My Kid

No -- no startling new revelations here.

I'm talking about my Angel Tree kid.

Our local DHS office puts up two Angel Trees at two different businesses in town. Each tree is covered with the gift requests of needy children in our county. Back in more flush times you'd also find requests from older teens and adults; in the last couple of years, because of our tanking local economy, and because shoppers are less likely to buy gifts for other adults, you just see the kids' requests. And the wish lists have changed too; a lot fewer items, as if the children were coached by their caseworker to keep their requests modest.

One Angel Tree contains tags with just a number, an age and a wish; you purchase the items the kid wants and take them to the service desk. The other Angel Tree includes the kids' first names on the tags, and asks that the presents be wrapped.

So, anyhow, I randomly pulled off a tag on the second tree, the more personalized tree, and found that I had picked a six-year-old girl with a lovely, unusual name that I will not use here; I'll call her Leila instead. And the first thing, the most important thing, that I noticed about Leila was that she had no special request for a Christmas present. Someone had noted that she needed some clothes; you know a six-year-old didn't request those. But no wishes for the Hot Toy Du Jour or toys or books or the other things that kids tend to want. Nothing. Nada.

It could be that Leila is disabled in some way and lives in a twilight world without wishes other than basic human comforts. But it could also be that Leila is simply a sad little girl with no expectations at Christmastime. And frankly I don't know which alternative breaks my heart more.

When I was six, I spent much of November compiling long, detailed wish lists from Sears, Penney's and Monkey Ward, the old trinity of Christmas catalogs. Not that I always got what I wanted, mind you -- the primary object of my holiday desire from toddlerhood to puberty, which was never fulfilled, was a science kit with a microscope; a topic that is still a somewhat sensitive one around the LutheranChik household -- but I always got something; and I always got enough to fuel my hopes for another year.

What do you buy a little kid who can't imagine getting a Christmas present?

Advent Calendars

When I was little, I knew it was Christmastime when my aunt brought out her very old Advent calendar and set it on her parlor windowsill. It was heavy cardboard, covered in tarnished glitter, and showed a picture of Mary and Joseph on their journey to Bethlehem. I can't even remember what was printed behind each door.

These days I'm rather fond of online Advent calendars. And here, for your own viewing pleasure, are some interactive online calendars I found surfing:

St. Margaret Mary Parish Advent Calendar

Grace Cathedral Advent Calendar (This one needs a DSL connection)

New York Carver Advent Calendar For all the medievalists out there, enjoy!

Teme Valley South Advent Calendar

Episcopal Diocese of Washington Advent Calendar

It's a little ironic to me that, considering the northern European love of Advent calendars, more Lutherans haven't created online versions. What's up with that, Lutheran 'puter geeks?

Mystery Date

I have a mystery date this Sunday, front and center at church, when our congregation's lay ministry graduate and candidates will help lead our service.

My pastor is supposed to call me sometime this week and tell me what role it is, exactly, that I'll be playing. That's kind of how it works at our place. (I have to get offline for awhile -- Ye Olde Dialup Connection and shared phone line -- so I can take the call.)

Know what I want to do? I want to lead the Prayers of the Church. I haven't done that in a long, long time. It's one of my favorite parts of the service anyway. It's a privilege.

Yup; that's what I want to do, this time around. Wonder what I'll be doing instead?

In Search of the Lost Minor Chord

This Sunday we sang not one, but two of my favorite hymns, both oldies but goodies: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and Soul, Adorn Thyself With Gladness. (The latter sung to a tune called "Schmuecke dich" -- fun to say, and the music is a pleasure to sing.) For the past few weeks now I notice we've had some of the venerable hymns familiar to cradle Lutherans interspersed with newer additions to our hymnal. And people are liking it...minor chords, solemn tempos and all. They belt 'em out. At one point, surprised by the sound of my own often anemic voice, I looked around to see other enthusiastically singing parishoners looking around too, in what seemed to be genuine surprise: Do we really sound like this? Wow.

You know those T-shirts that say "Art Can't Hurt You"? Here is my shocking proposition, directed to church music directors everywhere: Minor chords can't hurt you. The folks in the pews aren't going to melt, or stampede en masse, if you play them once in awhile. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy the broadening of our hymnody to include newer hymns and hymns from other cultures. But please don't forget the great old hymns of our tradition. They deserve to be sung.

Monday Morning Postscripts

Just a couple of bits of mental housecleaning this foggy Monday morning here in Outer Podunk, as I'm working up to getting ready for work:

An addition to my shop-in-yer-jammies post: Higher Grounds Coffee , located in Leland, MI -- one of my favorite getaway places -- is another great coffee purveyor that sells exclusively fair trade coffee. The company was featured on our local news this morning because it's selling a special decaf coffee blend to help fund a clean water project for its coffee growers in Mexico...it needs to sell a few more pounds of fundraising beans to reach its $8,000 goal. Higher Grounds hasn't updated its website to include this new blend, but if you e-mail the company you can find out more. Higher Grounds also has partnership programs if your church, workplace or organization would like to sell its products as a fundraiser. Check 'em out.

A few more garage-moment songs: One of our local PBS stations reprised its Veterans Day programming last night with a program featuring favorite songs and dance tunes of World War II, which I enjoyed muchly -- gotta add "I'll Be Seeing You" to my all-time favorites list. And even though it's not a song -- "Sing! Sing! Sing!" -- you can't just turn that tune off, no way, nohow. And I'll sit in the garage for many classics of the Motown songbook -- "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," "Reach Out," "Stop in the Name of Love," many more.

And speaking of music...if you've collected music over the years that you haven't listened to for awhile, it can be fun to pull a random cassette out of the basement box once in awhile for old time's sake. I've been doing this (the Intr pid having an old-tech tape deck), and rediscovering some good music, as well has having a few "What was I thinking?" moments. On the way to church yesterday I listened to an old Bob Dylan tape, "Another Side of Bob Dylan," that I think I originally retrieved from a $3.99 bargain bin back in my college days -- grooving to favorites like "It Ain't Me, Babe" and forgotten songs like "To Ramona," chuckling over some of the dated hipster language and basically enjoying the lyrics. Dylan describing a woman's lips as "wet and weird" -- jarring at first hearing, but after thinking about it, the phrase had an almost Beowulf ring to it, as if Bob had been French-kissed by Grendel's mama. Well, who knows what he was smoking back in those days.

UPDATE: I fixed my link. Thanks, Gene!

The First Candle Is Lit...

V Help, O King
R Shepherd of Israel, Hosannah!

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Psalm 80

V Blessed is our God who inhabits the highest heavens, blessed is he, and blessed is the kingdom of our father David which is coming.

R Amen. Thanks be to God.


my Advent wreath 

The God Who Comes Down

My Lord, what a morning!
My Lord, what a morning!
Oh, my Lord, what a morning!
When the stars begin to fall.

We sang this old African-American spiritual this morning in church. We also sang the European spiritual "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." Two songs with origins in very different cultural contexts, but both expressing the same longing -- what someone has called the "eschatological itch."

Ever feel that itch? I feel it, sometimes, watching the evening news, with its nightly illustrated litany of global misery and violence and stupidity. As I hear about the latest degradations of people and planet, I find myself thinking: How bad does it have to get?

Today in his sermon my pastor noted that he finds the end-of-the-world scenarios described here and elsewhere troubling; hard to read. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I'm an earth-dweller. I love it here." Now, I'm on the same page with my pastor most of the time, and I agree with him that today's Old Testament and Gospel texts make me wince...but for a different reason. I find my natural skepticism running up against the promise made time and time again in Scripture that, no matter how it may seem to us, history is ultimately in God's hand; that, in the end, "all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well." Some days, frankly, that seems just too good to be true.

I don't even try to speculate on the how's and when's of the denouement of the human story; as we read in today's Gospel lesson (and contrary to the purveyors of pop Christianity), it's an exercise in futility. I can't wrap my head around stuff like this anyway. For me it's a topic that leads to 2 a.m. "What sort of religious craziness have you gotten yourself into?" second-guessing; been there, done that, very wearying of mind and soul, don't want to do it again.

But what I can maybe hang onto by a quivering fingernail or two is the idea that God, for whatever God's reasons, wants us to know that we are not alone on this journey, as difficult and dangerous as it may be. That God wants us to know this so much that God "came down" -- not only down from God's glory, God's otherness, but down the same birth canal we all travel, down and out, bloody and bawling. And that God grew up as one of us and lived with us for 30-some years, and then died, the way we all die; and more than that, died in the way that the least among us die -- alone, abandoned, in pain, wondering why.

The other Sunday, in talking about Jesus' kenosis, his emptying of self into the human experience, my pastor wondered how our lives might be different if, every day in this time between the now and the not-yet, we looked for opportunities to show Jesus that his coming down and emptying out of himself on our behalf was worth it. Between you and me, threats of impending apocalyptic doom don't do a lot to bring me closer to Christ; but the thought of letting Christ down in the time that I have on this planet -- which is now over a decade more than his time -- gives me pause.

The late theologian Dorothee Soelle wrote that she was a Christian because she didn't want Jesus to suffer alone for his proposition. Today, beginning the journey of Advent, looking back to that first time of waiting and longing even while living with our own waiting and longing -- even as we may struggle with the question of how our lives matter in the greater scheme of things -- I want to respond to God's coming down for us in a way that says, "It was worth it. It did matter. And I want to walk with you the way you've walked with me." That, I think, is going to be my spiritual, on my own path through the Advent season.

"Leonid Sunrise," photo by Wally Pacholka at Astropics  

My Shameless Holiday Commercialism Post

I did not -- would not -- take part in the Black Friday shopping madness this year, but today I found myself wandering around a local Kmart in a state of shellshock, pushed and shoved by frantic shoppers and tugged at by the Maternal Unit, who is very adamant that we invest in an artificial Christmas tree. (It didn't happen today.)

I am now sitting with my feet up, regrouping. For those of you who'd rather do your Christmas shopping sitting in your PJ's and bunny slippers, sipping coffee -- a few suggestions from me:

I've bought fair trade food products, ceramics and jewelry from A Greater Gift and have been very satisfied with both the quality and with speed of delivery. I'm putting together a "death by chocolate" Christmas basket for our office's annual Chinese gift exchange (don't ask) with help from their line of Divine chocolate products, which really are divine...most toothsome. And one of my favorite pieces of jewelry is a colorful, funky-chunky glass bead fair trade necklace from A Greater Gift.

Green Mountain Coffee rocks. And it has an extensive line of organic and fair trade coffees, including flavored blends that are sometimes hard to find elsewhere. They also sell a Heifer Hope blend that benefits The Heifer Project .

If you're able and willing to be a little spendy, a foodie friend might appreciate a gift from American Spoon Foods , out of Petoskey, Michigan, a purveyor of very tasty and unusual specialty food products, very often spotlighting Michigan produce. I recently tasted a delicious mango-jalapeno salsa from American Spoon -- obviously not a signature Michigan food, but it was mighty tasty swirled into soft cream cheese.

For that giftee who believes cleanliness to be next to godliness, a really fun website to visit is Killmaster Soapworks . I met the Soapmistress of Killmaster Soapworks at an art fair awhile back -- she and her family manage a small farm with a multitude of different livestock, and she utilizes their milk in her soaps -- she even makes a mare's milk soap. I have tried her more pedestrian oatmeal soaps and loved their scent and sudsiness. Another favorite soapmaker 'round these parts is Bedazzled of Benzonia, which makes all sorts of yummy soaps -- the minty soaps are a favorite of mine, as well as the bay rum and a pleasantly woodsy/resinous frankincense and myrrh (which isn't on the website, but I bet they'd sell it to you anyway). Bedazzled also sells candles and other products made with bee products.

Down the road from Bedazzled is the Gwen Frostic Studio , an "up north" institution. Frostic was an artist, poet and right-on woman who followed the beat of a different drum her whole life and enriched us all by doing so. Her simple and sometimes whimsical nature prints always make me long for a long weekend up by the dunes.

For tonstant weaders who enjoy my occasional stained-glass graphics -- check out the Christmas cards and other products at Stained Glass Photography . And if you enjoy Carl Larsson prints, check out Scandinavian Treasures .

And, of course, if you scroll down my blogroll, you will find my ongoing plug for the RevGals' Advent and Christmas devotional, A Light Blazes in the Darkness. Get 'em while they're hot! The've already paid for themselves, and are now raising money for hurricane relief in the Gulf. We're shooting for sales of a thousand -- help make it happen.

There -- wasn't that more fun than playing offense in the mall?

LC Does the Gospel Meme

Here's a meme that's been making the rounds: Take the month and day of your birthdate, then find the corresponding chapter and verse of each Gospel and see what that says.

I did this with my birthdate. Let's go to the videotape...

Matthew 12:26: "If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand?"

Mark 12:26: "And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?"

Luke 12:26: "If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?"

John 12:26: "Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor."

All Good Gifts

The eyes of all wait upon Thee, O Lord, and Thou givest them their meat in due season; Thou openest Thine hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing. Amen. Lord God, heavenly Father, bless us and these Thy gifts which we receive from Thy bountiful goodness; through Jesus Christ,our Lord. Amen. -- The Lutheran Hymnal, 1941

What good gifts have you been given lately?

"For a Little Card Game," Carl Larsson, Scandinavian Treasures  

Good Bread, Good Meat, Good God, Let's Eat

(Not the table grace we say at our house, by the way.)

The heavens are currently dumping snow in great quantities on our state, with more to come, so a quiet dinner at home tomorrow is starting to look pretty good. Here's what's on the menu at the LutheranChik household -- pull up a virtual chair, do the napkin tuck and enjoy!

Roast turkey breast glazed with some chi-chi-foo-foo cherry-honey mustard from northwest Michigan that I had intended to pop in a gift basket, but didn't.

Stove Top stuffing (my mother prefers Stove Top to scratch) amended with dried cherries and pecans (I prefer scratch to Stove Top)

Mashed potatoes

Whole-berry cranberry sauce

Green bean casserole, complete with crispy canned onion tidbits

Braised celery with toasted walnuts (I love cooked celery -- a vastly underrated vegetable, if you ask me)

Sweet-and-sour red cabbage

Pumpkin crisp

It ain't exactly haute cuisine -- in fact, it's neither -- but I think it'll eat just fine for the next three days.

A Paean to the Preacherly

I know that those of you who preach sometimes wonder, as you're looking out at your hearers -- perhaps to find pairs of eyes glazed over in a thousand-mile stare, or gazing longingly out a window, or looking into a purse, searching for Altoids -- if anyone is actually listening to your sermon; if what you're saying matters, or if you may as well be standing in your shower, preaching to the grout.

I'm here to tell you: Yes, it does.

The winter holidays are always something of an ordeal for me, because the cold and dark make me sad and because I always wind up having to negotiate the household celebrations with my mother. I don't know where I ever got the idea that two people living together -- especially a mother and adult daughter -- can seamlessly mesh their holiday preferences and expectations with no frayed ends, but it seems every year I endulge this fantasy, and every year I'm disappointed, and wind up grumpier than I would be anyway. Yes, I know the definition of mental illness as engaging in the same behavior over and over, expecting a different result; what can I say -- I'm a slow learner.

Today as I was pondering the days to come, a phrase suddenly popped into my head: situations and circumstances. It was something my pastor had said in passing during his sermon on Sunday. I can't even remember the larger context; I'm not sure he could either, since he'd just gotten home from a trans-Atlantic flight and sounded more than a little jet-lagged, and my own brain had pretty much turned to tapioca after an intense out-of-town lay ministry training day. But it was something about how, when we take Jesus seriously about living our faith out into the world, we are able to transcend and transform our situations and circumstances. I think that's what he said; all I remember are those three words.

And when I remembered, I had an "aha" experience; an insight into how I might better, and more prayerfully, navigate through my particular situation this year. It was uncanny. Just three words.

So for those of you who proclaim the Word: What you say does matter...perhaps not always in the way you expect it to, but in a way that results in a Godward outcome for someone else. Hey -- thanks.

Race Is the Place

Check out your local PBS station for when this Independent Lens presentation airs in your area. Thought-provoking commentary on racism in America, with some great poetry and performance art.

Talk Like a Person

(R-rated language alert for those of tender sensibilities)
I need to preface this post with the disclaimer that I am in a foul mood. It all started this morning when my dog had an accident in the hallway -- an accident I discovered by stepping on it. I thought, as I hopped to the bathroom on my other foot, "Perhaps this event is a metaphor for the rest of my day." And it kind of was.

Anyhow, not too long ago I had an agitated individual inform me, online, that I was "drinking from the cup of Satan." The discussion wasn't about what you think; it was about women's ordination. Which made me much less angry than I could have been; it was a quaint sort of rebuke, like being yelled at for advocating bloomers and bobbed hair. (Which I do, by the way.)

But what made me go all Andy Rooney cranky -- Dontcha hate it when... -- was the purple prose. What is it about religious discourse that makes certain species of Christians start spouting verbiage straight out of the Osama Bin Laden Treasury of Florid Rhetoric? This drives me nuts. Ditto the faux King James English one sometimes runs into in some Christian circles: "The Lord has lain it upon my heart to pray that your iniquity might be hedged in lest it cause the weaker sisters to stumble."

Oh, for pete's sake: Talk like a person.

(Since we are a Fair and Balanced [tm] blog, tune in next week for Talk Like a Person: Mainline Edition, where we discuss mainliners' love of jargon-dropping first-year-seminary Greek: kerygma, kairos, metanoia, et al.)

One of the things that blew my mind, when I first began exploring the muchly Brit Ship of Fools website, was the out-and-proud potty language of some of the regulars. Their main discussion forums are divided into Heaven, Purgatory and Hell; if someone behaves badly on a forum, s/he may be summoned by others to Hell, and uncensored excoriation commences. I remember the first time I read through one of the Hellish topic threads, encountering Christians whose theological and social conservatism makes me, relative moderate that I am, sound like some sort of Spongian anarchist -- persons whose American counterparts tell me that I am, verily, drinking from the cup of Satan -- screaming breathtakingly crude epithets at their antagonists: bastard; wanker; fuckwit; colorful if anatomically difficult suggestions incorporating these terms. It was -- how can I put this? -- refreshing.

If Cup-o-Satan Man had just said, "LutheranChik, you fuckwit," or some variation thereof -- well, it would have just laid his cards on the table; short and to the point. What he said instead, translated into Talking Like a Person...is pretty much the same thing. So save some keystrokes and just say what you mean.

Can You Say...Turkeys?

I just heard this statistic, from Bread for the World, today: For the average household receiving foodstamps, purchasing the food needed for a modest version of the traditional Thanksgiving meal would use up one-eighth of its monthly food stamp allotment.

Oh...and our elected officials just voted to cut the budget for food stamps.

A Few Garage Moment Songs

My friend bls started a meme awhile back asking for people's Top 20 Songs of All Time.

"Best of all time" questions always make me twitchy -- I think I'm just commitment-phobic in this regard. Because I know that, six months from now, I'll read through a "best of" list I've written and say, "What was I thinking?" And I overanalyze everything, so I've been dithering for several days thinking about, "Well, would that mean best lyrics, or best melody, or most significant for its time, or what?" (I'm really fun to live with, too.)

Anyhow, I decided to approach the question from a different angle. I thought, "What are 20 songs that, if they're playing on my radio or on a CD as I'm parking in my garage, I have to sit and listen to the end of them before I get out of my car?" So I'm going to list some Garage Moment Songs. You will note a dearth of sacred music; I think I'd want to keep them on their own Garage Moments list. (My blog, my rules.)

The Valley -- Originally by Jane Siberry, I'm especially partial to k.d. lang's cover.

Night and Day Really, pretty much the whole Cole Porter songbook. Absolutely no one could write lyrics to pop songs like Cole Porter.

In My Life and Something -- the original Beatles recording...oh, and the long version of Hey, Jude, which I have been known to sing along to, every "na."

Stormy Weather

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

The House Is Haunted -- an oldie but goodie; the Chenille Sisters and the James Dapogny Band recorded this together; their version of Johnny Mercer's "Bob White" is also garage-worthy. And then there's "The Codfish Ball" -- how can you not love a song with lyrics like, "The catfish is a dancin' man/but he can't can-can like the sardine can"?)

You've Got a Friend -- off Carole King's Tapestry album

Carolina on My Mind

Night and Day, I've Got You Under My Skin -- pretty much the whole Cole Porter catalog. No one -- no one -- could write pop music lyrics like Cole Porter.

Lorena, the old Civil War ballad of longing and loss that many of us first heard in Ken Burns' The Civil War

Boots of Spanish Leather -- Nanci Griffith's cover (which I understand the Bobster likes muchly)

Fall on Me -- REM

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, from the Rattle and Hum album, with the gospel choir backing

Lili Marlene -- Marlene Dietrich's world-weary cabaret version, of course

Summertime -- Janis Joplin's cover

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Stairway to Heaven I know -- I'm dating myself. No Bic flicking, but I still do air guitar accompaniment toward the end.

Wild Mountain Thyme "And we'll all be together/when the bloom is on the heather..." I love that song.

Song for Ireland by Mary Black -- always gives me chills down my spine.

So there's a few songs. As you've noticed, I spend a lot of time sitting in my garage.

Love Reign On Me

A famous scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" shows two grimy peasants digging in a field. One of them sees King Arthur.

"There goes the King."
"How do you know he's the King?"
"'Cause he's the only one who hasn't got shit all over him."

We do prefer our kings and queens to look the part -- powerful, dignified, clothed in a way befitting their station.

But what Jesus tells us in the Gospel lesson for Christ the King Sunday is that his presence among us is going to be in the guise -- the distressing guise, as Mother Teresa put it -- of people who look more like those ordure-caked peasants than like the triumphant Christus Rex many of our churches have suspended over their altars.

Want to see Jesus? Look at the Sudanese woman gang-raped and beaten by Jenjaweed thugs on a furtive trip to the well to get water for her family, whose plight has fallen off our radar because we've moved on to the next International Tragedy Du Jour. Want to be with Jesus? Spend some time with the poor family who've not only lost their apartment lease in New Orleans but are also being kicked out of their evacuee apartment because they haven't received their FEMA check on time. Want to honor Jesus? Go to a hospice and sit with a dying person who garners little sympathy from the public because his illness has been judged to be his own fault, whose Medicaid benefits are in jeopardy from a taxpaying public who are tired of dealing with him and people like him.

Jesus is the crazy woman wandering the alley behind the supermarket, staving off alien death rays as she forages for discarded food. Jesus is the bleeding Iraqi in triage, who may be a terrorist or may be "collateral damage." Jesus is the abused child cowering under a chair as she hears the approaching footsteps of her abuser. Jesus is the angry, scapegoating small-town guy with no job, no skills and a family to support in a new economic reality that doesn't need him. Jesus is the hooker sitting in jail until her pimp bails her out. Jesus is the chemically ravaged, hollow-eyed scarecrow of a human being tweaking on a park bench.

Today's lesson is sometimes read as a prooftext for a works-based spiritual meritocracy -- what my friend Cory calls "earning points by doing stuff." But if you read closely, the "sheep" -- the people doing all the good stuff -- are unaware of what they've done. Their Good Works Meter hasn't been running; they haven't been keeping score. Why? Because they do what they do out of love. Dumb, crazy love. The same kind of love that would lead a God to empty Godsself of divine prerogative and become one of us, just to show us that God isn't some impersonal bundle of energies or dispassionate Cosmic Watchmaker. Sisters and brothers of Christ, members and co-inheritors of the household of God, share the family value of loving freely and extravagantly.

Christians who affirm the historic creeds affirm the idea that someday, in the denouement of our history, Christ will return -- will be present to all in a definitive, unmistakable way. And when that happens, what he will care about is not "What did you do?" but "How did you love?" The paradox is that such a love is not something we work ourselves into, but rather something that is worked into us by the Holy Spirit as we allow ourselves to be led in a Godward direction, following the lead of our King. When I examine my own "generosity of eye" in seeing Jesus around me, I know that, oftentimes, my spiritual myopia clouds my vision -- especially, ironically, when looking at the people closest to me -- but I also know that, as the saying goes, the Great Physician isn't finished with me yet. In the words of the hymn, In your hearts enthrone him/there let him subdue/all that is not holy/all that is not true/crown him as your captain/in temptation's hour/let his will enfold you/in its light and pow'r.

Artwork: "Christ the King," sculpture by Jean Julien Bourgault; "Lord of the Universe," William Morris stained glass, Calvary Episcopal Church, Summit, NJ, at Stained Glass Photography

Kid Lit

Well, I could keep watching the evening news as the twitching arrow on my Public Moron-o-meter comes perilously close to falling right off the far end of the dial...or I could answer the RevGals' Friday Five:

Earliest book you remember (read to you or by you): The Night Before Christmas -- also the first book I could read.

Picture book you would like to climb into: Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass.

Favorite series of books (then or now): The Pippi Longstocking books were a big favorite of mine. And Thornton Burgess' animal books.

Character you would most like to meet: The Cheshire Cat. And the Frumious Bandersnatch (despite all warnings to the contrary).

5) Last childhood book you re-read (for yourself or to someone): The Annotated Alice.

If I Needed You...A Game For the Easily Amused

Here's a great blog-game, courtesy of Derek at Haligweorc :

1. Google your real first name, followed by the word need, all in quotes.

2. List the top ten phrases that Google spits out.

Here's what Google came up with for my name -- changed here to my nom de plume/nom de guerre, of course, to protect the guilty:

1. LutheranChik needs you.
(Batting eyelashes wistfully into the ether...)

2. LutheranChik needs a term.
(A term for LutheranChik? An academic term, or a descriptive term? "Weird"?)

3. LutheranChik needs care 24 hours a day.
(How did they know?...)

4. LutheranChik needs the community's support.
(Yes; I'm all for community support.)

5. LutheranChik needs to get away from the problems of her relationship.
(You mean, as in not having one?)

6. LutheranChik needs to answer this question: Is my life worth living?
(Ooh...heavy...)

7. LutheranChik needs to remain available for caregiving and doctor's appointments.
(This one is actually pretty accurate.)

8. LutheranChik needs to keep moving south and west where there is more breeze.
(Does Grand Rapids count? I'm going there on Saturday.)

9. LutheranChik needs a break.
(From your mouth to God's ear.)

10. LutheranChik needs wit for this Emmy gig.
(Oh. I was thinking of maybe just singing my repertoire of 60's TV
theme songs.

As my friend Melancthon points out to me, you can substitute all sorts of phrases here. Try "[first name] wants," or "[first name] will," or "[first name] won't." Here are some gems from Googling "[LutheranChik] doesn't want to":

LutheranChik doesn't want to get too cute waiting until the last minute to make her monthly payments.

At nine, bedtime, LutheranChik doesn't want to go to her room.

I respect [sic] if LutheranChik doesn't want to discuss her sex life with us.

LutheranChik doesn't want to be like her mother.

LutheranChik doesn't want to see you. She's extremely upset. I can't believe you told her she was demon-possessed.

LutheranChik doesn't want to see the quarry. She wants to see the backseat of your car.

Go Googling. It's fun.

Elvish is Alive and Living in Outer Podunk

I may look (and eat) like a Hobbit, but I have the soul of an Elf. And now it is official.


Elvish


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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She Likes It -- Hey, Mikey!

I got my copies of A Light Blazes in the Darkness. (Shameless promotion alert: Check out my sidebar for ordering information -- one click and you're there!)

Mom read the book, cover to cover.

Mom likes it.

Earning a Mom Seal of Approval is not easy. Kudos to all my blog-sisters and -brothers!

Deja Vu -- And Sauerkraut Too

I was back at my childhood church this evening.

Tonight was its annual sauerkraut-and-sausage supper -- a sort of Teutonic bangers-and-mash-fest with sauerkraut, plus baked beans, pickles, bread and pies; everything made completely from scratch, including the sausage. It's a Big Event in our community; signboards all over town, the church parking lots full and more cars lined up along the street. The church schedules the sauerkraut supper the evening before opening day of the firearm deer season, to attract visiting downstate hunters. I make the annual pilgrimmage for takeout, for my mom and me.

It's interesting going back to a church you used to attend after a long time away, especially when you've become estranged from its theology and mindset. My mother still sometimes calls it "our church," even though it hasn't been my church in well over 20 years and hasn't been hers for a long time either. Since I've been a grownup, I associate it mostly with family funerals.

But tonight I passed through its doors on a happy mission (for my palate if not for my arteries or my waistline). I passed the classroom where I had Sunday School with my mom as my teacher; another classroom where our confirmation class met. The church building has doubled in size since I was a kid -- they have a big activity center and extra meeting space now -- but the place smelled the same -- an olfactory mixture of candle wax and bulletin-paper and and coffee (tonight, of course, suffused with the aroma of sauerkraut and browning sausage).

As I moved through the takeout line, I saw that the cashier was a family friend -- her family had known my dad's family pretty much since they'd both landed in the immigrant-German neighborhood in this county. We exchanged somewhat awkward pleasantries; anyone familiar with internecine Lutheran slap-fighting knows what it's like for a Missouri Synodian to jump the denominational fence to the ELCA -- technically speaking you're no longer allowed to commune in an LCMS church (although there's a certain amount of "don't ask; don't tell"), and you're pretty much treated as if you've gone over to the dark side.

When asked by her old church acquaintances where she's been my mother says, "Oh, I go to church with my daughter now," so I know I am seen as The Corrupting Influence in this particular church circle; that's fine by me. Kind of flattering, considering. And the way I see it, radical hospitality works both ways, so I'd like to think that the church ladies felt they were ministering to me in my condition of spiritual peril, by plying me with Wurst and pie, in hopes that one day I'll awaken from my benighted state and return to the One True Church, mother in tow, to the strains of "Softly and Tenderly."

Then again, maybe they just wanted my $16.

It was a good dinner. "We can't believe we ate the whole thing."

Alive in the Leap

But let me give utterance to this which in a sense is my very life, the content of my life for me, its fullness, its happiness, its peace and contentment. There are various philosophies of life which deal with the question of human dignity and human equality—Christianly, every man (the individual), absolutely every man, once again, absolutely every man is equally near to God. And how is he near and equally near? Loved by Him. So there is equality, infinite equality between man and man. -- Soren Kierkegaard

Last Saturday was the day Lutherans (most ironically, given Kierkegaard's opinion of the institutional Church) recognize philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Now, I have to tell you: Soren Kierkegaard isn't my idea of a fun read on a rainy evening. The last quality time I spent with Mr. K was back in the 1980's, in my slacker bookstore-clerk days, when I read Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death on slow evenings. Considering my own existential angst at the time -- broke, in debt, car-less, directionless, convinced that I would never, ever have a real job -- it's no surprise I glommed onto this book.

Anyhow, fast-forward 20-some years, and I found myself thinking of Kierkegaard again this weekend. Actually, I was thinking about the afterlife. This is a somewhat impolitic thing to do these days, in mainline circles; some of the more skeptical among us who are unwilling to see beyond the dirt nap don't want to talk about something that they doubt is there, and others among us point out that spending overmuch time in speculation about the hereafter has a tendency to make people so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good. But, anyway, I was speculating just a tiny tad about the afterlife, and what it might be like. I thought about how great it would be to be able to find all the people who've had a formative influence in my life -- whether personally or through their lives or writing or works of art -- and let them know that. And I thought about all those who labor in this life under the burden of great sadness and doubt and loneliness, and how it might be for them to finally find themselves enfolded for all eternity in the arms of "Love Divine, all loves excelling."

Kierkegaard is famous for talking about the "leap of faith" necessary to dare to believe, despite all odds, in a God who loves and cares about us. In reading his works, and in reading about his life, we find someone who indeed launched this leap with "fear and trembling." We know that Kierkegaard could be a charming individual, even at times something of a bon vivant ; one occasionally catches a hint of downright cheekiness in his writing; but underlying it all there's a profound sense of melancholy and alienation.

What I would hope for Soren Kierkegaard is that as his leap of faith reached the end of its arc, he found himself in glory, in the embrace of the loving God he could scarcely imagine. And that, there now, he and the other joyful saints of God intercede for us all every time we stand trembling on the edge of our doubt.

Playing Small

If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that she had made us like ill-taught piano students; we play our songs, but we never really hear them, because our main concern is not to make music, but to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch. -- Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three (hat tip to Brian Stoffregen )

And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah -- Leonard Cohen

Sin boldly, and trust in God more boldly still. -- Martin Luther

The other evening I was watching the PBS broadcast of this year's Mark Twain Awards ceremony honoring recipient Steve Martin. The show featured clips of Martin's career, and as I laughed yet again at Martin's 70's-era stage shows and "Saturday Night Live Appearances" -- which my wild-and-crazy high school friends and I pretty much knew verbatim -- I recalled one of Martin's most famous signature phrases back then: "Let's get small!"

You know what? We human beings love to "get small," spiritually as well as chemically. Our tendency is to live our lives curvatus in se -- self-absorbed, self-protective, turned in on ourselves, like an imploding star on its way to becoming a black hole. Because we all fall short, and don't get it right, Christians are every bit as likely to curve inward as the people around us. And from that flaw proceeds sin -- failure to love God and failure to love our neighbors.

Our love of our own smallness keeps us afraid of and resentful of the God who seeks to pull us upright out of that cozy, dark fetal position and grow us up in an expansive, Godward direction. Our dedication to staying small makes us fear and hate both the needy and the different, the other, among us, whose presence threatens our autonomy and our self-image. "Leave me alone, damn it! Leave my soul alone. Leave my mind alone. Leave my possessions alone. Leave my cherished cultural mores and prejudices alone. It was nice and quiet and safe here, but now you're ruining everything."

And, since the Church is made up of sinners, all too often the Church chooses to play small; in fact, if you take a quick Cliff Notes run through the history of the Church, every time the Church has dropped the ball, it's done so in service to smallness. Being afraid of letting the "wrong" people in, or of chasing the "right" people out. Being afraid of losing its privileges and prerogatives. Being afraid of upsetting the powers that be in the dominant culture. Being afraid of the God it claims to relate to as the Lover's Beloved.

Jesus' parable of the talents is all about the peril of playing small when called to live large. One of the best commentaries I read about it this week noted that the ruler in the story never exhibited the negative qualities that the third, fearful servant ascribed to him -- after all, he entrusted his servants with his money while he left town! It was only that third servant's resentful, fearful attitude, his perception that the money given him was a burden rather than an opportunity, that created what amounted to the servant's self-fulfilling prophecy of an angry master.


What happens when we give ourselves over to the love of a God who can untangle us from our cowering inward-turning and stand us upright? We learn to be brave, because we know that God's grace isn't dependent on our being good enough or "right" enough. We learn to take risks, because we know that God loves us and will stick by us no matter what. We learn to reach out, because that's what we see Jesus doing. We learn to get out of our own way, because that's what we hear Jesus telling us. And that is true on an individual and a collective level. Just as the Church's worst blunders in history have been grounded in fear and defensiveness, its finest hours have been when it has focused on the lordship of Christ and not on its own continued institutional existence or comfort; when it has exhibited courage in the face of persecution; when it has practiced radical hospitality and inclusion in the face of indifference, cruelty and intolerance; when it has dared to reach out, by word and action, to "the least of these" in society.

Today at church one of my fellow lay preachers shared this quote: "You are a child of God. Playing small doesn't serve the world." Living in fear, rather than by faith, doesn't serve the world. So let's stop doing it, as sisters and brothers of Jesus and as members of the Body of Christ.

Gettin' Squirrelly

This is my third squirrel-proof bird feeder.

The first two were destroyed. By squirrels. So as you might expect, I am approaching this latest attempt at anti-squirrel technology with a certain amount of skepticism.

I wouldn't mind so much if the squirrels would just take a mouthful of birdseed and leave. But nooooo. They're greedy. They chase the poor chickadees and titmice and finches away, then wrap themselves around the birdfeeder and suck down the seeds for a half-hour at a time. Or they'll jimmy off the tops of feeders and crawl right inside. When I had an old-fashioned wood-and-glass feeder, the squirrels managed to chew completely through the wood to get to the seeds. If this were a just world one of our resident pileated woodpeckers -- those ginormous crested woodpeckers that look like pterodactyls -- would swoop down and give the squirrels a good rap on the cranium. But they don't.

Enter the Duncraft Squirrel Resistant birdfeeder. It's made entirely of metal and has some sort of patented thingy-do on the cap that, theoretically, will prevent the squirrels from pulling it off.

The good news: Over the past three days I have not seen one squirrel on this feeder. I'm afraid to even think this lest I jinx the feeder, but...maybe the thing really is squirrel-proof. If it is, I will sing the praises of Duncraft from here to Siberia -- anywhere on the globe where human beings who love birds must battle the wiles of gluttonous rodents.

I'll let you know.

Is the third time the charm?