Churches using their green spaces for community gardens

Families buying local, eating local—refusing to support long-distance transportation and foods modified for shelf life instead of nutrition or freshness

Couples using purifier pitchers and faucets rather than purchasing cases of plastic-bottled water – or just drinking the tap water; regardless of what the commercials say—it’s fine!

Parents teaching children to plant and nurture and grow and love living things

Families taking the time to plan shopping and errands to save gas miles

People recycling – that’s half the equation

People committing to spending more to buy recycled – that’s the other half

Proving our strength by not buying the highest-powered, biggest pickups and RVs

Everyone trying to buy the highest mileage vehicles they can afford – even when it’s a squeeze

Shoppers buying everything we can at local Farm Markets

Buying – or making our own – green cleaning agents, detergents, etc.

Doing energy audits on our homes – contact the utility companies for information and help

Buying led or compact fluorescent light bulbs; they’re improving every day and will probably last half (or all!) of our lifetimes

Planting a tree.  Planting several.

Churches hosting Farm Markets or “free” farm markets

Composting. If we do it right, it won’t smell, will save us $ in our gardens and reduce landfills.

Studying our trash.  It can teach us a lot about how we live on the earth and how to do that better

Using reusable shopping bags – put them in the front seat so we don’t forget them.

Love the earth, and she’ll support us and provide for all we need. She’s a gift, and we’re the stewards of that gift.

Signing petitions and making calls to our elected officials – over and over and over again.

It’s Holy Week, the week that begins with Passion (or Palm) Sunday, and concludes with Easter, the Day of Resurrection.  This week means so much to those of us who are “churched” and accustomed to the rhythm of the church year and its seasons.  This is Lent, and Lent leads us to Easter, and we all know that.

Except that today fewer people than ever know that – and their children are not learning – and Christendom is no reality in this year of Our Lord 2014.

But yesterday we in the church began Holy Week with a flourish and a whoop.  At Christ Church Xenia we gathered in the Parish Hall for the brief and joyous Liturgy of the Palms.  As people held their palms aloft I walked among them. I sprinkled holy water on them and on their palms, blessing this reminder of the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem with the crowds shouting Hosanna! and laying palm branches on the road he traveled.  Then singing, we walked in procession out the doors of the Parish Hall, and around the outside of the church to the front door, where we entered to continue our worship.

This year it actually worked, that singing-in-procession part.  Joe, our hard-working Music Director, and my good spouse Pete arrived extra early to set up a temporary sound system which would send our organ music ringing out of the church windows and onto the path we walked.  There was a reason for this extra work.  If you’ve ever watched or been part of a singing procession, you know that the end of the procession will always be singing something very out of step with the beginning of the procession.  I’m not sure why that happens, but it does.  Everyone ends up confused, and the singing is halting if not downright discordant.  We reasoned that the music resounding from the church windows all along our path would keep us in time with each other.   It worked, and worked well. 

We had some concerns about our neighbors, though, and didn’t want to anger or offend anyone.  At the same time, we hoped our public procession (singing in tune and all together) might be a “witness” and touch some whom God was seeking.  Accordingly, one of our neighbors stepped out onto his patio and waved to us, and another commented later that it was nice to actually hear what was going on in the church next door.  So far, and with fingers crossed, we have had no complaints.

The neighbor’s comment, though, struck me.  It confirms my sense that many look at our stone “fortresses” and are intimidated or hesitant or uncertain of their welcome in such forbidding places.  So many of our beloved church buildings look more like medieval castles than anything people around us might find familiar or welcoming.  A procession, singing and joyful, is not a bad way to interpret our life to others.  There are many other ways to do that, and if God has ever meant anything good in our lives, we ought to find those ways.  When you have something precious and wonderful that has changed your life, why wouldn’t you want to reach out and share?

So – kudos to Joe and Pete, thanksgivings for the beautiful procession, and for – hopefully – a window opening to our community. A blessed Holy Week to all.

A Day in a Chaplain’s Life…

Almost thirty years ago I answered my pager and headed up to the eighth floor.  When I entered the room I found it filled with people, sitting or standing around the hospital bed where the family patriarch lay dying. I asked the family to gather with me for prayer, and together we prayed for the patient struggling for his every breath and for them as well – for their comfort and peace. 

Amid the many expressions of grief and professions of mourning, one strident young voice stood out.  Sounding angry and bitter, this thirty-something daughter stood clutching the bed rail and facing her family.  She told them his dying wasn’t changing who he was—a cruel and unloving man who had caused every one of them pain.  They looked away from her, not meeting her eyes but not disputing her words. I knew that this man had a life-long reputation in the community that matched her words.

Within the next few minutes life ended for that man.  As family members moved around the bedside, the young woman left the room and stood standing alone in the hallway outside. I went to stand with her as the nursing staff entered the room. She and I walked down the hall and she turned to talk to me.  “I don’t know why they’re all crying and carrying on,” she said.  “As far as I could tell, they hated him, and he hated them.  He hated everyone, I think.”  She paused, then suddenly burst out, “You know, he was such a mean son of a _________, I thought he’d never die!”

Horrified, she stopped. Shocked and speechless, I stared. We looked at one another for a very long minute, then – horror of horrors – we both began to laugh.  Unexpectedly and inextricably, the moment was funny with that weird humor some call gallows humor. She laid her head on my shoulder and laughed until she once again was crying.  When she pulled away I took her hand and said simply: “No guilt.” She nodded her head.  “Yes,” she said, smiled, and turned back toward the room where her family was gathered.

After checking in once more with the rest of the family, I left the unit.  It took me quite a while to forgive myself for my laughter.  It’s true that the moment was unique in my experience, and I’ll never fully understand why it was funny – but it was. I’ve often wondered how the young woman with the penchant for straight talk had fared.

And I’ve come to think that there’s a place for that kind of honesty.  It isn’t comfortable, and certainly it isn’t politically correct.  I never could have said what she said – I did not have the right.  But she - who had lived with her father and as part of that family –she had that right.  Her truth was the knowledge that death did not change the man her father had been; death did not somehow transform a lifetime of hurting others. She would not bend her experience and her feelings to social convention, and I remember another like that.  Jesus, who used phrases like “whited sepulcher” – who chased greedy men from the Temple with a whip –I think he would have understood this young woman.  She grieved, but her grief was not the simple grief of a loving daughter mourning a loving father.  It was too complex for that—but it was honest.

I will never be entirely comfortable with what happened that day; it’s a little prickly thing in my mind and heart that cannot be smoothed over.  But I know I will not forget.

Image of the Helix Nebula, aka Eye of God  from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030510.html

And so I’m working on it. I think about my ending, and what I can do to make it a little more reasonable for those I love.  I can’t eliminate their grief, nor would I even if I could.  We are entitled to mourn those we love.  That’s our right.  And I know from my own experience that we live through the mourning and can take something good from it back into our lives.  But I am practical about some things, and I have decided that I don’t need to leave those I love with mountains of unnecessary labor to complicate an already complicated time.  So I’m trying to clean up, and my first big project was my file cabinet.  Don’t laugh.  Cleaning out my files is enough to cause anyone grief, all by itself.  I’ve spent the last many days wading through papers I’ll never use again – papers no governmental agency will ever want to see – papers that are parts of projects long since accomplished.  Why in the world did I ever save them in the first place?!  I’ve cleaned out my files, so that what is left is current and generally necessary.  Anyone who has ever handled the estate of a “pack rat” will appreciate my efforts.

But other things beside the cleanup have been happening as I wade through stuff in an effort to ease the labors of those who love me.  I find I am less concerned about my own end as I make that simply part of “the project”.  And even more importantly, I am less weighed down and encumbered by my own life’s accumulated detritus.  All those things I’ve always been “going to get to” are finally being gotten to.  I am more free.  I won’t say that I’ve vanquished death, as Boff says, but it is no longer a scary specter somewhere in my future.  I have always believed that we are part of something larger, and that, in some ways unknown to us, we go on.  I also believe we never lose our connections with creation – with those we love.  I hope for and expect many, many years to enjoy my life – and I also want to be prepared to leave it whenever that happens.

Jesus lived his life doing and saying all the things he felt important to do and say.  He surely was an intelligent man, and knew that he was not prolonging his life span by those doings and sayings.  Somewhere along the way, though, he became able to make his own death a part of the project, and that freed him to bring God into the world in a way we’d never known before. That’s not to say he didn’t have moments of real fear and even real desperation.  But deeper and stronger than those were his ability to forgive, his hope, and his faith…and I firmly believe—his joy.  That’s what I’m aiming for; not a morbid preoccupation, but a sensible appreciation – and, of course, thankful joy.

Mismatched Socks

Our eight-year-old granddaughter is becoming a “fashionista”.  I’m not certain how one does that at eight, but it does indeed seem to be possible.  Jules was visiting with us one day when the last of the lovely winter snow was transmogrifying itself into the gray spring slush. She came in from the outside, cold and wet, and I sent her, as good Grammas do, to change into dry clothes.  She returned and asked if I had any socks for her.  Now, we keep a drawer in the closet organizer just for grandkids, and I was pretty sure I could find socks.  As I started toward the bedroom Jules called out:  “They don’t have to match, Gramma.  It’s OK for them to be different.”

Now, I guess I am sometimes an indulgent Gramma.  However, I’m also my mother’s daughter, and I would never have gotten out of my mother’s house in mismatched socks.  That seems to be the fashion, however, among young girls.  I would never even attempt to discern what makes for fashion, but certainly can accept that some things will be “in”, while other things will most definitely be “out”.  Mismatched socks are “in”, and my granddaughter wanted to be “in” as well.  So after a brief struggle with my mother’s shade, I found two mismatched socks and handed them over….without comment!

I found it ironic that in the effort to fit into her social circle’s strict convention she must accept that it’s alright for some things to be different.  What a dichotomy!

How I hope that her words “It’s OK for them to be different” come to mean more than a pair of socks to her.  I pray that she is able to accept differences without qualification; to understand that being different does not need to mean better than or worse than or in opposition to.  It simply can mean different.  I pray she comes to celebrate differences as the multitude of ways we express God’s creative love in our beings and in our lives.  …and in some ways, my mother herself could agree with that!