Seeing Ghosts

A couple years ago I was hanging out with some girlfriends for Happy Hour when out of the blue it occurred to me what I could say at Thanksgiving when we had to go around the table and announce what we're thankful for: I am thankful that, other than a couple dear friends, I have never, ever run into anyone from my high school since I graduated.

It was such a brilliant absence in my life! I was delighted that I could be aware of it and celebrate it.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I started to receive invitations to my (gulp) 20th High School Reunion and found (gulp again) that I really wanted to go! Wha?!

The notes have been coming in by email for maybe two weeks now. And with them, names of people who used to be a part of my life--but who I'd nearly completely forgotten about--have been floating back into view for me. It was a little like confronting ghosts. A bunch of these kids I went to school with from kindergarten all the way through graduation. And nearly all of them I'd known since the fifth grade.

I think I had the impression that I could float free of that group of people, as if it were only circumstance that tied us together. But I can't float free, untethered to such a large part of my past.

At the end of the list of names being sent around is a smaller list, though not nearly small enough, of the classmates who have died since graduation. (Actually one of them died our senior year from alcohol poisoning.) I felt awash in grief as I read through those names - and again a day or two later when one more name from the "unknown whereabouts" was moved to the list of deceased. After all these years, I can still see their faces plain as day.

I don't know that I'll actually be able to attend the reunion: it's the Friday after Thanksgiving on the opposite coast from me. But I haven't yet ruled out the possibility.

In the meantime, it prompted me to get in touch with my best friend from high school (and Maid of Honor in my wedding almost fifteen years ago now). So parts of my soul are feeling restored.

Ordinary Time

Sunday was the last worship service I had responsibility for planning as the Minister of Worship and Spiritual Growth at our congregation. As of the end of May, my position is coming to a close. Between this ending and the end of the semester, the month of June opens up for me to be able to pay attention as I move into my new position as Assistant Professor of Worship at the beginning of July.

I stand in awe at this transition time--and desire to engage it with great intention. Noticing the endings, anticipating the beginning, living in to this time of change.

The paintings I did this past weekend, what I ended up calling my Pentecost Trees, must have something to do with this. Some release of creative energies. Some openness to Spirit moving. On Wednesday of last week, my spiritual director asked me what I most felt I needed to do in the weeks ahead. I settled into God's leading after she asked the question, turned the question over for the Spirit to do her work on it. My sense was this: "Be open to receiving. Do not try to shape too much." I don't know what all that means quite yet. But I hope to live into it.

There is something truly lovely about beginning this new season of my life with the long, verdant season of Ordinary Time in the liturgical year. Festivals like Pentecost command our attention--with all their reds, and flames, and stormy winds. But Ordinary Time asks for a quieter reception--none of that bluster of birthing Spirit, just the gentle invitation of everyday moments of being.

My season of Ordinary Time begins with making lunch and breakfast for Monk this morning. Some time of reading and prayer. A trip to the bank to deposit checks. And then some work--reading, and writing comments on final projects. Nothing more ordinary than these things. And yet, all of it shimmering with God.

Keeping Time

I turned 38 a week ago. A delightfully curvaceous pair of numbers, wouldn't you say? I never mind, at least so far, turning a year older. It's better than the alternative, as my grandmother would say. But more than that, I like its reminder that time is passing.

I like the way age is phrased in French. J'ai trent-huit ans. I have 38 years in my life. In some ways, the English phrasing is accurate--but it's a bit presumptuous: I am 38 as if 38 sums me up.

I received a wonderful gift from my friend, srf, for my birthday. It's called the ECOlogical Calendar: A New Way to Experience Time, created by Antenna (a theater company) and published by Pomegranate. The ECOlogical Calendar emerged from a project by Antenna called AllTime in which they try to refocus our attention on the age of the universe rather than our usually constricted notion of time as counted out by the Gregorian Calendar. If you want to know what time it is, click here.

The ECOlogical Calendar incorporates many different ways that we experience the passing of time on earth: changing seasons, phases of the moon, changing tides, shifts in weather or winds, shifting biological behavior of plants and animals, seasonal stars, visible planets, and more. The calendar seeks to release us from our constricted, industrialized notion of time. In the introduction to the calendar they write: "As societies grew increasingly urbanized and diversified through industrial and technological progress, the calendar became more like a clock: a continuous, never-ending march of numbers, a business machine telling us when to be where, with appointments to keep and obligations to be met."

Aside:
As for me, I've never primarily experienced time in terms of numbers. I never experience anything in terms of numbers, not even math! Which is why I suck at math! :) When we did word problems in the sixth grade, I was always much more interested in the stories behind the problems. "Ann and David are traveling on two trains to Washington DC. Ann's train is going sixty miles per hour and her destination is 120 miles away. David's train is traveling 90 miles per hour and his destination is 240 miles away. Who will arrive at their destination first?"

That was the least interesting question to ask, as far as I was concerned. Why are Ann and David traveling on two different trains? Do they know each other? If not, will they meet? Why are they going to Washington DC? Who are their seat mates? How early did they each have to get up to catch their trains? Are they being reunited after being apart for a long time? Are they going home? Or leaving home? When Ann looks out the window, does she catch the reflection of someone else (a man? or a woman?) who is gazing at her? Is David reading a book on the train? Does he fall asleep and miss his stop? How would this affect who gets there first?

Needless to say, I had to go to the math tutor for extra help with word problems...

So one way the ECOlogical calendar undoes the sense of time as an endless progression of numbers is that they rename every day of the week to be something different--all 365 days! The names are lovely, whimsical, and rooted in the seasons (at least on the northern hemisphere). As you gaze across the week, a poem of sorts begins to emerge. So, for instance, this week, beginning on Saturday, the names of the week are:

FrozenSeas
DistantSilent
BarrenTrees
AlpineLake
HowlGale
WindBreak
SquirrelTail

That just makes me smile. And it's such a pleasure to check the calendar every day to find out the day's name. (Now to get these names embroidered on my days-of-the-week undies!) :)

Thing is, I constantly notice many of the things around me all the time. When I walk outside at night, for instance, the first thing I do is look at the sky to check for stars, the moon, clouds, or the silhouette of trees against the sky. But what this calendar has helped me realize is that in noticing these things, I am keeping time.

Because my calendar is an engagement calendar, each day has a few blank lines next to it. I've taken to writing brief notes on each page of something I happened to notice that day. I'll leave you with a few of my entries. I'll use the Gregorian date as well as the new day name.

Jan 3, LusterNight: beautiful moon!
Jan 4, Snow: Windy day, D arrives home
Jan 5, EarthGlow: Monk writes his first page of cursive for homework
Jan 7, SleetGlint: birds singing outside the Safeway
Jan 8, FrozenSeas: Spying constellations with Monk and D (Orion, Bootes, Gemini, Cassiopeia) Beautiful, half moon (lying on her back) at the horizon. HUGE!

The Gift of More

Last Spring when I wrote my two devotionals for the RevGalBlogPal's book Ordinary Time (advertised at right), November seemed so unimaginably far away. But here we are, about to heft the last days of the month onto our backs and carry them into December. I shamelessly invite you over to Ordinary Time to read the devotionals I wrote for yesterday and today. Both of them are based on the same text--David's last words--which are part of the lectionary readings for this coming Sunday when we celebrate Christ the King.

As I recuperated over the past couple weeks during my blogging hiatus, I sadly missed my first blogiversary. I published my first entry here on the Blanket in the Grove on November 14, 2005. If you're disposed to such things, I invite to you to take a step back for a moment and read my debut here. At that time I had just returned from the East Coast (as I have now, as well!); I was preparing with great (and as it turns out, unnecessary) trepidation to propose my comprehensive exams, (I'm now preparing for my final, oral exam next week); and had just been licensed for ministry in my congregation (where my hours expanded considerably for this current year).

Each of these things continue to be the benchmarks that help me know my place in this world. I had titled that first entry "In Between" and in some ways I wonder if this is always my experience. There is an enduring sense of being on a journey (as I know so many of us feel) and that the in-betweenness of that journey is the gift of it. Every arrival eventually becomes an invitation to set out again toward another unknown.

So I am recently returned from the East Coast again--arrived Tuesday night from Washington DC where I attended my first-ever Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature. As D pulled the car up at the airport about 8:00 on the night I arrived, Monk spotted me and opened his door before the car had come to a complete stop--so eager was he to greet his ol' Mom. There was no danger, really, the car was going slow enough by that point and he was well-strapped in. But it did give me a bit of a start!

I want to always remember the moment, though--the prodigal son who looks with overflowing eagerness for the return of his mum. In the car as we drove back home, Monk burst over with stories and laughter. When I would turn and look at him, I was amazed at the light in his eyes. I felt it all as gift.

Going to AAR was everything I needed it to be. I am so glad I was there this year. It got me out of the cozy box I'd had to live in over the past year as I answered the questions for my exams. It reminded me of all the amazing questions being asked by academics all over the world. It demystified some of the Big Names I've been reading all these years--I got to see them as people, laugh at their jokes, appreciate their three-dimensional humanness rather than their two-dimensional texts!

I was also able to reconnect with old friends in a way that simply helps me remember who I am.

I also was able to talk with people fruitfully about the next step in front of me--proposing and writing my dissertation. I won't say much about that now, but imagine it will be a subject which accompanies me in this blog for some time to come now.

One of the highlights of the trip, rather unexpectedly, was the opportunity to go to an exhibit at the Sackler Gallery (one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institute) where they featured Bibles (as in codices, scrolls, papyri, and eventually manuscripts) prior to the year 1000. You can read more about it here. What an awesome experience! With all the talk about fragmentation in postmodernity, it was humbling, indeed, to see the fragments out of which we have pieced together our scriptures. There is something fundamentally deceptive about the neatly contained, uninterrupted solidity of our bibles published by major publishing houses today. It was truly humbling to see the fragments of our scriptural origins, their very physical tentativeness seems to stand as a crying plea to careful, gentle, tentative exegesis--rather than the heavy-handed, confident, and stern certainty that all too often is our approach to biblical texts.

Not only that, but the reverent beauty with which many of these pages were created was awe-inspiring. Though I have to say that it occurred to me at one point that these pages were once somebody's deadline. Perhaps merely what had to get done, somebody's work. My sense is that they were not alienated from their work, as we so often are from our own. But I bet there were at least some moments when the monk working on his page felt the pressure to simply get it done. Perhaps he suffered from a sleepless night on occasion, worrying about the page he had yet to finish. This thought pleases me for some reason. To see the page a thousand years later seems to give those moments simultaneously unbearable weight and unbearable lightness. It matters; it matters not.

Well, there still feels like more to say. And for this, in and of itself, I am grateful. Too many weeks of dry silence in my world. So good to wake up to fresh dew on the grass.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Being My Body

One day shortly after I had turned thirteen years old, I remember I had gone through an especially moody day. I'd been ecstatic and miserable, delighted and lost--all multiple times within a span of hours. I remember a particular moment that day (Virginia Woolf calls it a moment of being) as I walked through our dim cellar, ducking my head under the low pipes, passed the old stagecoach toy trunk my Dad had made for my brother and I, over to my Mom who was moving the wash over to the dryer. I remember it was somewhere in that space that it dawned on me: I was an adolescent!

This thought was accompanied by one of those ecstatic moments of utter delight. It had happened to me, finally! That night, I wrote in my diary: "Today I officially entered adolescence. I was happy one minute and miserable the next. Then happy again. And this is exactly what happens with adolescents." I loved being aware of it in the moment, even if I can see now that it was a bit contrived. I was marking my own passage. I knew my body and myself were changing. It was a threshold moment.


This morning, during prayer at church, I sat staring at my hands. I had been noticing them all morning, actually. On the drive over I'd become suddenly aware of them. The skin on my hands is changing. It seems thinner somehow. And the lines in them are more visible, deeper. The wrinkles and crinkles are not just on my knuckles, but ease along the whole back of the hand. The night my grandfather died when I was sixteen years old, I sat beside my grandmother with her hand in mine. Her hands were deeply wrinkled then, with skin that seemed loose to them. Her veins were clearly visible. I held her hand and thought: "I'll always know how old I am by my hands. Some day my hands will be beautiful like this."

Lately, too, I've taken no small amount of delight in the grey strands that are starting to streak through the front of my hair. They greet me every time I check the mirror. I'm very, very fond of their joyous appearance.

Also, I see the lines around my eyes that betray how much I've smiled, out-right laughed, and squinted into the sun over my lifetime so far. Like my hands, the skin on my face is changing. Subtly, I'm sure. But I see it.

These are small things, but certain. Small ways that my body and myself are changing again as a woman who can now see 40 on the horizon. And just as I did when I suddenly realized I'd "officially entered adolescence," I celebrate these changes. They amaze me!


A week from today we'll celebrate E's eighth birthday. It dawned on me recently that that means it has already been nine years since I was pregnant. Now that nearly floors me, because I remember it all so well. As if it were last year, not nearly a decade ago.

Now I have this wonder-filled privilege of seeing my boy grow into his own body (even as I continue to grow into my own). E and I both had a pretty rough time this past week. E had his disappointment with the chess match on Monday, but also generally had a week where his emotions were close to the surface. Lots of tears. And I lived into that no-where-land of trying to meet daily obligations while keeping the long-term destination in close focus. D wisely suggested to E that his recent tears have been the sign that he's in the midst of changing, in a time of transition. "Maybe it's turning eight," he said.

Yes. Marking changes.

Lenten Lives

I think Lent may be my favorite season. (Or it may be that my favorite season is the one I'm in.) There is a deepening that takes place in Lent. A constant sense of invitation. There is a sense of urgency to it, but it's the urgency of a shoot breaking out of the soil. Not the urgency of things that need to get done.

I have spent Lenten seasons weeping, weeping. Feeling the awful burden of broken life. Weeping through every prayer. Only ceasing to weep when I would sing. I have spent Lenten seasons feeling the absence of alleluias.

And I have walked through Lents in contentment, beautiful contentment. Feeling Spring break in around me. Drawing my hand across the bark of every tree I passed. Noticing the yellows and startling greens of Spring's first growth.

I have had silent Lents. And barely noticed it was Lent. Surprised all the more by Easter's triumph.

I have knelt to receive ashes and I have refused ashes altogether. I've been the penitent. And I've lit cigarettes and tried surly on for size.

This year, a recurring theme I've heard already for Lent has been rest. One student in our class said her church is using the phrase "Rest and Relaxation" as their Lenten slogan this year. She kind of rolled her eyes, because the phrase struck her as shallow. But I'm not sure.

Yesterday, at the Episcopal Church, the pastor in her homily talked about the quietness of Lent, the sense of time set apart for study, prayer, and to open ourselves to God's relationship with us. She spoke of the wellspring in the desert, of our need for the "moisture of our baptism," and the wellspring in our hearts.

Last night, I heard similar themes. An invitation to put aside busy-ness and rest in God's presence. Not a command to do so. A demand of the season. But an invitation. Slow. Breathe. Rest. Bask. Open.