For the Ash Wednesday service tonight at the Congregational Church of Patchogue, Pastor Dwight invited us to compose prayers around the events in Ukraine. In the spirit of the season of atonement, I wrote this one.

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God, we want to see ourselves in the resisters and the freedom fighters.

But we need to see ourselves in the invaders, also.

Where in our hearts do we need to root out excuses for violence? The tendencies to invade and colonize, to take what is not our own? The refusals to consider other claims, to share or to gracefully yield?

Root this sin from Putin’s heart, and from mine.

Protect those who desire peace, and those who, in the coming days, may regret the harm they have caused or are positioned to cause.

In the name of the One who refused violence.

Amen.

“We have grown far from the dirt,” Roy said, in his sermon a few weeks ago, and while I know what he means, I myself never feel very far from the dirt.  Certainly not while watching Zoom church, which I’ve been doing in my home office space next to my Boston ferns, just barely holding on through the winter and shedding fronds at an alarming pace, while ensuring that Junia doesn’t eat stickers off the floor or color on the walls.

Later in the service, Valerie said, “Lord, you made everything and called it good.” Including, presumably, the dirt in all its forms.

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God isn’t a new concept for Junia, who was baptized, in the midst of COVID, at five weeks old.  She bounced in her carrier during Zoom church services and coffee hours.  She played in the grass during the outdoor Easter service at Orient Congregational Church.  She loves Judson, without pews and with so much space to run around and so many people to encourage her to do so, and in general, church is one of her favorite places to enjoy a few sips of breast milk. (Weaning is going great, thanks for asking.)  We pray every night before bedtime, using words I remember from my own childhood. Rachel Held Evans’s What Is God Like? is one of her favorite books.  But what really seems to have kicked her awareness of God into high gear is a little board book she got from my grandparents for Christmas, Good Night God.   We started calling the bedtime prayer “saying good night to God,” and now, when storybooks and songs conclude, we don’t have to tell her it’s time for prayers anymore.  No, now she announces it’s time for God.  Or, as she calls God, “Guy.”  “Guy!” she exclaims as we turn off the rotating night light that projects outlines of sea creatures onto the ceiling, and we say, Yes, time for Guy.  I mean, God.

Continue reading “Guy Loves You: Vignettes from Winter 2022” →

I watched church the week before, too, but I couldn’t write about it.  Between crying at how much I missed being in a space with other people and trying to stop Junia from launching herself off the sofa, I can’t say I took many notes or thought too deeply about it.  This past week, though, I was prepared.  I had a pile of paper from my old life, handouts from classrooms I used to visit and agendas from meetings I used to attend, ready for her to scribble upon.  I moved the church viewing area to my home office, where she could sprawl out on the floor or run around the upstairs reasonably safely when not sitting on my lap and waving at the Zoom boxes on the laptop screen.  Still, even watching church from home is an effort.  But I need to make it.  There is a sea wall that being in community seems to build for me, one that is constantly under attack from the wind and waves of the tragedy, cruelty, and bullshit the world at large has to offer.  I share some thoughts and hopes with others, take some of theirs home with me, and, maybe while I’m sleeping or drawing a crayon picture of a cat or cooking another meal destined to go only half-eaten, those thoughts and hopes fill the cracks in the wall.

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 1/16/22: Accepted” →

I attended Micah’s workshop on prayer tonight, and the hands-on part of the workshop was a chance to write our own “tiny prayers,” loosely following a structure Micah often employs in his own prayers.  I thought I’d share what I wrote there because it was really nice to finish something!

A tiny prayer for anyone who, for any reason, needs time to figure out what comes next

May you find the energy to get up just a little early or stay up just a little late;
May you find the courage to leave just one thing a little less than done or perfect;
May you trust someone to pick up what you lay down.

May you receive the gift of that time, or borrow it or steal it;
In stillness and memory, may you recollect the times when your heart’s deepest desire met the world’s deepest needs;
In community and companionship, may you be reminded of your gifts, your capacities, your powers.

And may you, after one time or one hundred times, return, nourished, energized, and committed to care;
And may you know when you don’t know,
when you need to know,
and when you don’t need to know…

…what comes next.

Amen.

Photo credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash 

Autumn is the earth announcing its own impending sabbath, or it ought to be: the leaves lighting up in their familiar array of crimson and gold, the light fading earlier and earlier each day, the last of the small green figs on the tree in the backyard turning a streaky purple.  Here, the earth is saying, I will not leave you without this particular beauty, but I am going to lie fallow for a time, let you enjoy the warmth and bounty of each other from your windows while I lean your half away from the sun and your southern brethren towards it. Good night and good luck, see you in the spring.

This isn’t quite true, of course.  Mycelia continue to snake beneath the soil; perennial bulbs assemble the shoots and sprouts that will reveal themselves after the thaw; animals digest the fat they store up in the fall to sustain them until the planet tilts again.  Still, at least it’s poetic, a nice story to tell over pumpkin spice lattes in our chunky sweaters, the ones that will look heavy and tired by March.

The actual state of things is a bit more complicated.  We wrapped up a four-part series, structured around the four classical elements of water, fire, air, and earth, this week at church as we listened to the Gospel of Joni Mitchell: Don’t it always seem to go/that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?  Do we?  One of the major lessons from the series has to be that there is no rest for the church around climate.  If life on Earth actually becomes too grueling for a critical mass of humanity, Pastor Dwight asked, how is the Christian church to respond?  The Bible, ambiguous to be sure on a great many things, is clear on this much: the Second Coming is not a reprieve.  We will not be spared the consequences of our greed, our shortsightedness, our apathy—not by the planet and not by God.

Continue reading “Take Me to Church October 2021: …Till It’s Gone” →

The first dress I put on this morning was missing a button. I found another dress to wear, but the missing button was a harbinger of discomfort and frustration to come: the shoes that rubbed a blister on the back of my heel, the hem of the second dress that felt a little too short, the cool breeze that stopped just short of actually refreshing in the humid late summer air. It’s Labor Day Weekend, and above all I should be resting, but I’m tormented by the thought of the pleasant barista at the coffee shop down the street from the church we started attending in our still-new-to-us town. She should be resting, too. Why was she making me a butterbeer latte on Sunday morning? Why, in my struggle to avoid shopping during the long weekend, did my post-church coffee run not count? I didn’t think of it, and thinking of it now only makes me more tired and more in mind of total depravity.

Pastor Dwight spoke on Ecclesiastes, but I can’t cite more than that because I spend the first thirty minutes of each church service wrangling Junia until the church is ready to reopen their nursery post-COVID (if we are ever post-COVID) and until we’re ready to leave her in the undoubtedly good hands of the volunteers there, and I didn’t catch the citation. (Dakota takes over when the bell chimes ten-thirty.) But Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about work: “So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot” (3:22), for example. That seems like a fine place to start.

Continue reading “Take Me to Church 9/5/21: All These Things That I’ve Done” →

Forget what J.D. Vance and the Post would have you believe: it’s still perfectly safe to picnic with your little ones in Washington Square Park.  I know, because I tested this theory with my tender thirteen-and-a-half-month old just this past Sunday, and she danced to “Johnny B. Goode” in front of the fountain and even tipped the piano player (with my money, of course, but it’s the practice that matters at this point; if you enjoy the busker, pay the man!).  I didn’t doubt it, not exactly, but the rumors do reach one even all the way out here in the sticks of Suffolk County, and I wanted to believe I’d find the park more or less the same when I got there this past Sunday.  And there they were: chalk artists, chess hustlers, dog walkers, vendors selling pins and balloons…all in their places, all right with the world.

We were there to celebrate our return to in-person worship, of a sort, after sixteen long months away.  The prerecorded service, interspersed with Mumford and Sons and Earth, Wind, and Fire videos, played on the wall below the rose window while a group of us watched and prayed, or didn’t pray, beneath.  And one of us took the opportunity to run some laps, and two more of us took the opportunity to chase her.  You will be able to figure out who.

Continue reading “Take Me (Back) to Church 7/11/21: Out of the Cave” →

 

It’s Thursday, and I’ve just finished watching Faith’s sermon from Sunday, which tells you something all by itself.  It’s been a real week here.  I’m not even sure why.  Maybe this is the pandemic wall people talk and tweet about.  I feel like I can’t think of another meal to make out of the standard grocery run items, like I can’t possibly watch any more TV, like I can’t bring myself to imagine that the world might be different in just a few short months. 

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, normally a day I take reasonably seriously.  I thought of the kind priests at St. Ann’s and the Holy Trinity and held them in prayer for a moment, remembering spending Ash Wednesday with them, however briefly, during the past two years.  They would offer ashes and space for meditation and prayer all day, and I would stop in on my lunch hour, since I was always passing through downtown Brooklyn one way or the other because of work.  (Remember work?  Remember passing through places, hopping from one neighborhood and borough to another, sometimes several in one day, on the bus and the subway?  Remember the warm glow of stained glass between stone walls, remember hot noodles in a cardboard box with a sticker on top?)  None of the Protestant churches around here were offering a daytime or outdoor service, and I missed church on Ash Wednesday for the first time in at least a few years.  The day was dull.  Even the ducks we visit a few times a week during our walks to the lake couldn’t be bothered to make an appearance yesterday.

Continue reading “Take Me to Church 2/14-18/21: How it Would Feel to Be Free” →

Valerie preached on Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”  today, a fine centerpiece for the first Sunday of Black History Month—especially in 2021, when we are so desperate for change, large and small.  Cooke himself, not only as a Black man in the mid-twentieth century but as a father grieving the death of a young son, knew profoundly that need for change.

And yet today’s Ancient Testimony was John 1:1-5: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  I associate John 1:5 with the beginning of the Christmas Eve liturgy in my ELCA church, and I often forget completely that the verse is not from the Christmas story at all.  John also writes in the past tense for the first four verses, and then switches to the present continuous: The light shines, the darkness has not overcome it.  The passage speaks of the constant—not merely constant, in fact, but eternal, beyond grammatical tense perhaps, outside time at all.

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 2/7/21: And the Darkness Has Not Overcome It” →

Photo: Olga Serjantu on Unsplash.

There was a first time to speak publicly even for Jesus, a first time to demand attention and claim authority.  Yesterday’s testimony from the Gospel of Mark related that story, in which Jesus teaches in the synagogue and drives out an “unclean spirit.”  Onlookers were amazed—by what, really, I wonder?  Was it a supernatural intervention that drove out the spirit, or was it Jesus’s audacity in that moment—not merely authority but authorship? 

Micah was preaching on theopoetics yesterday, and not for the first time—not even the first time he preached about it and I noted the occasion.  But it was fresh for me nonetheless.  Eight months into motherhood and nearly eleven months into the pandemic, I find myself professionally and creatively rudderless, obviously with plenty of energy to give but deeply lacking in direction.  When I care for the baby, I try to practice a certain amount of loving nonattachment, as paradoxical as that sounds—I need to get out of her way sometimes, literally and metaphorically.  She is on her own journey, and I tell her often that as long as she is honest and kind, she can be whoever and whatever she needs to be, and I will be proud of her.  I figure that I can start practicing that nonattachment now, which is sometimes harder than it looks.  She took a tough fall at one point today, as she does with increasing frequency while practicing standing and walking, and I dearly wanted to just hold her for a while and encourage her to cuddle a plushie and read a book or two.  But she doesn’t like to stay still for long, and although she tolerated The Very Hungry Caterpillar, she made it clear that she was ready to be on the move again as soon as we were finished.  And I had to watch her pull herself up on her Pikler triangle yet again, and prepare for her to tumble yet again, and accept that she is on her own journey.  This nonattachment leaves me with further paradoxes: I spend most of my days guiding and nurturing a child who will be her own creation; I have so much energy, so much will, but so little authority, or authorship.  

Continue reading “(Don’t) Take Me to Church 1/31/21: Once More with Authority” →