.  But summer still feels spacious in a way that other seasons do not, in part because I'm working from home more, commuting less.

I would likely not have picked up Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, if a friend hadn't talked about how much she liked it; she read it after her grown up son raved about it.   After the movie came out a few months ago, she asked if I had read it, and after her recommendation, I added it to my ever growing list of books to read.

I read The Martian (I wrote about it in this blog post) and liked it well enough, but Weir hasn't been one of those writers whose work I seek out.  Project Hail Mary felt familiar yet different.  I liked the flashbacks better than the parts in the spaceship.  I found the premise intriguing, the in-depth mechanical explorations less so.  

After finishing Project Hail Mary, I was in the mood for something shorter.  Kevin Wilson's Now Is Not the Time to Panic fit the bill.  Wilson captures a different kind of summer from the one I am having, a teenager without a job kind of summer.  Wilson captures the mid-90's, captures what it was like to have artistic aspirations in a pre-World Wide Web age.  The parts of the book about the girl artist grown up were a bit less developed, but I wasn't as curious about her--should I have been?

When I was younger, in my middle school years, my goal was to read 100 books in the summer.  Often the local library had some kind of contest.  Of course, those were easier books which I could read in an afternoon.  When I was older, in high school, I was reading the books I felt I should read by the time I went off to college, along with pulpy romances and multigeneration family sagas.

Now I just want to be reading books that call to me when I'm doing other tasks.  These two books did just that. 

Summer Then, Summer Now

A year ago I'd be getting ready to head over to the VA hospital for my first day of CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education.  I blogged about it during my first week, then it was brought up in a group meeting that I was blogging my positive observations, that VA officials higher up the chain were monitoring.  I was writing on my own computer, during my off hours, so I decided to be even more careful.  I didn't use the VA computers for anything other than entering patient notes and checking VA e-mail.

So, for future scholars, reading last summer's blog posts, wondering why I wasn't writing more, there's the story.  I did some offline journaling during the summer, but for the most part, I was too exhausted by being a VA Hospital chaplain to do too much in the way of writing at all.

I'm still not sure why this kind of training is seen as essential for ordination in the ELCA version of the Lutheran church.  Chaplaincy is VERY different from visiting parishioners in the hospital.  Throughout last summer, I kept thinking, what, exactly, am I supposed to be learning here?

While I liked all of the people I met during my CPE experience, I have not kept in touch with any of them.  It's strange, in a way--we do have a lot in common, even outside of our shared CPE summer.  But I am old enough now that I can't keep in touch with friends in the deep way I would like--there's just too many people to call every week or to see once a month.  So I'm rarely adding more.

CPE made for a strange summer, and it came crashing to an unexpected close when my mom got very sick with pneumonia; she was much closer to dying than we knew at the time.

This summer is very different, and I'm grateful.  I'm teaching more online classes, so I'm not having a complete summer off.  We've got a house that needs attention, 2 houses really.  But even with the pivots and plotting that a fixer-upper requires, there's still more down time.  I don't need to be at a hospital for 9 hours a day.  I have time for other interests, time to see friends, for example.  I'm still feeling overwhelmed at times, but I'd rather be overwhelmed by home repair timelines than by patients with life threatening issues.

The Morning After the Tony Awards

I have just spent a delightful smidge of time reading about the Tony awards.  Once I wouldn't have had to read newspaper accounts; once, in long ago teenage years, I would have stayed up late to watch the awards show.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in drama as a genre (as opposed to drama as a lifestyle?).  I was in plays throughout elementary school, and I was that strange kid that also wrote plays--and performed them.  I loved making puppets and putting on puppet shows.  For Christmas one year, I got a puppet theatre, which was three boards with hinges and a square opening--and a curtain!

So perhaps it seems inevitable that at some point, I'd think about becoming an actress as a career plan.  I first decided this in 7th grade, and in 9th grade, my best friend and I planned to go to NYC as roommates when we graduated from college.  She had recently moved from New Jersey to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was homesick.  I had recently moved and was impatient for grown up life to start.

I read every play I could get my hands on (often out loud, in my room, choosing one character and reading only those parts out loud) and bought the soundtracks to Tony nominated musicals.  Occasionally, I went to see plays--during most of my childhood, we lived in places with community theatre or university drama department offerings.  In those days, seeing Broadway traveling shows meant a trip to larger cities like Atlanta or Washington D.C., which we did occasionally.

This year, unlike other years, I read about last night's Tony awards, and most of the names of the plays are familiar to me.  In part, it's because many of the nominees are revivals or shows based on earlier works, some dramas or musicals (like Cats), some not (like The Lost Boys, based on the movie from 1987).  I also worry that we're in a thin period for theatre, where fewer shows make it to the stage or stay there long, so it means that people like me have less to keep track of from a distance, if we try to keep track through the years.

I am happy that I didn't try to make my childhood love into a grown up career--Broadway has not been kind to women, particularly older women.  I am happy that this childhood love of drama continues to make me happy, even as I don't always go to see live theatre or even read plays.  I do want to make a mid-year intention to read more plays, beginning with Bess Wohl, who won last night for Liberation.

Short Story Inspirations and "Mrs. Dalloway"

On Friday, I headed to Columbia to see my grad school friend who had a catastrophic stroke 2 years ago and now lives in a skilled nursing unit.  After that visit, I went to a different grad school friend, my upstairs neighbor in long-ago grad school days.  We are both writers, both college English teachers, both on life paths similar and different.

Lately she's been attending a Shut Up and Write group, which has been working for her in all sorts of ways.  I keep thinking I might go with her on a Friday when her group meets.  I'm also thinking it might make an interesting experiment for my own writing classes that I teach.

As I've been driving these past few days, I had an idea for my idea that I had a year ago on the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Dalloway.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  "Now I am thinking of new projects, a new narrative that might weave the voice of an older woman in seminary, a younger woman teaching section after section of freshman comp in a community college, a middle aged woman struggling to write poems around the edges of her administrator job--and yes, they would all be me."

Throughout the past year, this idea has bubbled back up periodically and then simmered right back down.  I have not had the time or focus to write a novel.

And then, on Friday, I thought, why not write linked short stories?  Write a short story for each year of my past 30 years and then choose the best.  I would probably not play with time; I would probably organize the stories chronologically.  So the fact that the characters in the blog post description are the same would not be a surprise.

I immediately felt tired at the amount of short stories if I had to write one per year--so I immediately decided that I didn't have to do each year.  I did wonder about perspective--if I'm writing a story set in 1995, can I use knowledge that doesn't come for another 20 years?

On my drive yesterday, I thought about a different approach.  I could write stories by way of subject.  I wrote one such story as a requirement for a seminary class, which I wrote about at the end of this blog post.  That story used fairy tales as a jumping off point to talk about beauty and self image and other stories, like the Little House books, that girls often read, along with boiling water in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  

Some subjects I thought about:

--shoes:  hiking boots and camouflage high tops

--the habit of buying fixer-uppers

--tea practices

--various books could serve as jumping off points, the ones we read in grad school or in childhood and the surprising intersections

--journaling and blogging and the types of writing that aren't always valued by grad school professors

--the oat bran muffins I made in grad school, the muffins sold in the coffee shop in the basement of the humanities office building

--all sorts of baking

--nutrition developments through the years

--a wide variety of religious/theological issues

--and then there's all the music

--yearning for graduate studies even after getting a PhD

I love the idea of short stories instead of a work that has a long narrative arc across 200-300 pages. It's an idea that's much more manageable with my current commitments.  Maybe in retirement I'll return to to writing traditional novels. 

Annual Dinner with Camp Counselors

Last night, we had dinner with the Lutheridge and Lutherock camp counselors.  We've done it before, and I always come away impressed.  The neighborhood community who lives in the residential section of Lutheridge brings a variety of desserts, and the camp provides burgers and hot dogs, chips and beverages.

We sat with a guy who's finishing the fall semester and then headed to Duke Divinity school and another senior staffer who hopes to come back for another summer or two before he said he probably should find a regular job.  I said, "Or you could continue working in outdoor ministries year round."

Happily, no one was there to point out the shrinking job opportunities in that field.  I will never understand why the larger church doesn't do more to help/commit to campus and outdoor ministries.  The counselors I spoke to last night are full of hope for all the ways their futures might unfold.  I've found that my SMC students are similarly optimistic.  It's refreshing.

Before the dinner, I spent the day trying to fix my course shell for my online class at Spartanburg Methodist College.  The book has changed editions (again--sigh), so the references to the book page numbers that students find in the assignments and discussion posts are wrong.  Ugh.  I'm teaching someone else's course, and so it's not intuitive to me, the way I would have if I had created it all--it takes more time to diagnose problems and fix them.

I also did some baking--I decided to bring a gluten free, dairy free dessert.  It worked beautifully.  It's an almond-coconut concoction, and I want to record it here:

1 C. sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 C. almond flour (or grind up a lot of almonds into as fine a powder as possible)

1 1/2 C. coconut (I used sweetened and unsweetened in 2 different experiments--no difference)

Whip the sugar and eggs until tripled in volume or until tired of the noise of the mixer.  Fold in the almond flour and the coconut.  Pour in a 9 inch cake pan lined with parchment paper and greased or in cupcake pan.  Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.  You can only tell if it's done by color--a golden, light brown color.  It will be sticky and delicious.  It keeps at room temperature for days, although the crispiness of the crust declines.

The Tiredness of Being Grounded

I woke up feeling tired--and why?  We spent much of yesterday at our Spartanburg fixer-upper, but we weren't doing the hard-on-the-body work of home remodel.  We were there for experts to come and evaluate various systems.

Yes, most people do this before buying a property, but we had a sense of what would be needed without needing a home inspector to tell us.  Now it's time to figure out a timeline.  So yesterday we had a plumbing team and an HVAC guy and an electrician come to the house.  It was a lot of waiting.

This morning, I thought, yes, it's been a long time since I had to be in a physical location for 9 hours.  The visits between experts were spaced out, which was great, since we could give our individual attention to each system under analysis.  It was exhausting in the unique way that waiting for home repair specialists is exhausting.

Before I went to bed, I took some ibuprofen.  Why were my arthritic feet so achy?  I have no idea, but they were.  They are not as achy today.

Now it is time to get on with the tasks of each week which don't involve a fixer-upper:  sermon writing, online teacher tasks, food prep.  Let me get my walk in before inertia takes over.

Memory Whisps from Last Week's Travel to the High Country of NC

Before we get too far away from our travels of last week, let me record some memories that I don't want to slip away.  We went to a different part of the North Carolina mountains, near Boone.  We were there for the wedding of my spouse's sister's oldest child.  The wedding was beautiful, of course, but there were other beautiful moments:

--On Monday night, we went to Parallel Brewing in Boone for a rehearsal dinner/party.  Do they brew beer?  I don't know.  Did I taste it?  No.  I wanted wine to go with the pizza.  Was any of the wine memorable enough to make note of what it was?  No.

--I was much more interested in Huzzah Books, which shares the building with Parallel Brewing.  We could go back and forth, which made the party better--more space.

--I also loved lingering among the books, which seemed to be used books from decades when publishers were more serious about publishing.  I found a book of "best new poetry" published in 1960 or so.  The names were fairly familiar and all male, except for Adrienne Rich.

--One of our younger family members (21 or so) was thrilled to find a book by Jane Kenyon.  I was thrilled that she was thrilled.

--We didn't do more in Boone.  We spent most of our time visiting with family members on the front porches of our cabins.  If it had been clearer weather, we'd have had a glorious view.

--I did love seeing the fog/mist move across the land, only to vanish.  Once again, I thought about how humans might come to believe in ghosts.

--I was disappointed that we didn't have a clear view of the night sky.  I wanted that non-light polluted view.  But we did have lovely nights on the porch, watching the mist, listening to frogs and insects.  And we saw fireflies, which I associate with much later in the summer.

--I'm not usually awake much past 8:30 or 9 these days, but for two evenings last week, I had normal-ish adult bedtimes.

--It was great to have a get away that was much closer.  We were home after a 2.5 hour drive.

Songs and Other American Experiments

It's Tuesday, and I began as I almost always do on a Tuesday, reading Dave Bonta's Poetry Blog Digest, which almost always takes me in interesting directions.  This morning, it's been a bit of a trip down memory lane, courtesy of Shawna LeMay's blog post which mentioned Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train."

She quoted lyrics, which I didn't remember from the song:

"Now I work down at the car wash
Where all it ever does is rain
Don't you feel like you're a rider
On a downbound train?"

So of course, I went in search of the song, which instantly catapulted me back to the fall of 1984, when the album Born in the USA came out.  I bought it at Wal-Mart, along with a fan for my dorm room.  A few weeks later, my boyfriend went back to Memphis where his mom needed him.  He'd been wearing my DC101 (a rock radio station) jacket that my sister had won somehow and given to me.  That jacket smelled of sweat and the Players cigarettes that he smoked, and I wore it all fall, feeling sad as my smells replaced his.

It was a different time, the results of a different election, daylight in America, brutal regimes across the globe, and when people wonder why I'm not as hopeless in 2026 as I might be, it's because I remember past time when I couldn't imagine how humanity would survive--and here we are, surviving this history that is not repeating but rhyming, a slant rhyme, to be sure, or maybe just a history so full of allusions that it's hard to read.

I wrote so many letters in the fall of 1984, actual letters on paper, back when long distance phone calls were expensive, and the only phone I had was the one at the end of my dorm hallway, where those of us with long distance relationships talked to distant loves.  My half of the correspondence filled a dresser drawer.  My boyfriend's letters took up a shoe box.

I married him anyway.  And now, here we are, decades later.  On Sunday we watched some PBS presentation on the American experiment, featuring Ken Burns talking about his documentaries.  It was fairly recent with the focus on the Revolution in 1776, and my spouse bleakly said, "It's all over."  I think he meant the grand experiment of freedom, and I said, "No, it's not."  I was talking about the American experiment of revolution and self-governance, with piercing awareness of all the ways that the foundational documents of the USA have not borne fruit--and all the ways they have.

We were well into the second bottle of wine on Sunday, so we didn't discuss further.  But it's a conversation we've been having since 1983 when we first met, so we didn't really need words.

This morning, some lines came to me, as I've been reading and writing:

We are half drunk with disappointment,
fueled by sundrenched picnics and longing,
and you declare the great experiment
dead, and I say no.

Schooled on Springsteen
and Woody Guthrie,
and the songs of enslaved people,
I know that times have always been hard.

I've begun the poem, but I don't know where it leads--like so many elements in my life.  The YouTube algorithm has given me delightful songs from the Springsteen starting point.  It's been a delightful morning, as Tuesdays so often are, rooted in the words (and rabbit holes) of others.