Five Years of Morning Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Week of Smoke, A Week of Encouragement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Thoughts and Pictures after a Quilting Bee

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

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

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

After some instruction, students got to do some knotting.

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

Here's a supply table:

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

All in all, it was a good day.  

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

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

Poems for the Feast Day of the Annunciation

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

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

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

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

A Girl More Worthy

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

Annunciation


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

The Feast Day of Oscar Romero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rice Pudding and Metaphors for Abundance

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

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

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

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

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

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