A Self-Affirming Friday Five

RevGalBlogPal's prologue to this Friday's Five begins:
Lately I seem to be encountering many people who have a very difficult time finding anything good to say about themselves. They are able to extend grace and forgiveness's to others but find it difficult to extend that same grace to themselves.

With that in mind, let's share some healthy affirmation today! Tell us five things you like about yourself!

Alrighty then!

1. I have a quick wit. I find humor in much of what goes on around me. It's kind of a survival skill. I'd hate not to have it.

2. I like to learn. I never, ever want to stop learning things.

3. I know how to express myself verbally -- a skill that's gotten me far in this life.

4. Animals love me. With few exceptions, I seem to be able to make up with most beasties...even feral cats and wild birds. I consider it a gift and a privilege to be able to engage in cross-species rapprochement.

5. I can cook for my own and others' enjoyment, even in my own inuitive/untutored way. (Don't ever watch me cut up vegetables, for instance -- Gordon Ramsey would drop a Hiroshima of F-bombs at my less than finessed technique.) I know some people struggle mightily with this skill, which they think of as a chore; but I love it.

Hey...that felt good!

Alt.Medicine

I gave myself the gift of an hour-long massage yesterday morning, after our crazy, tension-filled week.

My appointment was at an outfit called the Naturopathic Institute of Therapies and Education, located in Mt. Pleasant -- ironically in what used to be a funeral home. Part of the building has been transformed into a retail store, but the rest of the place is a school offering training in naturopathic medicine, massage and other alternative health therapies. I'd never been there before; but I was looking for something a little different than either the very clinical massage experience of our local medical center's PT department or the foofy, girly-girl massages at the nearby beauty emporium.

When it comes to alternative medicine, I'm like Agent Mulder: I want to believe. I truly believe in a mind-body aspect to wellness, and I also think that practices like meditation, various physical disciplines like yoga can make a positive difference in people's health, for reasons that can't always be explained by conventional science. I've had good luck with some herbal medicines (with the disclaimer that I've done my homework, and steer clear of the potentially dangerous stuff -- I'm talking innocuous herbs like peppermint and crampbark for "ladies' complaints," arnica cream for external bang-ups and so on.) I'm also enough of a revolutionary to feel satisfaction in seeking alternate answers to my health questions -- I think anytime we can safely and effectively go off the grid of Big Health and Big Pharm it's a good thing; fight the power.

But there's a whiff of snake oil in the alternative medicine universe. I felt that tension passing through the institute's retail shop, with its rows of homeopathic elixirs and books about the joys of colonic irrigation. It's why I wish that there were more accredited physicians out there with some academic and practical chops in integrative medicine to help laypeople navigate through all this, so that we're not left with a choice between eye-rolling by-the-book allopaths and quacks out of a 19th-century medicine show.

Nonetheless, my alt.med massage was heavenly. After filling out an information form detailing my health history and issues my masseuse, a slight young woman who nonetheless exhibited the body strength of a rugby player, attacked my constricted upper back, shoulders and neck with as much vigor as I requested...and then some. She did something to my spine that made it crack, but in a good way. She dug into the area around my kidneys, and seemed to elbow her way up and down my hips. She massaged my computer-stressed wrists, and made the tips of my fingers tingle. She pulled my head up from my neck and I felt like a turtle being stretched out of a hard shell. She pressed lightly around my upper chest, along the upper part of the breastbone, which momentarily startled me; but it seemed to create a soothing sensation in my back. She All the while I could hear, and smell, some interesting alchemy going on with oils and scents; unlike spa massages I've had, some of these aromas were not particularly pretty, but they seemed to have specific purposes. I could identify cedar, and lavender, and some warming potion that I think was Chinese linament.

I am definitely going back for more. And I'm re-dedicating myself to being a more active, less passive, healthcare consumer, even if it means veering off the beaten path of medical convention once in awhile.

Morning Delusional

No, I don't mean morning devotional. I mean morning delusional.

My morning delusional would begin as the sun slowly appears on the horizon. I would rise, go into our quiet front room and proceed with a leisurely examen, followed by Morning Prayer -- the whole enchilada, not the Cliff's Notes version for individuals. I would then move to the floor, roll out my yoga mat and do a few asanas to get the circulation flowing; or perhaps I'd move to the patio for some tai chi.

Here's how my real-life morning begins: I am startled into consciousness by the cold, wet, grassy paws of Gertie, who has already roused Fellow Traveler out of bed. A wet nose attempts to push past my lips as the wet paws slap at me.

Meanwhile a cat's head begins butting into my hair, accompanied by a loud purr. I feel Mollie's nose inserted into my ear.

"Brrrt? Brrrt?"

Gertie rolls on her back for a game of "Foot." Mollie leaps off the bed, runs to the doorway, then stops and looks back, with some impatience: "So...when can I expect the Whiskas?"

May as well get up and make the coffee.

Some Thoughts on the Churchwide Assembly

This past RevGalBlogPal's Friday Five -- which I didn't join in simply because I didn't have time or energy for the degree of reflection needed to comment intelligently on the good questions -- was all about "rules," specifically the spoken and unspoken rules that have guided our relationships.

I came from a family with a lot of unspoken, subtextual rules, not all of which were conducive to a healthily functioning family. One such rule was, "Don't disrupt the household peace by making your father angry or your mother upset." Because my dad was a very angry man, one whose life frustrations and limitations would, with regular frequency and little provocation, erupt like Krakatoa, with yelling that would literally shake the walls of the house. My mother was a very fearful, emotionally brittle woman; earlier in her life she'd had what they used to call a nervous breakdown, and after that point her ability to process anxiety was very limited. (For those of you who've read Jean Shinoda Bolen's book comparing dysfunctional, power-over family relationships to the Teutonic Ring cycle -- this is all familiar territory.)

When I was in middle school, around the end of the school year I took the pre-band music aptitude test administered by the school and received the highest score of my class. A few weeks later, at the beginning of summer vacation, school band teacher came to our house to congratulate me, to introduce himself to my parents and to explain the school music program to them. My father, without missing a beat, told the band instructor that he -- working man who breaks his back for long hours every day to pay the bills -- did not have time to chauffeur me back and forth from practices and ballgames and furthermore wasn't going to waste money on purchasing a musical instrument that was going to do nothing to further my ability to find a job as an adult: "We're not interested. You can leave now, and don't come back." My mother burst into horrified, embarrassed tears as the stunned teacher backed out of the house. That was the precursor to one of those epic domestic fights that live in family memories for decades. I think my mother wound up taking to bed while my father cursed and slammed doors and avoided my presence. I was numb; I retreated to my room and to farm fields for days.

My lessons from this little familial episode, and all those surrounding it before I finally left home: "If something good happens to you, something bad will inevitably follow"; "Don't do anything, even a good thing like acing a test, that is going to make other people angry or sad"; and, most importantly, "This is all your fault."

As you might imagine, it's taken some therapy for me to see how messed up my parents' relationship with one another and with me actually was, to see how misplaced my own shame for thinking that there was something wrong about me that precipitated these cycles of emotional abuse, and to grieve for myself and my lost opportunities as well as for the brokenness of my family.

Still, while catching bits and pieces of the CWA debate last week, even with the jaundiced eye of a natural cynic who can sometimes find such exercises in group discernment a little precious -- Hey! The ELCA is officially against malaria! Yay, us! -- I found myself experiencing that same feeling of doom I felt all those years ago, sitting at our kitchen table with my music aptitude test in my hand while my father thundered and my mother wept and cowered. I wanted to run -- to my room, under the covers; to the dark, dust-moted, fragrant comfort of the hayloft; to the grove at the far end of our pasture where I could sit under one of the ash trees and hug my dog, crying into his thick fur, and plot my liberation. Someday...someday...things would be different.

I want to say that I greeted the news of the CWA vote on LGBT participation in the ordained and rostered leadership of the church, and on the recognition, blessing and call to accountability of committed, monogamous same-sex relationships, with relief and rejoicing. I want to say that I found the general tone of sobriety and prayerfulness, and call for mutual respect and civility comforting and refreshing.

But on some level I'm still sitting in the dark, thinking, "This is all your fault. Again."

And in Other Family News...

We got a call last night from Son #1 announcing that he and his partner are making it legal in Boston next weekend. Son #2 and Semi-Daughter-in-Law -- the ones we've been silently rooting for to make it legal first, or at least in addition, what with in-utero G-baby and all -- are attending as witnesses. Yes, we appreciate the irony.

Respective moms of the happy couple have been invited to a reception at the end of January. Because -- well, we're not in the loop to understand the "whys" of The Kids' timetable.

Fellow Traveler is having a difficult time with all of this...actually, she's had one hell of a week, and this news, happy as it was, just capped it. Ora pro nobis.

Ties That Gag

Perhaps you need some levity after that last post. (I'm still wiping my smarting eyes after reliving the last few days.)

For reasons I can't explain, at some point during this medical emergency we said we'd invite FT's other sister and niece for a final familial send-off barbecue last night.

Now, I am pleasant with this SIL; we get along all right. But she has a sense of entitlement to FT's home and belongings that I, only child that I am, do not understand.

Yesterday, after arriving, she and FT engaged in semi-kidding -- and I mean semi- -- banter about a chalk landscape in our living room that SIL has, more than once, indicated that she intends to confiscate in the case of FT's departure from this mortal coil. But then she proceeded to take herself on a full visual tour of our home, noting and evaluating our collectibles: their mother's Brazilian iced tea samovar (I'm sure there's some special Portugese term for it, but that's what it is); our living-room lamps; my glass collection; our everyday dishes; our dining room table ("It has such a nice surface"); my great-grandparents' steamer trunk from The Old Country, which is now in our front room. On and on went the verbal inventory of our things.

I experienced flashbacks of the family broughaha that ensued after my paternal grandmother died, when the siblings all fought like cats and dogs for photos and Christmas ornaments, and FT's description of her former in-laws, after her partner died, backing up to her house the very next day with intent to load up pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down, before she stopped them.

"I almost asked your sister to empty her pockets before she left," I told FT, trying to inject some levity into what had been a generally un-funny day, let alone week.

I guess the moral of this story, kids, is to make your wills now. And to periodically change your locks. And that sometimes being an only child feels really, really good.

Ties That Bind

I hear tell that in the past week various weather events and CWA resolutions and other notable happenings have been going on in the wider world.

We've been rather preoccupied, you see, within our own family circle.

Fellow Traveler's sister and nephew came up from Florida last weekend to visit us and other FT family members. The plan was for them to bivouac with us for the second half of their stay, and go with us on a day trip to Mackinac Island, which our nephew had never visited before.

FT's sister is an alcoholic. Her drinking and other substance abuse problems have led to catastrophic consequences in her own life, including incarceration several years ago; she's a convicted felon. These days she maintains a certain level of functionality during the day -- she has a steady job and can pay her own way -- but as soon as she leaves work she starts drinking, and drinks for the rest of the day. She has a significant other who is also an alcoholic; her nights-and-weekends drinking buddy. Their home life is as dysfunctional as you might imagine. Her chain smoking has led to COPD, so she is never far from an inhaler and a portable nebulizer.d

Our nephew's dad, the sister's ex, is another substance-abuse casualty of the 60's and 70's. He is homeless, dying slowly of COPD and other health problems, and more or less lives on our nephew's sofa because no one else will take him in.

Our nephew -- who, FT tells me spent his early years being dragged by his neglectful, itinerent hippie parents from place to place, and who even spent time in foster care -- is a lovely, smart, funny and gentle young man who has, despite incredible odds, not only survived his childhood but has thrived in adulthood. He has a position of responsibility in a large company; he has a full-ride university scholarship and takes classes in addition to his full-time job. But he bears the burden of caring, in various ways, for two seriously damaged parents; he seems older, sadder, more serious, than his peers.

So he and his mother arrived this past week. She was edgy from the rationing of booze and cigarettes necessary in order to stay at her siblings' homes; she was also especially wheezy from COPD, spending a lot of time taking breathing treatments, and nursing a bandaged knee that she was reluctant to explain.

Our goal, as a household, was to help our nephew have as good a time as he could on what was also his vacation. And we knew that he was very much looking forward to a Mackinac Island experience, a place he'd never gotten to visit during his childhood. So we marshalled our resources for a fun trip to the Island and invited one of his other cousins to join us.

We arrived on Mackinac Island on Wednesday around noon and had lunch just a half-block from the dock, with plans to take a carriage tour around the Island afterward. FT's sister had become quiet during the meal, which we attributed to simple fatigue after our long car ride up north; but after a short trip up the street to find the departure point of our tour, we came back to find her in acute respiratory distress, purple and gasping for breath. Our niece said that as soon as she'd gotten on the main street sidewalk she'd started having a severe asthma attack. She'd also failed to pack the steroidal medication she is supposed to keep on hand for such incidents.

FT, seeing the stricken look on our nephew's face, said, "Why don't you and your cousin stay here today. We'll take your mother back to the mainland, and take her to the ER."

So that's what we did. FT's sister seemed to rally even on the ferry trip back; the quick exit from the proximity of horses and the fresh lake air seemed to do her good. By the time we reached St. Ignace she was breathing more smoothly, and insisted that she was fine, that she just needed some rest, and that she'd be happy to simply sightsee from our vehicle until it was time to pick up the kids. So we did that for an hour or so, up to the Les Cheneaux area and back.

As we approached St. Ignace and the ferry dock, FT's sister began to struggle with her breathing again. "I think you'd better take me to the hospital after all," she rasped. Fortunately we knew where that was, and got her to the ER; she was so weak she needed a wheelchair. We were both terrified -- especially from my own experience with my mother -- that she was on her way to a full-blown heart attack. FT stayed with her at the hospital while I took the Jeep back to the dock to pick up our nephew and niece.

We wound up spending the night in St. Ignace...and another night...and another night; with an intervening trip back home to drop off the cousin and find FT's sister's insurance card. It turned out that FT's sister had the beginnings of pneumonia. The doctor was also concerned about her health in general, especially after FT filled the staff in on the alcohol abuse and smoking and general life chaos. On Saturday morning, before she discharged FT's sister, the doctor had a come-to-Jesus chat with her, with her son and FT present, about the consequences of her addictions. "You have COPD. Your smoking, especially, is going to kill you," she added. "If you're not ready to die, you need to stop now."

FT's sister was defiant. "When I quit, it's going to be on my own terms," she announced to her crestfallen son, who'd told us he'd hoped that her cold-turkey three-day cigarette respite would somehow get her over the hump of at least that addiction.

So that's how the drama ended; with FT's sister self-absorbed, surly and demanding for the rest of her stay -- and not only that, but displaying actual aggression and cruelty toward FT, who has done nothing but help her these past few days -- and our nephew trying to put on a brave front for us while running interference for his mom; something I'm sure he's had to do his entire life for both his parents.

It takes a lot to make FT cry, but she cried herself to sleep last night. She is completely spent from this drama, angry at her sister and heartbroken for our nephew.

Addiction, up close like this, looks like a black hole whose voracity swallows everything in its path. It is not only self-destructive, but incredibly selfish.

Summer Vaycay: Da UP

Just a few travel pix from our journey to Hessel/Cedarville, then the southwestern Upper Peninsula:

We flatlanders aren't used to mack-daddy rocks like this boulder gracing the Hessel Cemetery.















Our very favorite tourist trap, just north of St. Ignace, run by a friendly but curmudgeonly older man who likes to talk current events. We were talking about the flat tourist season, and he told us he blamed the weather: "No one wants to spend big bucks taking the family to Mackinac Island and smelling wet horse manure all weekend."























Pte. Seul Choix Lighthouse in Gulliver -- a couple of past lighthouse keepers are supposed to haunt the property, but we didn't experience any paranormal activity the day we visited; just warmth and sunshine and a friendly docent. One of the unintentionally interesting finds at this site was the large pile of zebra mussel shells on the shoreline; zebra mussels are a rogue European mollusk, introduced by ships emptying their ballasts in the Great Lakes, whose voracious eating habits are disrupting the Great Lakes ecosystem. My thought, on seeing the sun-bleached pile of tiny shells, was selling them as landscaping mulch for the waterfront cottage crowd, if they could be mass-harvested without wreaking even more havoc upon our native wildlife. Any entrepreneurs reading this?













The light at Manistique.


















This is an artists' collective gallery in the tiny village of Garden, on the Garden Peninsula between Manistique and Rapid River. We were wowed not only by all the artwork and artisan items made by UP artists and craftspeople, but also by the reasonable prices; why buy a Yooper tourist tschotschke made in China when you can purchase the real deal here?

The peninsula seems to have a more moderate climate than the mainland, with many farms -- a winery, even. There's also a tiny fishing village, Fairport, at the very tip, and a state park preserving the ruins of the old iron-smelting boomtown of Fayette; it's very eerie to see the empty public buildings of this totally abandoned community and ponder the impermanence of life.

A Wild Friday Five

This week RevGalBlogPal Mompriest asks: For this Friday Five, share with us a wild animal story from your life. Or if you've never had such an encounter share with us your five favorite animals, and why. Bonus for videos and photos!

And, on cue, I produce a photo of a wonderful wildlife encounter we had this week on the Garden Peninsula of Michigan's Upper Peninsula...this is a little curled finger of mostly farmland that juts out into the north shore of Lake Michigan between Escanaba and Manistique.

We were backtracking from a drive down the highway that runs lengthwise down the peninsula, through the village of Garden down to the ruins of the historic Fayette iron-smelting town, then on to tiny Fairport at the tip, when we stopped at a small cemetery just south of Garden to let Gertie burn off the energy that builds up when she spends time in the Jeep. (As regular readers know, our dog loves to slalom around cemetery stones.) As we approached, we noticed a large bird sitting atop a pole planted in the middle of the graveyard; as we drew closer I recognized it as an osprey, a "fish hawk"; these are not necessarily uncommon in Michigan, but pesticide use in the 50's and 60's and ongoing habitat destruction have taken a toll on their numbers. The bird sat impassively as we pulled up to the roadside.

"Look," said Fellow Traveler. "There's its nest." At a corner of the cemetery stood a much longer pole with a nesting platform and second osprey sitting atop, covered with assorted dead branches and a jaunty sprig of what appeared to be cedar poking up from one end of the nest. A human benefactor had added a plastic owl to a nearby post, apparently to scare away possible predators.

I slowly got out my camera, while the osprey on the lower post fidgeted. I was able to take one picture before it flew away, accompanied by its mate, to a telephone pole a short distance away.

This was the best wildlife encounter we had on our entire trip, including our unintentional excursion into the southern edge of the Seney Wildlife Refuge the next day during a random adventure into the countryside. We wish long life and many successful fledges of youngsters to the osprey family we met.

Bonus: I'm an animal person; have been since I was a child growing up on a small farm that was a veritable Wild Kingdom of fascinating beasties large and small. It's hard for me to pick favorites. But I will name five wild animals that I enjoy and admire.

1. Wolves. I admire wolves for their intelligence, cooperative behavior and well-ordered social life. They often seem to be a more well adjusted species than homo sapiens.

2. Crows and ravens. I like members of the crow family for all the same reasons. I think there's a lot more going on in their "bird brains" than even animal behaviorists think, which is why our ancestors -- across cultures, I may add -- considered them significant, sacred creatures.

3. Chickadees. I love the childlike nosiness and friendliness of chickadees; the way they'll, with little prompting, sit on your hand when you come out to fill the bird feeder in the wintertime, and the way they'll respond to human mimicking of their happy "dee-dee-dee" call. (The ominous two-note song that sounds like an English police siren is the unhappy chickadee call.) I remember being on retreat several years ago and encountering a family of chickadees in an old spruce plantation -- Mom, Pop and several newly fledged youngsters. They acted as if I were the first human they'd ever encountered close-up. They perched within touching distance; they clowned around like little parakeets, swinging on spruce cones and hanging upside down from twigs. When they sang "Dee-dee-dee!" I answered back, which seemed to delight them and animate their antics even more. Apparently I was the best entertainment they'd had in the neighborhood in a long time.

4. Robins. Robins are another species whose ease of interaction with humankind I find touching. I remember, back at Cold Comfort Cottage, digging a flower bed one day and finding various obectionable things -- grubs and cutworms -- in the soil. A curious robin had been watching from a short distance; I tossed a fat grub out onto the lawn, and the robin immediately snatched it up and took it away. The robin came back; I kept tossing worms in its direction, and it kept taking them. When I was done, we kind of exchanged nods and went our separate ways. Interspecies cooperation -- it's a good thing.

5. Coyotes. I have only seen a coyote in action in the wild once -- I saw one slinking through the grass in a woodland clearing near Lake City. But I love their smarts and adaptibility. I also enjoy their mournful-sounding little howls.

Friday Five: "Child's Play" Edition

This week's RevGalBlogPals Friday Five quiz was a toughie for me, folks. Bear with me.

1) On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being I can’t do this now I am about to jump into a pit of plastic balls at the mini-mall and 1 being I can’t do this now until I can get all of the fonts on my blog to match – where are you?
I am probably right up there at 4.99. I was, as they say, "born old."

2) What is the silliest/most childlike thing you have done as an adult?
Possibly play miniature golf at Disney World at 11 pm, in the dark, on about the coldest day ever in Orlando. And do an end-zone victory dance when I won.

3) Any regrets?
Gloves would have been nice.

4) What is the silliest thing you have ever seen another adult do on purpose?
Take a pair of (clean) underwear out of the laundry basket, put them on her head and sing "Dominique." (Names will not be named.)

5) What is something you wish you did when you had the chance?
This is a stumper. I can't remember missing out on that many things I wanted to do when I was a kid. Maybe learn to do cartwheels...I was always a little chunky-monkey and didn't have the coordination to pull it off.

BONUS: For our ‘I told you so’ sides – what thing did you skip doing and you’re really glad you did!
Fall out of a tree and break my arm, like so many of my peers.

The Neighborhood Church

I spent my lunchtime today, here in the vicinity of the church, down at the township cemetery with Gertie -- she spun around the empty section and then down the quiet country cul-de-sac while I walked among the gravestones.

This cemetery actually has two sections separated by a farmstead; both are on sandy, rough, botanically challenged hillsides. It reminded me of the rural cemetery on the opposite end of the county where many of my relatives are buried, and that back in the pioneer days our ancestors didn't waste green, fertile land on the dead.

Some of the gravestones are very, very old, with surnames that no longer reflect the names on neighborhood mailboxes or our church rolls. One small stone next to a man's larger obelisk, both dated in the late 1800's, simply reads, "[So-and-So's] Wife"; the poor woman lost her name along with her life. A sinister-looking flat cement crypt whose lid is just askew enough to be creepy contains...well, I don't know; there's no corresponding headstone. A tiny headstone in the relatively newer section of the cemetery memorializes a two-year-old, whose death date corresponds with the scourge of the Spanish flu. Newer graves are festooned with whirligigs, flags, windchimes and other currently popular funereal effluvia; one display included a weathered knit watchcap that I'm sure held a good story.

As I walked up and down the hillside, getting to know the relations of many of our church members, I thought about our last lay ministry meeting. Our pastor, who just got back from a cross-country motorcycle adventure, recounted how, almost the moment he walked through the door of his home, he was awash in waves of local pain and suffering that had seemed to wait for his return to develop. There was a the tragic death of a young father who'd been battling chronic disease. A local family had lost their trailer home to creditors and had been reduced to living in tents. Terrible family secrets, buried for decades in the victims' minds, were finally coming to light, creating anguish and tension and side-taking among relatives. A neighorhood resident suffered an acute, mysterious medical event and was now in intensive care in a regional hospital as doctors tried to sort out her condition. More stories of the people immediately around us.

As our pastor noted, this was actually "situation normal" in our neighborhood; we lay ministers had simply enjoyed a short respite during our watch. But the more interesting thing to me was, as he shared his pastoral-care concerns with us, that most of these events that were marshalling the care and attention of our church were going on among people with a minimal, if any, formal connection to us. And in at least one case, it was one unchurched person, whose life had been previously touched by our congregation, that referred another unchurched person to us. "They can help."

Our pastor says that he wants to gradually move people out of the mindset that "church" is a one-hour event that happens on Sunday mornings and holidays; that "church," that Christ's body in the world, is happening all the time when we serve as Christ for one another. In this way, Christ will come alive for the people in our neighborhood, whether they're members of our congregation or not.

This struck me -- me, the one who is constantly questioning what I perceive as the highly conventional, non-visonary goals of our Evangelism Committee -- as something that I needed to hear.

I would love to strengthen our presence in our neighborhood -- not by somehow wheedling warm bodies into seats on Sunday mornings, but by helping people where they need help, without questions or strings or games or emotionally finagling them into some type of formal commitment to our congregation. What would happen if more of us in our congregation took that goal to heart?

Departure Emcee

We got an interesting call last night.

It was from Fellow Traveler's high school BFF, with whom FT has kept in contact over the years and who is one of our collective Facebook friends. Last week our friend's oldest brother -- this is one of those families whose elder children are an entire generation removed from the younger siblings -- died suddenly. Almost as suddenly, his spouse decided to have him cremated, sans funeral.

Well, of course, this didn't sit well with his family, and wheels were set in motion, and now -- with the wife's consent and participation -- the larger extended family is going to hold a "Celebration of Life" in his honor in two weeks.

The family is nominally Lutheran but not observant. One brother did join a fundamentalist church -- which, according to FT, led to a family funeral disaster several years ago when the family matriarch died and the brother enlisted his own, fundamentalist pastor for the funeral service. The pastor opined that Mother was likely in hell now, and that the assembled were on the short track there as well if they didn't make a decision to ask Jeezus to be their personal Savior right then and there. Well.

When D called, saying, "I have a huge favor to ask of you two," we wondered if she wanted to spend the night at our home, since her brother spent his summers in a resort community not far from ours. What she asked instead was if I -- me, lowly lay minister -- would be willing to lead, in an ecclesiastically off-the-reservation way, the memorial for her brother. The event would be at another sibling's home on the 8th; on the day we were to be happily vacationing in Hessel at the Wooden Boat Festival.

Gulp.

Thoughts of vacation disappointment (this is the second wrench to be thrown in the direction of our trip -- I momentarily thought, "Maybe God doesn't want us in the Upper Peninsula") as well as panic ("I don't know nuthin' 'bout doin' no Celebrations of Life, Miz Scarlett!") passed through my mind.

But I said, "Yes." Because this is Fellow Traveler's very best friend, from way back. Because they don't have a family clergyperson they can call upon for this task. Because this is a chance to help communicate God's love and grace to a group of people who need to hear it, and to demonstrate that we church folks aren't jerks all of the time.

So FT's friend and I are going to e-mail back and forth for the next few days, help me get to know her deceased brother's story, share some ideas for the memorial. I have the beginnings of an outline in my head.

The vaycay gets moved back a day and a half. The Chris-Crafts will be gone but Hessel will still be there. It's going to be okay.

Friday Five: "It's Perfection" Edition

RevGalBlogPal SingingOwl offers this challenge:

Please pardon me for talking about church in the summer when many of you may be on vacation. However, the church we are talking about today is the one you dream of. I've been thinking about this because I miss pastoring and preaching, because I am sending in resumes, and because...well...jut because. So have some fun with this. Tell us five things that the perfect church would have, be, do...whatever.

We can dream, right?

Oh, my.

Should I be serious or ironic? Or both?

Okay. Here goes, in no particular order:

Five Unrealistic Wish Dreams For a Church

1. In my perfect church we would have a comprehensive program for catechesis/spiritual formation that would include easy entry points for newbies as well as challenge and support for us long-haulers, and strong support for "the domestic church" -- for giving households the tools and support to (re-)sacralize lhome life. And our "Lutheran from home" members would finally shed the idea that one graduates from religious education/spiritual formation at confirmation.

2. In my perfect church we would be a more active, open spiritual and practical go-to community resource for the people who live in our church neighborhood, no matter what their affiliation or level of connection to our congregation...we would be a place that neighbors would think of as their neighborhood church. And this would be a two-way street -- with our lay leadership "getting out there" into the 'hood with the pastor, as well as neighbors visiting us. I'm thinking of the old-school model of, say, my dad's childhood church, which really was the hub of his rural neighborhood.

3. My perfect church would have a music program that wouldn't have to be of symphony-hall quality but would be something competent and worship-oriented.

4. My perfect church would be diverse -- a lively mix of gender, ages, economic levels, life experiences.

5. My perfect church would have excellent coffee. No stale Maxwell House in the industrial-size can, rationed out to last the better part of a year -- nosirree. We're talking Green Mountain or Just Coffee or some other righteously-grown-yet-skillfully-roasted java.

Just a few things.

Handiwork

One of my rediscoveries, this first summer sans paid employment in a couple of decades, is the pleasure of working with my hands.

Every day when I walk down to the garden, I experience momentary amazement that the theoretical garden patch I'd plotted out in my head back in March has become a living reality. It tickles me to nurture the plants one day -- water them, weed them or loosen the soil around them -- and see them respond positively the next. It frankly also stuns me, one of the more untidy individuals on the planet, to have created a tidy garden -- it isn't antiseptically free of weeds nor is every row precicely straight, but to borrow a phrase from my Presbyterian friends, it's growing decently and in order. Even my garden failures haven't been that devastating to my sense of competency in agriculture; I learn, make adjustments and move on. The first two rows of bush beans ravaged by wet cold and cutworms? Plant succession rows. The fingerling potatoes that for some reason didn't come up? Great space for transplanting some of my rapidly growing Savoy cabbage. Too many seedling tomatoes? Keep them around to fill in spaces. Patience; perserverence; problem-solving; it all happens in the vegetable garden.

My stained glass classes are also stretching my sense of manual prowess. I've always loved looking at stained glass -- being a product of the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the Victorian and Edwardian periods influenced everything from fashions to posters to homecrafts, I've always been fascinated by the glass arts; always wanted to live in a house with fancy glasswork transoms and door windows and suncatchers. But I never envisioned myself making such things myself. And when Fellow Traveler first expressed her desire to pursue this as a serious pastime, I saw myself as more of a drag on her progress than a true partner. But our hands-on coursework -- and our instructor is of the "Just do it and ask questions later" school -- is helping me lose my fear of not being perfect -- "perfect," of course, being the enemy of the good. I'm finding out that if I do mess up in certain ways, there are other ways to finesse it; that there's a lot of grace in the process. And after getting multiple stitches and a tetanus shot in my hand a couple of years ago when a frame slipped off my storm window as I was hauling it up the stairs, there's a feeling of regaining power over a potentially hazardous substance as I score it, cut it and grind it to my liking.

I also pulled out the bread pans this weekend and loafed my own homemade bread for I think the first time since I bought my first bread machine. I made challah; mixed it and rose it in the bread machine, then braided it and placed it into my pans. (My grandmother's cheap-but-useable way to get a decorative loaf while still maintaining sandwich-sliceability.) It turned out great. It felt good to knead the dough, to work out the various design problems of braided loaves, to watch them slowly rise under a dishtowel on the kitchen counter. "I've still got it," I thought.

I'm truly feeling a sense of detoxing from my past job, all its frustrations, all its assaults on my self-confidence. Getting my hands into things -- whether bread dough or glass tools or dirt -- is, I think, becoming an important part of grasping onto my true self and pulling it back into me.

Sisters

Gertie and Mollie, sharing the sofa for an afternoon chill-out.

Possessed

The Garage Kenosis Project continues at our house, as we sift through the contents of two previous homes and try desperately to get as much as possible out of the office space in the rear of our detached garage so we can be about the business of turning it into a family office and "woman cave" -- a space with a cottage feel without the added expense and upkeep, and only a few dozen yards from the house.

It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff we have both collected, and why I brought so much stuff with me over here, instead of throwing it or giving it away when I had the chance. Well, I know why -- because I got the offer on my house and was then given only a couple of weeks to move out; toward the end we were just tossing things into moving boxes.

But that was then and this is now. So far I have donated two very large boxes of clothing to the local mission, as well as boxes of unused medical supplies dating back to Fellow Traveler's major operation shortly before we met. After our garage sale we donated leftover furniture, books, tools, collectibles and assorted tschotchkes to the yard sale of the ELCA congregation down the highway, and in the last week, after opening boxes of "keeper" items we'd saved before our sale and reevaluating them, I found myself filling at least one big box with duplicate kitchen equipment and dishware fated for our own congregations' big Labor Day weekend yard sale.

Things. So many things. At times I feel like Alice in Wonderland in Sir John Tenniel's illustration where she's being bombarded by flying playing cards...except instead of cards I'm being pelted with superfluous mismatched juice glasses and silverware and mixing bowls.

Recently on the Ship of Fools a discussion ensued on possessions, and I found myself arguing against a broad application of the "sell all you have" asceticism in service to the Gospel that Jesus advocates for some who come to him. It was suggested that Jesus' words weren't intended only for the spiritual elite but for everyone, and that those on my side of the debate were practicing a bit of eisegetic Scripture reading to salve our guilty consciences. I still don't agree; but I do agree that possessions have a tendency to take over our lives and priorities.

And it's not just a matter of greedy acquisition. Most of my stuff, for instance, represented a 50+-year accumulation of a very modest working-class family; and a good proportion of it was worthless -- just family documents that had been stored for decades. But it's the learning to periodically take stock of it and if necessary let go of it that gets hard, particularly if we're preoccupied with other things. Otherwise stuff can just grow and grow until the anxiety involved in accomodating it spacewise, caring for it and wondering, in a vague way, what's to become of it push more important (not to mention more interesting) issues out of the priority queue. It's a form of attachment, even if it's not a positive emotional attachment; it's like a sticker from a weed lodging itself in one's sock during a hike and then constantly scratching against one's ankle.

We were frantic to clear out the front part of the garage. That has now been cleared out, and Fellow Traveler has done a beautiful job storing our garden tools and other such items vertically, on the walls, to free up space. Now that that's done and our studio space is more or less set up and ready for business, we've given ourselves permisison to empty the back room in a more gradual way. My personal goal is to rid the floor of one box per day. And it's become easier. The other day I found the box where we'd hastily thrown all my family cookbooks. It would have been easy to linger over every magazine recipe my mother or aunt had cut out, every manufacturer's cookbook Mom had sent for back as a newlywed in the 50's, books I recall fondly from my childhood -- but I tried to stay focused on what documents were truly useful and/or truly keepsakes. And I wound up throwing most of it away.

I'm trying hard to make this new spaciousness a household baseline for the future, so we're no longer so possessed by our possessions.

"Got Game" Friday Five

This week's RevGalBlogPals Friday Five invites us to get our game on, so to speak:


1. Childhood games?
Being an only child, with parents not terribly interested in playing games (in large part because they were too busy farming), I was often on my own when it came to pastimes. My grandmother, bless her heart, would give each grandchild -- age irrelevant, siblings or no -- a board game for Christmas, so I amassed a decent stack of them by the time I was old enough to be interested. And I'd play them mostly by myself, taking turns as one player or the other.

When I'd spend a week each summer with my child-friendly Aunt Marian and Uncle Leonard, they would play Monopoly or War (the card game) with me on rainy days when they weren't outside farming and gardening. They also introduced me to Consequences, the Victorian ancestor to today's Mad Libs. (See an explanation of the rules here .) When I got a little older we got a set of Jarts at my house -- ah, those were the days, before they heyday of litigation-as-income or child safety rules! -- a game that my father could occasionally be persuaded to join.

It's really only been as an adult, thanks to my "got game" partner, that I've been able to learn and enjoy a lot of games that I never really played as a child.

2. Favorite and/or most hated board games?
Scrabble is my favorite board game, because I like words. By contrast I hate Yahtzee, which I really don't understand no matter how often people try to explain the rules to me. I think it would be quite interesting to take scans of my brain while playing each game to see what's going on (or not going on) in each case.

3. Card games?
Please, dear God, no. Well, I shouldn't say that; I do actively enjoy SkipBo. But other than that particular game, evidently sometime during the human developmental process my mother failed to ingest whatever nutrient it is that gives one the interest in or the ability to play cards. I have tried -- oh, how I have tried, especially in a euchre-intensive Lutheran social milieu -- to learn how to play. I can't. Not only can't I remember the rules from time to time, I can't seem to make myself care enough to fully understand them. It's nothing personal against card players; I admire and envy all of you. But think about how interested you would be in, say, a symposium on particle physics or a several-hour session of plastic-canvas needlepoint down at the senior center, and try to understand that this is exactly how I feel about the games that you love so much. I will be happy to make canapes for your card game, or run down to the party store for more beer and chips, or sit at the table and banter wittily if that's allowed...but please don't make me actually play your card game. Is that so wrong, to ask that? Thank you.

4. Travel/car games?
We traveled so seldom when I was a child that I was usually completely entranced just rubbernecking out the window at the passing scenery; I didn't need games. That's true today as well; the trip is the thing.

5. Adult pastimes that are not video games?
At our house we like Scrabble and dominoes. Darts are fun, but other than the video kind we don't have a good place to play. As far as things like lawn games, I myself enjoy horseshoes, and think I'd love bocce if I were able to play it more. The problem is, Gertie the part-retriever tends to think that anything involving thrown or rolled objects is a game of catch for her -- most annoying in bocce, and potentially lethal in horseshoes. I'm too chicken at this point to attempt real golf (minus Miss G), but I do likes me some putt-putt golf once in awhile.

Meeting a Neighbor

The other day while poking around our detached garage (where we've been spending most of our days trying to divest ourselves of our accumulated junk and refashion the space into a craft studio and office) I saw a most amazing thing: a lizard.

Amazing because in Michigan lizards are few (only two species) and far between. I remember my father, a farmer who'd lived much of his life out of doors, commenting that he'd only seen an actual lizard (as opposed to salamanders and mud puppies, which some of the country folks lump into the same category) in the wild perhaps twice during his agricultural career. I myself had only ever seen one once as a child. During our trip to Orlando a couple years ago I couldn't get over the ubiquitous and at times Jurassic-Park-ishly disquieting presence of the little green anoles who seemed to be lurking in all the shrubbery.

So anyway, there was this lizard sunning itself on the landscaping stones around the garage foundation. I was fascinated by its sleek profile and curious, quirky manner. We spent a second or two sizing up one another. Then it quickly shot up underneath the siding.

I looked up the little creature I'd seen, and discovered that it was a six-lined racerunner, a lizard that, as its name implies, has a need for speed. It also seems to not only tolerate but enjoy hot temperatures, which makes our garage's sunny south side a logical choice for its summer R&R.

I'm kind of tickled that this critter has taken up residence at our place, and hope it lives a long, fulfilled life hunting bugs around the building and in our nearby garden.

Swearing on a Stack of Bibles

For some odd reason -- odd because I don't listen to contemporary Christian music unless I'm forced to -- I found myself, the other day, reading a blog dedicated to that musical genre. There is apparently a kerfuffle going on in those circles about the "explicit lyrics" of a song by someone named Derek Webb.

I read the lyrics. I read the frowny-faced comments by concerned CCM fans. And suddenly I had a flashback to 1979, when I was a freshman in college surrounded by members of groups like Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Navigators and Campus Crusade. These were the kind of undergraduates who worried whether saying darn was taking the Lord's name in vain because it was just a bowlderized version of Goddamn, so anyone who actually knew the etymology of darn and said darn anyway was more or less saying Goddamn, and "I really need to pray about this, and if it is a sin I need to repent, because if I don't, when I die God is going to ask me why I loved saying darn more than I loved Him..." We Lutheran students, generally unsaddled by this degree of scrupulosity even in my then-LCMS congregation, would later wonder over our beers what in hell these people were going on about.

But anyway, back in the day, the same subset of Christians were having the same fits of moral outrage over then-CCM-identified-musician Bruce Cockburn's song "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," where he, speaking for all conflicted pacifists everywhere, waxed ironic with the confession, If I had a rocket launcher/some son-of-a-bitch would die. You would have thought he'd actually set the thing off and taken out a few dozen innocent civilians, the way some of the Christian listeners were carrying on. My reaction to that reaction was the same eye-roll I found myself giving this latest episode of goody-two-shoes angsting. I mean -- these lyrics will never (please, God) make it into an Oxford anthology of sacred music -- but if the singer/songwriter's intention was ironic, to call out the sanctimony of his demographic by eliciting a predictable response, then it was in its own way quite clever; although apparently not clever enough to lead the subjects to understand the "gotcha."

In high school my English teacher -- a part-time gentleman farmer and full-time conservative Baptist -- affirmed the judicious use of cusswords in literature. His observation: "When you're up to your knees in shit, there's not much else you can call it."

A Physical Friday Five

This week's RevGalBlogPals Friday Five asks us "about you and your beautiful temple of the Holy Spirit":

1. What was your favorite sport or outdoor activity as a child?
I was a great hiker through our farm fields. And -- believe it or not -- I enjoyed mowing the lawn.

2. P.E. class--heaven or the other place?
Definitely the other place. Back in the 60's and 70's, PE class had nothing to do with inculcating a personal health regimen or even awxappreciation of one's physicality. Naw -- it was all about burning off kids' excess energy between academic classes and, later on in middle and high school, identifying elite athletes for school teams; oh, and following a state reg. I'd like to think that things have changed, but I'm told that at least in my locality PE is the same-ol', same-ol', only with perhaps even less student enthusiasm.

3. What is your favorite form of exercise now?
I enjoy walking. I enjoy gardening, which can provide a pretty good non-aerobic workout. And, all appearances to the contrary, I do enjoy going to the gym and working on the machines. (Our best intentions to this fell by the wayside when our lives started getting busy again in the mid-winter, and I frankly don't know when we'll be able to start up again.)

4. Do you like to work out solo or with a partner?
I have to say, I enjoy walking alone, which is like a moving meditation for me -- and that way I only have to worry about my own pace. I enjoy working the gym machines with Fellow Traveler so we can talk while we exercise, and for the friendly competition.

5. Inside or outside?
Walking outside; everything else inside.

My own bonus question: A type of exercise I'd like to take up but haven't yet: Tai chi. I love watching tai chi practitioners doing their thing. Sadly, the last time I attempted this discipline -- using a DVD designed for older adults, I might add -- the instructor went too fast for me. Which tells you something about my ability to move easily in space.