my goodly heritage

I Have a New Blog!

2010-08-24T09:10:00.000-04:00

Come on over and visit me at my new blog, a woman again.

"I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write." ~ Virginia Woolf

My first post, Back to School, will explain a bit why I'm moving. But in a nutshell: it just felt like time for something new!

Hope to see you soon!

Summer Reading List

2010-06-10T08:53:00.001-04:00

This summer we're going on a six week road trip to New York (a week at Chautauqua with Julie's family to celebrate her folks' 50th wedding anniversary!), Wisconsin (Bob and Bobbie at the lake!), Iowa (Mark, Jennie and Gillie on a farm with a pond!), Indiana (beer and books with Gordon! and Neville!), Ohio (Erik and Claire and two scrumptious nephews, Asher and Noam!), Vermont (paradise with Dad and Anne!) and New Hampshire (paradise revisited with Suzanne et al, in which Meg and Micah go to camp for a week!).

Yes, we're counting the days.

I'm also compiling a summer reading list, and am open to suggestions. The general themes this summer are 1) short stories 2) Virginia Woolf 3) James Joyce 4) books on the craft of fiction writing.

Here's my list so far, a somewhat random collection of books I already own (it's a budget summer reading list, but if you have suggestions that are classics, I can download them to Trixie's Kindle... and when we're at Prairie Lights, I'll probably have to spend a little money, right? Because it's important to support independent bookstores and writers, right?).

Short Stories

[edited to add:] The Mother Garden by Robin Romm
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Welding with Children by Tim Gautreaux
The Best American Short Stories of 2009 edited by Alice Sebold
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Great Short Stories of the Masters edited by Charles Neider
The Paris Review Spring 2010
Tin House Volume 11, Number 3
The Iowa Review Volume 40, Number 1
Canteen Issue Five
New England Review Volume 30, Number 4
Antioch Review Spring 2010
New Yorker -- the past several months

Joyce and Woolf

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (I'm half way through)
Homer's The Odyssey (any suggestions of a good translation for me and Trixie to read together?)
To The Lighthouse or Orlando (what do you think if I only have time for one this summer?)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Fiction Craft

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

You May Be Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today...

2010-06-08T14:42:00.001-04:00

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much. No?

Well, anyway, I haven't been blogging much.

When I started this blog, I was mostly looking for a place to publish my essay You Can Always Fry Eggs in Missoula, Montana, about my dad, as well as the book reviews I write for Gordon. It was around when I realized that not only do I really like writing, but I kind of need to write to stay sane. And I thought, I have a pretty interesting life, and some quirky ideas a few other folks might like, so maybe I'll write an essay or two a month, no big deal, and throw them up on a blog. I didn't give much thought to craft, and no thought whatever to getting published; stuff just sort of poured out of me, and I hit "publish."

A year after starting this blog with such modest ambitions, I took a fateful trip to New York to sit on Patrick's couch in Harlem and I wrote for four days non-stop. Okay, not totally non-stop, but I wrote a lot, and when I wasn't writing I was hanging out with other writers. Since then I've been back several times, I've made friends with more writers, I've joined a writing workshop called Rittenhouse Writers Group, and I've gotten this idea in my head that I might be a writer of short fiction (though I haven't given up on the essay; I like the essay a lot, I will admit). And while I still have fairly modest ambitions, I'm less inclined these days to write a draft and hit "publish." Indeed, I'm relearning that the real work of writing is revising. (I say "work," but really? I'm a pig in mud.)

So I'm not publishing much on the blog these days, and what I am writing now I probably won't publish here, at least not until it has been soundly rejected by any number of other venues. But I'm not ready to close up shop. There are still my book reviews, with many, I hope, to come this summer. And I want to finish the Midwestern Marriage piece, even though I don't have time now to give it much revision. That will be going up in parts over the coming months -- and then?

We'll see!

James

2010-06-04T23:00:00.000-04:00

Patrick Lacey and I are pretty sure we are twins separated at birth. I can't tell you how dear this man is to me. So even though I didn't know his beloved brother James, my heart still aches with Patrick and his family as they continue to mourn James' sudden death in a car accident a year ago.

It's an awful thing to have so many friends lately suffering the awful, untimely deaths of young men in their families, but it is an honor to stand with them in their grief, and to offer what small comfort I can as it unfolds. As Patrick notes in his current post at his blog Loose Ends, he and I have a mutual friend, Ellen, whose brother Mark also recently died. When I was last in New York, writing on Patrick's couch in Harlem, Ellen asked all of her friends to celebrate her brother's birthday by eating an Entenmann's double chocolate donut. Patrick and his boyfriend Bill and I were only too happy to oblige, and on the theory that where one Entenmann's is good, a dozen is better, we clogged our arteries good and hard that weekend!

The Laceys are now coming up on the first anniversary of James' death, just days after what would have been his 42nd birthday today. Patrick has compiled a joyful, playful list of ways we might honor and remember James -- everything from eating salad to walking a dog to running an errand for a shut-in. And my favorite, kissing friends (you never have to ask me twice, right?!) I didn't know James personally, though I know the rest of the Laceys and feel as though I knew James from the exquisite posts Patrick shared on his blog in the months after James' death. And what I know is that James was one of those souls that lives on a different plane than the rest of us, that he had some things figured out that the rest of us can only hope to understand if we're blessed with a long life. I'm going to be trying to live a little more like James Lacey in the next few days, with Patrick's delightful suggestions as my guide -- as a way to honor James, of course, and to remember him, but mostly because trying to live more like James is probably as sure a path to a good life as any of us is likely to find.

Even if you don't know Patrick or James from Adam, I encourage you to read this lovely post, eat some salad, kiss a friend -- and hold the Laceys in the light in the days to come.

Book Review: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

2010-05-14T15:42:00.003-04:00

Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (2010) [*****] In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably tell you right up front that I pretty much think Robin Black hung the moon these days because, after meeting her very briefly in a book signing line at the Free Library where I heard her read from this collection recently, I contacted her (through Twitter, no less -- I have completely drunk the social media kool aid...), and she very, very generously (as though she had nothing else to do while on a busy book tour) put me in touch with the leader of her old writing group, of which I am now a very happy and grateful member. I'm pretty sure, though, that even if I were entirely objective, I would just love this collection of short stories. Black's writing is beautifully unadorned, without flourish; it doesn't show off, and it doesn't need to, because in not getting in the way (as I felt Mary Karr's lush metaphors did a bit in Lit, a memoir I otherwise loved), her language ends up being mesmerizing. It's as easy to get caught up in these stories as in a great novel, which is saying a lot coming from someone who used to hate short stories because I thought of them as "failed novels." I no longer feel that way about short stories in general, but I still think it's a very rare thing for a short story to capture a world as thoroughly, to realize a character as fully, as Black can in ten or twenty pages. She also has an uncanny ability to write about very peculiar characters and circumstances --- a father and his blind, college-aged daughter picking up her first seeing eye dog; a eerie, prim school girl at a hippy Quaker school who was kidnapped for ransom as a young child living in Italy and is now bent on revenge; a woman whose child is almost electrocuted by faulty wiring at almost the same moment that the woman's mentally ill father steps in front of a train -- and yet it all seems completely plausible, quotidian even. I think that is one of the things I like best about these stories, the way they play with the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" -- this is fiction that compellingly and convincingly draws us into the truth of the strangeness of life. What I love most about these stories, though, is the clear-eyed sympathy Black brings to her characters, for the most part unremarkable men and women in middle age or older, experiencing losses or transitions -- there is a lot of death, divorce, infidelity, and illness in the worlds of these stories. In many cases it would have been easy to cast villains or victims -- especially victims -- but Black is both unblinking and kind, and thus creates characters who are nuanced and real. Black helps us know not only them, but ourselves through them. This is the quality I love most in my very favorite writer of all time, George Eliot, and I have often said that if I am to be judged for my own foibles and self-delusions, I hope it will be by someone as clear-eyed and sympathetic as Eliot. I would now gladly add Robin Black to my jury pool.

Aren't We All Immigrants?

2010-04-27T09:34:00.001-04:00

edited to add: I've already gotten good feedback/pushback from a friend at church, challenging me on this notion that we are all immigrants. That's what I'm looking for! Help me think this through -- please feel free to leave respectful comments, even (especially) if you I'm headed in a wrong direction!

This coming Sunday is the twentieth anniversary of the death of my mother, who was an immigrant, and whose story I have been feeling compelled to tell lately (it's a great story!). This coming Sunday is also the first of two Sundays for which there is no plan for adult Sunday school, due to a cancellation of the class that had originally been scheduled (I serve as the Director of Christian Education at my church, Old First Reformed, so filling this void falls to me, lucky me...) These two facts have me thinking about how I could both tell my mother's story and have something to offer at Adult Forum ....

So I have an idea that keeps swirling around in my brain, but won't quite cohere. I'm thinking about how much more likely it is for us to care deeply about an issue if it touches us personally. And as I think about my mom, and her immigration story -- which is also my immigration story -- I keep thinking about the ways that we are all immigrants. Right? Every one of us has a story about how our families came to this land. Some of them are stories of men and women seeking opportunity and hope. Others are stories of people fleeing persecution. Still others are stories of ancestors brought here forcibly as slaves. Some of us know more about our stories than others of us, but every family story ultimately takes on mythic proportions, every family story is both real and imagined. Indeed, it seems to me that if this land has a creation myth, that myth is an immigration story! Even Native Americans have immigration stories, albeit ones that likely must be mostly imagined because they are so ancient. Still, doesn't it highlight even more how much immigration is this land's creation myth, if we think of even Native Americans as having come from some other place? If we see that even peoples who have been here for millennia are immigrants too? Well, this is where it's still sort of vague in my mind, but somehow, it seems to me that by telling our immigrant stories -- all of our immigrant stories -- we highlight the absurdity of singling out the most recent immigrants among us as "illegal."

I even want to say -- and this is where it's still really fuzzy -- that somehow, if we all document our status as immigrants, doing so somehow compels us in a way that is more immediate and urgent to stand in solidarity with those who are supposedly "undocumented." I say supposedly, because of course, every immigrant has a story that should be heard, that we should care about, that should be -- and can be -- documented. I keep playing in my mind with the word "document"...

As I said, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. But for starters, I was thinking about telling my mom's story -- that is, my story -- at church on Sunday in the Adult Forum, and then trying to figure out ways for everyone else to tell their stories too. And because I'm a writer, I was thinking of trying to get folks to write them down. And because I'm a blogger, I was thinking maybe I would find a way to share them more widely ... I haven't figured it all out yet, but stay tuned.

And let me know what you think....

Gathering Madness

2010-04-23T13:07:00.000-04:00

It’s not too late: Call Gov. Brewer NOW & ask her to veto SB1070. English: 866-996-5161- Espanol: 866-967-6018

* * *

It occurs to me that if I were me, the same old Marta – everything about me the same – except that I were of Mexican, and not European, decent, and I lived in Phoenix rather than Philadelphia – it occurs to me that the SB 1070, which seems poised to become law in Arizona, would effectively require me to carry my birth certificate at all times or risk being stopped, arrested and jailed until I could prove my citizenship.

As I write this, I keep checking the news to see if Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law recent legislation which would make it illegal to be an undocumented immigrant in the State of Arizona. SB 1070 would not just allow, but as I understand it, would require police to stop anyone whom they reasonably suspect to be an undocumented immigrant, and demand documentation. Any suspect who fails to produce such documentation could be arrested and jailed.

It occurs to me, in fact, that if I were me, but of Mexican decent and living in Phoenix, that the danger I face as a lesbian would pale in comparison to the danger I would face as a United States citizen who rarely thinks about her family’s immigration story.

I am not of Mexican decent -- my mother came to the United States as an immigrant from Sweden in the early nineteen-fifties. She was actually Dutch, but the Dutch quota was full. My grandmother, Marta, was a Swedish citizen though, so they came from Sweden, on the Swedish quota.

But for that small fact – Sweden, not Mexico – my citizenship could now be something I must be prepared to prove in the state of Arizona. The entire rest of my family’s immigration story could be exactly the same and it wouldn’t matter one bit.

My mother and her family were legal immigrants. They did everything by the book. They came with almost nothing – almost literally just the clothes on their backs – to make a new life in Flint, Michigan. Theirs is a classic immigration success story – my grandfather was a waiter, my grandmother a chambermaid, my mother went to school consistently for the first time in her life as a thirteen year old who did not speak English when she arrived here. They all worked hard, my grandparents bought a home, my mother got good grades, went to college, eventually earned a Ph.D. She also had a family, named her first-born after her late mother, her second-born after her favorite Swedish uncle, Sven-Erik, and occasionally told us stories of life under Nazi occupation. But other than that, she raised two thoroughly American kids. We grew up in Indiana speaking only English, with flat, Midwestern accents. We have white skin, blue eyes; my nephews (the only children in this country biologically related to that little 1950’s immigrant family) have my brother’s childhood blond hair. There is nothing to distinguish us from the majority (at least for a little while longer) of full-fledged, legal, born-and-bred U.S. citizens.

Perhaps for this reason, it’s easy for me to forget that I am first generation American. That I have only to scratch the surface of my native soil to expose my immigrant roots. It’s easy for me to view immigration as just one more issue among so many that progressive folks like me should care about.

But the gathering madness in Arizona has shaken me up a bit. If everything were the same, except that my family were Mexican, not Swedish … Because in Arizona, what “reasonably” marks someone as an undocumented immigrant? Brown skin and fluency in Spanish, of course. There’s really nothing else.

This legislation has me shaken up, even while I am clear that the target and the real victims of this legislation are not anyone remotely like me, but rather are the hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom have lived and worked in Arizona for years, who are undocumented. This bill is very specifically intended to terrorize undocumented immigrants, making their very existence illegal, and I have no doubt it will do a very good job of pushing individuals and families even further into the shadows, into the margins, further and further away from the opportunities and responsibilities and protections of civil society. That those who crafted this legislation do not care at all that American citizens could be swept up in its police-state tactics is just evidence that SB 1070 is the work of extremists motivated by nothing more than racism and xenophobia.

We should not oppose SB 1070 because a midwestern white girl like me suddenly, for the first time in her life, is able in some small way to personalize the very real threat facing brown-skinned immigrants. We should oppose SB 1070 because it is awful, and hateful, and wrong. But still, I can't shake this feeling, what a small accident it is that I am not, in fact, at risk. That I am safe and they are not. In 2004, I felt unsafe as a lesbian, as Dick Cheney and Carl Rove cynically fanned the flames of homophobia. Maybe the memory of my fear then, whether real or imagined, is also part of why this issue suddenly feels so visceral and urgent.

Do you have a story, an experience, that puts you close enough to this issue to make it feel real and urgent? I hope so, because it's time to stand up and let your voice be heard. Please take a minute to call Governor Brewer, and to ask her to Veto 1070/Veto Hate.

Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

2010-04-07T12:58:00.002-04:00

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)[*****]. This seems to be the phase of my life when I read a lot of great books I should have read a long time ago. I've known that Tim O'Brien is a great writer I ought to read, but sort of like my resistance to reading Mary Karr (yesterday's review), reading about Vietnam is just never what's calling me in the moment, and I'm a pretty capricious reader. Again, Julie was the impetus to read The Things They Carried -- she teaches this book (she got a free classroom set when it was the One Book, One Philadelphia selection a couple of years ago) and recently was invited to hear O'Brien speak. Her rave review is not overstated -- I too just loved this book. It's categorized as fiction, and I suppose can best be described as a set of related short stories, but I'm really intrigued by the genre, which is really a blend of memoir and fiction, short story and essay. Many of the characters in the stories are real people, including the men O'Brien served with, and Tim O'Brien himself. O'Brien was a recent college graduate with a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard when he was drafted, and he tells in a very moving story about his decision to serve rather than to flee to Canada, which was his first impulse. He concludes that it was a failure of courage on his part, and simple fear of embarrassment and shame, that drove him to Vietnam rather than Canada. In the title story, he tells, literally, of the things he and his buddies carried -- first the literal things they carried on their backs, how much they weighed, what they were for, what it felt like to carry them -- and then the more metaphorical things they carried, and what that felt like -- and his writing -- the cadence, the images, the pace -- is just exquisite. His experiences in Vietnam have clearly marked him so deeply that he has spent the rest of his career writing about them -- the war is pretty much all he writes about, I think -- and this book is as much about Tim O'Brien the writer as it is about the war and Tim O'Brien the soldier.. As a character in the book, Tim O'Brien the writer very explicitly grapples with what it means to tell the truth about war, and whether there even is such a thing as truth when it comes to war, but at the very least, he concludes that to tell the truth, he has to make stuff up. He tells many compelling stories, and then he retells them, and then he tells you they are true, and then he tells you they are entirely all made up, and then he tells you what really happened, and then he tells you that's all made up too, and then he insists that nonetheless, it's all true. It reminds me a lot of how thoughtful people read Scripture, and I suppose that's not an accident, though O'Brien does not appear to be a person of faith. Nonetheless, he seems to be seeking some sort of redemption through his story-telling and his meta-story-telling; and while I suspect he might argue there is no redemption, this gorgeous and provocative book is perhaps as close as it gets.

Book Review: Lit by Mary Karr

2010-04-06T20:33:00.000-04:00

Mary Karr, Lit (2009) [*****]. I know I should read Mary Karr's first two memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry, as she has been credited with practically singe-handedly sparking the memoir madness of the past couple decades, but the brutal subject matter -- parental alcoholism and psychosis, childhood abuse and neglect, adolescent promiscuity and drug abuse -- have just never called me at the moment when I am thinking, "What shall I read next?" Julie, however, has read all of Mary Karr, along with the whole wretched-childhood genre she pioneered -- what we call the "Bastard Out Of" series, after Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (so Liar's Club is Bastard out of Texas, and Push is Bastard Out of Harlem, etc.). Julie recently read Lit, and insisted that I really had to read it, she loved it so much. And I'm very glad I did -- it is beautiful and very compelling -- though I didn't love it quite as much as Julie. Lit is the story of Mary Karr's adulthood, in which she writes poetry, marries a poet, becomes a mother, drinks an astonishing amount of alcohol, attempts suicide, spends some time in a mental hospital, gets sober, divorces her husband, converts to Catholicism, and becomes a successful poet and memoirist. Her story-telling is funny and thoughtful -- this is a very fast and engaging read. And I know I should say that it is beautifully written, luminous even, and it is! But.... I will admit there were times when I grew weary of yet another simile or metaphor. And don't get me wrong - every one of them was fresh! original! illuminating! But every other sentence, really? It's not an accident that the first half of the book is more lush with metaphorical language than the second half, which is much more sober. I get what she's doing, and she's really good -- I'm eager to read her poetry, in fact -- but sometimes it just felt like too much, distracting even. My only other criticism is that Karr strikes me as a bit falsely modest at times -- it was easy to believe, as she told it, that her career as a poet suffered terribly from her extreme alcoholism, but then when fellowships and book contracts and teaching offers kept falling in her lap, it seemed possibly she had been a bit disingenuous about what a hit her writing had taken. These are minor quibbles, though, in an otherwise fine memoir that does a lot of really hard things well: Karr convinces us that she really can love and forgive her totally crazy and self-absorbed mother without seeming like a martyr; she tells her side of the story of her pretty unbearable marriage without bitterness and with, what seems to me, a great deal of genuine generosity to her ex-husband; she acknowledges the pain she inflicted on her son with open-eyed clarity, but without narcissistic self-recrimination and self-pity; and the story of her conversion from atheism to Catholicism is moving and convincing and mercifully lacking in evangelism.

Conversations with Micah: On Food

2010-02-19T10:18:00.000-05:00

"Hello squishy belly." Micah wraps his arms around my hips, buries his face in my tummy. "I love you, squishy belly."

"What if I started running all the time and got really skinny Micah? What would you think about that?"

He looks up at me, very serious. His cheek is still resting on my belly as he ponders this.

Then, with all the passion of Micah: "Eat! Eat! Eat!"

* * *

It's Ash Wednesday, and we've just returned home from services. The quiche and the bread were not done in time -- everything always takes longer than it should -- so we had a snack and the kids are eating their meal now, late. Julia Child's quiche, so much better than Molly Katzen's. Heavy cream and butter are quickly climbing to the top of my list of life's greatest pleasures. Also, white flour. I've made a loaf and two baguettes, all white flour. All of this, I know, goes against every bit of sound nutritional wisdom, but oh my.... I just can't stop. I'm thinking of giving up risk-aversion for Lent.

I'm tidying the kitchen, wiping counters, loading the dish washer. The kids are at the table in the dining room.

"Trixie?" says Micah. "What's your favorite thing about this family?"

She has a fork-full of of cheddar-sausage quiche in one hand, a hunk of baguette in the other. "The food," she says, between bites.

"Yeah, me too."

* * *

Dinner the next night. Gratin with potatoes, cheese and pork sausage. For some reason we have two dozen eggs in the fridge, and Julie is coming home with at least another dozen in the winter farm share tonight. So I'm using up eggs like crazy.

Micah doesn't like the gratin, because he doesn't like potatoes, so he's eating another piece of quiche.

"Nial and Zach and I are the only ones in my class who eat healthy food," he says.

"Is that so?" This is an interesting development. Until very recently, he's been mostly horrified by his homemade lunches. "The kids will laugh at me," he would moan, "if I bring that to school." But when I relent, and buy him some awful yogurt in a squeeze tube or something, he doesn't actually eat it. It's just about street cred.

When Trixie was Micah's age, she began a boycott of MacDonalds after I told her about industrial beef production. It was an ethical boycott, though she didn't really like the food much either. A couple of times on our road trip last summer we stopped at MacDonalds in desperation, and because Micah begged, but eventually even Micah declared he wouldn't eat there anymore. "I just like the toys in the Happy Meals. But that's not real food."

Apparently he has embraced being the kid with the healthy lunch. "I'm teaching my friend Nassir to eat more healthy though."

"That's great Micah. Has your teacher been talking to your class about eating healthy?"

"No, I just decided to teach Nassir."

"What did you tell him about eating healthy?"

"Like, he should eat his sandwich before his chips and snacks. And his fruit, he should eat fruit. Like that."

"That's great advice, Micah," I say. "Maybe you should take your own advice, though."

He looks at me.

"You didn't eat your sandwich today. And only part of your fruit."

He looks away, shrugs, the sly smile. He is his own boy. He will be a good man.

The Welfare of the City: Scenes from a Neighorhood

2010-02-14T06:55:00.000-05:00

The second in an occasional series; the first: Sister Margaret (or: the first time I walked away from poverty)

***

The snow has been relentless. I missed the first wave, having been forced – entirely against my will, I’ll have you know -- to stay another day on my writing retreat in Manhattan because there were no trains home. The kids and Julie had off Monday, which was a gift, and they went to school Tuesday, which was also a gift. But they are off the rest of the week, which is, well, a mixed blessing. If I could have one more day to get on top of the mess in the house, to get my head back in the game, that would be a good thing. Instead I’m trying to catch some quiet moments alone where I can. Which is why I’m going to be late to the neighborhood snow day potluck at Kate and Pete’s house. The Brussels sprouts are my excuse – my, but they take a long time to roast, with just some olive oil and kosher salt.

When I arrive, the house is teeming. I’m laden with the Brussels sprouts (roasted to perfection, if I do say so myself) and half the sticky buns I baked this morning with Micah and his pals Ada, age five, and Zady, age four. Micah likes to measure and mix and roll things, but hates sticky fingers. Ada and Zady, on the other hand, are girls after my own heart. When it came to smearing soft butter on the rolled-out dough with their bare hands, they couldn’t get enough of it.

“Ooohhh! It feels so good!” They giggled, pinching off more butter and finger-painting it on the rectangle of soft, sweet dough. Micah sprinkled the cinnamon, I rolled it up, and everyone helped pinch the seam. I cut thick slabs and arranged the pin-wheels in the slurry of sugar and butter the kids had just spread with a spatula all over the bottom of the baking pans. The warm, sticky cinnamon swirl buns are… well, words fail. Possibly too much. I’m taking half of them to the potluck.

I take my food to Kate and Pete’s kitchen and put it on the counter. My Ada Ruby, their oldest, greets me with a hug. Jen and Tim arrive with a bottle of wine. Julie has put good beer in the fridge, Long Trail I think. Folks keep arriving, with salads, corn bread, chocolate cake. There are brownies in the oven, and the whole house smells sweet and chocolaty. The main course is sheer perfection: tortilla soup with lime and cilantro, avocado and red onions to sprinkle on top. There’s also black bean soup, but I can’t eat any, I’m already so full. I can’t find a plate to put Brussels sprouts on, so I just pinch a few with my fingers, then lick the salt off. Zady’s dad Zach sees me and smiles. He leans in and whispers, “I did the same thing.”

“Marta, those are so good,” says Pete as I squeeze out of the kitchen. “Brussel sprouts are much maligned and I just don’t understand why. I love them.”

“Me too!” There’s not much food I don’t love though. Licorice is the only flavor I really can’t abide. Everything else is about texture: oatmeal, tapioca, rice pudding – I can’t do it. It’s a shame too, because I love the idea of all those foods. I mean really, is there anything more cozy and comforting than a bowl of oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and raisins? Too bad it makes me gag.

“Hey Aaliyah, can I have that baby?” Aaliyah is one of Trixie’s best friends and our next-door neighbor. Trixie has known Aaliyah and her sister Qudsiyyah since they were all two and three year olds. For several years I took care of them before and after school, and had baby Ada during the day. “Marta’s daycare and taxi service,” the kids used to call it.

Aaliyah smiles and hands me baby Levi, Kate and Pete’s third child. Josiah, their two-year old middle son is showing us a few dance moves, much to everyone’s delight.

I settle on the couch and bounce the baby on my knee. Jen is beside me, hugely pregnant and looking uncomfortable. “How you doin’ babe?” I ask, and lay my hand on her belly. Jen is not only one of my dearest friends, but also my yoga and pilates instructor, with a studio in her home that is directly across the street from us. I take private sessions with her, and we’re bartering for childcare. It’s only recently starting to feel real that this isn’t just a plan, but a relationship. A new baby in my life! Suddenly I am so eager to have this baby on the outside. Not as eager as Jen is, though.

“I’m okay. I’m kind of sad, actually, but it feels pretty hormonal, not existential, you know?” I stroke her knee absently, assure her I do indeed know exactly what she means.

“I don’t think I’m going to stay for the movie,” she says.

I shake my head and whisper, “Me either.” I look round at this house full of people I love, every one of them a neighbor on my little block of rowhouses, most of whom I’ve known for years and years. Jen (the other Jen, Zady’s mom) and Q & A’s mom Kelley are hanging a sheet on the wall; Emilia has just arrived with an LCD projector. Movie night on the Terrace. This is a good life. My gratitude is deep. Still, I know my limits. “I’m going to leave when the movie starts, enjoy a little solitude before I put the kids to bed.”

I turn to listen to Michelle, on the other side of me on the couch. She’s talking about food. “We had a lunch meeting at work, and I’ve been trying to recreate this green been dish ever since. With cranberries and pearl onions. Oh my, it was so good. I can’t quite get it right though – I think I’m putting in too much olive oil.”

“Shelley, how many years have I known you? Seventeen? And I didn’t know you like to cook.”

“Has it been that long? Really? You know, you mentioned recently about knowing my father, and I didn’t realize you’d been on the block that long until you said that.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember your father. We moved here in 1992. I was just trying to remember how old your Erich was then? Maybe eight or nine?”

“Yeah, that’s about right. He’s grown now.” She sighs. “But food, yeah, I love food. I love everything about food. You know, some people say they like to eat, but don’t really like all the preparation – all that chopping and cooking, you know? But I just love it all.”

I smile, nodding. I remember last summer, when there was a huge block party to celebrate because Shelley had completed her degree. I do remember now eating some amazing barbeque pork on her stoop that day. That was when we talked about her father. How he went to Tuskegee. How proud he was – never bought anything on credit. Walked to the car dealership on the Avenue, paid cash, drove home with a new car, no note. Her parents were good people. Shelley is too. And I don’t doubt she can cook, because that barbeque was amazing. It’s all coming back to me.

“I was talking about this once with a girlfriend at work,” says Shelley, nodding her head in a sort of circular motion. “I said, ‘I love everything about food. I love the way it looks, I love the way it tastes, I love the way it feels and smells….’ And my girlfriend, she looked at me and she said, ‘Shelley? Are you talkin about food or are you talkin about sex?!’”

I touch her arm, laughing. “Shelley, good food and good sex? Just two sides of the same coin, if you ask me.”

“You got that right!” She’s still chuckling and nodding her head. “You sure do got that right.”

Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

2010-02-11T03:37:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925)[*****] I've never before read any fiction by Virginia Woolf, though I read and loved A Room of One's Own as a teenager, and I read about VW many years ago in Nigel Nicholson's biography Portrait of a Marriage about his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, in which Virginia Woolf plays a role as one of Vita's many lovers (I loved that book too). But I'd always been a little afraid of actually reading Virginia Woolf, cliche as that may be. Recently a friend spoke highly of The Hours by Michael Cunningham, but I thought I should read Mrs. Dalloway first. I'm so glad I did. I just loved this book so much. Mrs. Dalloway takes place in one day, throughout which Big Ben marks the passing hours while Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party. The narrative is stream-of-consciousness, tracking the interior lives of not just Clarissa, but also of all the people with whom she comes in contact throughout the day. The point of view is constantly changing, like a baton that gets passed from character to character. So Mrs. Dalloway is walking through the park, and we are hearing the thoughts in her head about her marriage and her former lover who has just returned from India; she passes a young couple sitting on the park bench, and suddenly we are in their heads. Sometimes it took me half a paragraph to realize that the point-of-view had shifted. Everything is very interior -- the thoughts, memories, revelations of the various characters, major and minor. One of the reasons I loved Mrs. Dalloway is that its stream-of-consciousness interiority mirrored very much what it feels like to be inside my head sometimes. All of the stories woven throughout the day converge at Clarissa's party that evening, a remarkably choreographed scene that is both biting and humorous in its social commentary. Mrs. Dalloway is about many things -- love, marriage, war, mental illness, social class -- but I think I loved it especially because it is so much about youth and middle age and especially what it means to look back on youth -- ones own and ones children's -- from the vantage point of middle age. Clarissa; her former lover, the adventurous philanderer Peter Walsh; and her former passionate friend, Sally Seton, are brought together for the first time in years, and are all confronted with the memories of what they imagined their lives would be, and with the choices that have brought them to their lives as they actually are. I could identify so much with the sense of confusion they all feel at finding themselves and each with such different lives than they had imagined, but also with the sense of passion and possibility they still feel in their middle age. I think it is just as well that I am only now finding Virginia Woolf's fiction, because all of that would have been lost on me a couple of decades ago. Now I am intrigued not only to read more of her fiction, but her letters and diaries as well. She seems to have lived quite a remarkable life.

Guest Post: Julie's Director of Music Report for the Annual Meeting at Church (in its entirety)

2010-02-10T07:48:00.002-05:00

Reflections on a Benign Dictatorship:

A Music Director’s Sonnet of Thanksgiving

I’ve been music dictator 13 years—

How lucky am I to have all of you?

To sing and play and do those things you do

So well and to God’s glory, festive cheers!

In thanking you, I might be in arrears.

Allow a shout out, first and foremost, to

The choir, week in and out, rehearsing, who

Up front, (LOOK UP!), sing as our Christ comes near.

Hey band! You rock the sanctuary space,

True testament to multi-age: Believe!

When soloists enrich our worship’s verve

And pianists say “yes,” it seems like grace.

For Tim’s dual keyboard skills (please, never leave):

This congregation’s thanks you all deserve.

Respectfully submitted way past the deadline,

Julie Steiner

February 7, 2010

writing retreat, the haiku version (with apologies to vw)

2010-02-07T08:52:00.000-05:00

what's this passion for?

always: buzz, hum, soar, roar, dive

then buried in snow

pardon our appearance

2010-01-28T16:33:00.003-05:00

edited to add: So whaddya think? I think I like it.

I'm being impulsive and fiddling with the layout. I'm also supposed to be cooking supper. And I'm a total luddite. This might take awhile!

The iTampon Jokes Yesterday Were Inevitable

2010-01-28T11:28:00.001-05:00

edited to add: more on Apple's new "intimate" product (apparently Steve Jobs actually used that word yesterday, with a straight face....)

But it just keeps getting better and better. I will admit that I am totally intrigued by this new gadget ... but really, doesn't Apple have any women on its design and marketing teams?

The Slippery Slope from Same-Sex Marriage to Bigamy

2010-01-27T14:02:00.001-05:00

While I spent last summer and fall reveling in my own marriage (see part one and part two of my on-going series, "A Midwestern Marriage"), I pretty much had my head in the sand with regard to most political developments on the marriage equality front (truth be told, I’ve pretty much had my head in the sand about politics in general). I have, of course, heard that Ted Olson, the conservative lawyer of Bush v. Gore fame, is challenging California’s Prop 8 in federal court, arguing it is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. I will admit that my somewhat cynical (but not, I think, totally unwarranted) first impression was that this is some sort of conservative plot, wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing and all that, because this Supreme Court? And I still think, yeah, good luck with that.

But I just read The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage by Ted Olsen in Newsweek , and I’m willing to concede that he at least seems sincere (though such deep cynicism is not beneath this Republican party, so if a we'll-show-those-queers, smoking gun GOP memo emerges some day, after the Court firmly establishes that gay and lesbian folks do not, in fact, enjoy equal protection under the law, I just want to go on record now as saying I won’t be surprised).

(edited to add: read the rest of this essay after the jump by clicking "read more" below)

Olsen’s conclusion to his conservative case for gay marriage especially caught my eye, because I have been thinking along the same lines:

California's Proposition 8 is particularly vulnerable to constitutional challenge, because that state has now enacted a crazy-quilt of marriage regulation that makes no sense to anyone. California recognizes marriage between men and women, including persons on death row, child abusers, and wife beaters. At the same time, California prohibits marriage by loving, caring, stable partners of the same sex, but tries to make up for it by giving them the alternative of "domestic partnerships" with virtually all of the rights of married persons except the official, state-approved status of marriage. Finally, California recognizes 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place in the months between the state Supreme Court's ruling that upheld gay-marriage rights and the decision of California's citizens to withdraw those rights by enacting Proposition 8.

So there are now three classes of Californians: heterosexual couples who can get married, divorced, and remarried, if they wish; same-sex couples who cannot get married but can live together in domestic partnerships; and same-sex couples who are now married but who, if they divorce, cannot remarry. This is an irrational system, it is discriminatory, and it cannot stand.

Julie and I like to note with mock glee or distress, as the case may be, the way our marital status changes when we cross state lines: “Hey, we’re in Vermont! We’re married again!” Or, alternately, “Back in Pennsylvania … well, dear, it was fun while it lasted.” We like to joke that we have the best of both worlds: sometimes married, sometimes living in sin. It’s almost like having an affair! All the fun without the hassle!

But all silliness aside, it is an absurd situation. Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, the Cocquille Indian Tribe in Oregon, Washington D.C. and New York all recognize our marriage (New York will not perform same-sex marriages, but will recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Apparently New York’s economy is so strong, the legislature magnanimously decided to send all that wedding revenue to her sister New England states.) The rest of the states, including Pennsylvania, where we live, do not recognize our marriage.

Recently I’ve been wondering what exactly that means. If Pennsylvania does not recognize my Iowa marriage, does that mean that I am still free to marry a man in Pennsylvania? If I were to take out a marriage license in Pennsylvania, and if I were to tell the nice clerk at the Marriage License Window that I have a wife, but only in Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, the Cocquille Indian Tribe in Oregon, Washington D.C. and New York, and so I would now like to add a husband (to my harem, if you will), what would she say? Other than, “Let me get my boss.” But once the boss of the boss of the boss had been consulted, am I right that they would have to let me marry a man here in Pennsylvania?

Greater legal minds than mine read my blog – what do you think?

And if I were to marry a man here in Pennsylvania (hey, don’t laugh; I’ve had not one but two marriage proposals from perfectly legitimate and eligible men in the last couple weeks alone), what would happen if I traveled back to Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, the Cocquille Indian Tribe in Oregon, Washington D.C. or New York (or, for that matter, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Canada, South Africa or Mexico City)? Would I be a bigamist? Assuming bigamy is illegal in those jurisdictions, could I be arrested and charged with a crime? And if I were charged with bigamy, but then fled back to the safety of Pennsylvania, would Pennsylvania extradite me?

It’s all a bit absurdly yet deliciously ironic, isn’t it? Because the only persuasive argument I have ever heard against same-sex marriage is that it creates a slippery-slope to legalized polygamy. Now, please note that I am not personally concerned about the persuasiveness of this slippery-slope argument. Truth be told, I’m a little libertarian-leaning on this one: I’m not sure why the state should bestow privilege on any adult relationships, and I’m especially unpersuaded that modern civil marriage is a useful proxy for interests the state actually has a legitimate interest in promoting, like the welfare of children and the stability of communities. Personally, I don’t see why polygamy among consenting adults is any less legitimate than the sort of serial-monogamy-plus-infidelity that seems to characterize so much of modern marriage. Having said that, I do understand that mine is not a majority opinion, and so accepting for the sake of argument that legalized polygamy is not something we want to embrace, I do sympathize with the argument that same-sex marriage opens the door pretty wide to legalized polygamy. Indeed, the argument-from-tradition, and even the argument-from-Scripture, is weaker against polygamy than same-sex marriage. Of course there are real distinctions, and of course we are capable of making them, which is why in general I don't like slippery-slope arguments.

Still, it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, that the very failure to recognize same-sex marriage nationally could also lead to an increase of bigamy?

On Resurrection, Redemption and Grace (for Neville)

2010-01-21T23:21:00.003-05:00

When I was in college, it took me almost three years to hold onto the concept of “hegemony,” which now seems silly, because it’s not really a difficult concept. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept; at any given moment, if I looked it up, or someone explained it to me, I understood it perfectly. But an hour later, it was gone. I just couldn’t hold onto it, and I certainly couldn’t pull it up at will to use it or explain it. I had at best an impressionistic understanding, one that only occasionally came into focus. “Hermeneutics” is another one; I still have no idea what it means. And it won’t help for you to leave an explanation in the comments, because then I will understand it … but only until I turn off my computer. Then it will be gone.

Big theological concepts often feel a bit like that for me. But if I feel a little dumb when I can’t hold onto concepts like “hegemony” or “hermeneutics,” I feel like a downright fraud for having only a tangential grasp on concepts like “grace” and “redemption” and “resurrection.” This is one of the many reasons I love Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. I come back to these lovely essays about the “scary words” of the Christian faith over and over, not so much to set difficult ideas firmly in my mind, but rather precisely because what Norris gives me is permission to claim them even in the fleeting, “hope is a thing with feathers” sort of way they dwell with me.

Mostly I don’t so much understand big theological concepts as I experience them. And the thing is, whether you understand it or not, sometimes grace can just wash over you. Sometimes redemption can grab hold of you in an instant and deliver you from a captivity you didn’t even know you were dwelling in. Sometimes resurrection looks you right in the eye in the form of a teen-age boy, now a grown man, who revisits you across the decades through the magic of social networking.

Last night I got a Facebook friend request from Neville Stephens (that’s not really his last name, btw), a name that rang a bell, but which I couldn’t immediately place. Julie said, “Didn’t you have a student named Neville Stephens?” Right. Our mutual friends were two other former students, so of course I immediately accepted.

I’m now Facebook friends with several of my former students from my brief foray as a high school English teacher in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Hancock County, Indiana. First was Radley; I found him at the Cato Institute when I was doing background on a potential donor to my kids’ school. I shot him an email; awhile later he wrote back, apologetic about the delay. I was actually in Indiana when I received his email, in a Holiday Inn Express, at Julie’s Nanna’s funeral. I was just miles away from Eastern Hancock High School, and his kind words about my influence on his intellectual life were most certainly a sort of grace, a totally unexpected affirmation from the least likely of sources. I’ve been a huge fan of Radley’s ever since, and will always be grateful for his thoughtfulness that began to redeem what was mostly a painful and difficult time in my life. I may have been miserable, but apparently it was not all for naught.

But miserable I was, for so many reasons. In no particular order, there was the fact that my introverted, anxiety-prone, bookish self was exquisitely ill-suited to a career teaching adolescents; there was the war, about which I held a distinctly minority opinion among my colleagues; there was my mother’s death at the end of my first year, the great trauma in my life, still; and then there was that toxic closet, which permeated everything. All around a bad combination. When I look back on those three years, my misery seems almost unremitting.

So I was happy to hear from Radley that something good had come of all that misery. And when I became Facebook friends with Shawn and Amy and Webb and Todd, I had a similar experience. “Miss Rose! [“Marta” I have to correct them every time] It’s so nice to be in touch! Thank you so much for trying to open our minds there at Eastern Hancock, you really did make a difference!” Nothing begins to redeem misery like this sort of unexpected and undeserved kindness and generosity. Especially since not one of them seems particularly freaked out by my life (not my lifestyle, Todd … it’s just a life, and so is yours! Though yours probably has more style, come to think of it… ;-)

Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting on Facebook with my boy Cory, whom I sit with at church, while Julie is conducting the choir (Michael, my friend and pastor, says new folks probably think we’re married, ha!). He’s a new friend, and very dear, a Hoosier no less. I adore him. While we were chatting, he told me that Autumn, one of his childhood chums with whom he is Facebook friends, recognized my name on his page because she had also seen it on Amy’s page.

“Autumn?” It took me a minute. “As in Asha’s older sister? Really, you knew Asha?” What a small world, huh? Asha isn’t on Facebook, but I immediately chatted up Amy and caught up on Asha’s life.

Redemption all over the place. I may have been miserable, but these kids? Well, they’re not kids any more, for starters, and what’s more, they appear to have grown up to be fabulous human beings. Very rewarding and heartwarming, let me tell you.

So I was happy to get Neville’s friend request, in much the same way I was happy to hear from all of them. Neville was a great kid. They were all great kids. His photo, though, it didn’t look all that familiar. People change, as it turns out, quite a bit between their mid-teens and their mid-thirties. Someone else commenting on his wall thought so too: “Neville, what happened to your long hair?”

And then it all came back to me: resurrection, redemption, grace, all in one fell swoop. Because suddenly I really remembered Neville. I really saw him, his fifteen-year-old self, with his long blond hair and the fabulous smile and a certain open-yet-shy sort of head-ducking, looking-out-from-under-his-eye-lids gesture that was so, well, Neville. Like his young self was standing right there in front of me.

Michael recently preached a beautiful sermon about bodies (one of my favorite topics) and resurrection, which threw me for a bit of a loop at the end, because he proposed that resurrection is not really a metaphor, that our resurrections will be bodily and unique, right down to the expressions on our faces and our quirky personalities and the very gestures that make us unique. I loved this sermon right up until that point, when I fell right into fretting about being a fraud. Because resurrection as not-a-metaphor and not-a-symbol is not-so-much something I can easily wrap my mind around. A couple of days after that sermon, I made Michael go for a walk with me and quizzed him about it. We walked around the block in the sunshine, my first limping excursion of any distance since my last bout with plantar facsiitis. I was in a funk, and a walk in the sunshine and my new fancy running shoes with my pal Michael was certainly a resurrection of sorts. His further explanation of his sermon was helpful, too, but still I was left mostly scratching my head.

I still don’t really understand the end of Michael’s sermon, but this morning, when a flood of Nevilleness washed over me, I certainly experienced resurrection in just the way Michael proposed: specific, quirky, bodily, right down to the very gestures and expressions that make Neville himself. I have experienced this before: fifteen-year-old Radley is pretty easy to recall too, but here’s the thing (and I trust that Radley would take no offense): there’s not so much redemption or grace in recalling a fifteen-year-old Radley in all his smirky particularity. The redemption of Radley is in knowing he turned out to be a fine human being, a good man, someone who does important work in the world.

The difference was that my experience of Neville, resurrected, recalled for me that my time at Eastern Hancock was not all misery. Neville appears to have turned out to be a fine human being, like most of my former students I’m sure, one that I will be happy to know and be friends with, on Facebook and perhaps even in real life. But the gift that has redeemed those years like no other is in recalling – so specifically, so particularly, so vividly – how much I adored him, then, and how happy it made me, then, to know him.

In the two pages Kathleen Norris devotes to “Grace” in Amazing Grace, she recalls the story of Jacob, who, as Norris tells us, “has just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. But,” says Norris, “God’s response to finding Jacob vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, is not to strike him down for his sins but to give him a blessing.” Upon waking from his dream, Jacob responds, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Grace, suggests Norris, is in realizing that God is with us even when we don’t know it. “Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us and bless us….” (pp. 150-151)

Indeed.

What's for Dinner? Curried Apple-Butternut Squash Soup and Cabbage-Carrot-Beet Salad

2010-01-20T19:11:00.005-05:00

Folks ask me for recipes a lot, so I'm going to start posting some of them. If you don't love food .... well, poor you. Because good food? Good food is on a short short list of life's greatest pleasures (and I'll send a yummy care package to anyone who can guess the other six. The Seven Greatest Pleasures in Life According to Marta. Sorta like the Seven Deadly Sins.... hmmm. Aren't there also Seven Virtues? Hmmmmm.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, food. I just read Michael Pollen's Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you've been meaning to read Michael Pollen ... well, you really should read Omnivore's Dilemma, because it's awfully good. But if you're not going to (though you should, really you should), read Food Rules instead. It will take you half an hour. Forty-five minutes if you're a really slow reader. Food Rules is Pollan's explication of his own seven-word (seven again!) answer to the question "What should we eat?" Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

Here are some of Pollan's 63 Rules that I particularly like:

#3: Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.

#7: Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

#13: Eat only foods that will eventually rot.

#20: It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

#27: Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.

#39: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

#43: Have a glass of wine with dinner.

#51: Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.

#53: Serve a proper portion and don't go back for seconds.

#55: Eat meals.

#63: Cook. (That's my favorite, I think.)

Speaking of cooking, here's what we had for dinner:

Curried Apple Butternut Squash Soup

(this is from my brother and sister-in-law; we had this for Thanksgiving, minus the butter)

Cut two butternut squashes length-wise and put then cut-side down on a cookie sheet with a little water. Bake in a 350 degree oven until soft.

Saute two small or one large finely chopped yellow onions in 4 tablespoons of butter (yes, butter!), along with 4 or 5 (or 6) teaspoons of curry powder or paste and two or three cored, peeled, chopped apples until soft, about 25 minutes.

Add three or four cups of vegetable stock (I made my own today, with roughly chopped parsnips, onions, carrots, cabbage, a bunch of old parsley, some bay leaves, and a tea ball full of thyme, rosemary and peppercorns) and a cup or two of apple cider.

Scoop out the squash and add to the pot. Salt and pepper to taste.

Bring the whole thing to a boil and let it simmer for a little bit.

Blend it all up with your immersion blender (and if you don't have an immersion blender? Get one! Everything is better with an immersion blender).

Serve with grated apples and/or a dollop of sour cream or just a scoop of soft butter if that's all you have.

Cabbage-Carrot-Beet Salad with Caraway and Cider Vinegar

(I made this up)

Boil two large or three or four small beets until soft, and then peel and cut into cubes or sticks.

Slice up a quarter-or-so wedge of green cabbage and saute in a couple tablespoons of butter, along with some kosher salt and a few grinds of pepper. Grate a carrot or two into the cabbage as it cooks. Grind up some caraway seeds (maybe a tablespoon or so) with a mortar and pestle and add to the cabbage. When the cabbage is a little soft but not totally wilted, add the beets, a little more whole caraway, and a couple of tablespoons of cider vinegar. Toss and cook for a few minutes until everything is warm and pink. Serve warm or room temperature.

The Lexicon of Social Networking (by my boy Patrick)

2010-01-20T08:32:00.002-05:00

I was in a grumpy mood this morning (just ask my family), but this snapped me right out of it. Patrick is one of my boyz and I do love him. He doesn't know it yet, but I'm scheming a trip to New York to sit in his Harlem apartment and write for a few days. Soon. In the meantime, I'm trying to pound my way through a list of onerous tasks that I keep putting off because, well, they're onerous. But I'm pretty sure I will feel so much lighter when they are done. So, more soon, but in the meantime, enjoy!

Book Review: The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

2010-01-19T20:36:00.002-05:00

The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver (2009) (*****). Taking a page out of Gordon’s book, I gave this to Julie so that I could read it. I justlove Barbara Kingsolver’s stories. This one actually took me about one hundred pages to really get hooked – a day on jury duty did the trick (law school and five miserable years practicing law is a high price to pay to never again get chosen for a jury, but it works; on top of that, I actually loved law school, so I guess the get-out-of-jury-duty-free-and-read-a-book-all-day card is really a bonus, not consolation). The Lacuna is structured as a collection of diaries, letters, newspaper articles and congressional testimony, assembled by Violet Brown, the secretary of Harrison Shepherd, a popular writer of romantic adventure novels. Shepherd is the product of an ill-fated marriage between an American government bureaucrat and a Mexican woman who leaves her husband and returns with the twelve-year-old Harrison to Mexico, in the futile search for a wealthy man to marry and keep her. While living on the hacienda of a rich oil man, and without any school to attend, Harrison swims in the ocean, reads adventure stories, learns to cook from the kind Mexican chef, and writes everything down in the little account book he steals from the housekeeper. From the chef he learns a technique for making perfect pan dulce with European white flour, a skill that turns out to be similar to mixing plaster, which lands the young Shepherd a job with the muralist Diego Rivera. Shepherd eventually joins the staff at the Rivera-Kahlo household, first as a cook and later as a typist. When Lev Trotsky, in exile and fleeing Stalin’s assassins, joins the household, Shepherd becomes his typist. I wonder if this section of the novel would have been quite as intriguing if I hadn’t recently read a biography of Freda Kahlo; at any rate, I’ve always suspected I was born in the wrong decade of the twentieth century, and should have been a bohemian communist, not a middle class housewife. At any rate, I loved the quiet, quotidian portraits of these larger-than-life figures, as seen through the eyes of the understated Shepherd (even while I suspect that the portrait of Trotsky might be a bit overly-sympathetic -- I might have to read one of the new biographies of Trotsky soon). When Trotsky is assassinated, a deeply traumatized Shepherd returns to war-time America, settling in Asheville, North Carolina, where lives a largely reclusive life, forever bemused by his own wild success as a popular novelist. That success turns sharply sour when Shepherd is brought under the surreal scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which ruins his life and career on account of his former associations with Rivera, Kahlo and Trotsky. Among the intriguing questions The Lacuna asks is whether and how is it possible to capture a life in words, and how differently it gets captured, depending on ones perspective. The Lacuna is the intriguing story of a life, one lived in the shadow of the epic political drama of the twentieth century. But it is a life filtered through multiple lenses, unintentionally told, in which, as the title suggests, what is left out – the missing pieces – are likely as important as what is left in. The relationship among words, silence, story and truth are intriguing to me.

Guest Post: Appreciating Others' Religions As Well As Your Own

2010-01-11T18:38:00.004-05:00

NOTE: This sermon was delivered by the Rev Dr Donna Schaper, Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church, on Sunday, January 10, 2010. Like Old First Reformed UCC, Judson Memorial is an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. Donna Schaper was one of the clergy arrested along with Michael in protest of Jean Montrevil's detention and threatened deportation. I am still praying and fasting for and with Jean. You can also help by signing this petition demanding his release. If you would like any more information, leave me a comment, and I will get right back to you.

This sermon is posted here with Donna's permission.

When we woke up in our several beds on the morning of December 30, 2009, we were one people. Now we are a different people. One of our members, Jean Montrevil was detained at his regular check in and first put in a detention center on Varick Street, right down the street from our solemn assembly. He was later moved to the detention center in York, Pennsylvania where he now resides, precariously perched on the tip of deportation from his country, my country and your country. For the details of this captivity, please come this afternoon for the gathering at 2 or refer to the web site. There will be several people at the welcome table who can give you a thumbnail sketch of this injustice, which is a dam in the river of justice and blocking the flow of the everlasting streams.

I have a problem this morning because all of you are on different learning curves on this egregious manner. Some of you know how these things can be, how a father of four and husband of one can be summarily and unjustly uprooted by the state. Others are just figuring it out. My own husband, who is intimate with me and with this matter, asked me in a quiet moment yesterday, can you explain to me how this could be happening? I heard his plea and while I can explain it legally, I cannot explain it morally What is happening is just plain wrong, in addition to being stupid. Like the government’s current intention to not even allow some immigrants to BUY health insurance, Jean’s captivity by the state is stupid, impractical, uneconomical and risks putting a whole family on welfare, which welfare the same punitive tax payers who want to be safe above all, will end up paying for. Immorality joins stupidity in this potential deportation.

Rev Eleanor Harrison, Rev Susan Switzer, C.B. Stewart and Rev Sherrilynn Posey arrested Jan 7, 2010, as part of nonviolent civil disobedience demanding the release of nationally renowned immigrant rights leader, Jean Montrevil

Still others of you are here for the first time, hoping for some kind of spiritual experience to get you through your week, which is filled with its own detentions and captivities. And others of you are remembering that you joined 17 others in being arrested this week; outside of Varick Street, and that you have a court date on March 8. We are necessarily in different places of involvement in something, which at one level is just another oppression of another good person. You may care more about the homeless woman who shivered on your step last night or the fact that you can’t yet get health insurance. You may be more involved with your own addiction or the early failure of your New Year’s resolutions. Forgive me if I overdo one matter on behalf of creating a spiritual floor for us.

Today I want to stick to my topic, which is about appreciating our own religion in the midst of many competitors for our spiritual attention. Jean is one doorway to all the rest, including the doorway to things, which you may think are small, compared to his grievance.

Today we need to connect the dots. Yes, that is what the President said; we must connect the dots in order to be secure. One of the dots is Jean and the thousands like him, already detained. Another of the dots is the way our own religions are too pathetic to stop injustice. Another of the dots is the way we are overwhelmed with clusters of injustice. There is a good word for this cluster, and some of you know what I mean. It is like cluster freight or a cluster of fears or a cluster you fill in the blanks. The American people are experiencing a tsunami of trouble; so fierce are its waters that we can barely gather our forces to focus on one. But, and here starts the good news. We have gathered with hundreds of others this week to face what has happened to Jean and to say no to it. For a brief update on the situation, just let me say that we have a legal, political and spiritual glimmer of hope right now that Jean will not be deported. It is only a glimmer. But it is a glimmer. Again, I don’t want to get into the details of that glimmer so much as to announce that there is a glimmer. You may clap now.

The spiritual floor for this glimmer of hope in the face of the cluster of fears starts now. It begins with the text from the prophet Amos which has God announcing how sick God is of pathetic religion. Pathetic religion is a bunch of rituals which are empty. Pathetic religion is a bunch of symbols without any relationship to human reality. Pathetic religion is frequently the victim of nationalism or state security. Many of us are triple agents in these terms. We say we are Christians but we are more pantheistic than not, more nationalistic than not. When the president, whichever president, it matters not, implies that the purpose of the state is to protect us from dangerous others and we bow down in compliance, we are singing noisy songs or banging out music on bad harps. We have burnt offerings and grain offerings but no resistance to the lie. Let’s start with the big lie that is the basis for Jean’s captivity. The big lie is that we can fight off terrorism by deporting people or having more wars or better-organized national security agents. Terrorism will not be fought off by torture or war or deportation. Justice rolling down like waters, internationally and not just domestically, will tame terrorism. When righteousness comes, people will stop bombing us Religion that lets itself be lied to by the state is not religion at all. It is triple agent religion, saying it believes in the power of an almighty God who is our only security and whose laws is our delight but actually doing whatever the state tells it to do. At the heart of Jean’s situation is the absurdity of our foreign and domestic policy regarding terrorism. Of course it is scary when people get bombs on airplanes or penetrate the security systems we idolize. Very scary. If we really wanted to stop that kind of terrorism, we would not house potential terrorists together for years in Guantanamo so they could cook up better plots and more hates. We would not torture, hoard, or kill.

We are in a religious fight here at the deepest of levels. We hear a God who is international, and not just American; tell us that there is no delight in our solemn assemblies, bunt offerings, grain offerings, and fatted animals. Instead this God wants one thing and that is for justice to roll down like mighty water. When that justice rolls down, we will be safe, saved, secure, and know salvation. Until that justice rolls down, there will be fights over security. At the deepest level of religion, we are not interested in our own petty safety. We are interested in it, of course, but we are more interested in justice for all and to just for ourselves. Some people have decided they need to be afraid of Jean, who did two crimes, as a youth, paid for them in prison, and now is paying again for them. Why be afraid of Jean? Because we are so deep in a cluster of fear that we don’t know how to get out. This cluster of fear will soon keep immigrants from getting health insurance. It has already drained the national treasury in undeclared and immoral and ineffective wars. If we want to connect the dots, we need to connect the dot of Jean’s oppression ot the national insecurity state.

The great sociologist, C. Wright Mills said, “The biographies of men and women, the kinds of individuals they variously become, cannot be understood without reference to the historical structures in which the milieu of every day life are organized.” Jean is right now the victim of historical structures, which now organize every day life, which structures are at their base petty. By petty I mean self-serving, selfish, and deeply nationalistic. Americans were attacked, Americans need to protect themselves, we are deserving of any kind or level of protection because we are the best of all people. God is laughing at this. Just laughing but in that painful kind of laugh which goes to tears of shame. There is nothing mighty about a river that flows only for one kind of people. It is actually terribly weak and invites others to attack it.

I said that Jean has a glimmer of hope right now. This congregation has worked tirelessly for over two years to work the system to make sure this captivity did not happen. It has happened. We are deeply sad when not just plain apoplectic. Because of this grave emergency, our efforts have quadrupled in size. We have been joined by a national movement that has said enough, enough, and enough. We have corralled and lassoed every political person in New York City who we could find. We have sat in on the street. W e have put up an enormous web site. 78 organizations have joined our efforts officially. We have talked to dozens of people in the press. Riverside Church has called an emergency council meeting for today to decide about whether they want to offer physical sanctuary to some of our other families who are equally endangered. Our glimmer is lighting up the hearts and faces of thousands of Americans who like us are tired of triple agent religion. Triple agent religion is pathetic and just keeps shifting its loyalties in a kind of espionage of spirituality. Something different is happening here. We are getting focused, not just on one man but also on how the injustice done to him is the link to the cluster of injustices our nation faces.

Rev Dr Donna Schaper getting arrested, as part of nonviolent civil disobedience, at Jan 5, 2010 rally to Free Jean

So let me summarize here with my little scaffolding about religion and its imposters. Religion that does not demand justice is not religion. It is triple agent religion. It is spiritual espionage and pathetic in its loyalties. Religion that does demand justice has deep action at its heart. By deep action I mean action that connects the dots between one man’s captivity and that of a nation’s heart and soul. Deep action reveals the apostasy of solemn assemblies that don’t do justice. Deep action shifts power, and we are experiencing the ever so slight shift of the tectonic plate. Ever so slight it is but it is shifting. And we are the shifters. We are shifting because we have been shifted, shifted to see how wrong our efforts at national security are. Once we have seen that, we can’t not see the rest. We will not be safe till others are safe. Deportation will not make people safe. Welcoming immigrants and growing a great openhearted nation will make us safe.

There is now a national movement for Jean, and you are at the heart of it. I almost want to do a roll of honor but that would sound too much like the noise of a solemn assembly. But I must give a few images of the shifting. Our offices were so full of humming computers and people all week that we got a message from our internet people. We are only paying for ten on line experiences at a time and had gone over our band width limit. When we explained why to the person with the concern, he said, “wow, that’s great.” Lenny Fox made sure we got the microphones for the rallies, which was no small thing. Many of you shivered through them.

I have always wanted to be like Leo Lionni’s Frederick. You do know Frederick, don’t you? He is one of the great children’s book’s characters. Frederick saves colors for the other mice so that in the winter they don’t get to grey. There is a ton of color happening in and around us right now. Watching Clover Vail be put into the police paddy wagon, I just wanted to paint the contrast of her white plastic hand cuffs and grey coat. One of the police officers took a good look at Lulu Fogarty and said he was thinking about coming to Sunday School himself. My assigned cop realized I had come out of my cuff links with ease and said, just put them back on when you get out of the paddy wagon. It’s all for the show, you know.

Jean and his US citizen wife and US citizen children

In DC on Friday, with one of our board members, Father Mark Hallinan, Janay Montrevil and her three kids. At one point, when Janay told her story to a congressional aid, she started crying. Then Father Hallinan started crying. Then the children started crying. Then the aid started crying. This is what we mean by spiritual transformation. We have begun to shed tears over the stupidity. The tears are the mighty rolling river of justice.

At another point, on what seemed to be our sixteenth security check, going from house office building to house office building, and Craig was carrying one of the kids, whose jackets and scarves we had to keep taking off, and we were all getting bored with the “who gets to push the elevator button” game, Jamiah said, “Where’s Daddy?” I knew Jean was with us in spirit and if anything just shocked and awed that we have put together so much energy for him this week. I think we are a little shocked too. Articles in CNN, Sunday School teachers in jail because how could she face her children, knowing that their father had been detained? Sequential arrests by people who didn’t know each other at all but now do. Money raised to keep our staff going..yes you may contribute.

Amusing things happened in each congressional office. At one point, Jamiah was wearing one of Charlie Rangel’s African masks in his office, as our legal back up team in New York was sending us non stop messages on our several blackberries. At the last hour on Friday, by the work of 7 of us in DC and literally dozens behind us on the net in New York, the same dozens who had been working all day and all night all week, we were told that Jean would not be deported on Monday. New information and new legal efforts are at work. That is our glimmer.

On the way home on the train Josiah totally took apart in the large ball of rubber bands someone had given him to play with. They were all over the train, amusing our entire car. This ball of rubber bands gave me the image of community with which I want to end. Somebody added one of those rubber bands at a time to the large circled web that it was. That was our action all week.

If you don’t want to be a triple agent in your religion, feigning commitment to a justice oriented God but living by the state’s self-protecting rules, all the while telling people you are spiritually drained and that you need a shift, stretch yourself now and join our ball of energy. Wrap yourself around it. We won’t let Josiah pull you off…. and some day maybe we’ll have the joy of taking all our parts off the center of this activity and putting them back together in a different way. For now, please stretch. Stretch to see one glimmer of justice that might grow into a flame. For now do us the favor of not snapping or popping or stretching yourself too far. There is a cluster freight of stuff trying to keep you down, trying to break your spirit, trying to sell you lies, lies that are actually very dangerous to you as well as being dangerous to others. For now every time you go through one more security check, ask yourself where your true security lies.

Amen

Fasting with Jean Montrevil

2010-01-06T23:21:00.002-05:00

The first time I ever fasted, I was a freshman at Earlham College. I was taking a course called Intro to Philosophy: Food Ethics, a course that changed my life in many good ways. My study group – a bunch of hippies interested in sustainable agriculture way before being interested in sustainable agriculture was trendy --- decided to try a one-day fast in solidarity with hungry people around the world. We didn’t really have any idea what we were doing – we had no sense of fasting as a spiritual discipline or even as political action. We were just earnest and angry, all at the same time, and thought somehow that fasting for a day made sense. I think we imagined, naively, that fasting would give us some feel for what it is like to be hungry. We fasted for one full day -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- all the way to breakfast the next morning. By then we were utterly clear that we had no idea whatsoever what it is like to be hungry. We had spent almost the entire day obsessed with food and talking about how good breakfast was going to taste. We were earnest, but we weren’t dumb: it wasn’t even lunchtime of our fast day before we realized that people who are truly hungry don’t get to break their fast at the college cafeteria after just a day. We even thought about giving the fast up, but the only thing that seemed more absurd and privileged than thinking we would know something of hunger after a day of fasting was giving up the fast before even a day had passed. So we kept our fast, absurd as it was. But for many years, I spurned all thought of fasting as silly and naïve.

After my conversion to Christianity, I became interested in fasting as a spiritual discipline, rather than as an act of solidarity. One year during Lent, I made a discipline of fasting one day a week, but usually only from dinner to dinner, skipping just breakfast and lunch. For much of my fasting during that Lent, I probably couldn’t have articulated very clearly why I was fasting, or what it meant to me; certainly now, years later, I am even less able. But I recall that then, as now, prayer was difficult for me; I often felt empty and shallow when I tried to pray with any discipline. Yet I imagined somehow that my fasting was a sort of prayer, and that was comforting. That hungry feeling that made me yearn to be filled, that heightening of my senses, that in-the-moment awareness my hunger gave me – I imagined that true prayer might be something like that. It was a good fast that Lent, even if I didn’t completely understand why.

I’ve been thinking today a lot about Jean Montrevil, a man I don’t even know, a man I had never even heard of before a couple of days ago. I am moved deeply by his plight, and by his hunger strike. But I know his is the plight of so many families who have been torn apart by draconian immigration policies in this country. And I know that the movement to change such policies is just one cause among so many -- too many -- in the world crying out for action and justice. And yet I am feeling called to fast in solidarity with Jean Montrevil. Not a hunger strike, of course, but perhaps one meal a day until he is free.

Before you even say it, I know: This is absurd. Impulsive. Trendy maybe. And unlike when I was earnest and eighteen years old, I have no thought that missing one meal a day would in any way change Jean Montrevil’s situation, or even help me to understand what it might feel like to be separated from my family and faced with deportation for no good reason at all. That is all beyond my imagination, and would be far from the point of a fast in solidarity with his hunger strike.

But I have come to believe that prayer makes a difference, even though, like my first spiritual fast during Lent, I can’t really explain how or why. Still, I feel called to pray … yet most often, painfully unable to do so. Perhaps fasting is the prayer I can offer now.

But why Jean Montrevil? Why fast with and for him, when there are so many other people, so many other causes? No good reason, I guess. Jean Montrevil happens to be the man I am thinking about now, and trying to pray for. He could very easily serve as a proxy for so many others who need and deserve our prayers, but who will forever remain nameless and faceless. I doubt he would mind.

So here is my prayer, for Jean, and for his family, and for all immigrants facing the threat or the reality of families torn apart: in solidarity with him and with them, I will fast one meal each day until Jean Montrevil is released from detention and reunited with his family.

Amen.

Support Immigration Reform and Jean Montrevil

2010-01-06T08:26:00.009-05:00

edited to add: photo by Tom Martinez

Yesterday Michael Caine, pastor of Old First Reformed UCC, was arrested at a rally for Jean Montrevil, the Haitian father of four American-born children, who was recently detained during a routine check-in. Montrevil has lived in the United States as a legal permanent resident since 1986. He is a leader in the immigration reform movement and a national spokesperson for the Child Citizen Protection Act (H.R. 182), a House proposal that would bring due process into the deportation system by allowing immigration judges to consider the best interests of American children before deporting a parent. Montrevil is purportedly being detained and threatened with deportation for a 1989 drug conviction, for which Montrevil served eleven years in prison. He has had a clean record since his release.

Please sign this petition, demanding the release of Jean Montrevil.

A Sonnet for Auntie and Jean Montrevil

2010-01-05T20:57:00.001-05:00

Upon a hill, wind-swept and bitter cold,

in milky light of bleak mid-winter’s sun,

we buried Auntie in the frozen wold,

in sure and certain hope, Thy will be done.

Small fingers twined, enfolded in small hands

Is this the church? Is this the steeple tall?

Is this the Shepherd on the hill who stands

with rod and staff to comfort people, all?

At Varrick Street and Houston, down they lay.

No pastures green, just biting wind, pale sun.

Forgive us, Father, of our debts, we pray.

For Brother Montrevil, Thy will be done.

A table set before my enemy;

In paths of righteousness you leadeth me.

Redux

2010-01-04T21:31:00.001-05:00

For so many of my friends, 2009 was just a terrible, terrible year. I know all-too-well how eager they are to cast it off and move forward into better days. Two thousand and eight was that year for me – the year that still makes me shudder to think of it. A year ago I was carefully and deliberately pulling myself out of a pretty fragile state, and while I felt tentative, I also felt hopeful, and ever so grateful, as one does on the upswing after depression. And as it turned out, 2009 was one of my best years in memory. It really was just bathed in sunlight and lived with arms wide-open. I pray for exactly that sort of year-to-come for all of my dear ones who have suffered so much in 2009.

And I would ask for you to keep me in your prayers as well. It feels so much more foolish and vulnerable to bare one’s soul on a public blog when one’s skin is feeling a bit thin and one’s soul is feeling a bit punky, but it also seems the only honest thing to do, doesn’t it? And the truth is that exactly a year after I started climbing out of the depression of 2008, I fear I’m crossing paths with myself on a downswing, tentative again, but this time with a blush of dread and foreboding. I promised myself a year ago that I would never let myself crash as hard as I did in the spring and again in the fall of 2008. Check in with me again in a couple of weeks, will you? Nobody I love can afford to have me fall that far off the deep end of depression and anxiety again. So I’m going to focus on taking care of myself in the next few weeks, and see how it goes. If I still feel this punky, I will seek some help. Promise.

In the meantime, I think part of my despond has been precipitated in the past week by the serious, painful, debilitating return of plantar fasciitis. Our trip to Ohio and a death in the family (Julie’s Auntie – I will write more about that soon) have made it difficult to do some things I know will help – get a really good new pair of shoes, get orthotic inserts, get a foot brace for sleeping, get to yoga, and stay off my feet for awhile. Auntie’s funeral is tomorrow; the new washing machine comes Wednesday; Thursday I’m off to the Bryn Mawr Running Company (and how much do I love the young man at Dick’s Sporting Goods who advised me this afternoon that no, the top-of-the-line shoe Dick’s carries is not as good as the even-more top-shelf shoe recommended by the American Academy of Podiatrists, where my research earlier in the day had landed me. This lovely young man urged me, in the interests of my foot-health – and, little did he know, my mental health – to pay a visit to the real running professionals at the Bryn Mawr Running Company. Which I am going to do on Thursday.) So, I’m not entirely without hope, but I’m pretty despondent. Running, especially running outside in the sunshine and fresh air, especially in the winter, is pretty much my first and best mental-health maintenance strategy. In the meantime I’m going to join a gym for a couple of months, but it’s just not the same. Sigh. Getting back to yoga will most certainly help, as will my plan to add in Pilates once a week. Still, this pain in my heel is a big old pain in the ass.

I’m also pretty sure that my funk is largely hormonal. Which doesn’t make it any less real, at least as I experience it, but it does make it feel a little less like something that is entirely in my control to pull myself out of by sheer force of will. I’m not surprised that menopause is calling me so early – my ovaries acted like forty-year-olds when I was trying to get pregnant in my mid-thirties, and they are acting like fifty-year-olds now that I’m in my mid-forties. There’s much that I love about this menopausal time of life, actually – in many ways it is powerful and passionate and liberating … and something I should write more about, now that I think about it. (Who is writing about menopause in the blogosphere these days? I would love to know….) But I’m pretty sure nature did not intend for the mother of a highly sensitive and energetic six-year-old boy to be shepherding her son’s early childhood while her brain is awash in the hormones of menopause. So I’m going to see my doctor soon in the hopes that she can help me figure out how to manage my wildly irregular and intense menstrual cycles these days. At the very least, I’m hoping she can tell me it’s all relatively normal (hypochondria runs in my family, and it’s pretty easy for me to convince myself that Something Is Terribly Wrong).

In the meantime, I’m cooking a lot – a sort of kitchen-therapy that feels calm and contemplative and satisfying on so many levels. I’m loving my Christmas copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, though if I can’t start running soon, I may have to consider cutting back on my butter intake. But cooking feels like the best way I can take care of my family these days, something I don’t always feel entirely up to when I’m in a funk. Tonight, on the eve of Auntie’s funeral – a sad and stressful time for Julie and all of us – Micah and I designed a menu of macaroni and cheese made with sauce béchamel, artichokes in white butter sauce, mussels steamed in white wine and shallots (and butter), baguette from Baker Street Bakery, and left-over apple tart that I made yesterday (I was even late to church waiting for it to bake, gasp! You know that’s devotion to my new French tart obsession – though I did make sure to get there for the sermon, which would have been a terrible shame to miss – Michael’s a little on fire these days).

And now that I have cried on your collective internet shoulders (and having done so, feel much better, thank you!), I’d better limp my sorry butt to the kitchen and clean up the Awesome Mess that a tornado of French cooking can leave in its wake. I’m writing on Wednesday while I wait for the washing machine delivery (we’ve been without for several weeks), so more soon, I hope.

xo m

PS I made Julie read this before posting, to make sure it wasn’t too embarrassingly confessional and attention-seeking. She looked at me with a quizzical expression and asked, “It’s a blog. Isn’t that what a blog is? Confessional and attention-seeking?” The fact that I laughed out loud rather than stomping off to pout – and have posted my confessional attention-seeking blather nonetheless – all points to the fact that I am really fine. Really. In case you’re like me and a bit of a worrier. ;-)

Book Review: Julie and Julia

2010-01-03T06:45:00.000-05:00

Julie and Julia, Julie Powell (2005) [***+] This book has been following me around for awhile. A year and a half ago, when I was looking for decorating inspiration for our newly renovated basement, I found a tiny piece of a robin's egg shell and thought, "This is it!" I set it on a shelf, and when I returned to match paint swatches, I realized the egg shell was exactly the same color as the book it was sitting by -- Julie and Julia. The cover art then inspired the entire decorating scheme of my basement ... but still I didn't read the book, even though Julie (my Julie) had liked it and thought I would too. Then this summer, we saw the movie with our friends Suzanne and Dan, and Suzanne and I were both charmed and inspired. In September we made Beouf Bourguignon for my birthday, and it really is one of the best things I've ever eaten. Suzanne and I have been cooking together monthly ever since. Still, I was not inspired to read the book. A couple of weeks ago, we watched the movie again with Trixie, who loves to cook, and for Christmas Julie (my Julie) got me both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For Christmas dinner Trixie and I made cream puffs and a pear tart. Yum. When we packed for Ohio, Julie tucked Julie and Julia into the book bag, thinking Trixie might like to read it, but Trix was obsessed with her new Kindle. I thought about picking it up, but started reading the new Barbara Kingsolver book instead. Then a few days ago, while on a date at a bookstore with Julie (my Julie), I started reading Julie Powell's new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, and just the first chapter was like watching a train wreck. It was awful, just like a train wreck, and I had to read it, just like a train wreck. But I was restrained, and did not buy the second book in hardcover, and decided instead to read Julie and Julia. Which I did in just a couple of days, and even though I found Julie Powell insufferably self-absorbed and irritating, I have to admit that I laughed out loud often and thoroughly enjoyed myself. You probably know by now that Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell's Julie/Julia Project, in which she cooked her way through the 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days in a tiny apartment kitchen in Long Island City, and also wrote a blog about it. Many of my friends have found her self-deprecating humor and turning-thirty angst charming and spot-on; I did not particularly. Maybe I've become hopelessly middle-aged and humorlessly maternal, but I just wanted to tell her to quit drinking so much and to clean her house. Also, my Julie clearly was remembering the movie rather than the book when she suggested that Trixie might want to read the book: Amy Adams as Julie Powell is pert and sweet and lovable; Julie Powell as Julie Powell is foul-mouthed and obsessed with her friends' sex lives -- apparently because her own is not much to write home about. Which perhaps explains the train-wreck in the new book. And yes, I probably will read it -- but in paper back, and on the beach. Now I'm off to finish Barbara Kingsolver.

Confessions of a Hopeless Geek

2009-12-30T15:16:00.003-05:00

This morning my mother-in-law expressed concern that I would go hungry if I did not accompany the family to the Amish restaurant for lunch, but I assured her I would find food if I grew faint while spending the day writing in the Wooster Public Library. My mother-in-law gets anxious if she thinks someone isn’t being well-fed, and we are all the happier (if a bit plumper) for her exquisitely successful means of coping with her anxiety. Today she put her anxiety to rest by directing me to an American-style diner and a Greek pizza place, both directly across the street from the library.

I have just returned from the American-style diner, where I had two eggs over easy, hash browns, bacon, wheat toast and coffee at two o’clock in the afternoon, for five dollars ($7.50, including the fifty percent tip I left for the very lovely waitress who brought my food before I’d even stirred the cream and sugar into my coffee). While I ate, I read Julie and Julia, which I can’t decide if I like, but I most definitely love in that I’m-on-vacation-and-I-just-dripped-egg-yolks-on-my-book-because-I-don’t-want-to-put-it-down-even-for-food sort of way. (Book review to follow shortly, in which I promise to offer a more nuanced opinion.)

And now I’m back at my spot by the sky-filled cathedral windows in the library. In addition to lunch, I have taken a few breaks from writing the latest installment in my Welfare of the City series, in order to flirt on-line with a couple of men I’m particularly fond of (both pastors no less! One gay, one happily married – “non starters” as Julie likes to say about the hopeless innocence of my flirting). And here is my geeky confession: Is it possible that a day could be any better than this? With only the very fewest of exceptions, I’m pretty sure the answer is “No.” Shameless geek, that’s me.

But I do want to leave you with a passage from Julie and Julia just to spice things up a little. If you are a regular reader of mine, you may recall that to my mind, food and sex are really just two sides of the same coin. If you are a regular reader of mine, you may also recall that I love to write about sex, but in the interests of my very private wife, not to mention her father-who-reads-my-blog, I will only ever write about sex in mostly abstract ways which offer very, very little in the way of detail about my own actual sex life. Here I offer just the tiniest deviation from that rule, in an effort to allay any concerns the following excerpt might create; that deviation being an assurance that I am not, in fact, a practitioner of polyamory (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), but, in point of fact, I am quite the boring, geeky, middle-aged, blissfully married lady. Such assurances, however, are prelude to a further confession, which is that blissful monogamy notwithstanding, I find erotic energy in all sorts of experiences and relationships. My friend Gordon, founder of my book review group, recently reviewed a book by George Steiner called The Lessons of the Masters. In his review Gordon wrote, “The essence of the master-disciple relationship, according to GS, is loving trust, in which the entire soul of the student is opened to new knowledge. The mode of exchange is always speech (never writing), and it is somewhat erotic, though usually not actively so.” I replied to Gordon’s review with such enthusiastic virtual head-nodding that it occurred to me after impulsively hitting “send” that perhaps I had not been entirely demure and lady-like, as befits a middle-aged married lady such as myself. So be it. This middle-aged married lady loves her teachers, and totally gets what George Steiner was talking about. This middle-aged married lady also loves to feed people, and totally gets what Julie Powell is talking about in this passage from Julie and Julia (pp. 216-17 in the hardcover edition):

"Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual. If you are not one of us, the culinarily depraved, there is no way to explain what’s so darkly enticing about eviscerating beef marrowbones, chopping up lobster, baking a three-layer pecan cake, and doing it for someone else, offering someone hard-won gustatory delights in order to win pleasures of anther sort. Everyone knows there are foods that are sexy to eat. What they don’t talk about so much is foods that are sexy to make. But I’ll take a wrestling bout with recalcitrant brioche dough over being fed a perfect strawberry any day, foreplay-wise."

Indeed.

More on Truth and Fact in the Bible

2009-12-28T08:05:00.003-05:00

Michael's sermon from this past Sunday. We are on vacation, so I didn't hear it (which is a shame, because Michael is nothing if not a preacher, and he writes to be heard), but I think it's quite nice.

A Guest Sonnet and Sermon for a Belated Conclusion to My Advent Blogging

2009-12-26T08:02:00.006-05:00

The Christ-child has arrived again, and so ends my Advent daily blogging challenge to myself. I count this Advent discipline to write (almost) every day a perfect success in that it really got me writing again; and while I most certainly won't be writing every day through Christmas and Epiphany, I do plan to be focusing more on my writing this winter. So stay tuned. And thanks to all of you who are my faithful readers (and an especial welcome to any of you who became faithful readers during my Advent blogging!) It still feels like a bit of a paradox to offer one's writing with humility, on the one hand, yet to be so eager to be read on the other. All of you smart, kind folks out there who read me and say thoughtful, generous things make it somehow feel like less of a paradox.

But enough of my sappy reflections. I know I punted several days in Advent, and failed entirely to post on Christmas Eve, so I offer a couple beautiful things as penance.

First, you may have noticed on the right a link to my Facebook profile (I have SO drunk the Facebook cool-aid; if you are inclined, please send me a friend request letting me know you're a blog reader, and it would be my pleasure to "befriend" you!). There is also a link to Old First's Facebook fan page (go ahead, become a fan -- you'll find a delightful mix of silliness and seriousness! But please note you can read the page even if you're not officially a fan.) Here I offer you a link to Michael's wonderful Christmas Eve sermon called Isn't It Ironic? about the dynamic tension between tradition and change at Christmas time. I loved it; I hope you will too. So, I hope that makes up for my absence on Christmas Eve.

And, for those two or three (four or five?) lame days in Advent when I technically posted but not really anything worth reading, here is a sonnet more worth reading than any that I've noodled around with this Advent (though I have to say thanks to Shannon for getting me hooked on writing sonnets; it's been super fun, and I doubt I'm done!) This is written by a friend at Old First, highlighting once again what an insanely talented and thoughtful bunch we are. Marjorie and I are are not, as far as we know, related, though we do share a last name and a Michigan birthright (among other things), so who knows? I hope you enjoy her Advent Sonnet as much as I do:

Advent Sonnet

The hurried mind is kin to Advent dreams

And darkness does to ghost’s what angels hope

Would be their mission; crafting fear, it seems.

Ghouls hearken now and meld their lifeline rope

To spirals, hoping errant sheep might wind

Along its tendrils; some might lose their way.

Preoccupied is Gabriel; her find

Is pure, while others’ load is apt to sway

Beneath the burdens of this season’s press

Archangels’ work is frantic in the stars

And shepherd’s crook is gentle herd’s redress

The infant’s cry is fertile balm for wars

If lamb were general and ghost be pawn

Then angels’ charge is nothing more; ‘tis dawn!

Marjorie Rose

December 24, 2009

Christmas Menu: A Sonnet

2009-12-23T18:00:00.004-05:00

Of brie and gouda, comte, let us sing!

Of marinated mozzarella balls!

Oh kalamata! Ascolano calls!

For French baguette our peals of joy shall ring!

Oh turkey stuffed with Cajun pepper bread!

Bring potch* and corn and roasted Brussel sprouts!

Pour wine and cider, winter ales and stouts!

Come one, come all, that none shall go unfed!

Rejoice! Key lime -- oh cranberry delight!

Corn muffins, macaroni and (good) cheese!

This tart with pear and frangipane will please!

Let cream puffs, coffee, tea round out the night!

Oh glorious day! Oh silent night of joys!

Upon the island of the misfit toys!

edited to add: *potch (not sure if this is how it's spelled) is mashed potatoes and rutabaga, which Aunt Beth brings every year

"If you're afraid of butter, use cream." ~Julia Child

2009-12-22T09:26:00.022-05:00

Last summer we made our second -- and hopefully annual -- trip to New Hampshire to visit Suzanne and her family at their vacation home where they spend the summer. We swam across beautiful clear lakes, we kayaked, we hiked, and of course we ate lots of really good food. We also went to see Julie and Julia, which Suzanne and I just loved. We loved it so much, in fact, that we made a date to cook Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child on my birthday in September.

It was perhaps the best birthday ever. We watched an old episode of Julia Child cooking Boeuf Bourguignon, and then started cooking. While the stew simmered in the oven, we watched Sense and Sensibility, because another of our projects together is to work our way through all the Jane Austen movies (I know, it's a hard life, but someone's got to life it! As Suzanne noted when she posted these photos on Facebook, it's a shame you can't upload the aroma! You'll just have to take my word for it -- this was one divine meal.

We promptly decided we needed to cook together regularly, and chose Italian for our next adventure: pan-fried thin beef steaks cacciatora style with zucchini risotto (also divine, if I do say so myself):

This meal was a little more labor intensive than the beef stew was, so we didn't have time to watch a whole Jane Austen movie. Instead we watched several episodes of Jacque and Julia, including an episode on desserts that featured ice cream filled profiteroles. Our next meal was conceived: a simple tomato soup that would leave plenty of room for the main course:

cream puffs and ice cream filled profiteroles

cream puffs served on a bed of creme anglaise and raspberry jam (below)

fried apple pies

and raspberry souffle.

YUM.

edited multiple times to deal with stupid formatting issues (sorry!)

Photos to Follow?

2009-12-21T20:19:00.005-05:00

I'm a frustrated idiot when it comes to technology, and right now I'm especially frustrated because I don't know how to capture photos from my friend Suzanne's Facebook album and post them here. Can anybody tell me how to do that? Because tonight, I wanted to tell you all about my cooking adventures with Suzanne, but by the time I figured out that I had not, in fact, saved the photos to my desktop, and therefore could not, in fact, post them here, I was too tired to write anything worthy of our culinary exploits.

But if you tell me how to post the photos, I will tell you all about the three meals we have made so far (here's a preview: September's meal featured Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child; October's featured pan-fried thin beef steaks cacciatora style and risotto with zucchini; November's decadence was an all-dessert meal of cream puffs in a bed of creme anglaise, ice cream profiteroles, fried apple pies and raspberry souffle. In January we're planning a whole meal of hors d'oeuvres including Julia Child's country pate, gravlax, and maybe some savory puff pastry? We'll see.)

On Meaning and Metaphor (for Mark)

2009-12-20T21:14:00.002-05:00

Do you remember back in high school English, when your teacher taught you that a simile was a comparison using “like” or “as,” and a metaphor was a comparison that skipped the “like” or “as”? So, for example, under the heading “Simile,” she might have written on the blackboard (back in the olden days, when we still had blackboards) the phrase “cool as a cucumber,” and also the sentence, “The storm raged like a bull.” On the other hand, she might have written in the “Metaphor” column, “Ted Kennedy was the lion of the Senate,” though that’s probably not one Laura Baker, my high school English teacher, would have written, because she was a staunch Republican. She might have thought, rather, that Ted Kennedy was a jackass, though she probably would have refrained from writing it on the board. But if she had thought it (and she probably did), she would have been using a metaphor. Because Ted Kennedy was, in reality, neither a lion nor a jackass, but rather a human being who had certain qualities of lions … or jackasses, as the case may be. Get it?

So another way of explaining the difference between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile tells the truth, and a metaphor tells a lie. Right? I mean, you could say that, right? To say that someone is “cool as a cucumber” might literally be true, I suppose, and to say that “The storm raged like a bull”? Well, I suppose.

Metaphor, on the other hand, is never literally true, or, to put it another way, factual. On the contrary, it is a fact that Ted Kennedy was neither a lion nor a jackass, no matter what you thought of his politics or his political skill. So you could say that a metaphor does not tell the truth, because it is not factual. And if you care about the truth in that way, you could try to rid your language of metaphor, though you’d have a really hard time. Because most language is highly metaphorical, in ways we often don’t even register.

For example, when a political race is described as being “neck and neck,” it is being compared to a horse race; and if you’ve ever said you could “see the light at the end of the tunnel,” you’re comparing your situation to a train ride. But a political race is not really a horse race, and no matter how relieved you are about the end of a difficult situation, it usually doesn’t actually involve a ride through a tunnel. For that matter, most of the time our kids don’t literally “bounce off the walls”; and even when they do, it doesn’t actually make us “go out of our minds”; and when we’re bored, the minutes don’t literally “creep by”; and when we speak of “the root of the problem,” we’re usually not talking about potato blight. If you’ve ever used the expression “home run,” or “slam dunk” or “knocked it out of the park” outside the context of an actual ball game, then you have used a metaphor, and I suppose you could be accused of being less than truthful. And I suppose you could be accused of telling a lie if you have ever called someone a “straight shooter” who is not, in fact, a hunter; or if you’ve ever thought someone other than a carpenter “hit the nail right on the head”; or if you’ve ever thought that a grown person was a “babe” or that someone who is not, in fact, running a fever is “hot.”

But I would never accuse you of telling a lie in any of those situations, because I think that metaphor, rather than telling a lie, can actually tell a deeper, more evocative truth. When we place two images or situations next to each other that are not, in fact, the same, we can get at a truth that no amount of factual description will ever uncover. Often putting the two images or situations together creates a meaning that can touch us in a more profound way than straightforward reporting can. And in that way, I would argue, through metaphor we often get at the most important truths … even if it is by way of a little white lie (which is not, in fact, white … see? Metaphor is everywhere.)

I offer this scintillating discussion on metaphor as prelude to my answer to Mark’s daily Advent blogging question: “How can the Bible be true if it’s not factual?”

I do not believe every word in the Bible reports in a straightforward and factual way things that actually happened. It seems likely to me that some things written in the Bible are “factual” in the sense that they really did happen pretty much the way the Bible says they did, and that some things are not “factual” in that way; indeed, there’s a group of scholars called The Jesus Seminar who get together to consider the evidence for which among the Gospel stories can actually be attributed to the historical Jesus, and which cannot. That seems sort of interesting to me in the way a logic puzzle can be interesting, but it feels pretty irrelevant when it comes to my faith, because whether something really did or really didn’t happen, its power for me is in the story as metaphor for how I might live my own life. The metaphor is the powerful part for me; whether it’s also factual is sort of beside the point.

So, for example, maybe Jesus really did feed 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes, and maybe he didn’t. But let’s just say for a minute that he really did; let’s just say that story is straight-up, factual reporting of something that happened around 2000 years ago, and that as fact, and not metaphor, it tells us some truth. What is that truth, and what does it mean today? I guess the truth it tells us is that Jesus had supernatural powers. Maybe it tells us that he liked to feed people. It might tell us that 2000 years ago, some fisherman were convinced that he was the Messiah because he had these supernatural powers and used them to feed a lot of people. But what does that do for me, in Philadelphia, in 2009, even if I believe that Jesus had supernatural powers, and that he liked to feed people? Maybe, like those fisherman, his supernatural powers convince me that he is the Messiah, but it seems just as likely to me that I might come to a different conclusion, even if I accept his powers. I mean maybe I believe lots of people have supernatural powers; why should that convince me that Jesus is the Messiah? Or maybe it tells me that I ought to feed people too. But I don’t need Jesus to convince me of that, because I already love to feed people. Or maybe it’s telling me that with enough faith, I too might some day be able to feed a multitude of hungry folks with literally a few loaves and fishes …. but you know what? I’m not so much holding my breath, you know? So I’m just not sure where this story gets me if I treat it as straight-up factual reporting.

On the other hand, if I treat this story as a metaphor for life – if I put this story next to my life, and ask myself what meaning I can glean from the relationship between the two – then suddenly this story is speaking to me (but not literally; that’s a metaphor!) Because this story seems to be about faith and abundance, you know? It seems to suggest that out of our faith in God, we can live abundantly; that we can share what we have, no matter how small, and still have enough; that we can care extravagantly for others, even folks who are strangers to us, without fear that the good things in life will run out. Does this mean that if I literally give away all the food in my house, I can with good faith still expect to feed my kids tomorrow? No. And I would be foolish and irresponsible to do that. But it does mean that I can orient my life toward faith and abundance, rather than toward fear and scarcity, and in doing so I can know that my life will be pleasing to God. To me, that is a far greater truth than the “fact” (if indeed it is a “fact”) that Jesus multiplied a few loaves and fishes half way around the world, several millennia ago.

I know a lot of folks disagree with me about my reading of the Bible. I know a lot of folks, especially fundamentalist Christians, are really committed to the notion that the Bible is “true” in the most literal, factual sense. I think such a reading is not only dangerous, but also probably not what Jesus himself intended. If Jesus had wanted us to have “just the facts, nothing but the fact,” I kind of doubt he would have spent all his time telling stories and talking in metaphors. Right?

I could be wrong. But I’m willing to take my chances. (Which is, of course … yup, a metaphor!)

Church

2009-12-19T22:00:00.001-05:00

I’m sitting on Michael’s red leather sofa, in the lime green room of the parsonage that I painted for him before I really even knew him, back in the heady days of summer when we were fast Facebook friends but had only ever spoken in person for twenty minutes, about paint colors. The first time I really spent any time at all with Michael was the day shortly after he moved in when I drove him to Ikea in the mini-van to pick up this red sofa. I hadn’t eaten all day, and we had lunch – meatballs for me and a Philly cheese steak for Michael, and across the table there in the Ikea cafeteria, he told me stories about his ex-boyfriend and was perfectly charming but also perfectly scandalous and I couldn’t quite believe our luck to have called him as our pastor.

Tonight I’m sitting on Michael’s red sofa, waiting for the apple pie to finish baking, watching a snow storm rage outside. Julie just excused herself to Michael’s bedroom (pale yellow – too pale, in my estimation, but it’s not my bedroom, except for tonight); Micah is upstairs, finally fast asleep, in one of the two twin beds in Michael’s guest room. Michael will sleep in the other one, once his sermon is done. Trixie is a few blocks away at Aunt Beth’s.

Tomorrow church will happen, just like every Sunday. But really? This is it, right here.

Lapeer, Michigan?

2009-12-18T22:34:00.003-05:00

Someone is reading me in Lapeer, Michigan! I was born in Lapeer.... what are the chances? Wanna introduce yourself?

I know this doesn't really count, but it's all I've got. Six more days ...

On Suffering (for Ellen)

2009-12-17T08:18:00.005-05:00

My mom used to say I could bring anyone home except a Republican or a born-again Christian (by which she actually meant fundamentalist Christian). And the truth is that she would have very much welcomed both, if they were one of the many college friends I used take home with me for the weekend, because extravagant hospitality was kind of the basic organizing principle of my family. She would have given them a hard time – all in good fun, of course – but she would have welcomed them, and they would have loved her, because everyone loved my mom. She got along with everyone except idiots. (She really couldn’t abide idiots).

But as it turns out, I didn’t have any born-again or even Republican friends in college, and what my mom really meant, anyway, was that she’d rather I didn’t fall in love with one. But anyone else? That would be just fine. And she really meant it. I think she loved reliving her own youthful exuberance vicariously through me. Having come of age in the 60’s, she understood perfectly the sort of ardent conversion experience young adulthood can be – even if, as in my case, you’re not converting away from anything, but just passionately embracing your world and your values as your own, and not just as an inheritance, even if a welcome one.

So when I announced, after taking Intro to Philosophy: Food Ethics, that I was a vegetarian, Mom thought that was fine, especially since I could explain why. I got her a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook, and she discovered that you don’t really need meat at every meal. And when I brought home a black boyfriend, she loved him (he was pretty lovable, I’ll admit). Next was the Cuban girlfriend – she didn’t blink. Then the Methodist minister’s daughter (not Julie, the one before Julie) – even that didn’t phase her (but only because she was not a fundamentalist).

So when I announced that I was going to be majoring in Peace and Global Studies, I wasn’t anxious that my parents might suggest that I get a real degree, for all the money they were spending to send me to the most expensive liberal arts college in the state, for heaven’s sake. And I was right. My mom thought Peace and Global Studies was a splendid thing to major in, and she even got sort of intrigued. My mom had, among many other wonderful qualities, one of the sharpest intellects of anyone I’ve ever known, and a deeply curious mind, so there wasn’t much she wasn’t intrigued by. Everything I was studying was fair game for long conversations on the green couch by the wood stove in our big farmhouse kitchen.

I remember in particular a conversation on the couch about the concept of “structural violence.” I used the phrase and mom immediately perked up: “What does that mean, ‘structural violence’?” I started to explain, but she already had it figured out. “That’s the way oppressive structures – like racism, or poverty – do violence to people, right? And it can be really explicit violence, like lynching, but it can also be slower, or less direct violence, like the way a child’s mind and spirit and opportunities get more and more and more hemmed in by living in poverty.”

Exactly. Yeah, she was pretty awesome.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation with my mom a lot lately, in part because I’ve been thinking about suffering a lot lately. I’m thinking about suffering these days because I’m holding several friends in prayer who are suffering a lot right now. I’m also thinking about suffering these days because when I solicited topics for my daily Advent blogging (what was I thinking?), Ellen suggested I tackle the question, “Why is there suffering?” Ellen knows too much of suffering lately. I am quite sure I am entirely inadequate to the task of explaining suffering to her or anyone else. Indeed, the only sort of cosmic answer I know to that question is, “I have no idea.”

But still, I know a little bit about suffering, especially of the sort Ellen is experiencing right now, the suffering of losing someone very dear to you, way too young. For Ellen it was her brother, who died just a couple of weeks ago; for me it was my mom, who died almost twenty years ago.

I used to think there was a pretty clear distinction between the sort of suffering that stems from, well, life, you know? And the sort of suffering that stems from structural violence. I remember making this distinction to my mom in that conversation on the green couch, when she immediately got it about structural violence: “Yeah, and you know, it’s not like the world would be without suffering if we ended structural violence. People would still leave their lovers, and break each other’s hearts, and there would still be earthquakes and people would still die of natural causes. But war and poverty and racism? Seems like that sort of suffering is worth fighting against.” My mom, of course, entirely agreed, and enthusiastically endorsed my plan to be a Peacemaker (“A Profession for the Future,” remember Earlham friends?)

The more I learn of the world, though, and the ugly horrible ways that human structures work on it, the less I am convinced that such a stark distinction is meaningful. Cancer may not be a violent human structure, but industrialized agriculture certainly is, and so is toxic waste, and probably both contribute in ways known and unknown to many cancers. Hurricanes may not be violent human structures, but if they ramp up because of our addiction to fossil fuels, is the suffering in their wake an act of God, or the result of human structural violence? And if they wreak greatest havoc on the poorest and most wretched of the earth, what is the cause of that suffering? Mental illness may not be a violent structure created by human society (though I could be convinced otherwise). But if a brilliant and talented young man suffers from mental illness and turns to drug use to cope, and if our society maintains an absurdly ineffective and vindictive public policy around the sale and use of certain drugs, then is his death by overdose at least in part a result of structural violence?

I don’t know.

Why is there suffering? I just don’t know what the answer is. I’m pretty sure that even in a world entirely free of structural violence, my mom still would have collapsed one day while weeding the asparagus patch, and the aneurysm in her brain still would have killed her a couple of days later, just a few weeks short of her fifty-first birthday. I’m pretty sure that when I got around to trying to get pregnant at the ripe old age of thirty-four, my ovaries still would have been old souls that were no longer going to produce viable eggs, because in the law of averages, someone has to be an outlier, and that just happened to be me.

But I am also pretty sure that a whole lot of suffering in the world – so very much of it – is caused by structural violence. Which is another way of saying that a whole lot of the suffering in the world is caused by sin. That, of course, is a word which is sort of out of vogue these days, among progressive intellectuals at least. I think it’s a shame that it’s been so co-opted by the fundamentalist religious right-wing. Indeed, now that I think of it, “sin” has itself become a form of structural violence. But I’m comfortable reclaiming it, because I do think there is such a thing. I probably prefer Michael’s formulation (and I’m loosely paraphrasing here because I don’t know how to find this particular conversation on his Facebook page) – that sin is anything which takes us out of loving relationship with each other and God. Structural violence, sin, broken relationship …. however you want to define it, or whatever you want to call it, it seems to me that a whole lot of suffering is caused by it.

And where is God in all this? I think for a lot of folks that’s the hardest question when faced with inexplicable suffering. I know such suffering can cause some to lose their faith, or at least to question it. For me, actually, the opposite is true. For me, if sin is that which pulls us out of loving relationship, then God is that which puts us back together. And I know that even in the face of so much suffering in the world, there is also so much goodness and beauty and abundance. I know too, though I surely don’t understand the mystery of it, that somehow that goodness and beauty and abundance often flows right out of suffering, even the sort that results from sin. My God is the God of that goodness and beauty and abundance, even the kind that is forged in a crucible of suffering. Why God isn’t bigger than sin, why God can’t just vanquish sin and suffering in one fell swoop, I don’t know. Maybe God isn’t all-powerful in that way. Maybe God needs us as much as we need God. Maybe the more we’re in loving relationship with God – which is the same thing as saying the more we’re in loving relationship with each other -- the less power sin and suffering have over the world.

I surely could be wrong. But if faith is being sure of what we hope for*, then my faith in that God is like a rock, even in the face of inexplicable suffering.

edited to add: this is from Bart Campolo.

Well Gosh...

2009-12-16T20:24:00.004-05:00

Many thanks to Thorn (motherissues), SEB (Long French Dinner), and Dr. Charrier (Exploration of Self) for outing themselves and leaving me such thoughtful comments. I have a lot of friends -- like IRL friends -- who read my blog, so I sometimes forget that they're not the only ones ... it's kind of a nice funny feeling that there are folks out there I don't even know who are also reading my blog. So thank you all for letting me know who you are and what's interesting to you.

edited to add: Beth (Terribly Unfashionable: Tales of a Geeky Librarian) and Nancy (who is apparently blogless, yes?). Thanks to you both for leaving a comment!

Today was supposed to be a whole glorious day of nothing but writing. I even made plans to go to my friend Cory's house -- he's a single childless gay man with terrific taste and not a lot of stuff and big windows and 1000 more square feet than the four of us live in, so his place pretty much feels like writing nirvana to me. Alas, I forgot that I had volunteered to help with the HINI boosters at my kids' school, and then a couple of other things I needed to take care of neatly dissected the day into tiny portions of time with which I am completely incapable of accomplishing anything. So it was a sort of wasted day. Well, other than the volunteering, and some important church work ... but writing? Not so much. So here's another lame post, with the hopes that I will have something real tomorrow....

For what it's worth, I'm thinking about suffering. Just too much of that going around my circle of loved ones these days. If you're the sort that prays, won't you pray for Claire and her boys, Sarah and her boys, Ellen and her family, Liz and her girls.

Thanks friends. And if any of the rest of you want to come out, I really do think you'll feel so liberated -- come on, what are you waiting for?

Come Out, Come Out, Where Ever You Are!

2009-12-15T10:21:00.002-05:00

Okay, so today? I've got nothin'. Sorry. Yesterday and today I'm ticking my way through a long list of small, nagging things that have piled up long enough to feel like huge, anxiety-producing things. Tomorrow, calm once again, I will set aside time to write. I'm not promising much, but I am promising something, okay?

In the meantime, let's say it's your turn today. Why don't you leave me a comment that answers the following questions:

~ Who are you? Where are you? How'd you find my blog? Tell me a little about yourself!

~ I'm thinking about changing my blog description -- you know, the part that says "Essays on life as a lesbian housewife, an urban homesteader, a race traitor, a doubting Thomas, an occasional political theorist and recovering bleeding heart, and always, always, a promiscuous lover of books." How would you describe my blog? What in particular is interesting to you?

Hasta la vista babies! (Also: Go ahead, make my day.)

mellifluous

2009-12-14T14:42:00.001-05:00

warm bread dough rises

woman’s breast, milk and honey

baby, comfort food

Crusty French Bread (for Ellen and Greg and Chris)

2009-12-14T06:13:00.010-05:00

Yesterday I meant to bake loaves of crusty French bread for communion, like the women in Michael’s consecration prayer, God and her sisters, sharing their power through the miracle of bread. I planned to bake the loaves at church, filling our sacred space with the aroma of fresh bread, setting the table with bread so fresh from the oven it would still be warm.

As is often the case with lovely, deep spiritual intentions, real life barged in. Late Saturday night I realized I had no flour, and had to make a quick Sunday morning trip to the grocery store. Then the perfect, smooth, elastic ball of dough did not rise, not even in a proofing oven.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, I choose not to stress, and decided to trust that the bread I ended up with would be exactly the bread we needed. I cranked the temperature on the proofing oven and let the dough rise some more, but by then I was clear we would not have triple- or even double-rise crusty French loaves.

Julie, as usual, had a brilliant idea. “What you’re really going after is not loaves, but bite-sized pieces of bread and a lovely smell, right? Why don’t you just roll the dough out like a pizza crust, let it rest for ten minutes, and bake it? You can skip the second rise entirely and the church will smell just as nice.”

So that is what I did. And as with most of Julie’s great ideas, it turned out so nicely that I think we will make this our practice for baking our communion bread. (Serendipity, right Michael?)

But still, I promised the secrets to crusty French loaves, so they are:

1. With Brother Juniper (Brother Juniper’s Bread Book is my bible; here is a review), I am a true believer in the triple rise. Mix your dough, put it into a bowl, cover with a damp tea towel, and leave it to rise – in the winter, I set the oven for “proof,” which is 100 degrees. Let rise for an hour and a half, then punch down and repeat. Got that? Two rises in the bowl, for a total of about three hours, plus the mixing and kneading time. Then you make your loaves and let them rise too, for a total of three rises.

2. Mist the loaves with a spray bottle of water right before they go in the oven, and then three more times, every two minutes.

3. White flour. If you want a good crust and you’re devoted to whole wheat bread, use half white and half wheat for your dough. If you want a great crust? All white flour all the time. That’s just how it is.

4. Your crusty French bread will never be as good tomorrow as it is today, so eat up!

get to know me

2009-12-13T20:09:00.002-05:00

The care and feeding of introverts is not really all that complicated.

edited to add: One of the things I love most about Julie is that being with her is just like being alone. Another of the things I love most about Julie is that when I told her that once, she immediately understood.

hail mary

2009-12-13T05:27:00.003-05:00

before dawn, i rise

flour, water, yeast and salt

bread of life. thank you.

Why Not Come to Church Tomorrow? You Might Be Surprised!

2009-12-12T16:59:00.003-05:00

If you live in Philadelphia, think about coming to church tomorrow at Old First Reformed, United Church of Christ! Here's what Michael says on Old First's Facebook fan page:

I am preaching on Mary (the mother of Jesus) this Sunday, and I wonder why the tradition has so stripped her sexuality; it seems we'd almost deny her gender if the church didn't need her womb... maybe as redemption of this inhumane bias, we need to bear Christ to the world, yes, with humility and in service, but also in our whole bodies and with the solace of great physical pleasure... Come Light the Third Advent Candle... for Mary who so graciously bore the Child. And see where I end up on this sermon.

4th and Race Streets. Sunday School at 10:00, service at 11:00. Street parking with a parking placard that you can get inside. Communion with bread baked by yours truly.

A Purpose Driven Sonnet

2009-12-12T08:42:00.005-05:00

The Rev’rend Doctor Warren, seems to me

would like to have his cake and eat it too

regarding homosexuality.

Alas, his fork-ed tongue is nothing new.

“Let me be clear what God’s own Word intends:

that sex outside of marriage is a sin.”

And marriage as a union he defends:

no other than a man and woman, kin.

But killing gays perhaps does go astray;

let’s not forget what Jesus did command:

that dignity for all be his new Way,

upon that rock the church must take a stand.

Um, Rick? My sexuality is ME.

Shut UP already ‘bout my dignity.

‘mkay?

edited to add: This is my second submission to Shannon's InSoWriMo (International Sonnet Writing Month) challenge.

On Feeling Needy and Blue ... and Grateful (though there outta be a better word)

2009-12-11T15:00:00.003-05:00

Awhile ago I wrote about some of the reasons I stopped blogging at the wide tent. In part, I felt like my writing created a false sense of who I am; that in trying to write with craft and wisdom, I worried that I lacked humility, and I was creating an on-line persona that was not quite honest, because it did not share all of my messy, complicated, needy self. I don’t know if my on-line writer persona here at my goodly heritage matches my real-life persona very well at all, but it’s something that I care about and strive for. If I have any wisdom at all to share, and any beauty, I suspect it is more true and more accessible if it’s coming from a real live human being, warts and all.

What I really want to write about today is gratitude, and not just gratitude in general, but a very specific gratitude for which there should be a word, though I’m not sure what it is. But before I can even get there, I have to let you in on a bit of my messy self, which in the past couple of days, has been feeling kind of blue and needy.

But maybe before I get to my blue and needy self, I should back up even further, in the interests of full disclosure and truth-in-advertising, and let you know that I have in my life suffered from pretty serious depression and anxiety. Not completely debilitating – I’ve never experienced a real breakdown, though in the past couple of years I came pretty close, twice. You’ll get more of that in my “Welfare of the City” series, which, come to think of it, is probably why that series is progressing so slowly…. But now I offer up my experience of depression only to assure you that “blue and needy” is not that, and I will most certainly be fine.

But still, blue and needy is, well…. blue and needy, you know? Yesterday in particular, by the end of the day, all I really wanted was a good cry. But by the time the chores and errands were finished, the dropping off at swimming and the picking up done, the stories read and the snack fixed and the teeth brushed … well, I was too tired to even indulge myself in a good cry, so I just went to bed. And the thing is, every Thursday night I’m on my own, because Julie has choir practice. Julie has had choir practice every Thursday night since before we had kids, so I’ve never known any other sort of Thursday night parenting. It’s no big deal … it just is. But last night it just felt like too much.

Who knows why? There are little things … the days are getting shorter, it’s finally gotten bitter cold, peri-menopause sometimes feels like it’s kicking my butt. Then there’s the way bigger stuff … a friend of mine, a young mother, was in surgery yesterday for a recurrence of cancer; another young mother I know is undergoing chemotherapy; one of my oldest friend’s younger brother died; Julie is struggling with stupid school stress and sad family stuff. In the midst of all that, my own desire to be present and kind and helpful sometimes leaves me instead feeling inadequate and petty and, worst of all for me, needy and vulnerable.

But that’s really all just backdrop to what I want to write about, which is not the blues, but rather gratitude. And not just the sort of gratitude such moments certainly call for, the I’m-grateful-for-my-health-and-my-family-and-the-roof-over-my-head sort of gratitude, though I certainly am grateful for all of that. But what I’m thinking about is more fortuitous? Providential? Neither of those words is exactly it, either, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten for that out-of-the-blue kindness, which is usually small, and often unaware of the context that makes it so needed, but precisely in its smallness, and in its lack of intention, it is just the thing. Breathtaking. Grace maybe. I’m feeling grateful for instances of grace, and the friends and strangers through whom God has visited them upon me.

Like the time I went to a family wedding in New York when Micah was just a baby. I had been nursing him since he came home with us at 15 days old, and though I never produced a full supply of milk, I had amassed a huge stash in the freezer of my own milk, from months and months of pumping before we ever even knew about Micah. By the time this wedding rolled around, though, I had pretty much worked my way through my stash, and was almost through the donations from Rachel and Cate who had, with the most exquisite generosity, pumped and donated their milk to the cause of teeny-tiny Micah-boo.

So I went off for about six hours to this wedding – the longest I had ever been away from Micah -- and Julie went off with Micah and visited Ansley, who lived near-by. It was a lovely, lovely wedding, full of people I adore, but for some reason I’m not sure I can adequately explain, I just felt so out of step. My breasts ached and I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and try to hand express milk so I wouldn’t leak all over my borrowed party dress. Because I had been ambivalent about leaving Micah, I had been late in RSVP’ing, and so was seated with folks I didn’t know at all – a middle-aged single man, a widowed neighbor of the bride’s parents, a couple of family friends and business associates, none of whom really know each other. From this vantage point, somehow, all the young, beautiful, normal people – the young friends of the bride and groom who were so effortlessly and unselfconsciously themselves at this most hetero-normative of all celebrations – it was just overwhelming. I felt like a freak, and all the ways that I have had to invent my life suddenly were just too, too much.

And then, when I finally got back to Julie and Micah, he smelled overwhelmingly of formula.**

On the way home from New York, I just couldn’t stop crying, keening almost. I was completely inarticulate, even to myself. My grief felt profound, yet inexplicable. Somehow the smell of formula on Micah’s breath had become the symbol of all the ways my life lacked normalcy – ways that, for the most part, I cherish, and wouldn’t trade for the world. But in that moment, I just wanted to feel normal in some sort of way that most folks – like the dear ones at that wedding – get to take for granted, but that mostly eludes me.

Certainly at the very least, I wanted to have breasts full of milk and never need a stash in the freezer, but short of that, I most desperately wanted a stash in the freezer. I hated what formula represented, the failure of normalcy that seemed to extend into so much of my life, right down to my ovaries and my breasts. In that moment, I hated formula with a passion, yet that’s what I was going home to: no more of my stash, no more of Cate’s milk or Rachel’s, just a can of baby formula to make up the difference that my breasts couldn’t provide.

When we got home, there was a message on the machine from a total stranger. She had heard, from a mutual friend, that I was looking for breast milk. She had a bunch in her freezer that she was not going to use. Did I want it?

The gratitude I felt in that moment … why isn’t there a word for that? She didn’t know, she couldn’t have known, but her gesture was exactly, exquisitely, profoundly what I needed at that moment. My gratitude to this woman was just as inarticulate as my grief had been just hours before. There ought to be a word for that, for the sort of gratitude you feel when someone totally unwittingly, through just common decency and kindness and generosity, becomes a channel of God’s grace in exactly the way you needed it at exactly that moment.

Which is a very long and round-about way of saying that I feel that sort of gratitude a lot. And believe me, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am.

So this morning, for example, I was feeling better – a good night’s sleep goes along way, not to mention a lot of kindness on my Facebook page yesterday – but still, I was a little punky and blue, feeling needy and vulnerable and inadequate to the task of being present and giving in the face of so much suffering around me these days. I was on my way to yoga with Jen across the street when Pat called. She couldn’t have lunch as we had been hoping, but she just wanted to tell me that my writing lately has given voice to some things – big things – she has been mulling, but has been unable to articulate herself. And she said a lot of other really nice things that I won’t bore you with, but that were just the right thing – making me feel not just needy and vulnerable, but also helpful, present, effective.

I ran across the street, late but with a smile, and then Jen did it all over again: first we could barely get through our practice for all the giggling, and then we fell into a conversation about her experience of pregnancy and impending motherhood that was so open and honest and affirming of my place in her life and her family.

Now I will say that Pat and Jen are probably the two most intuitive people I know, bar none. Both of them have this intense insight, like they see right into your soul and get it right every time. Now that I think of it, I don’t know anyone else quite like them, but they are very much like each other in this way. Which is to say there is no point, ever, in trying to bullshit them. And which is also to say, both of them probably knew that I was feeling a bit punky. But certainly, my gratitude is no less, nor is my awe at not only their kindness, but their willingness to make themselves vulnerable in order to lift me up. What a gift. Am I one lucky girl, or what?

** Please let me here assure you that I do NOT believe formula is evil. I did NOT breastfeed Micah because I think formula is evil, and if you formula-fed your baby, I do NOT think I am better than you, nor do I think Micah will have any sort of advantage over your child. I DO think breastfeeding is a powerful experience, and I’m awfully glad I was able to do it, and if you ever want support I’m your gal. But I think there are LOTS of good reasons to feed formula to a baby, and I’ve said as much while leading a La Leche League meeting. Okay?

You Must Not Know 'Bout Me (if you thought i was done talking about sex)

2009-12-10T11:47:00.004-05:00

To the left, to the left, to the left….

I guess that’s where you could say I come down on the spectrum of Christians who think about sex. And these days, sadly, many Christians are positively obsessed with sex. Indeed, many Christians these days have made their sexual obsession – especially their obsession with homosexuality – almost a fetish, a fetish that has lost sight entirely of the good news of Jesus Christ.

That good news is that people matter -- not abstractions, but real, live people, and their lovely, messy, complicated relationships and their yearning, passionate desire to know and share the love of God. Classes and categories don’t matter – Jew or Samaritan is irrelevant, man or woman, sick or well, rich or poor, prostitute or wife, tax collector … centurion … servant…. thief.… Everyone matters. Everyone can be in relationship. Everyone can love everyone else as a blessed child of God. In the same way, rigid rules – about what you can or can’t eat, about whom you may or may not touch, about how and when and where to worship God -- just dissolve if they don’t foster dignity, love and relationship, among people and with God. A formal system of purity is set aside in favor of a more intentional purity that asks, “Is this good for people? Does this free people to love one another and God more closely? Does this require that people be intentional about the way their lives and actions affect the human dignity of others?”

It seems to me that if these are the questions that matter to Jesus (and I think they are), then much of Christianity’s current obsession with sex is nothing short of blasphemy. It seems to me that when Christian fundamentalists – whether they purport to be “progressive” or not – build an alter in front of a few passages of scripture, such as the first chapter of Romans, but turn a blind eye and cold heart to the blessed and beautiful desires and relationships and yearning of millions of actual human beings – well, it seems to me that is idolatry piled on top of blasphemy.

The blasphemy of much of Christian thinking about sex is that it starts with a set of formal purity rules of exactly the sort Jesus came to free us from. The Christian Right spews hate and damnation, “progressive” evangelicals kill us bit more softly, but even the liberal church does not really offer a paradigm shift, but merely a “kinder, gentler” set of purity rules.

These rules and how they shift, depending on where you sit on the spectrum from conservative to liberal Christian, remind me of a moralistic game of sexual Clue: definitely everyone is down with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with candles (and maybe even sex toys?), in the bedroom; and maybe some of us can handle Mr. and Mr. White, also with candles (but please don’t tell us about the sex toys), in the bedroom; and possibly Mr. Brown and Miss Jones (though it’s probably better if they are someone else’s kids), but only with birth control, and only in the bedroom they share only with each other; and most definitely not Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones, with anything at all, anywhere; and obviously not Mr. White and Mr. Jones, even if they use a condom, at the rest stop; and ditto Miss Jones and Mr. Black, with alcohol, at a party where they’ve just hooked up.

Right? Isn’t that how it goes? We start with a formal set of rules – they might be about “the sanctity of marriage,” or they might be about “loving and committed relationships,” but always formal rules about relationships in the abstract – and then we plug in real people, without much thought to their actual relationships with other real people, and rarely with any thought at all about their actual desires or, horror of horror, their physical pleasure. Real relationships and real pleasure always seem subservient, at best, or even irrelevant, to these formal rules about sex.

What if, instead, we started with real relationships and real pleasure and built a sexual ethic from there? I’m no Biblical scholar, but I’m having a difficult time understanding why that would not be pleasing to God.

How would such a sexual ethic change the way we think about sex? Well, first of all, it might problematize a lot of sex that no one ever questions under the current set of formal rules. Isn’t it funny how no one ever worries much about the ethics of sex within a heterosexual marriage? Oh, we hear all the time about the problems (that’s what Viagra’s for, right?) and the wonders (the Obamas are making marriage sexy again!) of such sex, but what about the ethics? So for example, what if Mr. and Mrs. Smith have an emotionally abusive relationship that extends to their bedroom? Is that ethical? Or what if Mrs. Smith has never experienced pleasure in her sexual relationship with Mr. Smith, and he doesn’t really care? Is that ethical?

On the other hand, what if Mr. Smith and Miss Jones really enjoy sex with each other, but they’re not at all romantically attached to one another? What if they’ve taken care to communicate to one another that neither of them is interested in a love match, but that they are both very interested in exploring sexual pleasure as a natural extension of an intimate friendship? Could that be ethical?

And what if Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones are married to other people, and for various reasons that aren’t all that difficult to imagine, all four adults have decided that a sexual relationship between Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones is worth exploring, and everyone is being a grown-up and communicating, and it’s all pretty emotionally healthy? In a universe where relationship and pleasure are the foundation of sexual ethics, couldn’t that be ethical? It seems to me that such a scenario is inherently complicated – but in my ethics, at least, it is complicated because there are so many relationships to attend to, not because there are some formal rules that require certain behavior within the institution of marriage, everyone’s real relationships and pleasure be damned.

And what about Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones at the rest stop? Or what about Miss Jones and Mr. Black’s drunken hook-up at a party? It seems to me that these are the most ethically problematic. As with any form of conspicuous consumption, these sexual encounters are ethically problematic because they lack any sort of meaningful relationship outside of possibly healthy pleasure, and even healthy pleasure can’t be very meaningfully tended to when two people know nothing at all about one another, and even less so when judgment is impaired. It is difficult for me to affirm these encounters as ethical, but only because they do not seem to me to be intentionally concerned with healthy relationships or pleasure. Moreover, I should note, that much of our culture’s conspicuous consumption is unethical by exactly the same standard and every bit as sinful in my eyes.

A sexual ethic that begins with relationship and pleasure … does this seem complicated? But of course! Being a human being in relationship is complicated. Treating people as though they matter is complicated. Add sex to that mix, and it gets very very complicated, most certainly. A sexual ethic that begins with relationship and pleasure is NOT simply “anything goes” – indeed, it is quite the opposite. It is an ethic that requires intentional and careful tending to real relationships and pleasure, which is never easy, especially when passion is involved. It is not an ethic that promises to solve all the problems that inevitably will arise in sexual relationships. People will still get hurt, and relationships will still end, and even people acting with the most ethical intention they can bring to their sexual relationships will make a big old mess of things. Ethics doesn’t solve the dilemma of being human.

But all the pain and sorrow and alienation and shame that so many people feel about themselves as sexual beings, and all the violence and persecution and hatred that has been visited on so many for so long, all because of the rigid and merciless purity codes that so much of Christianity is obsessed by? None of that is intrinsic to being human. None of that is necessary. It is not good news, and it is not pleasing to God.

Christianity’s obsession with sex, and in particular homoerotic sex, is tearing apart the Body of Christ limb from limb. I would go so far as to say that this obsession is crucifying Christ all over again. May God have mercy on us all.

Sexiest Words Poll

2009-12-09T17:20:00.002-05:00

Assuming for a moment that "huntress" is one of the three sexiest words in the English language (Shannon thinks it is, and I tend to agree), what are the other two? Leave your nominations in the comments, please!

Book Review: Becoming Native to this Place by Wes Jackson

2009-12-09T11:56:00.001-05:00

Becoming Native to this Place, Wes Jackson (1994)(*****). I read this little book in one day on the beach in Ocean City this past July or August; it’s short (118 pages) but dense, and I felt like I needed to reread it before I could adequately review it. But then I didn’t reread it, and the four or five months between reading and review will only serve to make my review even less adequate, I’m sure. Which is a shame, because I really loved this book a lot. Jackson, the founder of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, argues that “We are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability in any area unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape.” (Prologue, p. 3) Jackson argues that if we are to become truly sustainable – meaning that we create lifestyles in which the outputs of our consumption do not destroy us and the world – we must make community (i.e. human-scale communities, not institutional/bureaucratic-scale communities) our organizing principle, and we must develop a science of sustainability with nature as the measure. He argues that much of the “prosperity” of the last several centuries has been fueled – literally – by an extractive economy based on fossil fuels that allows us to live far from the sources of our energy, but at devastating cost to our world. He calls, along with Wendell Berry (to whom the book is dedicated) for a resettling of the nation, a “homecoming” of sorts, in sustainable communities. This, he protests, is not “mere nostalgia. To resettle the country-side is a practical necessity for everyone, including people who continue to live in cities. To gather dispersed sunlight in the form of chemical energy in a fossil-free world will require a sufficiency of people spread across our broad landscape.” (Prologue, p. 4) His vision for such a new pioneer movement is unsentimental, politically astute, and – to this country girl, at least – very appealing.

triple dog dare you

2009-12-08T11:18:00.006-05:00

Edited again to add Myra's (my ... sort of.... what would you call yourself, Myra? My aunt-in-law?) sonnet (and oh be still my heart, how happy am I now??):

From festival to festival we yearn
To leave undone the many tasks that beckon.
Perhaps the earth, with every global turn
Grows weary of her solstice tasks, I reckon.

So if the leaves can put on different hues
When Autumn struts her stuff, I guess I can
Devise a new display, as I may choose
With green and gold and scarlet as my plan.

If stars can glow, as still the snowflake drifts
I'll add my contribution to the night.
If heaven can devise celestial gifts
I'll twinkle with a small domestic light.

So toss your list and fret not on your chores.
Here's wishing Love and Peace to you and yours!

Edited to add Jeff's response:

Sometimes when evening drapes it's fingers round
And squeezes thoughts and fears from someplace deep
When whispers of my spring cannot be found
And winter's snow so close now seems to creep
I watch my babies blankets rise and fall
And feel those fingers tighten harder still
As women's forms sleep soft on pillows tall
More beautiful than I could wish to build
Their faces speak of summers dreams and plans
The innocence of those living in spring
My winter's heart begins to understand
And slowly evenings fingers set me free
I lie back down contented in the fall
And winter doesn't seem too bad at all...

And now my happiness is complete....

***

My friend Jeff responded thus on Facebook to my challenge:

I can not write a sonnet

I will not wear a bonnet

Keep such dares inside your mouth

Before there's duct tape on it.

To which I respectfully reply to my dear friend, a talented photographer and father of some astonishingly lovely girls:

you can you can you can you can you can

a sonnet is not really difficult

please try and i will be your biggest fan

i do not fear it will lead to tumult.

indeed a sonnet could be just as fun

as taking photos of your lovely girls

okay well maybe not if there is sun,

or if their bonnets let peek raven curls.

but still and all a sonnet you can write

and i believe today is just the day

for such a form in you to take its flight.

duct tape is no defense from what i say

so put your bonnet on your pretty head

and send a sonnet 'ere you go to bed!

So if you're still not sure, here's a little tutorial I offered to another friend:

it's like a puzzle, because it has a really strict form. so first, there's the rhythm of the poem, which is written in what's called iambic pentameter. an iamb is what's called a "foot" in poetry, and it's two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed. so like "da DUM." pentameter just means there are five of these feet in each line.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

so that's the rhythm of a sonnet. all the lines are in iambic pentameter.

next, there's a really strict rhyme scheme. well, actually there are several, but the one i used in my sonnet is the easiest and most typical. it goes like this (with the letters representing the rhyme at the end of each line; i've put the rhymes in my sonnet here too):

A (dog)
B (child)
A (agog)
B (reviled)
C (fear)
D (foreigner)
C (pier)
D (in her)
E (magnifies)
F (now)
E (clearer eyes)
F (vow)
G (then)
G (amen)

so the fun of a sonnet is making it all fit in the strict form, but still saying something meaningful. here's a really famous one from shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

cool huh? you should give it a try!

Triple dog dare ya, Jeff. I'm not afraid of your duct tape, but you should be afraid of the bonnet I'm going to make you wear if you don't send me a sonnet by the end of the day.

I Dare You

2009-12-08T05:38:00.006-05:00

Mark has challenged me to write a post on how the Bible can be true without being factual, and whether it means anything at all if we start picking and choosing what is factual, as opposed to stories that can point to important truths. This is not a simple task, especially for someone as unschooled in the Bible as I am. But I would like Mark and others to understand how I read the Bible, and why. So I'm working on it.

I think this post will dovetail nicely with the question Suzanne has asked, which is how can rational people believe in a religious faith based on a tale of virgin birth? So I'm working on that too.

In thinking about both these posts, I asked Michael to send me a copy of his sermon titled "People Matter," because at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure that's the key to both questions. So last night, I was reading his sermon and thinking.

At the same time, and totally unrelated, I had asked Julie to write a sonnet for Shannon, who is writing a sonnet a week in the month of December, and has challenged her readers to do the same. I have never fancied myself much of a poet, but Julie is a bit of an idiot savant when it comes to sonnet-writing. I think she dreams in iambic pentameter. So in about thirty minutes, Julie whipped this off:

A “dona nobis pacem” frame of mind

eludes me and the world this time of year:

no peace on earth, no tranquil hope may find

free lodging absent stealth companion’s fear.

The bleak midwinter challenges my mood,

A dilatory penchant for stiff drink,

The promise of vast stores of festive food,

I cannot draw a breath nor even think

About the 40 thousand items on my list

of absolutely musts and shoulds and mights

…How is a girl to stave off being pissed

About responsibilities’ mad flights

through quantum realms of things still left undone?

I fear the race is o’er before ‘tis run.

Yeah, Julie's feeling a little cranky these days, but she was a sport to crank out a sonnet anyway. She made it look so easy, I decided to try my hand. Since I was reading Michael's sermon, I thought I would rewrite it as a sonnet. Almost three hours later, this is what I came up with:

Syrophoenician woman, like a dog

you wait for crumbs of bread to heal your child.

You break convention, touch the man, agog,

insist that no one should be spurned, reviled.

In you Jesus confronts the demon fear:

of woman, gentile, unclean foreigner.

Not just the food he shared beside the pier

is clean, but also now the soul in her

your child. Her soul, your courage magnifies

the Lord, expands his heart and shows him now

what love can make us see through clearer eyes,

and hearts can strive to make their solemn vow:

with no exceptions, never, now nor then,

all People Matter. Lord we say amen!

Julie points out that "Jesus" in the fifth line is not really an iamb, but that it's actually a "substitute foot" that focuses your attention on Jesus. And I just want to be clear that was totally intentional on my part.

I don't think I've ever written a sonnet before, but it was kind of fun. I might write another one soon. I double dare you to give it a try!

A Little Christmas Cheer, New York Style

2009-12-07T12:06:00.005-05:00

Michael's status update on Facebook is worth sharing, I think.

Michael Caine is humming to himself: In the meadow we can build a snowman. Then pretend that he is Parson Brown. He'll say "Are you married?" We'll say, "No, man! 'Cause the bigots in the Senate shot us down."

That's my pastor. If you're on Facebook, go friend him, 'cause he's trying to get to 1000 friends, and he only has 111 to go.

What's that you say? No, it is NOT shallow! It's just very media-savvy, that's all!

But if you friend Michael, you should friend me first, 'mkay? Marta Rose.

edited to add additional lyrics, suggested by one of Michael's Fb friends:

Later on we'll conspire

as we plot by the fire

and think of new ways to be nice to gays

surviving in a bigot's wonderland.

lite beer (for ellen)

2009-12-07T08:03:00.003-05:00

(Julie's doctor told her this joke once in the context of a discussion about limiting carbs, upon Julie's protest that lite beer is NOT one of the solutions. Julie's doctor is a grey-haired grandmother with glasses hanging from a chain, so I feel confident that you can handle it.)

What do lite beer and sex in a canoe have in common?

They are both f@*king close to water.

Marathon Mama

2009-12-06T06:44:00.002-05:00

If plantar fasciitis was a set-back in my Broad Street dreams, it was at least a set-back that taught me something about training well. Which was a good thing, because in my really really secret heart of hearts? I was starting to think about running a marathon. This was possibly the most absurd notion that had ever crossed my mind. So ridiculously absurd, in fact, that I dared not mention it to anyone for a long time. When I finally mentioned it to Julie, she didn’t seem astonished at all, but Julie is both an athlete and my biggest cheerleader, so the fact that she failed to appreciate the lunacy of such a notion was not surprising.

The thing was, by the time I missed the Broad Street due to plantar fasciitis, I was already a long, long way on my path to feeling healthy and whole and integrated in my body. I had been running regularly for a couple of years. I had also been practicing yoga pretty seriously for a little over a year. Micah had joined our family through a domestic, transracial adoption, and he and I were physically nearly inseparable for the first year of his life. He never wanted to be put down, and I didn’t want to put him down, so he pretty much hung out in the sling all day, and we slept belly-to-belly all night. I was nursing him successfully (and did, for three and a half years), an accomplishment that to this day still sort of takes my breath away. More because of nursing, I think, than anything, I ate voraciously – just unfathomable quantities of food – and the pounds kept pouring off. I had never been stronger or more fit, and had never loved being in my body so much.

And yet, I still had this lingering sense of loss around childbirth. For years I had been a birth junkie, and had dreamed of giving birth in my home one day. During my years of trying to get pregnant, and during my two all-too-brief pregnancies, I would visualize what it would be like, this profound experience of giving birth to a baby. I had come to realize that many of the dimensions of birthing a baby – the spiritual and emotional – are likewise intense (not the same, but similarly intense) in building a family through adoption. But it was the physical challenge of childbirth that had always seemed the most daunting and therefore the greatest challenge to me. I had always wondered if my body could really do something that huge and powerful and challenging. It was the one piece of my infertility that felt unresolved.

I knew that running a marathon is not really the same as giving birth, and so on some level I felt sort of silly imagining that running a marathon could resolve my infertility loss. But I wasn’t actually looking for something that could take the place of giving birth – I knew that was just a loss that I could move on from, but it would always be a loss. Still, running a marathon was an extreme physical challenge that seemed to me, frankly, way less likely for me than giving birth would have been. And it wasn’t exactly that I wanted to say, “Oh, if I run a marathon, then I’m sure I could have given birth.” Childbirth (as with much of parenting) is unpredictable, and while you can prepare, there’s much you don’t control. I will simply never know what childbirth might have been for me. Still, I wanted to know that my body could rise to a challenge that for most of my life would have seemed absurdly unreachable.

I decided to start with the Philadelphia Distance Run, a half marathon held each September in Philadelphia. I started training in the spring, as soon as I had recovered from the plantar fasciitis. I found a book about running for women, with a reasonable training program, based on time rather than distance, designed for folks who just want to finish, but didn’t care about speed. I made a big training chart and taped it to the cabinet above the sink. And with uncharacteristic discipline, I set about training all summer long.

My plan had been to attempt the half one year, and if I were successful, to think about a full marathon the following year. This plan was as ridiculous as the whole notion of running a marathon in the first place. As Julie pointed out (after yet another Saturday of solo parenting while I was out doing a long run), when I ran the half, I would be half way there. Why not just keep training and run the Philadelphia marathon a couple of months later, rather than starting all over with this grueling training schedule the following year? This, of course, made perfect sense. Except that the notion of running a marathon still just seemed so absurd, so remote. Me? Run a marathon? This year?

Still, I could see her point. The training was pretty time-consuming, especially because I run so slowly. It was definitely a strain on my family, and while Julie supported me way above and beyond anything I reasonably deserve (she’s like that), it did seem to make some sense to just get it over with.

And so I did. On a clear, crisp September morning just before my 39^th birthday, I ran the Philadelphia Distance Run in my best time ever. Every single mile of that run was perfect. I felt like I was flying (in reality I ran 10:39 minute miles), and it remains the very best thing I have ever done just for myself. Bar none. Two months later, I finished the Philadelphia marathon, about half an hour slower than my goal of finishing under five hours.

I may run slowly, but I run slowly in a category of elite runners who have finished a marathon!

Plantar Fasciitis (for Melissa)

2009-12-05T08:47:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, I never ever thought of myself as an athlete. Running made me wheeze, and I hated team sports because I knew I was going to let everyone down. In elementary school, I was always in awe of the tomboys among my friends who actually choose to play kickball with the boys at recess; I only played kickball when forced to by my gym teacher, and I was always the proverbially last-kid-to-be-picked. Even worse than kickball was volleyball. I had a natural reflex to duck away from a ball hurtling itself right at my face. The pain of a volleyball hitting my glasses right on the bridge of my nose is still vivid, and I probably haven’t played volleyball in thirty years. I will be quite content if I die never having played volleyball again.

In high school, I found a small niche for myself in the drama program, and never gave a thought to sports. In middle school, the basketball coach had half-heartedly tried to recruit me, simply because I was tall. But I would no sooner have joined the basketball team than a Christian youth group. As an adolescent, I was not even agnostic, not about God, not about sports: I rejected both pretty much out of hand.

So at the age of thirty-five, two miscarriages behind me and facing the stark likelihood that I would never carry a pregnancy to term, I felt pretty alienated from my body. For years I had assumed that though I was soft and not particularly strong, I had a body just meant to grow and nurture a child. Though I didn’t – and still don’t – care much at all about having a biological connection to my children, I did very much yearn to experience pregnancy and childbirth. I was sure I was going to be really good at it. As it turns out I was wrong.

I was also as heavy and out-of-shape as I’ve ever been after a couple of years of low-tech yet grueling infertility treatments, two miscarriages, depression and a sedentary desk job. I was heavy, out-of-shape, alienated from my body, disappointed that I would not experience the physical challenge of childbirth – and totally without any resources to draw from in facing those challenges. The conventional wisdom was that I should exercise, but I was so convinced that I was not an athlete, I didn’t even know where to begin.

I’m not sure what led me to my first lap around the track. That’s as far as I got that first time, one agonizing lap. A quarter mile. At the end I could barely breath and my thighs were burning. The next time I added half a lap, and the next time another, until very, very slowly-but-surely, I was up to two miles. I left the track out of sheer boredom, took to the trails in the woods, and – still the slowest runner in the park – I was, nonetheless, a RUNNER! An athlete. I would say to Julie regularly, “You know what, I think I’m actually a runner!” At first she was very encouraging, but eventually she began looking at me with a sort of “no duh!” kind of look on her face. But for the longest time I just never stopped being astonished. A runner! An athlete! Me!

Then I got a little cocky. Somewhere in the most secret recesses in my brain I began thinking that maybe I could really be a runner. Like run in races and stuff. I started looking into 5k’s, which seemed fairly reasonable, but my secret goal – unspoken to almost anyone, it seemed so absurd – was to run Broad Street, a ten mile race held every May in Philadelphia. In January, I started training in earnest.

You know what happens when athletes get cocky? They get injured. About a month before the Broad Street run, I was felled by a searing pain in my heel. I could barely walk. I had no idea at all what was wrong with me, but the pain was so excruciating and my devastation so dramatic, I feared my running career was over before it had really even begun. I was convinced that my body was never going to be my friend. Fortunately, I was wrong.

My friend Pete quickly diagnosed my malady as plantar fasciitis, and a little Googling suggested that this need not be the end of the world, though pretty clearly Broad Street was not in the cards that year (as it turns out, Broad Street has continued to elude me every year due to injuries). My Googling also suggested that if I had set out to inflame my plantar fascia, I could not have gone about it with a more targeted training program: I was running sprints, I was running up hills, I was running in sand. Oops.

It was a pretty major set-back. But confident that I would, indeed, run again, and with Pete as my coach, I set about healing my heel. First, I stopped running entirely for almost a month. I started wearing a brace at night that Pete loaned me, which kept my foot flexed. It was terribly uncomfortable, and usually I would kick it off before the night was over, but it really worked. I also got special inserts, again recommended by Pete, to put in my new gel-cushioned running shoes, which, for the first time, I actually spent some money on.

When I started running again, I started back at the beginning. Well, not all the way back, but I did go back to the track, which is soft and flat, and began with maybe a mile. I increased really slowly, and took it easy if the pain flared up. I’m not much of a stretcher, but I started taking care to do gentle stretches for the bottom of my feet. And eventually I was back up to my normal running routine, now with even bigger dreams in the secret recesses of my mind.

In my experience, plantar fasciitis is a permanent but manageable injury. My right foot flares up occasionally, usually when I get up to four miles several times a week. This just happened recently, but due to the genius of my friend and yoga instructor, Jen, I have recently had a bit of a breakthrough in my treatment. I’ve been doing private yoga once a week with Jen for several months, and because she knew I had suffered from plantar fasciitis in the past, she has been working very diligently at making sure my feet are planted very firmly and evenly on the ground, especially in my down dog.

“See that crease at your ankle when you’re bent forward?” she will ask. “Let’s make sure that’s even. Make sure your foot is evenly grounded, especially the big toe.” I knew this had something to do with my plantar fasciitis, and Jen really is a genius, so I trusted her implicitly and took care to be mindful of how my feet felt on the floor. But I wasn’t suffering from any heel pain – my running was great, though I was only going a couple of miles most of the fall – so I didn’t really get it.

Then just the other week, there it was, after just two four-mile runs, that familiar, stabbing pain in the ball of my heel. I prepared myself for a set-back, but didn’t despair. I don’t have Pete’s brace, but I started flexing my foot whenever I could. Started doing gentle foot stretches. And a new pair of shoes and new inserts are on my shopping list.

But the real key has been paying attention to my stride, both when walking and running. I tend to underpronate, especially on the right side. When I focus on making sure my foot is evenly planted on the ground, most of the pain in my heel just disappears. Since rolling to the outside of my foot feels natural for me, compensating means being especially mindful of planting my big toe firmly with each stride.

Soon I will be adding weekly Pilates sessions to my weekly yoga practice, and Jen and I continue to work on strengthening and re-orienting my legs to correct for the underpronation in my stride. And don’t tell anyone, but I think maybe I’m finally going to run Broad Street in 2010!

let's talk (some more) about sex, baby!

2009-12-04T20:22:00.003-05:00

I have a friend with whom I have frequent conversations about sex. This friend was recently describing folks he knows who are quite sexually promiscuous, and while my friend is not so interested in that sort of a sex life, he suspects God doesn’t really care all that much either. This prompted an email conversation about sexual ethics, and here’s what I wrote (in the all-lower-case type I often use in casual emails):

here's the sum total of my sexual ethics (and, i like to think, god's):

do whatever feels good, but do it with intention and care so as not to harm yourself or others. i'm suspicious of a lot of promiscuous sexual activity such as what you describe, but only because i think often folks are trying to feed themselves in unhealthy ways, without being careful of the emotional/psychological/spiritual lives of themselves and their partners -- but i don't view it as any more of a sin than any sort of mindless and careless consumption.

i also think anonymous sex is pretty problematic, because if you know nothing about your partner, by definition you can't be intentional about not doing them harm. what if this anonymous encounter is actually an act of self-hatred? i'd kinda like to know about that before i get sexually intimate with someone....

lots of folks say their needs are being met by all sorts of unhealthy stuff, so self-reporting that needs are being met is not so persuasive to me. having said that, i'm equally sure that i'm in no position to judge or to know whether someone's needs are actually being met. i'm just suspicious when someone tells me that, say, shopping or mcdonalds is good for their emotional and spiritual lives; likewise i'm a little suspicious of multiple, secret sex partners.

but i think pointing fingers and lecturing, even if you're pretty sure you're right, gets you almost nowhere. and often folks are doing the best they can with the resources they have, and taking care of themselves in the small ways they can -- and a god who loves them (and our god does) understands that. sexual promiscuity is not an unhealthy way that i feed myself, but there are plenty of others, and i'm just really grateful that there is love and salvation and forgiveness and LOVE at the end of the day and the beginning of the next one.

* * *

As they say in my kids’ school, I’m ready for questions and comments.

let's talk about sex, baby!

2009-12-03T20:57:00.005-05:00

i beg your pardon.

i never promised you a

rose-style post on sex.

a haiku or two

will have to do. oh poor you!

but here’s a sneak peek:

my ethics of sex?

have sex like people matter.

questions anyone?

How Do People Change? Why Be a Christian?

2009-12-03T09:42:00.002-05:00

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this daily Advent blogging! Especially when my friend Wanda, an ordained minister and a therapist, asks Really Big Questions like these:

1) How do people change?

2) What contributes to personal transformation process?

3) How can I be part of/helpful to the transformation process of others?

4) The exploration of above has to include relationship...

I happen to know that in asking these questions, Wanda was thinking about her conversion experience to Christianity at the age of thirteen, so when I was trying to think of a story that might illustrate what I think about personal change, my own conversion to Christianity came to mind.

That’s a long story, but don’t worry, I only want to tell you about a little part of it that came up in a conversation I had recently with Michael. Our conversation was indirectly about another Really Big Question that Michael has posed, so I think I will try to tackle them all together: If in God's grace, there are many ways to lead a good human life, why choose to be a Christian? Or is it a choice at all?

I believe that God’s grace is bigger than the church, infinitely bigger. I reject any theology in which Christ is the only source of salvation. In a nutshell, if you are not a Christian? I for one am not worried about your soul. To insist that God is so small that God cannot work outside the church is blasphemy. To insist that a handful of scriptures validates this view is idolatry piled on top of blasphemy.

So why choose to be a Christian? Why indeed. Lord knows, we Christians have mucked things up so badly for so long, I think my church friend the Reverend Joe has a point when he suggests, with some conviction, that Jesus himself wouldn’t be a Christian in these days.

Is Christianity a choice? I think it most certainly is. In my case, at least, it is, and a pretty remarkable one, and almost ridiculously unlikely, truth be told. Until just recently, my experience of faith has often made me feel like a fraud. I empathize with folks who reject the church because it is narrow and literal and hates sex and requires magical thinking. I empathize because I am not really all that different from those folks – and yet here I am, inside the church, embracing my identity as a Christian, and grateful every single day.

I think it’s actually easier to articulate “why NOT be a Christian,” even for me, than to articulate “why BE a Christian.” I couldn’t possibly tell you all the reasons why I choose to be a Christian, because it’s an experience that is always evolving, ever changing, and will likely be something I’m forever working out. I’ve written about it a bit here. I’ll no doubt be writing about it many more times. But in a nutshell, I would say that my choice to be a Christian has to do primarily with four things: relationship, ethics, story and mystery.

I am a Christian in the first instance because I married a Christian. If I had married a Jew, I would most certainly be a Jew. But I didn’t, I married the preacher’s daughter, and through her became part of a Christian community that I can’t imagine my life without. My relationships in this community – so diverse, so wide-ranging, so unlikely to ever happen in any other context – are what sustain everything else in my life. So there’s that.

I also happen to find the Christian ethic compelling, at least when it isn’t pushed aside by the idolatry of Biblicism. Of course, at its heart Christian ethics are not that different than the ethics of any other faith, or even of a secular humanism, but I find Jesus’ telling of the Christian ethic compelling. In a nutshell, I would say that ethic is, as Michael preached a couple of months ago, that “People Matter.” Simple as that.

I also love the Christian story, the incarnational messiness of it, the rhythms of its liturgical year. It is a story that gives deep and meaningful shape to my life, a story into which I continue to grow and grow.

And the growing into that story is ultimately about becoming comfortable wrestling with, but also resting in, mystery. The mystery of the Christian faith often makes me uncomfortable, but it is also what calls me to be my best self. My faith helps me give form and word to my experience of that which is ineffable and mysterious and complex.

So that is why I choose to be a Christian: relationship, ethics, story, mystery. But truth be told, it’s ultimately all about relationship. It was my relationship with Julie that got me into the church in the first place, and it is my relationships – with God, with Christ, with the Body of Christ, and with a wide-ranging community of folks both in and out of the church – that mean everything to me.

Which brings me back to Wanda’s question: How do people change? For me, at least, I need to change when my life falls short of my ethics, as articulated for me most compellingly by Jesus. I want to change because I desire my life to be part of a story that is meaningful, and compelling and rich. I am called to change when I am drawn to mystery and allowed to wrestle with it but also rest in it. But first and foremost, I change because I am in relationship – with those who challenge me to remember my ethics when I get lazy, with those who tell me stories I might not otherwise hear, with those who are not afraid of mystery and invite me in.

Relationship is everything, which makes transformation everything, which is why I am a Christian. Thanks be to God.

Scenes from a Friendship

2009-12-02T11:30:00.005-05:00

September 1983

Against his better judgment, Gordon allowed us to talk him into having our Humanities I tutorial outside, rather than in one of the small conference rooms of Lilly Library, where it was usually held.

“No good work will happen if we take the tutorial outside,” he insisted to the five of us: Jennie, Bart, Tanya, Hector and me.

We assured him that nothing could be further from the truth. “It’s so beautiful today, Gordon!” And it was, one of those idyllic September afternoons, clear blue skies, crisp dry air, a hint of red and gold in the trees that surrounded the red-brick library. “We will be entirely focused, we promise. We will not be the least bit distracted by the beauty of the day! Pleeeaaasssee?” we pleaded, like children.

“What is the point then?” Gordon deadpanned. “Nothing good ever comes of taking class outside.” Nonetheless, we prevailed. As it turns out, Gordon was probably right, because I only recall two things after we went outside, and neither of them has anything to do with the Humanities papers we were supposed to be discussing.

The first thing I recall is what I was wearing: a blue and white striped Oxford button-down shirt with a white knit vest over it and jeans. I remember this very distinctly because just that day I had decided, for the first time since I was about thirteen, not to wear a bra, and I felt very daring, but also just a little bit self-conscious about whether it was too obvious that I did not have on a bra (hence the vest over the shirt). This memory is quite amusing to me, as very quickly – like probably the next day – I stopped caring entirely what anyone thought about whether or not I wore a bra, and I have only on very special occasions worn one since. I hate bras, and that was the momentous day that I realized that I could be liberated from such torture. Right there on the lawn outside of Lilly Library, in Gordon’s Humanities I tutorial.

The other distinct memory from that afternoon was that I asked Gordon how long he had been teaching at Earlham. “Seventeen years,” he responded, to which I not at all diplomatically noted that I was seventeen years old. Gordon looked startled, which I now understand perfectly, as I am now forty-four years old, the same age Gordon was that day.

May 1987

I was startled and honored and maybe just a little confused that Gordon invited me, along with Jennie and Anne and Ansley and … what was her name? I don’t even remember her name, but I’m pretty sure she was Jewish. Or an English major. Because everyone Gordon took out for lunch just before we graduated was either Jewish, like Gordon, or had majored in English, Gordon’s field. Everyone except me.

I had managed to take Humanities I with Gordon, because I was put in his class by some angel in the registrar’s office; and I apparently had a tiny bit of good sense myself, because I took Intro to Lit with him my sophomore year, and read Adam Bede by George Eliot, which in one fell swoop managed to change my life for the better by about a thousand percent, and which caused me in fairly rapid succession to read every other book George Eliot ever wrote. I continue to savor her books to this day. But that was the last of Gordon’s classes for me: despite some lobbying on the part of several professors, I ended up majoring in Peace and Global Studies, a decision I do not regret, although I wish I had combined it with a double major in English, since I was so close, and since I most likely would have taken more classes with Gordon if I had. I seem to recall that Gordon might even have made such a suggestion, but if he did, it was not with nearly enough force as it turns out. As I recall, in fact, Gordon was actually lobbying me on behalf of a colleague in the Political Science department, who may have thought “peace” was a nice extra-curricular activity, but not something serious students actually majored in.

“Bob Johnstone wants me to tell you that you should not major in Peace and Global Studies. He thinks you are being overly influenced by George Lopez’s charisma, and that you should major in Political Science instead. I promised him I would tell you that, and now I have. But I think you should major in whatever you want to major in, though of course, it would be best if you also majored in English.” And of course, he was right, but I didn’t. I didn’t even take Gordon’s Judaism class, which in retrospect is inexplicable and inexcusable, especially given that I pretty much only hung out with Jews back then, and went regularly to Shabbat at Jew House, or, in a pinch, said Sabbath prayers with Jennie over pizza and beer of a Friday night. I even courted Julie, the pastor’s daughter, with a picnic of matzo and cheese because I was keeping kosher for Passover with Jennie and Cassie.

But I was not a Jew; in fact, I was a Quaker. I had become a Quaker in my Junior year because I loved agitating about peace; and because I actually believed in the Inner Light (still do) and that Truth could be discerned through consensus (which I also still believe, though damn it’s hard, and I’m pretty sure that the best you get is still little “t” truth); and because I just gloried in silence -- gorgeous, lovely, deep, gathered silence. But truth be told, I was really a Quaker -- and a Peace Studies major, for that matter -- because I was being overly influenced, not by George Lopez’s charisma (though he WAS charismatic, it’s true), but rather by the sad eyes and quiet wisdom and wry wit of another professor, who shall remain unnamed. This other professor, I loved him so much. He meant the whole world to me.

Which meant, among other things, that I didn’t take any more classes with Gordon after Intro to Lit first term of my sophomore year. But he still invited me out to lunch with Anne and Jennie and Ansley…. and what WAS her name? Curly hair, maybe just the tiniest hint of a lisp? She wore flowy scarves draped artfully yet casually … It’s going to drive me crazy. Anyway, I was most certainly the lone Quaker PAGS major at that graduation lunch with Gordon, and the honor of that was not lost on me (especially because by then, that other professor had dumped me, being first quite annoyed when I offered a feminist critique of his syllabus, and then totally freaking out when I came out to him as a lesbian).

(Toby, that was her name.)

May 1997

At our tenth reunion, Cassie and I unexpectedly bumped into that other professor off campus after our class’s reunion dinner. Cassie and I had been roommates in college for three years. We were also both PAGS majors, and we were affectionately known by that other professor as “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” or, alternately, “The Gruesome Twosome.” We were pretty inseparable a lot of the time, especially in PAGS circles. Ten years after our graduation, Cassie had just finished a Ph.D. in sociology and was working as a research assistant for Jonathan Kozol, the renowned writer and education activist. I was about to graduate from law school, and Julie and I had just had a baby. As we stood on the sidewalk in downtown Richmond, that other professor turned his back to me – literally -- and gushed to Cassie: “Everyone in the department is just SO PROUD of you!” On and on. A doctorate from Boston College! Jonathan Kozol! What an honor! Cassie was mortified as he proceeded to ignore me, and failed to ask anything about my life.

The next day Jennie and I went to visit Gordon, and when he turned his attention to me, he pretty much only wanted to talk about Trixie, who was all of six weeks old. He was also very glad to hear that I had loved law school, but it was clear that Gordon thought being a parent was just the best thing in the whole world, and he was genuinely thrilled for us. His delight would have been touching under any circumstance, but given the context – entirely unknown to Gordon – his kindness moved me almost to tears.

October 2007

Jennie made a date for me and Julie and Ansley and Melissa to accompany her on a visit with Gordon, now retired, on the Saturday afternoon of our twentieth reunion. I needed a safety pin and Micah needed to work out some energy, so I offered to take him on his scooter up to the bookstore on campus, and meet them a little later at Gordon’s house. It was another perfect autumn day, and I was happy to have a few moments alone – or as alone as one can be with an energetic four year old – in the midst of so much talking and catching up. I was looking forward to seeing Gordon, but other than a few letters we had exchanged almost a decade ago, I hadn’t really stayed in touch.

When we arrived, Micah joined his cousin Gillie in the grandchild-friendly basement, and I jumped right into the conversation about, not surprisingly, books. Gordon loves books more than anyone I know. I recently saw a long-lost friend from college days, who never had a class with Gordon, but who still remembers a lecture he gave to the college in which he confessed his despair that he will never have enough time to read everything he wants to read. And everyone who went to Earlham College in the forty years that Gordon taught there remembers him as the guy who always had his nose in a book as he walked across campus.

“Do you ever miss teaching Gordon?” asked Ansley.

“You know, I had an almost perfect career, a career most professors can only dream of. I loved teaching very much,” said Gordon. “But I love reading even more.”

I wasn’t surprised that Gordon was talking with a bunch of now-middle-aged former students about books, but I was surprised that he hadn’t changed at all. He looked exactly the same as he does in my mind’s eye on that September morning outside Lilly Library in 1983. He had on jeans, and a polo shirt, and tennis shoes, just as he always does, and he was very fit, and prone to the same bouts of understated, wry laughter that interrupt his otherwise typical deadpan. It was very comforting.

The way Gordon loves books is infectious. Of course, I love books too, and upon joining the conversation, my desire to talk about books with Gordon suddenly felt insatiable. I regretted having delayed my arrival for a safety pin, of all things, and I jumped right in, quizzing Gordon about what he was reading, what would he recommend on this topic and that. Finally Gordon confessed that he writes a short review of everything he reads, and if I would like he could print out a copy of, say, the past year’s reviews.

“Yes please!” I said, and we all followed him into his study, a large, sunny room with built-in bookshelves on every wall except the one with large windows, under which is Gordon’s desk, covered with photos of his four children and eight grandchildren.

“So, you just write a review of everything you read?” I asked. “Just for the hell of it?”

“Well actually, I am part of a small group of readers who write such reviews. We email them to each other,” Gordon explained as he printed out pages and pages for me, over one hundred reviews already from 2007 alone.

“Can I join that group?” I blurted out.

In retrospect, I am a little mortified that I so impulsively invited myself into his book group. As it turns out, this group consists almost entirely of Gordon’s family, and for the most part only he and his wife write reviews. It was entirely possible – likely even – that such an impertinent request would not have been welcomed from a former student with whom Gordon had been out of touch for a decade. But Gordon is nothing if not gracious, and the next day, after reading all of Gordon’s reviews straight through, in one sitting, I sent off three reviews of my own.

October 2009

If I neglected Gordon for ten years between reunions, I have more than made up for it with my relentless pestering in the past two years. I review everything I read without fail, becoming the second most prolific reviewer in the group, right after Gordon. But even more satisfyingly, Gordon and I have struck up a correspondence via email – always starting with books, but continuing in free-ranging conversations about politics, family, religion, you name it. I sometimes find myself worried that I’m gushing, but I just can’t help it, I enjoy our conversations so much.

And now I am sitting on Gordon’s living room sofa, legs curled under me, a pile of knitting in my lap. Jennie and I are staying with Gordon and his wife for the weekend, to visit with them and one another, Richmond being almost halfway between Iowa and Philadelphia. We’ve made a dinner of quiche and roasted sweet potatoes, and have settled down with glasses of good beer and several hours of conversation ahead of us.

I have no idea where Bart, Tanya or Hector are, but Gordon, Jennie and I? Twenty-six years later, we’re still sitting around, talking about books.

Don't Be Afraid To Ask

2009-12-01T04:57:00.006-05:00

Yesterday on Facebook, I solicited topics for my daily Advent blogging. (What? You're not my Facebook friend? Why not? We have too much fun over there, you should definitely be my friend.)

First my friends thought I was only going to blog about Advent, and I received these questions:

Chris asked: Do you have any decorations or ornaments of personal spiritual or familial importance?

Melissa asked: What are your thoughts on Santa? Do you have a philosophy about gift-giving (i.e. something to read, something to wear, etc.)?

Jennie asked: What, really, is advent :)

Then I clarified that I was soliciting topics about anything and everything, not just Advent. I imagined, however, that I would get topics I might at least be a tiny bit qualified to answer, like, "How do you get a really good crust on a loaf of French bread?" or "Do you think charter schools poach the best students and teachers from the public schools?" or "What is your ethics of sex?" Instead, right out of the gates, I get Really Big Questions from two of my favorite people, who happen to be far better qualified than I am to tackle such issues:

Michael (Old First pastor) asked: 1) Why does the contemporary church so often fail to assist people to develop faith, deepen spirit, walk a different way of life? 2) If in God's grace, there are many ways to lead a good human life, why choose to be a Christian? Or is it a choice at all?

Wanda (member of Old First, ordained clergy, therapist) asked: Here's a cluster of wonderings I've pondered since age 13:
1) How do people change?
2) What contributes to personal transformation process?
3) How can I be part of/helpful to the transformation process of others?
4) The exploration of above has to include relationship...

Then the sort of amazing conversation ensued that is one of the reasons I love Facebook (and think we need an Old First blog, don't you think?)

In reply to Wanda, Michael commented: Marta, here's my take on Wanda's question # 3: the best way for me to help others is to work on myself, and as I change, that enables them to change themselves...

... to which Mark (a friend from high school) responded: Wanda, Michael, Marta: Just a thought and I am nowhere near a theologist, but do we need to change at all, aren't we suppose to be what God made us! If you were to change me wouldn't you be changing what God made! I don't know, just asking. What also would you transform me into, something that YOU want me to be? Who decides what or who I should be?

... to which Michael commented: Mark, don't know about you, but there are some ways I know I need to change or wish i could change. While God loves me as I am, that involves God's forgiveness as there is some distance between where I am and where God made me to be. Traditional theology calls it sin. I find separation a better idiom-- separation from God, from my neighbor, from myself, where I could be. In everyday langague, it's just about falling short...

Wanda added: Oh no I don't want to change anyone. And don't think I can change anyone anyway. My wonderings have more to do with thinking about these things as I experience myself changing, or have seen others change or meet people who want to change. Comes out of my "conversion" (for lack of a better word) at age 13 and then wondering for lo these many years since "what was THAT all about?" (Actually I do want to change some people but that's a whole other topic than what i'm referring to here.)

And then Ellen (one of my oldest friends) chimed in: Are you all trying to get a former Presbyterian/current Quaker to start going to church again? First, it was just the music, but if this is what you talk about at Old First, it seems like we all should come (at least for a visit). Michael, I love the idea of separation as opposed to sin. Thanks for that and also for including my family on your prayer list this week. OK -- Marta -- if you are going to tackle the Virginity problem [see below], how about the "why is there suffering" problem?

At which point, two things come to mind. First, how much do I love my church, huh? And second, clearly I'm already in way over my head with this Advent blogging!

Fortunately, Suzanne, Jennifer and Lilian have all asked reasonable questions that are right up my alley:

Suzanne asked: I loved your piece on the Resurrection Problem. Could we have a follow on the Virginity Problem?

Jennifer asked: My goodness! Marta, a gift for you.... Please blog about Julie's beer making. Yes, just the beer making...hops and barley. Not the microcosmic implications of Julie's beer on faith paradigms or the greater human psyche......just the beer.

Lilian asked: I'm curious to hear more your thoughts on Catholicism and your spiritual journey (you've mentioned something about this sometime back).

Virginity (as problem), beer, and Catholicism -- maybe I should try to tie those all into one essay. Except no, I have clear instructions from Jen: just the beer.

So, how 'bout you? Anything you'd like to add to the list? There's nothing you can't ask, and little I won't answer.

Diary of a Mad Housewife: A Monday Morning List

2009-11-30T06:40:00.013-05:00

Edited in red to end the day.

Edited in blue for a mid-day check-in.

Yesterday Michael preached a great sermon (it will be up on the Pastor's Page of the Old First website eventually) that was in part a Buddhist meditation that could have been entitled "Be Here Now." Michael didn't talk about it in those terms, but yesterday at Old First, Jesus was a Buddhist. Which, now that I think of it, our friend Joe insists on every chance he gets. And Joe is an ordained UCC minister! Perhaps you see why I love my church.

Anyway, Michael spoke of how paralyzing our daily worries and anxieties can be, how sometimes he feels himself distracted by this thing pulling him this way, and before he can really attend to it that thing is pulling him that way, until eventually he's just standing there shaking. I know that feeling all too well.

Lists are my solution. I love lists, I need lists, I thrive on lists. Come to think of it, lists are a sort of daily liturgy for me, a kind of prayer or meditation. A good day almost always starts with a list. I keep my lists in my day planner, which is just a grid-lined Moleskine notebook in which I have written the date on the outer top corners. If you want to know how I'm doing, just flip through my day planner; if there are many days in a row without a list, it's not such a good sign.

So here's my list for today (in no particular order, and imagine a hand-drawn square in front of each item, in which I will put a very satisfying check mark upon completion; also note that I will not finish all of this, but whatever does not get done today will just roll over to tomorrow):

~ morning chores check

~ breakfast for all check

~ pack three lunches check

~ clean kitchen check

~ make beds check

~ hang up clothes from day before check

~ wipe down bathroom (sink, toilet) check

~ clean house

~ clear surfaces in living/dining rooms check

~ dust check

~ tidy basement check

~ basement bathroom check

~ micah's room check

~ vacuum everywhere check

~ clean out fridge check

~ compost!

~ bake bread on first rise check

~ finish laundry almost done check

~ make chicken broth chicken is thawing check

~ what's for dinner? two kinds of homemade ravioli just one kind, but check (and yum!)

~ make grocery list (milk, ricotta, mushrooms, parm, toilet paper, cleaning supplies) check

~ stop by kids' school to sign something that needs board signature check

~ go grocery shopping -- check

~ read and/or work on poncho

~ map out the rest of the week and make a list check

~ balance checkbook

~ sort through stack of mail check

~ go through visa bill for reimbursements I need to give various folks

~ cancel cable

~ sign up for netflix

~ call verizon about landline/wi-fi

~ increase minutes and text plan on cell phones

~ edit letter for michael check

~ evening chores

~ clean kitchen check

~ tidy surfaces in living/dining rooms check

~ take down any laundry on the line not dry yet

The Cost and Joy of Discipleship: Advent Reflections

2009-11-29T06:11:00.007-05:00

Do you ever wake up on a Saturday morning, and your body and your mind are all oriented toward getting up and going to work; maybe you're anticipating the day with dread, maybe with eagerness, but either way, you're gearing up, lingering in the warmth of the duvet for just a few more minutes .... and then you realize it's Saturday. You know that delicious feeling in the first few moments when you realize you don't have to get up? When the whole orientation of your body and mind shifts? You rest back into the warmth, your face and body relaxes, maybe you sigh and smile, and your mind turns with a different, slower sort of anticipation ... of more sleep, or a pancake breakfast, family time, domestic chores.

That's what Advent always feels like to me. I've always loved new beginnings, that back-to-school feeling of new clothes and blank copy books, freshly sharpened pencils, everything new and fresh and full of hope and anticipation. I love the new calendar year in the same way, that sense that everything is possible with a fresh start, last year's failed resolutions be damned! But as someone relatively new to observing the Christian liturgical year, Advent -- a season of anticipation that also begins the new church year -- often creeps up on me. It's like this little gift of a new beginning, tucked between back-to-school in September and the New Year in January, all the more fresh and delightful because I often sort of forget about it, especially when it falls so closely on the heals of Thanksgiving, as it has this year.

So this morning I woke up, early as usual, made coffee and began noodling around on Facebook as is my usual morning routine, thinking about getting ready for church, getting myself oriented toward the busyness of a Sunday morning for my family -- and then I remembered: it's the first Sunday in Advent.

And what a delightful moment when I realized, because I love Advent! Advent is about nesting, full of domestic chores as we prepare our home to welcome a new child in the bleak midwinter. Advent is the most female of the liturgical seasons, pregnant and full with heavy, round bellies. I used to think Advent should be so quiet and peaceful and contemplative, and was often annoyed by how busy and hectic and even cranky it can be, especially as Christmas gets near. But if you've ever known a woman in the last few weeks of pregnancy, no matter how much she has loved being pregnant, she just wants that baby out NOW. She's usually tired, uncomfortable, and a little cranky that this child still hasn't made its appearance. Mary may be the very mother of God, but I doubt she was any different. Advent is her ninth month of pregnancy, and ours too. We may not have a baby Jesus pressing on our bladders and our sciatic nerves, but we ought to have him pressing in other ways that make us a little uncomfortable and tired as we wait with eager anticipation for his arrival, for all the freshness and mystery -- not to mention all the hard work -- that a new child brings.

A couple of years ago in Advent, I made a discipline of going to noon Mass almost every day. It was lovely, and sort of gave structure to the otherwise chaotic nature of this busy season leading up to Christmas. One of the things I'm preparing for in the New Year is to get more serious about my writing, and so for my Advent discipline this year, I am planning to blog every day.

That's a lot of blogging, especially for me. So if you have anything you've been dying to ask me about, now's the time. Ask away -- as those who know me well can attest, there's very little I'm not willing to blather on about!