Loss of power

From our friend Barbara Crafton in New Jersey...

SOME OF OUR POWER

I think of them whenever our electricity goes off -- the generations of human beings for whom this was the way life was, people who rose with the sun and slept with the moon. People whose houses were always cold in winter. People who could not read at night unless by candlight. They far outnumber us: electrification is a newcomer to human experience.

At times like this, I long to see them. I sit by the fire with a shawl covering my legs and another my shoulders, and I worry about their attire: if it was this chilly, how on earth did the women endure the décolletage we know characterized their dress in Jane Austen's time? How did the men of the 18th century endure knee pants? Or might we have imagined the whole thing, egged on by the hyperactive imaginations of their portraitists and our filmmakers? No, we did not: some of their clothing remains. You can visit it in museums.

Their great-grandchildren queue up anxiously to buy matches, for water in bottles, for ice in bags, fretting about the endangered contents of our freezers. We dread the absence of our electrical genie before it occurs, calling and texting each other about the impending disaster. Have you lost power yet? What about your mom? Does she have power?

"Power," we call it. We have no power. This is our third day without power. As if the departure of electricity were the loss of all our power. It is not. It is the loss of SOME of our power, not all of it.

We were almost out of bread before the hurricane hit, and our oven is electric. This was the opportunity for which I've been waiting for years: the chance to test a contention of my grandmother's that has always seemed nonsensical to me. She never liked the newfangled stove my mother had. You can't control the fire, she would fume, like you can in a wood stove.

What?!? The stove of my childhood was primitive indeed by today's standards, but it had dials with exact temperatures on them.

No, no, she insisted. It doesn't get hot fast enough and you can't adjust it fast enough. Wood is so much easier.

In memory of her, then, as well as out of necessity, I decided to bake our bread in the fireplace. I banked hot coals up around my iron pot and put the lid on, leaving it there to get really hot. Then in went the bread and back went the lid. My internal dialogue with my grandmother began:

Me: This won't work. It's a waste of good flour. There are no temperature gauges.

My Grandmother: Yes it will. People who couldn't even read have been baking bread like this for thousands of years.

Me: Maybe I need to bake it longer? How will I know?

My Grandmother: Trial and error. That's basically how we know everything.

Half an hour into the baking, I removed the lid and looked at the loaf, expecting something pasty and unappetizingly pale. But no: it was brown and gorgeous -- browner, in fact, than it is at this stage in my fabulous new oven. Hmmmn.

In fifteen minutes, it was done. It looked wonderful. I sliced off the heel when it had cooled. I don't really eat bread any more, but this was an emergency. I had an argument with my dead grandmother to win.

Damned if the woman wasn't right. It was good. Better than in my new oven? I'm not sure. I'd better have another slice.

Copyright © 2001-2012 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

The Geranium Farm

Incense and smoke alarms

Our wonderful friend Barbara Crafton sent this missive this morning about the Great Vigil of Easter at the church in New Jersey where she is serving as interim rector. This is definitely worth a read, and see below this post for photographs from our Easter Vigil at St. Paul's from last Saturday evening...

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St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Metuchen, NJ 

Great Vigil
By Barbara Crafton

It had been some time since incense was used in this church -- so long that the charcoal had expired, it seemed, and was hard to light. Eventually Deacon Bob managed to coax a modest smolder from it, though, and we were off. Because you need incense for the Easter Vigil -- incense and darkness and candles. You can't do an Easter Vigil in a church that's lit up like a convenience store -- no, convenience has very little to do with it. There's no point doing an Easter Vigil at all if you don't want mystery -- that would be like the lady who wrote into the paper asking how she might make a pecan pie that wasn't so sweet. Just don't make a pecan pie, the cooking columnist wrote back.

Oh, it was lovely. People turned out for it, I having harped on it in the bulletin for weeks beforehand and promised strawberries and champagne to anybody still standing after it was over, and the church was respectably filled -- not packed, but respectable. Some of our best readers read the ancient stories. There were no babies to be baptized this year, so the people signed one another with the cross in holy water, their faces tender and beautiful in the candlelight: a son blessing his father, a husband blessing his wife, sisters blessing each other. And the incense was just right -- we didn't want to smoke them to death the first time out, just a gentle plume of sweet-sharp mystery to perfume the reading of the Gospel.

That's when the smoke alarm went off.

They've made huge advances in smoke detection, it seems. The alarm sent out strobes of piercing white light, and the sound of it must certainly have disturbed the repose of the beloved dead out in the memorial garden, not to mention that of our living neighbors. The mood of mystery vanished -- in a puff of smoke, as it were -- and soon firefighters in full regalia and a police officer appeared at the door. You should have been there.

It fell to me to restore reverence after the firefighters left. This would be a challenge, but it is why we study homiletics. Come here, Jesus, I said silently, and began.

What if -- what if---what if it hadn't been a false alarm? What if it had been a real fire? What if this 150-year-old building had gone up like a torch, the building and everything in it: the needlepoint kneelers, the old wooden pews, all the hangings and the purificatory and corporals and all the prayer books? We would have gotten out safely, but the walls would have blackened and then crumbled to the ground, the beams would have plunged to earth, glowing orange as the setting sun. The stained glass might have melted -- certain the lead holding it would have. I wonder if the brass would have melted? The silver would have.

Thoughts would rise in the dark: I was married here, and my kids were baptized here. My wife made the kneelers. My husband' funeral was here, and my son's confirmation. Four generations of our family, all baptized here, in the same white dress.

We would have stood out on Oak Avenue in the dark and watched the firefighters struggle to save it. But in the morning -- Easter morning! -- there would have been a smoking pile of charred wood where one of the prettiest churches you've ever seen used to be.

We would have wept at the sight. Of that I am certain.

But then what? Well, I would have to find us a new place to worship -- if the parish hall were intact, I guess we'd use that. And we'd have been on the phone to Church Insurance, to see about all that. The vestry would have begun the long process if deciding how to rebuild -- because we would rebuild. Without doubt.

Of course, the church we finally built would not be just like this one. No -- we wouldn't make a replica of it. It would be different -- first, because they don't make them like they used to in 1868 and second, because we are not who we were then. We wouldn't make the Stepford version of St. Luke's as we have it now. The church that would rise from its ashes would be different.

The resurrected Christ was different. People who had known him well didn't recognize him. How he was different, I do not know -- I wasn't there. But something about him was so powerfully changed that encountering it changed the lives of those who did, as it continues to transform those who encounter Christ today. A mystery, he was. In broad daylight.

Copyright © 2001-2012 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

You can read more of Barbara Crafton on her website The Geranium Farm.

Guest commentary: Stand back, God is free

Among the privileges of my work is sitting on the Committee on Diaconate in the Diocese of Virginia. I've been with this wonderful group of people, lay and ordained, for a couple of years now as we discern with individuals whether they are called to be vocational deacons.

Although deacons have been a vital part of many parts of the church for decades, this order of ministry is relatively new in the Diocese of Virginia. Bishop Shannon Johnston ordained only the second class of permanent deacons last Saturday. Our committee worked with each of these three candidates for several years as they moved to that moment of ordination.

Deacons are called to be servant ministers and to be icons of servant ministry for the whole church. They are to bring the church into the world, and the world back into the church.

Our committee met Wednesday in Richmond to continueironing out the details of diaconal discernment and formation in the Diocese of Virginia. And so it happens that Barbara Crafton sent this last night from her archives, a perfect reminder of how imperfect our work of discernment is:

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By Barbara Crafton

I spend lots of time with people who are hoping to be ordained in the future -- seminarians, new clergy, people who hope to become first one and then the other of these. So I think often about what it means to be called -- not just to ordained ministry, but to any life's work.

Stand Back. God is Free. - February 2003

"He that is not against us is for us." This is what Jesus said to his disciples when a couple of them came running to tell-tale on somebody outside their circle who was performing healings. Same thing Moses had said to a couple of his folks centuries before, when they came running to tell on Eldad and Medad for prophesying, when they hadn't specifically been chosen to do so. Sometimes people we didn't authorize to exercise a gift of the Spirit do it anyway. This can happen, because the Spirit doesn't belong to us.

We keep forgetting this.

In the Church, we regularly seek to discern spiritual gifts. We have ornate processes for doing so, some of them involving phalanxes of psychologists and rank on earnest rank of interviewers, all bent on trying to figure out if God has called one among us and, if so, to what work. None of can really know what God is doing, though, so we must satisfy ourselves with the discovery of talents and predilections that seem suited to the performance of whatever calling we're hoping to discern, coupled with adequate mental health to enter into the often-thankless work of ministry. We make our call. Usually we are right, I think, but sometimes we're wrong. Still, we make our call, and hope for the best. We never really know.

History reveals it, though. A call of the Spirit lives, even in difficult circumstances. It may not always triumph -- we are not in heaven yet -- but it always remains. One at war with the Spirit withers and dies. Put a person in the wrong calling and you're doing him a terrible disservice. Refuse a right one and you miss the chance to share in the mighty works of God, but you won't wreck it. The Spirit is stronger than we are. It'll get through somehow.

What our inability either to predict or contain the work of the Spirit, our failure ever to be exactly sure of our discernment, gives us is something we need: an ongoing sense of the freedom of God. God is free. We draw lines in the sand and God hops nimbly across them. We set up systems and sometimes God just does something else. With God, Mary of Nazareth so astutely observes, nothing will be impossible. And she should know.

All this is not to say that we should aspire to anarchy. That the best rules for us are always no rules at all. We do the best we can to regulate our lives -- we must. But we should never be surprised when our careful arrangements turn out not to be the last word. We don't really have the last word.

Copyright © 2001-2012 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

How do we know there is such a thing as time?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Christmases past, friends near and friends far away, and dear friends departed this life. Sometimes it seems as though only yesterday I was going on my first date, taking my first college exam, looking for my first job, filing my first newspaper story, quitting my first job, getting married, moving from this place to that place.

We've been in Virginia almost four years, but it seems like yesterday we arrived (and, yes, there are still a lot of boxes yet to be unpacked). Another New Years Eve arrives in a few days, another year marked gone on the calendar. I behold each day with thanks, for each day is truly an irreplaceable gift. May you have many blessings, abundant health, and beautiful memories in the coming year.

Barbara Crafton penned this the other day about time and Christmas, and I leave it with you today:

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HE'S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
By Barbara Crafton

How do we know there is no such thing as time, you ask?

Ah -- I can document it for you: cast your mind back to the Christmases of your childhood. Remember the afternoon of the great day -- the wreckage of toys and wrapping paper, the ruin of the Christmas feast still littering the table, the exhausted adults surveying it all listlessly. Remember your lust for the toys you received, remember the carefully-selected gifts you brushed aside, so entranced were you with whatever gift it was that seemed to you to be the star. And remember, then, the despair that clung to the edges of your orgy: it would be a whole year until next Christmas. A YEAR! A YEAR, do you tell me? How on earth would you make it through? A year was as good as a century in those days. A year was an eternity.

Now think of last Christmas. How long ago does it seem? About a month? Me, too.

Time is not constant. It is relative. It speeds up -- and not just the human experience of it, either. Time itself is intimately paired with location. It's why there are time zones -- it's already tomorrow in India. And yet I can pick up the phone and speak with someone there: he will answer right away: real time intersects with elapsed time when I do that. If that's the case in India, on the other side of the modestly-sized earth from where I sit and write this, imagine what time it is on Alpha Centauri.

Did I mention that this train of thought can be confusing?

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Just when we think we might have overdosed on Nativity scenes, the gospel reading in church this Sunday will feature this austere reminder: that which is, always has been. It IS. Jesus of Nazareth was born in a time and a place, but Jesus the Christ is not contained in a moment. The moments of Christ are all now.

Don't worry if this isn't coming together for you yet. Sit with it for a few decades and it will. When it does, its implications will, too: if there is no such thing as time, nothing is lost. What was still IS. The sad parade of loss we know as history is only a parade on this narrow stage of earthly life. It stretches out only here. The God's-eye view of our life is not linear. It is all now.

He's got the whole world in His hands. Bet you never thought of it as a Christmas song.

The Eternal Now and the two baskets

Our friend Barbara Crafton, who was with us this past weekend for an Advent retreat at St. Paul's, sent this missive this morning. Barbara puts in writing much of what she reflected upon in her time with us: the "doctrine of the two baskets."

I summarized her ideas in an earlier post, but this is much better coming from her:

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THE TWO BASKETS
By Barbara Crafton

If it is so -- as it surely must be -- that God has no past, present or future, but encompasses all of these in an eternal NOW, that the One who "has the whole world in His hands" holds everything material but is neither held nor limited bit anything, then it must also be the case that we are also in it. Already. It is not an afterlife, at the end of a linear progression of minutes, years and centuries; it is an also life, existing all around the life we know, and containing it.

It is as if there were two baskets, a large one and a small one. The smaller basket sits in the larger one, which easily holds it. We live in the smaller basket: we and everything we love and hate, we as we are now, and we as we were. We as we shall be. The world as it was before we arrived, and as it will be when we have departed it. The universe from its first inorganic breath to the final sigh of its extinguishing. What was, is now and what shall be -- it is all in the smaller basket, our beautiful home.

We love it here. Almost all of us never want to leave. We count our departure from it as tragedy, the departure of those we hold dear as unbearable loss. Many of us refuse even to discuss that ending: won't make out a will, won't see the life insurance agent, won't choose a healthcare proxy. Won't even say the word "died.". And the ending of the universe that contains us? We find it inconceivable.

It is in the nature of baskets to have holes, is it not -- openings between the strips of wood or straw or grass that have been woven together to form them? If you were in the smaller basket, you might, from time to time, peer out one of the openings to see what's out there. Sometimes you see it in a state you call dreaming. There's something out there, that's for sure, and sometimes you get a glimpse. But the opening through which you peer is small, and you can't really get a good look. And who cares what's out there, anyway? You like it here. Everything you love is here, in the smaller basket.

One day, though, the smaller basket begins to crumble. Soon you stand amid the shards of it. You look around and see that you are in another basket. You see, in fact, that this is the very place you saw, those times when you peered out of the tiny openings in the smaller basket. Oh, you say to yourself, I know this place! I have always been here. Everything I loved has always been here. Everything is here.

All our times are there. All our loves. All our possibilities, including the ones that never bore fruit here in the smaller basket. Everything has always been there. As you have aged, loss has stabbed you many times, and you have bled freely from the wounds. But take heart. The fragile loves we clutch in a vain attempt to hold them here? They all wait there, just outside the basket's thin walls. The smaller basket is pregnant with us.

Our first birth into this world is frightening, I think -- a perilous journey through an impossibly narrow opening. It must be terrifying for the little traveler -- even a year or two later, you try to put a turtleneck on a toddler and it evokes an unpleasant memory. But the journey inaugurates the life we love. It's worth it.

We live in fear of our second birth, the one we call death. But it is probably the same: a transition from one state to another, from the rules of one world to a world in which they do not apply.

So be of good cheer. And stay tuned. What we see is not all there is.

Photo of Barbara Crafton at St. Paul's Memorial Church, Dec. 4, 2011, by Gwynn Crichton.

A wonderful Sunday with Barbara Crafton

We had a wonderful Sunday with author and priest Barbara Crafton and her husband Richard, aka "Q." You can listen to her sermon by clicking HERE.

Below is a photo taken by Gwynn Crichton this morning just before the 10 am worship. From left to right, David Poist, rector emeritus; me; Barbara Crafton; Heather Warren; Ann Willms.

Prayer in the hard times: Our day with Barbara Crafton at St. Paul's

We had a very rich Saturday with author Barbara Crafton, and she will be with us in the pulpit Sunday at the 8 am and 10 am worship services at St. Paul's.

Barbara, who is an Episcopal priest, sat on a chair in front of the Holy Table and talked to us about a very difficult subject -- praying "in the hard times."

She imparted much practical advice for how to pray when it is hardest of all to pray, when God seems very distant, when the world seems to be crashing in around us,

She also talked about how to pray to forgive and to be forgiven.

Barbara began by telling us what prayer is not: it cannot be outcome based. We should not be thinking of God "as a powerful genie who will do what we say if we pray properly. We don't order up the results of our prayer like a pizza."

She asked us to think of prayer as a way we enter into and become aware of the kingdom of God, or the dominion of God, or the energy of God that connects all things in the universe, all that there is and ever shall be. She urged us to pray specifically and honestly, but also know that God knows before we ask.

"In prayer, we are not cajoling God or making God change his mind. We are not placating an angry king who has it in for us. We don't think God sends evil into our lives," she said.

"The creative love of God that causes everything continues to reverberate, continues to create," she said. "There is a river that flows from the love of God."

In our prayer, we we enter the river, or more precisely, we become aware of the flowing river we are already in.

When we pray for others we connect to them in profoundly holy way by sharing in God's compassion.  "When we pray, we take people's hand and go in the river with them."

Barbara gave us the benefit of much wisdom Saturday in her gentle and eloquent way. She is also a spell-binding story teller.  I won't presume to give all that we heard to you here -- I am not capable of that, but do come here her preach Sunday if you can (and I would suggest you sign up for her email reflections at The Geranium Farm website by clicking HERE).

She took us deeply into some difficult topics including how to live with our own death. She imparted to us a metaphor that I will summarize for you:

Imagine two baskets, she suggested. One basket sits inside the other. "We live in the smaller basket," and that basket is the universe, all that we know and see.

The smaller basket is our home, and we don't want to leave that basket, but we can see through the weaves to the other basket -- and those are glimpses of what is beyond.

"One day the smaller basket crumbles and we are in the bigger basket. The big basket is also my home."

The bigger basket is the Kingdom of God, and we've always lived in it. "Our first sensation after death is I've always been here. Recognition."

To live now is to live beyond our fear of what comes next and bring it to prayer. "Heaven may be what God intended for us all along here."

Living in the woods with birds that ask: Can you believe this?

If you are in the Charlottesville area, I hope you will join us at St. Paul's Memorial Church for a very special time today with Barbara Crafton, a noted author who will be leading us in a workshop entitled "Prayer in the Hard Times." We start at 9 am, and we should be done at 3 pm. The cost of the workshop? Free, our gift to you. Please come if you can. I will write something later in this space for Sunday about our time with her.

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Around our place the leaves have dropped from the trees and we can see the mountains beyond once again. We lost one of our chickens the other day to a predator. We live in the woods on the side of hill, and it is beautiful here, but this is a wild place, and life can be a struggle for the animals that live around us.

Each morning we hear the chirps of small gray birds -- the tufted titmouse -- at the feeder on the back porch. Their chirps never vary and I sometimes think it is a recording.

The tiny birds swoop in one at a time, take a few seeds and skitter off into the woods to break them open. Apparently they don't fly south for the winter, or no one told them to go. We will keep putting on the seeds as long as they come around. They are a tough little bird.

Our friend Karen from Tennessee sent this other day, a poem by Richard Levine. May you have a restful and fruitful Saturday:

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Tufted titmouse

Believe This
By Richard Levine


All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling
work of turning a yard from the wild
to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing
from a hidden, though not distant, perch;
a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding
like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
And all morning, I did believe. All morning,
between break-even bouts with the unwanted,
I wanted to see that bird, and looked up so
I might later recognize it in a guide, and know
and call its name, but even more, I wanted
to join its church. For all morning, and many
a time in my life, I have wondered who, beyond
this plot I work, has called the order of being,
that givers of food are deemed lesser
than are the receivers. All morning,
muscling my will against that of the wild,
to claim a place in the bounty of earth,
seed, root, sun and rain, I offered my labor
as a kind of grace, and gave thanks even
for the aching in my body, which reached
beyond this work and this gift of struggle.

Please join us for a day with Barbara Crafton on Saturday

On Saturday at 9 am, we will be treated at St. Paul's to a day with Barbara Crafton, a noted author and retreat leader who also is an Episcopal priest. I hope you can come -- the day is free (lunch on your own).  Not long ago, Barbara described what she does when leading a "quiet day," and how all of us can be our own retreat leader. Enjoy:

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QUIET DAY
By Barbara Crafton

The format is usually the same from place to place: I give several talks, with a little back-and-forth talk together after each one, and a period of quiet time in which retreatants can think their own thoughts about what has been said. Most of them are in silence while they do this, but they can talk quietly if they want to -- we're all adults, and there is no Quiet Day Silence Police. I only ask them please, to talk about things that matter and please, not to talk about church business -- that will all still be there when we're finished, and some of it will be even worse than it was when you came.

Usually I ask for a room in which I can speak to people in private, should anyone desire to do that. A sacristy or somebody's office is fine -- all I need is a door and two chairs. If the door's open, come on in. If it's closed, just lurk near it and it will be open soon.

At lunch, we talk -- normally, I ,mean, as in conversation. About halfway through lunch, I usually read from one or two of my books. Then another cycle of talk and silence. Sometimes there's a Eucharist at the end. Usually there is not -- just a blessing and good-bye.

It is remarkable how restorative just one day spent in this manner can be. No phones, no media, no power point, no small groups tediously reporting back -- these things are fine for a conference or a workshop but not for a retreat. They are work, and a retreat is the opposite of work. A retreat isn't making something, though we do often talk about "making a retreat." Rather, a retreat is taking -- taking a gift God continually offers but which we are usually too busy even to see, let alone accept. We make room for ourselves and God in a retreat. Room for joy and room for sorrow, room for truths we may not have understood before. Or, maybe, truths we have understood all too well and sought to avoid. Central among these truths is the fact that we are beloved of a God who understands us better than we understand ourselves.

In a sense, all retreats are self-directed, even retreats led by a retreat conductor. You alone determine how far you wish to go -- or if you wish to go any distance at all. Some people just sit, soaking up silent refreshment against the busy world to which they will soon return. Some talk. Some probably doze off. And some are transformed forever.

Many people make it their business to go on retreat at least once a year. Put it in your calendar, as if it were a meeting, or a continuing education experience, as if it were something you had to do. Find a convent or monastery near you. Don't be afraid to cross denominational lines -- they are far less important to God than they are to us. Ask a clergyperson to help you find the right place for you. Even a day is good -- a weekend is better, of course, and a week is pure heaven.

Do it. Plan your retreat today, and then go. Even if it's just a day. Your spirit needs and deserves it.

Barbara Crafton and her Almost-Daily eMos

Next Saturday we will be graced with the words and presence of Barbara Crafton, who is an author of several books, workshop leader and much more. She will lead us in an Advent retreat day at St. Paul's.  For those who follow her, you know she sends an email every day or two with a reflection or two. She gets to the heart of things in a gentle way. She puts all of her writing on a website called The Geranium Farm.

Her email missives are called the "Almost-Daily eMo." She sent this the other day explaining how it got its name; those of you who write with regularity may also recognize yourself in this. Please join us with Barbara at St. Paul's on Dec. 3 from 9 am to 3 pm (lunch on your own) and she will be preaching the following day.

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WRITING THE EMOS
By Barbara Crafton

In the new living room of a new house on a new street, some things are still the same. The dark of early morning outside the window. The crackle of burning logs. The ancient words of Morning Prayer. The steaming cup of tea. And the expectant page, waiting for words.

All day, every day, ideas appear. Ideas, or fragments of ideas. Some matriculate and some do not: I forget all about them and they never become essays. Many matriculate but never graduate -- my files are full of lonely paragraphs who have yet to become essays. But some of my ideas actually do graduate and find meaningful work -- there they are on the page, the fortunate few who realize their birthright promise.

I can write on assignment -- tell me what you need and I can probably pound out something that will suit. Writing the eMos is different: there is no assignment. I have read that yeast floats through the air, and that if you set out a paste of flour and water you can catch enough of it to leaven a loaf of bread. The eMos are like that: images and ideas float through the air, and some of them germinate.

The extent to which the germination of an essay depends on receiving is a little frightening. You can't sweat your germ of an idea into existence: you can only wait for it to appear. But you can become more skilled at recognizing the spores that will form it -- there are millions of them, and you learn to see them as they swirl toward you. Over time, it takes less and less to prime the pump. A single image, a lone word can be enough. You have grown fertile in your receptivity, easily impregnated with words that become sentences that become paragraphs that become pages. You do parent your writing, even if you do not sire it: this or that decision about this or that adjective, this or that fragment, the stretch for the very word you want -- these things you learn by doing, over and over. And by reading. And by listening to the way real people really talk.

In the early morning dark, by the fire -- this is still where it happens best for me. Music used to be part of my writing process, but I now seem unable to read or write to it. And I notice that my writing is slower-- my brain is showing its age. But that's all right. It'll have to be. We work with the instrument we have, not the one we wish we had.

Every once in a while, somebody writes and asks how the Almost-Daily eMo got its name. "Almost-Daily" speaks for itself, I guess: a hedge against the spottiness of my output. And "eMo"? Parishioners over the years have called me "Mother Crafton". I grew accustomed to it long ago. The abbreviation for "Mother" is "Mo." Kids in my parishes, and many who were not kids, took to calling me "Mo." I liked this, and still do. Anything good enough for the Three Stooges is good enough for me.

So an eMo is an electronic visit with Mo. Crafton. That's all.

Barbara Crafton coming to St. Paul's!

Koinonia of Charlottesville presents

Prayer in the hard times

an Advent retreat led by Barbara Crafton

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Saturday, December 3, 2011 from 9 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

at St. Paul’s Memorial Church

1700 University Avenue, Charlottesville, VA

(across from the UVa Rotunda)

When you're too scared to speak - or too sad...

When a situation is so complex that you honestly don't know what to hope for...

When you're not even sure what you want, or what's best...

At such times, words fail us. Yet there are ways through these times of difficulty.

We'll look at some concrete ideas about the kinds of prayer that might fit. One thing is certain: God does not leave us without a way to get in touch.

This retreat is free and open to the public; however, to reserve a place we do ask that you either return the form below or call the church office at (434)295-2156. Lunch is on your own from noon until 1 p.m., but feel free to brown bag.

About Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is an Episcopal priest and author. She heads The Geranium Farm, an institute for the promotion of spiritual growth. The Farm publishes her "Almost-Daily eMo," a meditation read online by tens of thousands of people worldwide via email and at her website. She has served many churches, including historic Trinity Church, Wall Street, St. John's-in-the-Village in Greenwich Village, and St. Clement's in Manhattan's theater district. She was a maritime chaplain on theNew York waterfront, and served as a chaplain at Ground Zero after the attack on the World Trade Center. Most recently she served St. James, the American church inFlorence, Italy. A spiritual director, Crafton leads retreats and teaches throughout the United States and abroad.

Her many books include books of essays (The Sewing Room, Yes! We'll Gather at the River, Some Things You Just have to Live With), books of daily meditations (Let Us Bless the Lord - in 4 volumes), Meditations on the Psalms, Finding Time for Serenity, and several others; a book of poetry (Blessed Paradoxes), a book about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing (Mass in Time of War) and, most recently, a book about how people of faith experience depression (Jesus Wept: When Faith and Depression Meet).

Our blind spot

Barbara Crafton sent this the other day, and I pass it along to you. Be forewarned, this is not really about a fender-bender in a parking lot.

She speaks deeply to me about an issue I care deeply about; you may disagree with her (and me) but I hope you will consider her points carefully and prayerfully.

Barbara will be with us at St. Paul's for an all-day Advent workshop on Saturday Dec. 3 and she will be preaching Sunday Dec. 4. Please mark your calendars and come join us.

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BLIND SPOT
By The Rev. Barbara Crafton

I have a clean driving license -- no points. Not that this distinction is of much import in my life these days, as we no longer have a car. And it must be said that I was not always so pure -- I was penalized two points for a moving violation years ago, when I broadsided a brand-new Volkswagon at a gas station.

"What are you doing?!? the owner screamed. It was a reasonable question. "You backed right into me!"

The pavement wasn't wet and I wasn't going more than four miles an hour. The VW wasn't moving at all. It was broad daylight. I was wearing my distance glasses. I had not been drinking, nor was I fatigued. I just didn't see her car -- it was black, and it was in my blind spot. Anybody who's ever backed up or overtaken another car on a two-lane road knows about the blind spot. You have to look twice when you look behind you before passing, not once.

It certainly looked to my horrified victim like a deliberate act. Or an incredibly stupid one, which I guess is what it was. "You were in my blind spot," I said, apologizing over and over as we stood there waiting for the police to come. "I didn't see you." Not surprisingly, my explanation was not particularly well-received, and who could blame her?

I thought of this yesterday, when the news came over the radio that the Supreme Court had refused to overturn Georgia's execution order in the Troy Davis case. It seemed his innocence had not been proven to everyone's satisfaction, a standard in American jurisprudence new to me -- I thought we operated under a presumption of innocence here, and that it was guilt that needed to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But what do I know? I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.

But I am a priest and a religious journalist, and as such am charged with pondering and commenting on what faith may say to us about the way in which we conduct our life together: a communal life lived not only with our co-religionists, but with the larger society in which we find ourselves. Faith is not only about the sublime and nourishing personal sense of God's love, though it certainly is about that. As central as the encounter with Christ is, it does not exist in a social vacuum. Faith is not faith without ethics.

Christians believe in a life larger than the life we experience as physical beings. We believe there is more to life than meets the eye, that a spiritual dimension, mysterious and beyond our capacity to describe in the concrete ways we use to describe events in the world, is part of human reality. It is true that we affirm it without understanding very much about it at all, but our answer to "Is this all there is?" is a solid "No."

That said, we also affirm the sanctity of earthly life. We don't think it doesn't matter what happens here because we're all going to heaven anyway. We don't think we'd be better off dead. Life matters. Death is an enemy. We found hospitals, sit on their ethics committees, visit the sick. We stand against death, until the moment comes when it is time to leave this world, when life in the body at last becomes too heavy to lift. Then Death, too, becomes an angel, setting the strong spirit free to enter the immediacy of God's unfiltered presence.

Human beings do not have the right to end life prematurely, before that last moment arrives. We need not torture the dying with heroic lifesaving measures after it has become clear that these will not avail, but we can't kill people to whom death has not already laid claim. Even soldiers, who must stand ready to take life in the line of duty, do not escape the stain -- just ask somebody who has had to do it. The Christian theory of the just war, in which self-defense is broadly defined to include the prevention of a greater violence, does not provide a road to the taking of life that avoids the stain. It may mitigate, but it does not absolve. This is one of the many reasons why we recognize a duty to care for soldiers and military veterans: not just because they must sacrifice their safety on our behalf, but also because they must sacrifice their innocence.

That Troy Davis may have been innocent of the crime for which he was executed yesterday may someday be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. If it is, he will join the ranks -- not small in number -- of innocents killed by the state. Even a supporter of the death penalty must acknowledge this as tragic.

But the greater tragedy is that Americans think capital punishment is ever appropriate. That we do not ask ourselves why it is that we cling to it, in company with regimes we consider wholesale violators of the human rights about which we are very willing to lecture them every chance we get. That we do so in the face of abundant clear evidence that capital punishment fails to deter violent crime. This cognitive dissonance bewilders the countries we like to believe admire us and our way of life. They do admire us, in many ways. But not in that one.

America has a blind spot.

The death penalty panders to the basest part of our personalities: our craving for revenge. Everybody has this craving, but we learn in early childhood that violence does not bring about peace. Our parents teach us to talk things out, rather than hitting each other, when we disagree. Growing up is a process of learning to say no to ourselves about many things, and revenge is one of them. This is not easy: the desire for revenge is a natural desire, upon which we must learn not to act. Punishment in the service of restraining evil? Yes. In the service of exacting payment of a debt to society? In order to ensure society's safety? Yes -- there are criminals who must never again be allowed to go free. But revenge? No. Though we acknowledge our primitive longing for it, we must learn to say no. Revenge is far from a solution to violence. It fuels it.

Mature individuals have learned to control this universal urge. Many societies have learned to control it. But not ours. Can we really call ourselves civilized until we do?

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China, together with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the United States carried out the most executions last year. Runners up include Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Somalia and Libya under Muamar Qaddafi. In Europe, only Belarus retains the death penalty in its law; abolition is required of European Union member states. To see a complete listing of state-sponsored executions carried out worldwide last year, visit HERE.

Walking on water

This came yesterday from Barbara Crafton, who will be speaking and preaching at St. Paul's on Dec. 3-4. Perhaps a few words to pull us from the safety of our certainty?

WALK ON WATER

Today Jesus walks on the water and Peter almost drowns trying to do it, too. There are church jokes about this story --the one about Jesus knowing where the submerged rocks were, the one about Jesus treading water. We make these jokes because the miracle part of miracle stories makes smart people nervous. We're afraid we'll seem gullible and pre-scientific to our unbelieving friends. A healing is one thing -- the power of suggestion is a well-documented factor in many somatic events. And the multiplication of the loaves and fishes can be explained away in like manner: a little boy comes forward with his tiny meal, and pretty soon everyone opens up and shares what he brought to eat. So, if your goal is to explain away the Biblical miracles, we have ways.

But should that be the goal? To explain away the scriptures? To put them in a rational box, the only box we now honor -- we, the unimaginative, poetry-deprived grandchildren of the Enlightenment, so cowed by its sterility what we can no longer travel beyond the anorectic binary of did-he-or-didn't-he? Stay there and you deprive yourself of the story and all it intends for you. Pre-scientific they may be, but the miracle stories are also pre-journalistic. They're not newspaper reports. They're stories. They're intended to be told.

Let the story of Jesus walking on the water stand on its own terms -- just for a moment, if you think your high school physics teacher may be looking over your shoulder. Here he comes, white-clad and Aryan if you grew up that way, swarthy and stripped to the waist if you're going with what Jesus probably looked like. The sea is rough, the disciples -- experienced mariners all, not afraid of a little rolling -- have their hands full dealing with it. His sudden and calm appearance in its chaotic midst is inexplicable, and it frightens them more than the high seas do.

The sea is like life is: rough, dangerous. utterly absorbing. Just staying afloat consumes all our energy. We rarely have time to take a long view of it: we are too busy leaping from one emergency to the next. Then we hear that Jesus can help us live it, and suddenly we're attentive. This is great, we think, finally I'll be able to do the things I can't do now. I will have everything I want. We assume that our wants and needs will remain the same. It will be the same system, only now Jesus is going to help us game it. The rules will no longer apply to us. It all sounds great. Into the water we go.

As long as we keep our eyes on him, we're okay. But we stop and consider our own inadequacies, how much bigger life is than we are, how immense our problems and our aspirations are, how unequal we are to the task of meeting any of them, and we panic. We begin to feel that we are all on our own again. I must do this all by myself. I have no help. It's wrong to ask for help, a sign of weakness. I should be able to do this myself.

Why? Why do you think you should be able to handle everything by yourself? Who told you that you should be ashamed of the fact that you lean on many people, and always have -- not just in childhood, but now? Why is it a source of shame to you that God is bigger than you are, so that you can only believe if you cut God down to your own size? The point of the story is our need for help. Peter is foolish when he tries to walk on water by himself. That is only one of the many things he can't do on his own. It's on my list, too. My list is a long one. Yours is, too, maybe. But we're not supposed to be able to do anything on it alone. 

The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

Why is all this happening?

I've been in silence for the last day, breaking it at Complines prayers at the Trappestine monastery a few miles from here last night.

Today I am going on an adventure to experience a couple of other churches in Charlottesville. I might write more on this later. In the meantime, it is a good day for a reflection from Barbara Crafton, who will be with us Dec. 3-4. May you have a blessed Sunday. . .

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WHY IS ALL THIS HAPPENING?

Awake too early even for me, I rummaged through my bedside drawer in the dark for my earphones. Across the pond, the morning rush hour was already underway -- doubtless the BBC would have something engaging going on as the Brits began their day, and I could pass a pleasant half hour with them in hopes of dozing off again.

But no -- the news was all bad. Both Nikkei and FTSE had contracted as we slept. The madman who gunned down a summer camp full of idealistic Norwegian teenagers is bizarrely calm and reasonable in his explanation of this terrible deed, and the French politico interviewed about it seemed to stop short of condemning the massacre. The polygamist on trial in Texas for the statutory rape of several of his tween "wives" chose to represent himself, then sat in silence in the courtroom for the rest of the day? Starvation in Somalia has reached epic proportions, even for that beleaguered country. The mother of another murdered child appears to have had her phone hacked by another reporter, and an AWOL soldier seems to have come this close to committing another mass murder at Fort Hood. The rest of the world watches in disbelief as American politicians double-dog-dare each other to drive the fiscal credibility of the United States off a cliff. An indeterminate portion of the electorate views this indifference to the effect of our actions on the world economy as patriotic and brave.

I did eventually fall back to sleep, but it was in self defense. And when I awoke for good, the newspaper did not accompany my cup of tea. You don't want to know, Q said apologetically. Out in the garden, an enormous poke plant sprang up overnight in the midst of a prize butterfly bush, its central stem too thick and tough to eat but its offspring coming up all around it thin, tender and just the right color -- this on the same day that I read that the entire plant is poisonous and should never be eaten. How can this be, I asked myself, thinking of all the people I knew as a child who ate it. Of course, they are all dead. But they didn't die from eating poke salad. I don't think they did, anyway. Not all of them, anyway.

Oh, why is everything is so other than as it ought to be? Why do expensive cell phones leap from our hands into puddles of water and emerge, simple and mute as rocks? Why do people go to the shopping mall dressed as if they were about to turn in for the night? Why are there migraines and children estranged from parents, why friends with cancer, why is addiction so hard for people to fight?

Why? Though there are proximate causes for things, there are no cosmic reasons that I know of, beyond the fact that this is not the Garden of Eden and so life is hard. Grand-scheme-of-things reasons for our small annoyances feel ludicrous the moment we suggest them, and offensive when applied to our greater heartaches. Whatever the "why" for the loss that maimed me, one thing is true: it is not sufficient.

Perhaps it is time to abandon "why." It leads only into an improbably decisive past, a past about which we can do nothing. Or it leads straight to a God cruelly punitive, more Idi Amin or Pol Pot than Prince of Peace, a God who can't seem to think of a way to instruct us more creative than by torturing us. This is not a God I know, nor is it one I want to know.

Perhaps it's time, instead, to turn our attention to more earthbound questions: Who and What? How? Where? When? What can happen now? Who stands ready to lead me to it, to show me a new way, now that my old way has died? Where are the things that will help me rebuild? When can I begin? How will something new come to be in my life? All stories, from folk tales to Bible tales (and so many Bible tales are both) are stories of new things coming to be. A story of things happening as expected is no story -- something in it must be odd enough to catch our attention, or we do not notice. It begins to catch us when we begin to ask what on earth is going on here. And what can we do?


WHAT'LL I DO?


Gone is the romance that was so divine.
'tis broken and cannot be mended.
You must go your way,
And I must go mine.
But now that our love dreams have ended...

What'll I do
When you are far away
And I am blue
What'll I do?

What'll I do?
When I am wond'ring who
Is kissing you
What'll I do?

What'll I do with just a photograph
To tell my troubles to?

When I'm alone
With only dreams of you
That won't come true
What'll I do?

What'll I do with just a photograph
To tell my troubles to?

When I'm alone
With only dreams of you
That won't come true
What'll I do?

-- Irving Berlin, 1923


The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

The objects that fill our lives

Today I bring you a guest commentary from Barbara Crafton, who will be with us Dec. 3-4 to lead us in a retreat and preach at St. Paul's. I am about the same age as Barbara, and a remember well what she remembers here.

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FINAL FLIGHT
By Barbara Crafton

A striking photograph on the front page of today's New York Times: the space shuttle Endeavor coming in for a landing last night, after completing its final mission. Discovery is already finished its career, and Atlantis has one more run, which will be in July. No more NASA space shuttles will lift off after that.

A television was brought into the cafeteria at school. Televisions weighed a ton back then -- I can still see our principal struggling under the burden as he carried it in. We huddled as close to the set as we could get, which wasn't very close -- there were about sixty of us, and the screen was small. But this was historic, and he wanted all of us to be able to say we saw it as it happened: the first American was about to rocket into space.

We saw him walk toward the immense rocket and disappear into the elevator for the ride up to the nose cone. Clouds drifted back and forth around the rocket's base; this was oxygen, our principal told us. There was no oxygen in space, we knew, and very little of anything else -- the oxygen pumping into the space capsule was all that would stand between Alan Shepard and a terrible death.

Once he was inside the capsule, the elevator descended with its load of
engineers and the final countdown, began. It was eternal. We all chanted along -- 10,9.8.7.6,5,4,3,2,1,0...

Liftoff was curiously slow. I had expected it to be like a shot, but the rocket groaned at its fiery leaving of us, fought to loose itself from our pull. When at last it had broken free, it veered crazily off to one side of the screen and then off it entirely, until another camera caught its jagged ascent. A moment or two of this and then it was gone.

Some static on the screen and then we were inside the capsule. The astronaut sat in his seat, trussed like a turkey, surrounded by instruments and dials, his thick white oxygen tube tethering him to life. Only his eyes moved inside his windowed helmet, and his hands moved slowly, jerkily in their clumsy gloves. They seemed incapable of picking up much of anything. We watched the strange sight for a few minutes as Shepard's remained in inscrutable technical conversation with his earthbound partners, interrupted only once by an exclamation in plain English, shocked at the loveliness of the earth he had left
behind. "What a beautiful view!" he said, and the few dozen who have made that escape from its bonds since then have all said some version of the same thing.

Orbiting the moon, then walking on it. Building an island in the darkness of space and then living in community on it for months at a time, even modeling an international unity on that island in advance ofthat unity becoming a reality back home. Creeping across the plains of Mars. Photographing the gorgeousness of heaven, a thousand thousand galaxies in colors too splendid to describe in
mere words. Commuting between the earth and outer space. Even, perhaps, house hunting.

One shuttle will be on display in California and one at the space center in Florida. Discovery will live at the Smithsonian Institution, where many of its ancestors also live in retirement, including the one that began it all, the biplane in which the Wright brothers first gained the sky in 1903.

I am always sad when inanimate objects are set aside. When I was little, I wept when we traded in our car for a newer one. We partner one another, we and our bikes and cars and planes and rocket ships. We shape them, and then they shape us.

But the objects don't mind. They are all right. People who care about history will care for them with something that can only be called love. Other people will come to see them. All will know that, without them, we would not be who we are.


The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

Lenten Rose

I am not in the pulpit today, but you can read today's lessons: Genesis 12:1-4a, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, and John 3:1-17.

In case you've missed it, we've prepared a booklet if reflections written by members of St. Paul's for each day of Lent. You can read the reflections online by clicking on the Lenten Cross to the left.

This came across the other day from Barbara Crafton, who will be with us in December, and I commend this to your Sunday reflections:

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Lenten Rose
By Barbara Crafton 

Most graciously, our last spring with this garden has dawned early -- daffodils ready to pop in mid-March, the little reblooming irises deep purple against all the brown. And the dusky Hellebore has been in bloom for at least a week.

The Hellebore is a favorite of mine. So early, as early as the snowdrops, but with such a sophisticated palette: its flowers are mottled purples and greens. The assertive brightness of the later spring flowers is one thing, but the Hellebore is subtle, almost sly in its sudden appearance --one day just the promise of shiny new leaves and the next day the blooms are there, as if there had been no budding in between.

One of Hellebore's folk names is "Lenten Rose," although the plant is completely unrelated to roses of any kind. Some of their blooms look a little bit like a wild rose, I guess, which would be enough to prompt such a name among long-ago people who had pined another weary winter away longing for spring. But the Lenten Rose is as close as we're going to get to a rose for a while. No actual rose will bloom around here for a good two months.

The forsythia, swelling, ready to burst. The daffodils and then the tulips.
The irises and lilacs, and then the peonies, sturdy and dependable as clocks, already poking their red heads up from underground in their 80-year-old bed. The dogwood, lovely in every season, preparing to layer its drifts of white blossoms that seem to drift in mid-air like clouds. All these beloved -- can I really leave them behind? Strike out somewhere new?

Whether I think I can or not, I will. Life on earth only goes forward. It is
only in heaven, or in dreams, that we can go back.

And will people who come after us love the garden as we have? Will they be patient and let her unfold, showing them her successive treasures as week follows week in the growing season. You can't dictate to a garden new to you, no matter how old a garden it may be or how old a gardener you are. No. You first must let her show you who she is.

 The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

A reflection on the defense of marriage by Barbara Crafton

I did not preach today, and I'd invite you to go to our sermon page to hear and read the sermon by The Rev. Nicholas Forti, who preached on the Transfiguration.

After our 10 am service, we launched an adult education series on marriage and same-sex marriage. I gave an overview of this complex topic, and talked about the shifting meaning of marriage within the Christian tradition over time and the arguments for and against redefining marriage to include couples who are of the same sex.

There is a lot to take in, and over the next few weeks we will take our time looking at Scripture, history, theology and sacraments. I am very pleased to be teaming up on this series with The Rev. Dr. Heather Warren, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and a historian of American religious history and our part-time ministry associate for adult education.

I've created a special blog, called Marriage & Blessings, to post our presentation notes and other materials from these talks. My notes from today are posted and you can read them by clicking HERE.

As we go along, I will be posting various commentaries here on this topic, beginning with this reflection that came yesterday from Barbara Crafton, who is an Episcopal priest from New Jersey, an author and a retreat leader. We will be hosting Barbara in December for a parish retreat day, and perhaps we'll get to hear her thoughts on this and other topics as well. Here is her commentary:

DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE?

Things seem pretty solid here at home, the week after the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the constitutionality of Defense of Marriage Act cases. So it seems that our straight marriage has survived the unspecified threats gay marriage poses to it. I still don't get what these threats are, exactly, nor do I understand how it is that an institution said to be the bedrock of everything civilization holds dear can at the same time be so utterly fragile as to stand in need of a vigorous defense. Now it seems that the whole thing may be on its way to the footnotes of American constitutional history without my ever having figured it out. Not even the Republicans, for whom this issue seemed so central not that long ago, seem to want to fight about about it any more, except for Mike Huckabee. Of course, he's a pastor, so what do you expect?

But wait a minute -- I'm a pastor. This reminds me of what has irked me about DOMA ever since it appeared, what's been so irksome about the whole moral conversation among us, and it's this: people think there's only one kind of Christian. People think there's only one kind of religious moral vision. People outside faith communities imagine a conservative social consensus within them that isn't there, and people within them often think there should be one, even though there isn't. The old inside joke about Jews -- two Jews, three opinions -- is true of all faith communities. We share a certain moral and cultural inheritance, and our spiritual assignment is to puzzle over it. Often we agree among ourselves about its meaning and application in the world, and sometimes we don't. That's the way assemblies of human beings are, and faith communities are nothing if not human.

Still, many faith communities -- most of them -- do claim a monopoly on truth. They want to proclaim it and then they don't want anybody messing with it. The last sentences of the Christian scriptures contain this warning to anyone who might be toying with the idea of adding something to Holy Writ: I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. -- Revelation 22:18

Our reverence for our ancient texts trips us up. We imagine the truth of scripture to be of the journalistic sort, the who-what-when-where-how kind of truth, the it-either-happened-or-it-didn't kind of truth, which many among us have come to believe is the only kind of truth there is. But it is not so. There are many truths -- the truth of story, the truth of archetype, the truth of poetry, the truth of group aspiration. None of those fit easily into who-what-when-where-how. And the world's holy scriptures contain them all.

Because we have so beggared our notion of what truth is, we can easily find ourselves imagining religious truth to reside only in our past, as the words on the page record it. There it is, in black and white, we say. Just do what it says. And so we reach back across several linguistic groups and several cultural groups, through the filters of redactors and translators too numerous to count, and struggle to don first-century clothing we can no longer wear. Or we project ourselves backwards through time -- Well, they must have been just like us, we think. Our own local version of The Family, as we know it today, must be and always have been the timeless rock of humanity. In order to believe this, we must not only ignore the varieties of contemporary family arrangements but also significant portions of the very scriptures we tell ourselves we are protecting -- our polygamous patriarchs, their concubines and the children they begot upon them. We must ignore the custom of the Levirate, by which you had to take your sister-in-law as your wife if your brother died. We must read the story of David and his beloved Jonathan selectively, resolutely ignoring the sexual aspect of their deep friendship. And we must ignore some very interesting women of the Hebrew scriptures -- Tamar the wronged daughter-in-law who turned the tables on those who wronged her. Rahab the brave and crafty prostitute, who used her profession to save her people. Ruth, who secured her future by seducing a wealthy farmer. Old Testament women who thought outside the box, remembered fondly in the New -- each of them listed by Matthew the evangelist as part of Jesus' family tree.

The nuclear family, so often imagined to be the norm in America, is not the only family of the scriptures. It is not even the majority family of the scriptures. In fact, it is not even the only American family: American families have had many configurations in the short history of our Republic. The family has always changed. Yes, it has always been a basic building block of society, but it has changed shape throughout history. Human history is shaped by living people, as well as by the testament of dead ones. It is a conversation between the living and the dead. And the history of any community is shaped by forces outside it, as well as by those within.

So, not with a bang but a whimper, the Defense of Marriage Act fades from the headlines. Don't Ask, Don't Tell has ended, too, with hardly any truculence to mark its departure. Maybe we are turning a page. Maybe we are beginning to save our energy for something more worthy of it than the culture wars about sex and marriage we have fought so long and with such zest. Maybe. Because there are, indeed, threats to the health of families everywhere, but they are not other kinds of families. Shocked by an economic downturn, sickened by the sacrifice of young lives in ill-considered wars, sobered by a new consciousness of societal and environmental limits, perhaps we can begin to see an urgency in finding ways through all of these, instead. Perhaps we already do see it.

The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

Egypt: We pray for God's nearness

Among my favorite writers these days is Barbara Crafton and her almost-daily meditations that she sends to friends (you can read Barbara's work and get a free subscription on her website HERE). She sent this reflection the other day about the events in Egypt and it is well worth the read:

WAITING FOR WORD
By Barbara Crafton

It was too early to turn on the radio -- Q was still asleep. But it was almost noon in Cairo, and I wondered what the news there might be. We fell asleep to two sounds, one very loud and one very quiet: angry Egyptians in the streets, burning cars and facing down riot police. And the careful tiptoeing of diplomats around the situation, the same gingerly response we heard last week in Tunisia. Yemen, too. Algeria. We hear nothing from Saudi Arabia, not yet -- who knows? But it is clear that a region long nicknamed "the powder keg" has, once again, ventured very near the flames. What will happen is anybody's guess.

Americans have a natural inclination toward those who wish to free themselves of despotic rule, a powerful mythology about ourselves and our origins that makes us reflexively sympathetic to them. And yet we know from experience that no revolution in the Middle East will be a copy of our revolution: different heritage, different culture, different lots of things. And this is a different century, for heaven's sake: think of how long it took for news of the difficulties in America to travel across the sea to the Court of St. James. And then think of Twitter.

And so what happens in Egypt or Tunisia might surprise those of us who have failed to give these events more than an approving glance -- and this is why the diplomats tiptoe. Just because both we and a new government in Egypt or Tunisia spring from revolutions does not mean that the newcomers will recognize us as natural allies. Quite the contrary: the new order in these countries may well be distinctly less welcoming to American interests than the old ones. Our old habit of propping up questionable leaders to the detriment of the local scene has backfired on us before, and it could do so again.

I think of the infant Christ, now a month old. Of his parents -- political nobodies, an ordinary couple who just wanted to raise their little boy in peace. Of how troubling it must have been to them when people reacted so strongly to their baby's presence -- when old Simeon broke into song in the temple, when foreign potentates showed up bearing gifts, how horrifying when they heard that other people's babies had been slaughtered for his sake. Yes, yes, I know that the December birthdate of Jesus was probably a later embellishment to the story, and I know that the Slaughter of the Innocents is not attested in any sources save Christian ones. But I am less interested in the journalistic truth of our story than in the story itself: a story of ordinary people caught in the web of world events they did not shape, seeking and finding God's guidance in the midst of them. We are not given a choice as to whether or not to be affected by politics -- like it or not, we will be.

And so I listen to the radio and wonder what will happen -- I, who have no worldly power to change a thing in the Middle East or anywhere else but my most immediate surroundings. And I remember that a Jesus in shackles told a very worldly ruler, one who had the power to put him to death, that his kingdom was not of this world. The categories of justice and power which the world recognizes are not the final word about either justice or power. This world is not the only world there is, nor is this life the only life. In it, we do not always win. Many people find it offensive when someone suggests that the country we love might not win every time, that we might not always be first. But nothing lasts forever. Nobody is first forever. We need not control everything. Indeed, we cannot.

What this means for our prayer about the world is similarly humbling: prayer is not incantation. It does not summon God to our side, a powerful but obedient genie who must do as we ask if we ask in the right way. Or if the right people ask. "God with us" does not mean "God on our side against someone else," as a political alliance with an earthly king would mean. Rather, it is a constant invitation to us to go deeper into what it might really mean to be righteous.

Nations will always act according to their perception of their own interests -- and that usually means their immediate interests, at that. This is the limitation of politics as moral yardstick -- standing alone, it makes a poor one. Righteousness is something different. We do not expect much of it in politics, yet we know that God is not far off from any human activity, and politics is nothing if not human.

And so we pray for God's nearness. And we wait for word.

Barbara will visit us at St. Paul's later this year to lead us in an Advent retreat. Stay tuned for more details as they unfold.