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.