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.

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.

Houses of Dynamite

I spent the week-end watching A House of Dynamite, which I've wanted to see since it came out.  At last, we had a moment and seized it on Saturday.  It was so well done that I wanted to see it again, to see the artistry of it, once I had the plot figured out.

In some ways, it was strange to be watching a movie about the launch of a nuclear missile during the week-end of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela.  It might have been better to watch Missing, which is about U.S. intervention in Chile or maybe Salvador about U.S. interference in El Salvador.  

Watching A House of Dynamite also made me want to revisit the nuclear war movies of my youth:  The Day After, Testament, and Threads.  But I am resisting--there's only so much of this that I can take and maintain my equilibrium.

It was interesting, though, seeing the very realistic sets of A House of Dynamite and reflecting on the sets of Threads and The Day After, especially the military bases and government operations.   The technology is both updated (all those computers!) and old-school (the siloes that house the missiles, the hatches that cover the siloes).  Then as in the 1980's, I think about all the money spent on weapons, what else it might have been used for.  But I also know that some of that technology had additional purposes, like our laptops and phones that might not have been invented otherwise--weather forecasting equipment too, that keeps us safer.

A House of Dynamite also had wonderful shots of the D.C. area, which gave me that twist of time feeling.  It made me think of the D.C. of the year that I lived there in seminary, but also the D.C. of the 1980's.  In some ways, they are very different cities, and I thought about how long I've loved that city, but how it is unlikely I'll be spending much time there again.

But who knows.  Five years ago, Wesley wasn't even part of my awareness, although it was about to be.  Life takes interesting turns.

Christmas Morning, Christmas Eve Report, and Sermon Recording

It is Christmas morning, 2025, and through the decades, I've had a wide variety of Christmas mornings.  By choice, I had no children of my own, but I have spent Christmas mornings with little children, and I understand how wonderful it is to have that enchanted kind of morning.  I am also a fan of a leisurely morning, even if it ends up feeling like a regular morning.  I've had Christmas mornings in my own house and Christmas mornings in the houses of relatives, along with the occasional Christmas morning at a vacation property.  I love them all.

This morning, I unwrapped the pumpkin roll that had been waiting for me in the church freezer.  I thought we took home the pumpkin roll intended for us, back in the fall, but there was another, in the upstairs refrigerator.  The woman who baked it assured me that it was mine, and so I brought it home.  It makes a delicious breakfast.

I thought about rolled cakes, about my one attempt to make a Buche de Noel.  It was back in my teenage days, when I subscribed to Bon Appetit magazine and actually attempted to make some of the recipes, if the ingredients were ones I could find in Charlottesville, VA and Knoxville, TN, back in the days (1980's) when grocery stores didn't have the wide range of products that they have now.

It was a tasty enough cake, that long ago Buche de Noel, but we all agreed that it was an awful lot of effort for a cake that tasted like, well, cake.  My pumpkin roll breakfast was also delicious, but it doesn't really taste like regular cake.  It does taste like autumn, so it's a bit out of place on Christmas morning, but since I love both autumn and Christmas, that's fine.

Yesterday was a delightful day which revolved mostly around our trip across the mountain to Bristol, TN, Christmas Eve service, and the trip back.  It was unseasonably warm for December, which I no longer complain about; I took advantage of the warm weather and took a longer walk.

I love the Christmas Eve service; it will always be my favorite.  Everyone is in a good mood, and all the hymns are familiar.  The central message of Christmas is easy to preach, unlike many other texts.

Speaking of sermons, my Christmas Eve sermon was recorded, and you can view it here on my YouTube channel.  If you want to read along (or read instead of watching the recording), I posted the sermon manuscript as a post on my theology blog.

Watching "Thriller" in the Composition Classroom

Yesterday, my English 101 class continued its study of music, more specifically Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  I thought about playing the song without the video and then the video to have them compare and contrast the images in their head without the video to the video.  But in the end, I decided to go with a simpler movie review type of writing--plus, the official video is almost 15 minutes long, and the class is only 50 minutes long.

We did have time for a bit of discussion about whether or not the video holds up well.  Most of the students agreed that it did hold up well.  It wasn't as scary as it might have seemed in 1983 when it debuted, but the music, the costumes, the dancing, and almost every other element was sound.

Only 1/3 of them had seen the video before, and only one student had seen it in the last month.  I wasn't sure what to expect in that regard.  I also wondered how much of Michael Jackson's story they would know.  Most of them seemed to say that his history of being accused of sexual abuse of children shouldn't negate his art. 

It was strange, in a time wrinkle kind of way, to watch this video with my first year students.  This video premiered when I was a first year student, in 1983.  I remember making a special effort to see it on MTV; it felt like an important cultural moment.  And now MTV is bankrupt.  Michael Jackson's red jacket that he wore is in the Smithsonian--and the Smithsonian is closed because of a government shut down.

It feels like we're at another cultural moment of a turning point, but it's hard to know where we're headed.  I don't know that I felt the same way in 1983, at least not about "Thriller." 

It was a fun way to have a sort-of scary, very short film.  It was a great addition to my fall festival two weeks in English 101 class.  Will it lead to good writing?  Time will tell.

Poems and Chocolates and U2 on a September Tuesday Morning

It's been a strange morning, strange but satisfying.  I began it as I do most Tuesday mornings, by reading Dave Bonta's weekly Poetry Blog Digest and exploring some of the blog posts.  Rachel Barenblat's post includes an amazing poem, which made me weep.  It's the perfect poem for a week of shootings, and sadly, multiple shootings is a hallmark of almost every week these days. 

I also wanted to hear U2's "Shadow and Tall Trees," so I went to a YouTube site, and after each U2 song has come another.  But they've all been from the early years, The Joshua Tree and earlier--such powerful music!

Some of it I haven't heard in decades.  I'm getting deep cuts from the October album for example.  I remember it as an album that I bought and didn't really listen to much; I wanted to be listening to War, and so I did.  And yet, I remember the songs still.  I don't listen to music that way much anymore.

I am also struck by the way the lyrics twine together contemporary politics and ancient religious texts and concepts.  Wow.

As always, this music takes me back to earlier falls:  the autumn of 1983 when I first bought a lot of this music on vinyl (War and October and Boy), the autumn of 1984 when I had The Unforgettable Fire in constant rotation.  That music made me think of listening to my own recordings on cassette as I drove across South Carolina to see my grandmother in Greenwood, SC.

Those memories made me think of her Whitman's Sampler and the time I got one of my own, on sale, at a local drugstore, during the spring of my last year at Newberry College.  Finally I could eat as many of the chocolates as I wanted!  My grandmother only ate one at a time, spaced out across many days, making that box last as long as possible.  It will surprise no one that being able to eat as much of the box as I wanted in one sitting was not as satisfying as I always imagined.  Ah, the heartbreak of grown up life!

I've been trying to write a poem out of it all, and I'm a bit haunted by thinking that I've already used this material but I can't remember if I really have or if I thought that it would make a good poem.

I've continued with the poem composing, and I like this line:  Sugar soaked mouth unsatisfied

I've also done some sketching and noted the way a mostly dried up marker looks like tree bark on the page.  That, too, seems like it should be a metaphor for something, but in a different poem.

I woke up this morning thinking that I was going to blog about reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this past week, and being struck by how it speaks to our current conversation/argument about generative AI.  Frankenstein seems timeless in so many ways.  Last year I read it for a seminary class, and the isolation of all the characters was what grabbed me.

I feel so lucky to have this life, and I'm amazed that I managed to stumble into it, being able to teach undergraduates in a small, liberal arts college in South Carolina, just up the road from my the small, liberal arts college where I spent my youth listening to U2 and reading British lit and dreaming of being a poet myself.

The Glory Days of Older Movies and Outer Space

In addition to taking trips down memory lane by way of song this week, I've also been watching old movies.  I thought we would have movie afternoons, but afternoons have been full of naps.  So watching movies in the evening has been a great way of turning our attention away from the national news and getting ourselves settled.

I wanted to choose movies that we've all seen before.  I thought it might help to have something that's not challenging us to keep track of new characters and different plotlines.  On Saturday, we watched Hannah and Her Sisters, which I saw with Mom and Dad in a movie theatre when it was first released in 1986.  Dad came home from a business trip where he had seen it and loved it so much that he wanted to watch it again.  So we did.

They had no memory of ever seeing it, but they were open to it.  They laughed at all the funny parts.  We all stayed awake through the whole movie--no small thing.  I tried not to think of revelations about the more sordid side of Woody Allen that were to come, a reason I can't watch Manhattan again.  There were a few lines that made me wince, but overall, it holds up well.

Mom said she didn't understand it, and Dad said it was a great movie.

Last night, we watched Apollo 13.  After the death of Jim Lovell this week, it seemed fitting.  Plus I figured the plot line would be easy to follow:  doomed spaceship and astronauts trying to get home.  I was right--we were rivetted.

In the past, I've written an extensive blog post about my sadness thinking about the space programs of the past and wondering why we let all of that slip away.  Last night as we watched the credits, I felt a similar sadness about great movie making of the past.  I saw Apollo 13 in a movie theatre when it was first released.  It has been a long time since I saw a movie in a movie theatre, and even longer since I saw a movie trailer and thought that I needed to see it on a big screen, not a small one.  

Most movies these days don't seem like they're worth the time or the money or the effort.  I know it's because I'm not the target audience for many of them--if I liked big budget super hero movies, I'd be writing a blog post about how we're in a golden age.

I look at our movie landscape in 2025, and I don't see big budget movies that will make multiple generations happy.  There's very little being released today that I can conceive of seeing with both my parents and my nephew--or even with my spouse.  Sigh.

But let me not lose myself to sadness today.  Let me be happy that we could stream this movie in ways we could not 30 years ago--and for the same price that a video rental cost in 1995--about $3.00.  Let me be happy that we could sit on a sofa and watch a great piece of filmmaking together.

Papa Don't Preach and the Other End of Age

My recent singing of Prince's "Raspberry Beret" with different words (which I wrote about in this post) led me to some additional thoughts:

--I needed to snap myself out of a morning funk, so I sang Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach"--softly because I was at my parents' house.  No, this is not one of my usual go-to songs to snap myself to a better mindset.  But I heard it on my long drive to Williamsburg on Tuesday night and it's stuck in my head.

--The line about keeping my baby led me to do some math.  If the speaker in that song had kept her baby in 1986, that baby would be 39 years old, and let's assume the mom would be 16 or 17 years older, so 55 or 56.  I thought of the papa in the story, who likely now needs some assistance in his twilight years.  I thought of a short story, but that's been done to death. 

--I'd love to create a poem, but again, not around the issue of elder care or teenage pregnancy.  I want to write about caring for aging parents when we're all just flabbergasted that we've become this old.  In their minds, they're my age.  In my mind, I'm 32.  In some ways, we're reverting back to my adolescent years, with lots of focus on who should be eating what.  There's body shaming, both the kind we did during my adolescence, and the shame that comes with aging bodies that know exactly how old they are and lose no opportunity to remind us.

I Am a Spirit, I Have a Body

Yesterday, because of a strange confluence of busyness, I consumed about 1000 calories.  I am adopting the Weight Watchers approach of not counting vegetable and fruit calories, so if I included the calories in the carrots and the cantaloupe chunks, I consumed slightly more.

There was a brief moment this morning where I started to calculate how much weight I might lose if I could stick to 1000 calories a day--and maybe even lower!  For a brief moment, I felt like my high school self, who could stick to diets of 600 to 1000 calories a day for about 2 weeks.  I recognized the adrenaline rush of thinking I could exert control over at least that small part of my life, the calories consumed, even if I had no control over other parts, like having to go to high school.

And now I am older, and I know that the body has the last word when one tries to restrict calories drastically.

As I look back on my years of gaining and losing weight, I have been most successful during the times when I was conscious of what I was eating.  I've done well tracking calories.  I've done well when I cut things out of my diet:  becoming/going back to vegetarian eating, getting rid of high-fat foods, cutting out most white flour products, saying no to alcohol.

I have lost a bit of weight this summer.  I've been tracking calories, trying to stay between 1200 and 1500 calories a day, while knowing that one or two days a week, I'm likely to be closer to 2000 calories.  I'm doing a walk in the morning before work and lots of walking during the day.  I feel like I should have lost more than the 6 pounds I've lost since May.

I am feeling healthier, which is another reason why I'm surprised that my weight loss is small.  I'm eating more veggies, fruits, legumes, and whole grains than I usually do in the summer.  Most summers I do a good enough job of eating enough veggies and fruits if I've been to the farmers market, but I also consume much less in the way of legumes and whole grains if I'm not going to an office.

I'm also drinking less, which makes me surprised at the slower weight loss.  But the health benefits of drinking less go way beyond weight loss, so I'm happy for my success in this area.  I started my alcohol abstinence on June 16.  This time next week, I'll hit the mark where I've been alcohol free for the longest consistent time since 2008 or so.

When I was at my annual physical in February, my doctor was direct:  "Someone with as much cancer in the family as you have should not be drinking alcohol at all."  It sounds blunt on the page, and it was, but she didn't say it in the negative way a doctor might, a shaming, blaming, you will die if you don't do this kind of way.  It was straightforward and informative.

My family also has a history of dementia, some severe, some mild, and I think we are only just beginning to understand how alcohol interferes with cognition beyond the immediate drunken state that comes from heavy drinking in one sitting.

In a family where alcoholism also lurks in the family tree, I know how lucky I am that I can give up drinking as easily as I have.

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."

Kissinger's Death and Carter's (Rosalynne's)

Henry Kissinger has died, and it's the kind of death where I would have thought, wait, he's still alive???!!!!  But I had heard a news story not too long ago about his involvement in something, even though he's 100 years old, and he had begun to seem like a vampire to me, this foreign policy vampire who will be around sucking the blood out of social justice movements long after we're all gone.

I thought about not writing much more than that paragraph, but I've seen some evocative writing by others, and I want to record a few thoughts.  The first bit I read was from this piece by the editors of The Washington Post:  "Indeed, Mr. Kissinger’s heyday was a time when the secretary of state could strike grand bargains that seem elusive to U.S. leaders today. Such a time seems long distant."

But I'm old enough to remember the news stories from the 80's and 90's that bemoaned late century politics and how political actors were a faint shadow of the powerful figures who navigated World War II.  Even then, I wondered how we would remember the Henry Kissengers and the Ronald Reagans.  And now, I wonder how the future will respond to our current time, 2023, our curdled politics, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives where so many seem to have decided not to accomplish a single damn thing.

My view of Kissinger was shaped by events in Latin America during my college years.  I was astonished by U.S. foreign policy that seemed to care not a whit for the humans on the ground.  I still am, but I am less judgmental about situations that seem to have no good ending and humans who have to decide how to navigate that.

Maybe Kissinger was similarly conflicted, but most stories about him don't show him caring about human rights if it meant that his geopolitical goals could be met.  This article in Rolling Stone was quite explicit, but sadly, I can no longer quote it because it seems now to be behind a paywall when it wasn't at 4:30 when I first read it this morning.  But I can summarize:  if you count up all the bodies in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Chile, in Argentina, in Pakistan, in the USSR, in India, on and on I could go, it's clear that his geopolitical goals left millions dead.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, Kissinger's death and Rosalynne Carter's (and I assume that her spouse Jimmy will not be far behind her).  It's interesting to compare the news stories, the retrospectives,  people born at roughly the same time, experiencing the same world events, reacting in such very different ways.

I know how I prefer to be remembered when I die.

Sea of Tranquility, World of Turmoil

During my April travels, I heard this interview with Emily St. John Mandel on the NPR show 1A. The interviewer and the author discussed the new book Sea of Tranquility, which sounded interesting. I first read Station Eleven and enjoyed it thoroughly, so I was predisposed to like this book.

In fact, I loved this book. I’d go so far as to say it's one of the best I've read in a long time. I started it Friday afternoon and got up early Saturday morning to finish it. I don't want to say too much about it because I don't want to ruin it for those who haven't read it, so let me just say that it was satisfying in so many ways, particularly in ways that pleased me as a writer. I was so impressed with what she managed to pull off.

This interview on the Ezra Klein podcast also inspired me to want to read this book. This morning I went back and listened to both interviews again. Emily St. John Mandel is a wonderful guest with a wide range of knowledge.  I’m glad that she’s younger, that we might have many more books from her to enjoy.

I was sad yesterday when I learned that Rosemary Radford Ruether had died. She, too, had a wide range of knowledge. She was one of the feminist theologians who helped change how we talk about God. She did groundbreaking, revolutionary work on gender issues and God talk. She's not one of the theologians whose work I go back to reread, but her work forms a foundation for many of the works of theology that have sustained me.

I wish I could say that her work was done, that it seems part of an earlier age and no longer relevant.  Sadly, that is not the case. Just last month I was part of an interesting conversation about changing references to God as a father. We talked about translation issues and gender issues and whether or not it was appropriate to have a more expansive language when talking about the creator.

The person who was most opposed to changing God the Father language was not in his 90s. I looked him up later to be sure. He's roughly my age, at the far side of mid life. I thought that most people in more liberal church denominations had accepted the need for careful language when it comes to the creator, a need to move beyond tradition. I was surprised by the ferocity of the conversation.

I held my own, while at the same time thinking of the decades of work that had been done on this issue of the language of God talk. It's also interesting to think of these issues in a week where the Southern Baptist Convention has had revelations of all sorts of horrible abuse. It reminded me of one of my undergraduate friends who went on to seminary in the late 80’s, right at the time at the Southern Baptists decided to stop ordaining women. I felt sad that the church world would lose her gifts.  I feel that sadness still.

We live in a time when the church world is losing the gifts of all sorts of people who turn away for all sorts of reasons. Some people scoff at the idea of language making a difference, but theologians like Ruether knew that change doesn't happen at the larger macro level without change happening at the micro language level. Maybe we need to return to some of those revelations.

This morning I took delight in reading this tribute to Ruether. Come to find out, the academic dean at Wesley Theological Seminary, where I am a student, studied under Ruether, and she directed his MA thesis. I have been so pleased this past year to be at this seminary, and discovering that the seminary has connections back to Ruether makes me even more happy to have made this choice.

Radio Free Europe and Other Places

Some random thoughts--can they make a loosely braided blog post?

--A Facebook post from late last week, one week after Russia's invasion of Ukraine:  "This afternoon I noticed the flag of Ukraine now flies above the Hollywood (FL) Arts Park. Two blocks away, there's a carnival "with modern midways" at the Little Flower Catholic Church and School. I'm just an ordinary poet and theologian, here to notice interesting juxtapositions on our Lenten Cold War II journey."

--A Facebook post from Monday, while I was listening to 80's music of my youth:  "Listening to REM sing "Radio Free Europe" and dreaming of being the poet theologian in residence of some sort of group that will give me a salary and health insurance. Our day job will be to get messages/poems of hope and resistance behind the front lines."

--We've been watching The Americans--yes, we're late to this party, although I read essays and reviews as the series aired, so I feel like I've seen parts of it.  I first started watching it a few months ago out of 80's nostalgia, and I had heard an interview on the NPR show 1A with Joe Weisberg, the man who created it.   I thought, if we're going to watch so much junk TV, maybe we should put some of it aside for some of the quality shows we've missed through the years, if we've got the right streaming service. Yesterday we watched another few episodes--interesting to watch this show about KGB agents with Putin never far from our minds.

--I also love the shots of DC--although as I read up on the show and realized how much of it was filmed in NYC, I realize I'm probably feeling nostalgia based on the wrong scenery.  So much of my heart remains in DC, and I'm feeling a bit breathless these days realizing that we are likely headed there very soon.  The breathlessness comes from hope and fear and anxiety.

--There is some part of me that thinks, of course you'll move to DC right about the time it becomes a target for nuclear weapons again.  And yes, I realize it is never not a target--its symbolism is too huge.

--And now, off to the rest of the day.  I made this Facebook post this morning:  "Back in my days of full + employment, Wednesdays were days full of dread and meeting after meeting. Now, because of underemployment, I can spend this Wednesday volunteering in my church's food pantry."  And I'll be making a stop along the way to help stock the food pantry with peanut butter and jelly--there's a constant need for it and very few donations.  I still have some microgrant money left over from a different feeding the hungry project, money that will vanish soon, so I'll use up the rest of the money this morning.

The Fourth Week of Underemployment Begins

Three weeks ago, I awakened to my first Monday of underemployment.  The world has changed radically since then, or maybe it hasn't.  It is hard to know.  Let me collect a few snapshots here.

--I am still adjusting to the idea that my schedule has a lot more flexibility than it once did.  I continue to think about the balance of writing, walking, and other practices that make up the best morning.  I am also aware that it may change in 2 weeks when we go back to Daylight Savings Time.

--Similarly, I am thinking about more travel than I once would have, back when I had to consider how much vacation time I had accrued.  One of my church friends asked me if I had considered going to the God Spa retreat.  I am now considering it.

--My replacement arrives today at my former campus, just a month before the accreditors come for a big visit.  When I took the job that brought me to my former campus, we had just a month to get various accreditation documents ready, but that was a much easier task than getting a campus ready for a visit.  I wish her luck; she will need it, but she might not realize that she needs it.  She's coming from a University of Phoenix campus, so she won't have had experience with the accreditors that will be coming at the end of March.

--This is also the week where lots of people on the academic side will be moving into and out of offices at my old campus--or at least, that was the plan when I left.  I don't miss that aspect of campus life.

--Over the week-end, I signed a publishing contract for one of my essays to appear in a book of essays about assembling poetry manuscripts.  It has been so long since the initial acceptance that I assumed that the project had fallen apart.  What a pleasant surprise to realize that it has not.

--Whenever I get this kind of news, I wonder if I should be doing more to attend to my poetry career, such as it is.  But then I look at various submission guidelines and feel that jolt of shock at submission fees.  I saw one journal this week-end, one that was fairly new, charging $5.00 to submit.  Nope--not doing that unless you're a journal where an acceptance might actually further a poetry career.

--And even then, part of me has to laugh at the idea of a poetry career.  I don't think anyone is making a living off of their poetry book sales.  Even poet laureates have teaching jobs.

--And yes, I do understand the precarious economics of literary magazines.  I do not feel called to underwrite those economics with my poetry submissions, but I am not criticizing those that decide to play that particular lottery/game.

--I came across this article in The New York Times yesterday, an essay that looks at these developments in Ukraine through the lens of 80's popular culture.  It calls the coverage the worst kind of nostalgia programming:  "There was the buildup of tensions over a supposed “military exercise,” the scenario that opened “The Day After” in 1983. There were the columns of tanks, an image out of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet newsreels and the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.” There were the maps of Europe, with arrows diagraming pincer attacks and fire-red explosion graphics."

--That article ends this way:  

"You could see this as evidence that we were still living in the same world that we lived in last week. You could assure yourself that this did not fit the apocalypse-film script, that this was not, in the end, 'The Day After.'

You might also remember, though, that that is exactly the sort of thing someone always says in the first 15 minutes of the disaster movie."

--Here's hoping that we can back away from this brink in the way that a pop culture movie script would not.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is also the anniversary of the day that the concentration camp Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army.  I remember a high school history class where we talked about the shock that those soldiers felt as they tried to understand what they had discovered.

I remember the first time I saw a photo in a book of those bodies stacked like cordwood.  I know it's hard to believe that one could get to one's teenage years without seeing such a picture, but in the pre-Internet days of my youth, it happened.  I had read about the Holocaust, of course.  But that first picture that I saw hit me in a visceral way.  Was I seeing human bodies or something else?

When I was in high school in the early 80's, I thought that the Holocaust was the only genocide of the 20th century, but sadly we know that's not true.  It becomes increasingly easy to wipe out whole populations, and whole populations increasingly do not care about basic human rights, which makes it increasingly easy to wipe out whole populations.

Today some people will light candles, some will write letters, some will pray, and some of us may not remember at all.  I'm thinking of a poem that I wrote in August of 2016, as the campaign season ramped into high gear. I couldn't get the Sylvia Plath quote out of my head. Did I read Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" before I wrote it? I think I was writing it, and the title came to me, and I looked it up and proceeded to read it; Ray Bradbury was such an expert storyteller.  Later, the literary journal Adanna published it.

History’s Chalkboards


“Every woman adores a Fascist,  
The boot in the face, the brute  
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
                            “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath


Every woman adores a Fascist.
Turns out men do too.
But we imagine the boot
on someone else’s face,
a face that doesn’t look
like ours, the face that arrives
to take our jobs and steal
our factories, while laughing
at us in a foreign language.

No God but capitalism,
the new religion, fascism disguised
as businessman, always male,
always taking what is not his.

Brute heart, not enough stakes
to keep you dead. 
We thought we had vanquished
your kind permanently last century
or was it the hundred years before?

As our attics crash into our basements,
what soft rains will come now?
The fire next time,
the ashes of incinerated bodies,
the seas rising on a tide
of melted glaciers.

And so we return to history’s chalkboard,
the dust of other lessons in our hair.
We make our calculations.

The Body Politic and the Parts of My Brain

I have spent the last two days being intensely aware of my joints--so achy.  I know it's likely about either changes in the weather and/or the fact that I've been on my feet more than most week-ends, but it's unsettling.  The part of me that has read every book on the body keeping score even as the mind isn't aware of all the stress, that part says, "You sold the house, and now you have to deal with all the difficult emotions you've been suppressing and delaying."

The Apocalypse Gal part of my brain says, "The U.S. has just ordered the families of diplomats to leave Ukraine.  Your aching joints are not what you will remember when you reflect on the early part of 2022.  Enjoy these halcyon days while you have them."

I think of the Body Politic.  Are there small countries feeling fretful this morning?  Countries beyond the current locus of conflict?  I think of all the countries of Central America, countries that are more familiar to me because they were the settings of proxy wars of my college years.  I think of our college conversations about what we would do if the U.S. suddenly went from a cold war to a hot war status and tried to make all of the men of our generation go to war.  We were in the early years of men being required to register for the draft in order to be eligible for student loans.

Those years seem so distant--and it is a shock to realize how long ago those days were.  I hear an occasional dispatch from those Central American countries, an election result for example, and then the news moves along.  Those stories don't merit more than just a mention at the top of the news hour.  

The Sensible Woman part of my brain says, "Are you sure you've completed every task for seminary that you need to have done right now?  Have you thought about your seminary tasks for the coming week?  Don't forget to check on your online class that starts today, the one that you're teaching; make sure to send that welcoming e-mail."

The Foxfire part of my brain works in concert with the Apocalypse Gal.  They want to start canning.  They wonder if we could raise chickens in this condo, if it all comes to that.   They made a huge pot of yellow split peas and barley yesterday.

Sensible Woman thinks about the days to come, when she will be tired of this concoction that she will now be taking to work.  She has lunch for days, months, but part of her just wants to eat Beef and Guinness Stew or maybe a lovely ricotta cake.  She hasn't made a ricotta cake yet, but she's aware of the tub of ricotta cheese in the fridge with a pull date just past.

All of these selves will now suit up for a walk in the chilly morning, a walk before work, the last chance to let all of these thoughts swirl before heading to the office, where these thoughts can swirl in a different setting.

Competing Apocalypses

This morning, I wrote this tweet:  "An autocrat in Moscow, troops on the border of countries that once would have been called satellites, NATO pondering. Modern politics or the script of "The Day After"? Jason Robards, comforting his wife, sure everyone will back down. Me, writing a blog post. #5amwritersclub"

I thought of that scene last night as I drove home from work, hearing that there is still no diplomatic solution to the issue of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine.  This morning I looked up the plots for both The Day After and Threads--both feature nuclear wars that start over standoffs at distant borders, East/West Germany for The Day After and Iran in Threads.  In Testament, that other great 80's nuclear war plot movie, we never know what happened to make the bombs fall on big cities nearby.

The plot line of not knowing seems more plausible.  If there is a nuclear exchange, I imagine that most of us will look up from our phones, wondering what just happened while we were solving today's Wordle or watching the shenanigans of the rich and famous.

This morning I thought of Testament as a metaphor for our pandemic times.  Testament is a movie that I can't watch the way I watch the other 2 nuclear war movies.  I watch Threads and The Day After the way that some people watch horror, with the comfort of knowing that it's a highly unlikely plot.  Watching the characters deal with demands of daily life (what to cook for dinner, when to give up on missing family members) in Testament makes the movie almost unbearable, as I suspect it is designed to do. 

I have always been an apocalyptic gal, although the plotlines I gravitate to have changed as my life has changed.  As a child, I loved the child surviving in the wild after disaster strikes plotline.  As a preteen, I couldn't get enough of Holocaust survival stories.  In late adolescence, I shifted to nuclear war scenarios, expecting to be living them in any moment.  As I started teaching British Lit survey classes, I explored what diseases had done to societies in the past, but until recently, I didn't see much of that in contemporary fiction.  

Our fictional (so far) apocalyptic stories tend to imagine mass death all at once, with a band of hardy survivors figuring out how to move forward.  They don't often describe the slow grind of an apocalypse.

And it's rare to see characters who have to deal with a competing apocalypses.  I hope it's not something we're all about to experience.

The Ghosts of Autumn Past

I've had past Octobers on the brain, and I'm not sure exactly why.  When the local NPR station did it's fundraising at the beginning of the month, I grabbed 2 CDs, which happened to be CDs from Octobers past:  U2's War, which I bought on vinyl in the fall of 1983, and Reggatta de Blanc by the Police, which I bought on vinyl in the fall of 1984.  Listening to that music slammed me right back to those time periods.  While I loved that music, and I loved aspects of those autumns, they were stressful:  first semester in college in 1983, during a time of increased bombings and increased tension with the USSR, and in 1984, my boyfriend (who would become my spouse much later) had to return to Memphis, and we carried on our relationship from a distance.

I've been sorting through boxes of housing stuff; our buyer asked for information/receipts concerning our Hurricane Irma damage and repairs, which meant digging through files and reliving it all a bit again.  That was a September storm, but the repairs dragged through October.  We didn't have our first post-Irma trash collection until October, for example.  That was a subdued season for decorating.  I remember seeing fluttering in the trash pile and thinking of the ghosts.

Thinking about Hurricane Irma took me back to Hurricane Wilma, an October storm that came before we had recovered from Hurricane Katrina, which took out a huge tree, a shed, an above ground pool, and any sense of safety I once had.  That was back when we lived 3 miles inland, and although those storms were a category 1, they did so much damage.  That's when I first started thinking, if a category 1 storm can do all of this, what would we suffer under something stronger?

I still wonder that.  So maybe it's no wonder that although autumn is still my favorite season, I still get anxiety flares, in part because something reminds me of past traumas.

But it's also the time of year when I remember past autumns with fondness, along with some yearning.  I've spent the week-end thinking that if it was a year ago, I'd be enjoying crisp air, apple orchards, and a surprise pumpkin patch.

Yesterday I tried to cheer myself up by going to the pumpkin patch of a church that's near my new condo that we're renting.  I enjoyed walking around the grounds, choosing some smaller pumpkins and gourds, and then I enjoyed arranging them yesterday.  I bought them for something I'm going to do with the altarscape that I'll be making at church today.  More details about that to come, but in the meantime, here's this year's haul from the church pumpkin patch:

Collegial Chaos and the Ways that 1970's TV Schooled Us

I was sad to hear of the death of Ed Asner a few days ago.  But it's a sadness mixed with gratitude for his long life and his fine acting.  I was first aware of him as Lou Grant, the boss of Mary Tyler Moore.  But I also loved his spin off show, where he's part of a newspaper outfit.  Many of my contemporaries wanted to be journalists because of Woodward and Bernstein, but I may have first felt that spark of longing when I watched both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant.  This article gives a wonderful tribute to Ed Asner and the character of Lou Grant that he created and the world of newspaper journalism.

I did not follow Lou Grant into the news business, but instead the college world, which bears some resemblance to those 1970's workplaces.  We've been wrestling with a different kind of work issue each day this week:  mi fi hotspot out, elevator buttons not lighting up, mail gone to a different floor while graduation regalia needs to be returned to a different campus, getting our new LMS less than a week before classes start for Fall 2021 quarter, on and on I could go.  I've been thinking of the great TV shows of my youth that were set in a work place and how we don't see that much these days; work is tangential in most weekly TV shows.  The work place TV shows of my youth prepared me for collegial chaos.

At one point, as my writer friend-colleague and I were trying to solve an issue at school, she suggested that our conversation would make brilliant dialogue for a TV show, like The West Wing, only set in a shrinking school.  I said, "Like The Chair, only it's a realistic look at a campus."  She later created this post on Facebook:

"Have you seen The Chair? Is that us now?"

"You know I have an ongoing Netflix trailer in my head of everything that happens on a daily basis."

"Maybe we could be the other end of the spectrum in Netflix shows. Like here's this Ivy League school and its quirky English department and ALL THE WAY OVER HERE is our little gritty-mostly female-70s-style workplace situation comedy about a tiny struggling college with no internet and a variety of other issues."

"Would part of this trailer be me curled up in front of your desk?"

"Probably."

To which I replied, 

"It's like Barney Miller meets WKRP in Cincinnati meets Taxi--but with better cake and less groovy music and a mostly female staff which means no sexualizing of the one lone woman. As workplaces go, it could be worse . . ."

It was the kind of week where we learned that the mi fi hot spot at the Gainesville campus and at our Hollywood campus were registered to the same phone number, so when they used theirs, ours went out, and vice versa.  I don't know enough about wi fi hot spots to understand that, but at this point in our campus tech crisis, I wasn't surprised.

I also wasn't surprised that the people on our campus reacted with grace and the determination to create a work around so that our students' progress can continue.  The TV shows of my youth schooled us in how to do just that.

Across Decades, A Woman Weeping for Afghanistan

I spent much of yesterday returning to a state of tears over Afghanistan, while at the same time marveling over how many decades I've spent feeling weepy because of what's happening in Afghanistan.  My first memory of knowing about Afghanistan as a country was the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, which made my teenage self both angry and weepy.

As I prepared for my wedding in 1988, Afghanistan was in the news because the Soviets were pulling out.  I joked that we should have gotten married earlier because peace seemed to be breaking out in the most unlikely places in that summer of 1988.

Ah, the foolish optimism of youth.  I was astonished that Afghanistan seemed to fall back into the middle ages once the Soviets left.  The 1990s brought all sorts of misery to Afghanistan, particularly to females.  It was shocking to me that a country could go backwards that way, in terms of women's rights.  I thought about Margaret Atwood's claim that anything that was in The Handmaid's Tale was something that was actually happening in the world as she wrote the book in the early 1980's, and I felt a shiver along with my weeping.

For the past twenty (20!!!) years, many events in Afghanistan could provoke weeping, but I held out hope that the U.S. presence in the country helped stabilize it.  I predict that events in the coming weeks will solidify that claim, as the U.S. leaves, and once again, the country will head to a place that's very unhealthy for females.

As I listened to coverage of yesterday's events in Afghanistan, I thought of the scene in The Princess Bride about the classic blunder of getting involved in a land war in Asia.  When I first saw that movie in 1991 or so, I heard the line and thought about Vietnam.  Afghanistan has been another part of Asia that has a long (very long!) history of being very challenging to invaders, from Alexander on to the U.S., century upon century of sorrow.

Not for the first time, I wondered why anyone would want to have the U.S. as an ally.  I thought of our history of abandoning those who tried to help us.  Some of my earliest political memories are those of the exit from Saigon, those images of people clinging to helicopters and trying to push their way to a safe exit.  As the news from Afghanistan has gotten progressively worse as the U.S. leaves, I've thought of the South Vietnamese, of the Kurds, of all of those types of people in Afghanistan who have tried to help the U.S. and will now be in great peril.  And I've thought of the females, who are also in great peril, solely because of their gender. 

My life has shown me the folly of trying to save everyone.  My life reminds me again and again that I can't even keep my closest loved ones safe, so why should I think that I can somehow protect the vulnerable in other countries?  Why should I think that I can save those who didn't win the lottery of being born into a safe body, a safe country, a safe situation?  

Why do I believe in safety at all?

As I waited for the AT&T person to finish making my phone line communicate with the outside, I ended my day by reading Patricia Smith's brilliant and terrifying Blood Dazzler, a good reminder of all the aspects of life that threaten us:  hurricanes and poverty and bad information and poverty and learned helplessness and poverty and forced helplessness.  I loved this cycle of poems that revolve around Hurricane Katrina, and each subsequent reading only increases my appreciation of the work.

I wondered about my own ruminations throughout the day and wondered if I could create some sort of poem cycle that connects Afghanistan and the health of a nation and the personal health choices that lead to ruin.  Or maybe I want a simpler poem, a poem about a woman hearing about the dire circumstances of Afghanistan's women and children, a woman sobbing in the car as she goes to pick up her books on hold at the public library, a woman who has spent her day at work trying to make the educational path easier for college students.  Let my brain ruminate on that a bit before I attempt to catch it on paper.

This morning, I came across this magnificent blog post, where Dr. Wil Gafney makes connections between Afghanistan and the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Bible.  Her work always makes important connections, so I wasn't surprised to find her continuing to do so.  I am grateful for a solid spiritual dimension to my reading about Afghanistan this morning.  

I am grateful to know that I am not alone in weeping.