Tag: faith

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

Safe and Swim

Sally6 Comments

Originally my plan was to write about “safe” for the letter S.

About a month ago, I overheard a conversation while waiting for my father. He was visiting friends and I was sitting in the front lobby of the nursing home after an unsuccessful attempt to visit Mary  Three octogenarianesses (octogenarianettes?) sat down opposite me.

Their conversation was at an octogenarian level, so I couldn’t help but overhear.

“I just need to feel SAFE,” one said. “That’s why I would come HERE.”

The last word of every sentence was the loudest, and I found it an interesting way to punctuate.

A different lady, the one they were visiting who was obviously a resident, said, “My children kept telling me that I couldn’t do this, that, or the other thing. After I fell…” Her voice trailed off and she spread her arms to highlight the wheelchair she was in.

The third woman said, “I just don’t have the pep to do everything at home any more.”

“When the house sells, I’m coming HERE,” said loud-final-word.

Resident lady said, “I should have come here when I was 70. Now I’m 87, going on 88.”

#3 said, “It’s at the point where I have to do something.”

Loud said, “SAFE. I just need to feel SAFE.”

But as my mind wandered over this “safe” conversation, I thought about Laurel’s water safety presentation that she’s working on, and I thought about how I missed swimming now that it’s over and the pool is closed, and I thought about how unsafe the water can be and water safety is so important and… you see the currents that my mind drifted along, like a lazy river ride that had no definite end.

So S is also for Swimming.

My parents made sure we all could swim — and I’m sure my love of the water began at a very early age.

Mom and Stewart
Mom and Stewart
Mom and Stewart, Donabeth, and Peter
Mom with Stewart, Donabeth, and Peter
The only picture I could find of me. What form!
The only picture I could find of me. What form!

I can remember being in the watch-me stage when I was about 5 at Mirror Lake at Fort Devens. My mom was sitting on the beach and I was in the shallow water, stretching my legs out behind and walking my hands along the bottom.

“Look, Mom! I’m swimming,” I called, but I’m sure I didn’t fool her for a moment.

I remember playing and playing in the water — and I think that may be why I’m a big proponent for kids playing in the water. Kids can learn so much through play.

The thing is, though, water is never really safe. Kids drown in small amounts of water. Elite-level swimmer Fran Crippen drowned in an open water race. Being around water requires vigilance.

Bodies of water are like Aslan — not safe.

But good.

Each time a swimmer slides into the water, he or she is baptized into a new way of moving and breathing.

I think that’s why I love it.

That’s why I go to the POOL.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Prayers

Sally7 Comments

Every Saturday morning, I sit alone, pen poised over my journal, and attempt to write a prayer.

It is a discipline that I have not mastered. My words falter and fall flat on the page.

Then, as I pray my newly-written prayer in the days that follow, I edit, crossing out whole sections or single words, trying to form the sighs of my heart into something utterable. I know that when I can’t, the Spirit will intercede for me. (Romans 8:26)

P is for prayer.

I pulled out my journal to look at the prayers I had written during those last weeks with my mother.

On the day after she went in the hospital, this is all I had —

You, God, are amazing.
I am not.
Thank you for Your presence and Your help.
Hold me,
Help me,
Heal me and mine.

I never changed a word of it. Maybe it was all I could do to pray it. By the next Saturday, she was gone.

And I struggled.

The next time I wrote, I filled two pages with prayer words, but then crossed out and wrote over much of it. By the end of the week, I had two prayers where I had begun with one.

Prayer A —

Lord, I don’t know what to pray.

My mother is gone.

My father is so sad.

Like a small child riding the up-and-down of a carousel pony,
I need someone to hold my hand.

Will You?

Prayer B —

Almighty Father –
You set into motion the cycles through which we live
– the turning of our planet
– its orbit around the sun
– the rising and falling tides
– the four seasons
– the water cycle
– the respiration of plants
– the respiration of animals
– the breath of a human being
from first cry at birth
to last breath at death
– decomposition

Every breath — the inhale, the exhale —
is part of Your plan,
part of a cycle

So, Lord, with profound gratitude
and amazement
I will live this day
And breathe these breaths
ordained for me.

I will ride this turning planet
orbiting around the sun

And thank You.

Amen

*****

Prayer is a mystery.

Writing prayers even more so.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Egg

Sally11 Comments

Laurel has been practicing cracking an egg with one hand — with these:IMG_8539

“Please can I try it with a real egg?” she begged the other night.

“No,” I replied. I was tired and the likelihood of having to clean up an egg mess was unappealing.

“But, look,” she said, holding a green egg in one hand, “I can do it,” and she neatly opened the empty egg.

“No,” I said again. “Do it in the morning when I have more energy.”

“But I’m not going to make a mess,” she insisted. “And I’ll clean it up if I do.”

“No,” I said one last time.

The truth is I had gotten sad the day before when I was making waffles for my father. I had used the recipe my mother used to use.

But it calls for separating the eggs.

Every time I do it, whether I’m using the separator, the shell, or my hand, I start thinking about my mom.

She taught me to cook — to level off the flour in the dry measuring cup, to get eye-level with the measuring cup when measuring liquids, and to crack the egg with a sharp rap using the back side of a knife. She taught me to pull the eggshell apart with my thumbs. She taught me to always put the egg into a separate dish before adding it to whatever I was cooking — we had our own chickens, and sometimes what came out of the egg was an unpleasant surprise. She taught me to get the last bit of white out of the shell with a quick swipe of my forefinger. She taught me to separate eggs, not allowing any yolk into the white because if I did the white couldn’t be beaten to stiff peaks no matter how hard I tried.

When her dementia robbed her of her cooking ability, she was so lost. No more cooking for a crowd. No more delicious soups where she put something akin to magic in the pot. No more casseroles.

Food was whittled down to marmalade. On everything.

But I can still eat marmalade.

IMG_6067There’s just something about eggs. They make me think of her.

An egg is both strong and fragile.

It is life.

And hope.

An egg is three-in-one, like God.

But the word “egg” only appears once in the Bible.

Somehow, for me, an egg inextricably connects mother to daughter.

It is a mystery — a pearly, porcelain, alabaster mystery.

Today, I’ll let Laurel try cracking that egg with one hand. Success or failure, we’ll laugh and then figure out what to do with the eggs she opens.

Maybe someday she’ll look at an egg and think of me.

Faith · prayer

Resurrection Branches

Sally4 Comments

OsterpostkarteI was delighted to learn that the pussywillow is waved on Palm Sunday in many Eastern and Slavic churches.

“The Pussy Willow is also our Easter symbol,” said Father Czeslaw Krysa, rector of St. Casimir’s Church in Buffalo, in a 2013 article. He said that it is “one of the most prominent Easter symbols, because of the fact out of this dry, kind of twig all of a sudden bursts forth this beautiful flower of life, and it is the first bush that blooms.”

They call them “resurrection branches.”

Reading about them reminded me of a poem/prayer that I wrote back in January.

Oh Lord
I need a pick-me-up
For I am feeling down
Outside the snow is glittering, cold,
Inside my heart is brown
And dry and brittle, mostly dead,
Like last month’s Christmas tree
Weeping prickly needles
Which need be swept by me

IMG_8480I know You can’t restore the tree
To vibrant verdant green
— Well, yes, You could
And yes, You did
When Aaron’s rod was seen
Budding,
Blossoming,
Bearing fruit
— Can You do that with me?
Of course, You can —
but would You, Lord?
Miraculously use me?

For, Lord, You know I have this fear
I’m one of the eleven
Sticks that stayed quite dead and brown
Not bearing fruit for heaven

I fear I too am dead inside —
Like Lazarus, I stink —
Roll back the stone –
Call out my name –
Pull me from this brink

Of hopelessness
Of deadfulness —
I need to be made new
Please water me
Sunshine me
And let me grow in You.

Today the rocks and stones and pussywillows are crying out “Hosanna!”

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Wound

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W is for Wound.

Flannery O’Connor said, “Grace must wound before it can heal.”

I scribbled those words in my notes during one Flannery O talk given by Dr. Ralph Wood at Laity Lodge.

If I can grasp that concept, I think I’ll be able to understand her writing more.

Jonathan Rogers looked at me during one session and said, “You don’t have to like Flannery O’Connor.”

I know. But I want to.

I really do.

I want to wrap my mind around this peacock-loving, slant-writing, perfect-word-choosing writer.

I want to be able to read one her stories where someone is gored by a bull or where a grandfather kills his granddaughter, I want to  read one of those stories that leaves me feeling like I’ve been sucker-punched, and be able to say, “Ah, I’ve been wounded so that I can experience the grace of this story.”

Flannery O’Connor  said, “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

Yes, that’s it, Flannery. That’s me.

I see the hardness and hopelessness and brutality, and I miss the grace.

I said something to Jonathan about Judgement Day, the story that did me in on Flannery O. It’s the story of an old man from Georgia brought by his daughter to live with her in New York City. He wants to go home but dies in a horrible death in New York.

“I’m stuck with this image of a man with his head stuffed in the spokes of the railing. It’s an awful image,” I told him.

“Yes,” JR agreed, “but he got to go home.”

In the end the daughter brought her father’s body back to Georgia.

Was she the one wounded?

Was she the one who experienced grace?

See what I mean about not understanding Flannery?

And yet if grace were easy to understand, somehow it would seem cheaper.

So wound me, grace, so I can heal, and be more aware of the amazing power You hold.

Help me learn to extend that same grace, then, to others.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Society

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S is for Society.

Maybe society isn’t the right word.

At Laity Lodge, though, we were cut off from society. My car companions were laughing about how friends and family were shocked that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with March Madness while we were there.

Laity Lodge has no televisions in the rooms and no cell phone reception. I wonder how many people pulled out their cell phone when they got there just to make sure that the warning was a truth.

I have a friend who rents out her home weekly during the summers in Cooperstown. Even though cell phone companies have upped the coverage in that area during the summer, the way her home is nestled between hills, she still has no cell coverage. The fact that there is no cell reception is clearly stated multiple places when people rent the home, but she said they still pull out their cell phone when they arrive to check to see if it’s true. It is.

I thought about that cut-offness one day as I was walking the grounds at Laity Lodge. All sorts of stuff could be happening in the world and I wouldn’t know. Plane crashes, racial tension, earthquakes, men kneeling in the sand, presidential candidacy announcements, March Madness.  Somehow I would survive three or four days without knowing whether or not any of these things happened.

Early in Fiddler on the Roof, the people of Anatevka gather while someone reads to them from the newspaper. The news they hear is already old, probably several weeks, ancient by today’s standards. Yet, they listen because it’s new to them.

Well, I was reading my paper. It’s nothing very important, a story about the crops in the Ukraine, and this and that…. And then I saw this….

“In a village called Rajanka, all the Jews were evicted, forced to leave their homes.”

Some news is just a kick in the gut.

Most news we hear is either nothing very important or it’s awful. I didn’t feel I was missing anything by missing it for a few days.

The truth is I was cut off from society, and yet I wasn’t.

I was in society with the 80-some people on the grounds.

And the hummingbirds.

And the Frio River.

And God.

It was good.

It was very good.

The highest society.

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

Prayer

Sally3 Comments

P is for Prayer.

Before my trip, with the Lenten season on my mind, I wrote a Collect for Laity Lodge.

To the God of Silence —

Speak to me in whispers
in gentle breezes
in birdsong
in the laughter of running water
and the tears of gentle rain.

Remind me now and again
that You are with me every moment.

Fill my heart with Your silence
and Your song

Through Jesus —
who heard Your silence in Gethsemane
and again on the cross
and who now sits at Your right hand.

Amen

 Elie Wiesel, in his foreword to the newest translation of Night, said, “[I] trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words… For despite all my attempts to articulate the unspeakable, ‘it’ is still not right.”  And later, “[Some things] need to remain between the lines.”

Night‘s awful story needs to be heard — yet it speaks as much through the silences as it does with the words. It is a powerful book.

And I found myself, during Lent, going again and again to God’s silence in Gethsemane and at Calvary.

So much is said between those lines.

God’s silence is powerful indeed.DSC03871

A to Z Blogging Challenge

Hike

Sally5 Comments

H is for Hike.

Henri Nouwen said, “Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.”

Friendship is the core of almost any journey — and it was true of my hike at Laity Lodge.

I know that I already mentioned the hike in my post, Bluff, but it really is a three chapter story for which I only told the middle chapter.

Chapter One — One mile hike up.

Chapter Two — Pretty view.

Chapter Three — One mile hike down.

While I loved the view, I think I loved the hiking part more. Because of the friendship aspect.

The hike up
Walking to the start of the trail

When we walk with someone, we learn something — about them and about ourselves.

On the way up, I walked with Dawn — Dawn-of-a-thousand-careers, also known as Dawn-of-the-mutual-friends.

Everyone has a story.

Everyone has a thousand stories.

As much as I love reading stories, I love hearing the stories. I love asking questions so I’m picturing it clearly in my mind. And hearing the rise and fall of the teller’s voice as they emphasize the words that are important in their telling of the story. I love seeing them smile when they tell the parts that make them smile, and bite their lip a little when they tell the parts that are hard.

I loved hearing Dawn’s stories on the way up.  One of her stories involved running a marathon (or was it a half-marathon?) where she completed it by sheer will-power. She’s a strong woman.

What I learned about me while I was hiking with Dawn was that I don’t like to confess to my weaknesses.

I was running out of breath, going what felt like straight up. The gap between us and the next group of hikers grew larger and larger as we hiked slower and slower.

Darned if I would admit needing to rest though!

If Dawn could keep going, I could keep going.

Thankfully, she stopped.

“I need to catch my breath,” she said.

Benevolent me, I said, “No worries. I don’t mind waiting.”

What I meant to say was, “Thankyouthankyouthankyou.” gasp-gasp “Myheartispoundingoutofmychest.” gasp-gasp  “I (gasp) need (gasp) a-rest, (gasp) too!”

On the hike down (which was much easier) I walked with a young woman named Kristen. Tall, beautiful, and with an enviable openness about her — she told me about her work, her church, her family. It hit me as we were talking that she is the same age as Philip, my oldest son.

I could be her mother, I whispered to myself, but the words flew away in the Texas wind.

I marveled at the fact that I had arrived at the enviable stage of life where I have friends, real friends, that span many generations, and I’m right smack dab in the middle of them.

It was a cosy feeling — not out of breath at all.

A hike with friendship at its core.

 

 

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

Dawn

Sally4 Comments

D is for Dawn.

This post is about four Dawns — no, make that five. But where to begin?

Dawn #1 — For years, I have prayed for a friend named Dawn.  I’ll call her Dawn-with-the-many-boys because this Dawn has four sons.  Raising sons is the most fun job in the whole world. Boys possess a certain crazy energy that plays out in ways that most mothers never dream of — swords fights and jousting, damming creeks, and putting batteries down the drain. I speak from experience. Mothers of boys need prayer. So I pray for Dawn. Every day.

Dawn #2 — Several months ago, when I was praying for Dawn-with-the-many-boys, I felt this nudge to pray for another Dawn. I’ll call her Dawn-of-the-mutual-friends.

I felt a nudge – Pray for Dawn-of-the-mutual-friends.

“But I don’t even know her,” I countered.

Pray for her.

So I did.

Then she climbed into my car at the San Antonio airport. Unplanned. Yet, I wonder if it was. As her story unfolded to me, I realized how much she did need prayer. I felt both privileged and thankful that I could pray for her, and now in a more meaningful way.

Dawn #3 — For Lenten reading, I had chosen Elie Wiesel’s trilogy, Night, Dawn, and Day. High-schoolers across the country read Night, the story of Wiesel’s time in German concentration camps. Buchenwald, and Wiesel, are liberated at the end of Night.

But the story wasn’t over.

Dawn tells the story of a concentration camp survivor recruited by a Zionist group to fight in Palestine. Elisha, the main character, is called on to kill a man — an act that will forever change him.

“Elisha–” said the hostage.

I fired. When he pronounced my name he was already dead; the bullet had gone through his heart. A dead man, whose lips were still warm, had pronounced my name: Elisha.

I kept putting that scene next to this, from Night:

…The officer wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head.

I didn’t move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head.

My father groaned once more, I heard:

“Eliezer…”

… His last word had been my name.  He had called out to me and I had not answered.

And next to this, where a life is laid down, not taken:

“Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46)

I read Dawn a second time during my flights. I’m still wrestling with it.

Dawn #4 — I watched the sun rise every morning from a lonely place near Laity Lodge. In the daytime, I had bemoaned the telephone poles and wires stretching across this view. When I came home and looked at my photographs, though, I saw a cross, an empty cross, on a hill.

Laity Lodge dawn
Laity Lodge dawn

Dawn #5 —

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb… (Luke 24:1)

An empty tomb, an empty cross, a hard story that isn’t over yet, women who are dear to me.

Dawn, Dawn, and Dawn at dawn.

 

 

 

Faith

Communion again

Sally4 Comments

IMG_5903[1]I was the first in line for communion.

When the teen server tore off a piece of bread and handed it to me, she looked at me and paused.

I waited for the words — “This is the Bread of Life.” Or, “the Body of Christ broken for you.”  Which would she say?

She hesitated and then her face broke out into a big smile. “Hi,” she said. She had forgotten what she was supposed to say and simply greeted me.

I laughed and took the bread to dip into the challis.

The little girl beside her lifted the cup to me and said, in a tiny voice, “The cup of blessing.”

I dipped my bread and went back to my seat, still smiling.

Sometimes, in the somberness of the occasion, we forget that it was like a family meal in that upper room so long ago. I’m sure there was a clatter of dishes and hubbub of voices while everyone dined, reclining at the table.

  • Peter objecting to Jesus washing his feet.
  • Peter motioning for John to ask Jesus a question.
  • John asking Jesus Peter’s question.
  • Jesus dipping the bread and handing it to Judas.
  • Judas leaving.
  • Peter’s exchange with Jesus.
  • Thomas’s exchange with Jesus.
  • Philip’s exchange with Jesus.

Comings, goings, actions, conversations — all in the course of one meal.

Quiet introspection played no part.

Listening to Jesus did.

Sometimes, in the ceremony and formality of communion at church, we miss the human connection — and that’s what Jesus did on earth, connect with us in a very human way.

“Hi.”

Communion amazes me every time.