If you haven't looked at my blog for awhile, you may be surprised to see it has a new name. Yes, it is still Pastor Kathy's blog, but Pastor Kathy has been through some changes since her last post in June.
For one thing, in July I left the small-town church I had served for more than four years. It was not a happy departure. I have learned in the last few months that there are a lot of ministers out there whose first pastorate out of seminary was, shall we say, difficult. It's a complicated topic and one I don't plan to deal with in this blog. Suffice it to say I learned a lot from the experience, both good and bad.
So, I was boogeying along, looking for another church, starting to wrap up my business in the small town. The ecclesial authorities told me to go take this week-long class to be qualified to work as an interim minister -- the one who serves a church while they are looking for a new "permanent" minister. And that's what I was doing when life as we knew it in my part of the world ended forever.
When I left New Orleans on a hot, sunny Friday morning at the end of August, a TV news truck passed me on the interstate. I figured they were on their way to Florida to cover this hurricane that had just crossed south Florida as a category 1 and was expected to make another landfall around Apalachicola as a category 2. And that was my last thought about it until the next morning, in Atlanta, when someone called me and asked what I was doing about the hurricane.
WHAT hurricane? And suddenly this minor storm cutting across south Florida was a category 5 hurricane headed right for New Orleans. And my cats were locked up in my house, expecting someone to come over and feed them twice a day until I got back.
There was no turning around and going home. The interstates had all been redirected to head out of town. There were a couple of two-lane highways still open into the city, but where was I going to find gas? I almost did go home. I thought seriously about filling a bunch of five-gallon gas cans, putting them in the back of my SUV, and going home for the cats, probably asphyxiating myself in the process. Over the next several days, I wished over and over again that I had. But instead I went on to my conference in North Carolina and stayed there for the most horrible week of my life, not knowing what was going on at my home. Was there water up to the roof? Did the whole block burn to the ground? Did the looters break in and trash the house and kill my cats?
The short answer is "No." And ten days after the storm, I was able to slip into the closed city and rescue my felines. Sadly, a lot of people did have water up to their roofs, and some did have their homes burn to the ground. The looters for the most part were breaking into commercial establishments, not into private homes. (And if you think this would never have happened in your town, I beg to differ. What happened in New Orleans is what would happen anywhere if you were actually able to cut off the supply of illegal substances coming into the community. When the substance abusers ran out of substances, they went nuts. And they didn't get those automatic weapons in Wal-Mart. They already had them.)
So, life for me -- and for all of us affected by the storm -- is now divided into two time periods: Before Katrina and After Katrina, B.K. and A.K. for short. We have all been changed forever by this experience. Whatever our plans were B.K., they're different now. Our priorities, too.
So this blog, formerly known as A View from the Other Side of the Hill, is now The Daily Cattown News, in honor of my first journalistic effort when I was eight years old. I have left the small town of my first parish ministry to live in the Uptown New Orleans house that once was my grandmother's. At the moment I don't have a job. God will provide, in God's own time. My next job may be another parish in ministry, or it may be something else. In the meantime, I am back at the kitchen table, writing. And preaching from time to time. And ministering to folks whose lives, like mine, have been changed forever. Stay tuned.
Pastor Kathy
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Friday, June 10, 2005
The Circle D Revisited
I was a child in the era of the great television Westerns. I watched them all. "Bat Masterson," starring Gene Barry, was my favorite. I would also get up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings to watch the Roy Rogers show. To be honest, I probably watched them because I was horse crazy, and Westerns were pretty much the only place on tv you could see horses. But I digress.
Somewhere in there as I learned Western lore, I learned about brands and how they branded horses and cattle. (Today they use microchips under the skin -- my horse has one -- but I am digressing again, bad habit.) And somewhere in learning about brands, I created one for my imaginary ranch. I called my ranch the Circle D. I have no idea why D and not A, B, C, or something else. But it was the Circle D. And being a creative child, I made up a song to go along with it. It used all of seven white notes on the piano. "Circle D (D, D), Circle D (D, D), it's the best ranch in the land." Well, I was six or seven years old, and I was no Mozart.
My mother's brother, however, WAS a musician. And his last name started with D. Whether he thought I came up with the Circle D as homage to my maternal family or what, I don't know. But he composed a grand piece of music to my Circle D melody. It was awesome.
My Circle D imaginary ranch went by the wayside as I grew up. I hadn't thought about it in years. But then we bought this material at church for Vacation Bible School, and the theme is the Circle G Ranch: "Where God is at the center and the love never ends." I admit it was a while before I made the connection between the Circle G and my old Circle D, but there it is. The Circle G Ranch, like mine, has its own theme song, something about "There's a place for you at the Circle G ranch." Much more inclusive than my song, which I have to admit was somewhat more grandiose in its theme.
As I write this, I am not sure what is going to happen to our Vacation Bible School. We haven't had a lot of registrations come in so far -- the opening session is two weeks from today -- and I don't know if we will have to cancel it or not. (More on that in another blog.) If push comes to shove, we will have "Vacation Bible School" in the worship service that Sunday (it's my one chance every year to sneak in a little contemporary worship) and use the material that way. I hope we get to do the whole program we have planned. It looks like so much fun.
Circle D. My musical uncle recorded the Bat Masterson theme for me off the television, circa 1958, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had a 78 rpm record made of it. I still have it. In fact, I sent my old turntable to a company on Long Island for repairs some years ago just so I could play the 78s I still have (they don't make many turntables any more, and the ones they do make only have 33 and 45 speeds). I should hook up the turntable and play my Bat Masterson theme song, just for old time's sake. This in an era of MP3s and iPods and all-digital music. Yeah, yeah. In this age, it's as big a challenge to get the old technology to work as it is to get the new technology to work. And that, too, is a subject for another blog.
Pastor Kathy
Somewhere in there as I learned Western lore, I learned about brands and how they branded horses and cattle. (Today they use microchips under the skin -- my horse has one -- but I am digressing again, bad habit.) And somewhere in learning about brands, I created one for my imaginary ranch. I called my ranch the Circle D. I have no idea why D and not A, B, C, or something else. But it was the Circle D. And being a creative child, I made up a song to go along with it. It used all of seven white notes on the piano. "Circle D (D, D), Circle D (D, D), it's the best ranch in the land." Well, I was six or seven years old, and I was no Mozart.
My mother's brother, however, WAS a musician. And his last name started with D. Whether he thought I came up with the Circle D as homage to my maternal family or what, I don't know. But he composed a grand piece of music to my Circle D melody. It was awesome.
My Circle D imaginary ranch went by the wayside as I grew up. I hadn't thought about it in years. But then we bought this material at church for Vacation Bible School, and the theme is the Circle G Ranch: "Where God is at the center and the love never ends." I admit it was a while before I made the connection between the Circle G and my old Circle D, but there it is. The Circle G Ranch, like mine, has its own theme song, something about "There's a place for you at the Circle G ranch." Much more inclusive than my song, which I have to admit was somewhat more grandiose in its theme.
As I write this, I am not sure what is going to happen to our Vacation Bible School. We haven't had a lot of registrations come in so far -- the opening session is two weeks from today -- and I don't know if we will have to cancel it or not. (More on that in another blog.) If push comes to shove, we will have "Vacation Bible School" in the worship service that Sunday (it's my one chance every year to sneak in a little contemporary worship) and use the material that way. I hope we get to do the whole program we have planned. It looks like so much fun.
Circle D. My musical uncle recorded the Bat Masterson theme for me off the television, circa 1958, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had a 78 rpm record made of it. I still have it. In fact, I sent my old turntable to a company on Long Island for repairs some years ago just so I could play the 78s I still have (they don't make many turntables any more, and the ones they do make only have 33 and 45 speeds). I should hook up the turntable and play my Bat Masterson theme song, just for old time's sake. This in an era of MP3s and iPods and all-digital music. Yeah, yeah. In this age, it's as big a challenge to get the old technology to work as it is to get the new technology to work. And that, too, is a subject for another blog.
Pastor Kathy
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Wait a minute...
My denomination is struggling, as are many mainline Protestant churches. Somewhere along the way, probably back in the 1960s, we lost touch with the people in the pews. The ones who are still there are dying out, and the young ones just aren't coming in the way we wish they would. There are all sorts of theories about how-come-we're-declining, but the bottom line is, we are. Some individual churches in my denomination are growing, particularly in areas of the country that are growing. But the sad truth is, many of them are small and getting smaller every year as the older members die. They struggle and they seek ways to grow, but it's an uphill battle. Meantime, new churches start up -- many of them not in denominations at all. And we mainliners watch them (with envy) and try to figure out what they are doing right and try to copy them. (Sorry, for some reason the program is not letting me make paragraph indents today, so this blog is going to be one long paragraph.) I serve on a committee of my regional body that is trying to "re-form" in light of new realities, and we have been reading, reading, reading. One of the church consultants (yes, the church has management consultants just like secular businesses do) we read insisted that the purpose of the church is to grow numerically. Period. He cites Matthew 28:18-20, "Go therefore and make disciples" -- it's known in church circles as the Great Commission. Yes, grow. Growth is good. But then this consultant goes on to trash ministers who do anything else but work at growing their churches numerically, and I have a problem with that. He refers to ministers who like to visit people in hospitals and nursing homes, etc., as "enablers." He quotes one of the ministers who read his advice as saying, "Oh, thank God! I no longer have to feel guilty because I don't like to do those nursing home visits." Whoa! Wait a minute! This consultant needs to keep reading his Bible to see what Jesus had to say about feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison, clothing the naked and so on. Growth is good, but growth without a purpose isn't. Termites and cockroaches grow numerically, too. OK, I am sure God has a purpose for them, but he has yet to reveal it to me. Anyway, if that consultant is going to call the ministers who are pastors "enablers," then I have a name for his idea of "evangelists," too: sales managers. Sorry. Just a rant.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
The end, again?
I got into this blogging business last year after a conversation with my friend Michael Robertson in San Francisco. I had dinner with him and his wonderful wife while I was out there on vacation, and he told me about this blog he had started as part of a project he was working on while on sabbatical from his teaching position at the University of San Francisco. I started reading his blog and decided to give it a try myself. And here I am.
Michael's blog went through about three iterations, if I recall, changing its name and its focus (the identity-crisis thing). Finally it emerged under the title of "Darwin's Cat," which sort of echoes Pavlov's Dog, but I am not sure the blog ever had anything to do with cats, and as a cat person, I can tell you that cats do not salivate unless they are about to throw up. But I digress.
At any rate, after a year of writing his blog, Michael has given it up. I guess it was a project with a finite life and that life is now complete (I think it was originally intended to be research for a book on writing newspaper columns, but Michael quickly learned that a blog is not a newspaper column but its own animal entirely.)
But doggone it, what poor timing! Look at all the endings I have had to deal with in the space of one month!
May 13: Star Trek ends, after a 17-year continuous run on television
May 19: Star Wars ends, after a 28-year run since the first movie came out
May 30: Darwin's Cat ends, after a year's run.
Now what am I supposed to do for entertainment???
It is going to be a long, long summer...
So I guess I will have to start writing more often in this blog, for my own entertainment if nothing else. Sheesh.
As we say in the church, I am sure God's hand is in this somewhere.
Pastor Kathy
Michael's blog went through about three iterations, if I recall, changing its name and its focus (the identity-crisis thing). Finally it emerged under the title of "Darwin's Cat," which sort of echoes Pavlov's Dog, but I am not sure the blog ever had anything to do with cats, and as a cat person, I can tell you that cats do not salivate unless they are about to throw up. But I digress.
At any rate, after a year of writing his blog, Michael has given it up. I guess it was a project with a finite life and that life is now complete (I think it was originally intended to be research for a book on writing newspaper columns, but Michael quickly learned that a blog is not a newspaper column but its own animal entirely.)
But doggone it, what poor timing! Look at all the endings I have had to deal with in the space of one month!
May 13: Star Trek ends, after a 17-year continuous run on television
May 19: Star Wars ends, after a 28-year run since the first movie came out
May 30: Darwin's Cat ends, after a year's run.
Now what am I supposed to do for entertainment???
It is going to be a long, long summer...
So I guess I will have to start writing more often in this blog, for my own entertainment if nothing else. Sheesh.
As we say in the church, I am sure God's hand is in this somewhere.
Pastor Kathy
Friday, June 03, 2005
Are you still here?
That's a line from the television series Babylon 5. The Centauri ambassador, Londo Mollari, asks his aide Vir, "Are you still here?" It's more in the sense of "Haven't you left yet?" although, if I recall, he asks him this in more than one episode, and later in the series it's more like "So you haven't deserted me like everyone else has." At least it seemed so to me.
At any rate...I notice I haven't posted here since, gulp, April 4. Any readers of this blog would think I had abandoned it. Frankly, I was starting to wonder myself. Maybe I need to re-think what I am writing and how and when. My posts were turning into sermons. It's tough enough to write one sermon a week, but one a day is way too much.
So, maybe this blog will take a turn and be more about life on the other side of the hill rather than pontifications from a preacher who sometimes takes this whole business of ministry way too seriously. And maybe the entries will be more frequent and a little bit shorter. Maybe.
Life on the other side of the hill: I notice that sometimes I will mis-read something and on a second reading discover that I was only a letter or two off the mark, but what a difference a letter or two makes. Yes, thank you, I do wear glasses, and yes, I have had my eyes checked recently. Chalk it up to reading without paying particularly close attention. Or being on the other side of the hill.
Anyway, yesterday as I was sitting at a traffic light, I noticed that the car in front of me had something written on the license plate holder. "Born broken," it said. Wow, what a powerful theological statement. In the Christian understanding of original sin, we are all born broken. We're not perfect coming out of the womb, only to screw up our lives as we grow up. At least not in my Calvinist upbringing. No, we are born broken and sinful and in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, because we are never going to be perfect in God's eyes, but through Christ we are forgiven.
Born broken. What a wonderful confession to put on the back of one's car. Truly this must be a humble person, someone who acknowledges God as the ultimate healer of our brokenness.
And then I looked again and realized that the B was really an H. "Horn broken," it said, and added below, "Watch for finger."
As Roseanne Rosanna-Danna would have said, "NEV-er mind."
At any rate...I notice I haven't posted here since, gulp, April 4. Any readers of this blog would think I had abandoned it. Frankly, I was starting to wonder myself. Maybe I need to re-think what I am writing and how and when. My posts were turning into sermons. It's tough enough to write one sermon a week, but one a day is way too much.
So, maybe this blog will take a turn and be more about life on the other side of the hill rather than pontifications from a preacher who sometimes takes this whole business of ministry way too seriously. And maybe the entries will be more frequent and a little bit shorter. Maybe.
Life on the other side of the hill: I notice that sometimes I will mis-read something and on a second reading discover that I was only a letter or two off the mark, but what a difference a letter or two makes. Yes, thank you, I do wear glasses, and yes, I have had my eyes checked recently. Chalk it up to reading without paying particularly close attention. Or being on the other side of the hill.
Anyway, yesterday as I was sitting at a traffic light, I noticed that the car in front of me had something written on the license plate holder. "Born broken," it said. Wow, what a powerful theological statement. In the Christian understanding of original sin, we are all born broken. We're not perfect coming out of the womb, only to screw up our lives as we grow up. At least not in my Calvinist upbringing. No, we are born broken and sinful and in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, because we are never going to be perfect in God's eyes, but through Christ we are forgiven.
Born broken. What a wonderful confession to put on the back of one's car. Truly this must be a humble person, someone who acknowledges God as the ultimate healer of our brokenness.
And then I looked again and realized that the B was really an H. "Horn broken," it said, and added below, "Watch for finger."
As Roseanne Rosanna-Danna would have said, "NEV-er mind."
Monday, April 04, 2005
One person's weed is another person's wildflower
April is high spring in South Louisiana. Apologies to those of you who live in the frozen North and won't see spring for another month. (I went to school in the frozen North and well remember seeing a six-inch snowfall in April. The horror, the horror.)
In the frozen North people look forward to spring because they are so sick of winter. In South Louisiana we enjoy spring while we've got it, because things are about to get pretty awful. By May the lovebugs will be here (they have two seasons, May and mid-August through cool weather, and in the late summer they cover the air like clouds; you can't believe what it's like until you've lived through it), not to mention the mosquitoes (which never completely go away), the gnats, and the big black grashoppers the size of locomotives. And the heat and humidity, which go on until mid-October. And then there's hurricane season.
So we love spring while we've got it. And now that I live in the country, I really appreciate it. I live down a country road on three acres. I'm only ten minutes from my church, four miles, but some of my parishioners think I live WAY far away. Oh well.
Life in the country is a huge change for a city girl like me. I still don't understand much about my well or my septic system, except that when the power goes out, I don't have any water. Don't know much about that big silver gas tank in the side yard either, except that you have to be very careful when you lift the lid to read the gauge, because wasps like to nest under there. (Oh, yeah, I left off my list of favorite insects the wasps and the fire ants. I know God put them on the earth for a reason, but God has yet to reveal that reason to me. Maybe to keep me humble.) I do have some of the big-city conveniences like electricity, phone service, Internet access and cable TV. Good thing. I don't think I'd survive without cable and amazon.com.
At any rate...this city girl knows better than to try to keep three acres mowed by herself. I hire someone with a tractor to cut it for me. Last spring was so rainy that I couldn't get the yard cut until it dried out a bit. (We are on the edge of the swamp, too, which doesn't help matters any.) And so last year I discovered, when I couldn't get the yard cut until mid-April, that it would turn into a wildflower meadow in the spring.
Now, I don't really know the names of the flowers. There are little yellow daisy-looking flowers and white sort-of daisy looking flowers with yellow centers, only not big enough to be daisies. And there are some lovely bell-shaped blue flowers, mostly growing in the ditches on the sides of the road. And these wonderful spiky plants I wanted to call wild artichokes, but I found out they are called thistles. Nasty, stay-away-from-me jagged leaves, but the most beautiful cream-and-purple flowers (that look a little like artichokes) that, I discovered the other day, must be scented or sweet because they are full of bees and what look like chinch bugs that fly up in your face when you get too close to the flowers. So the wild artichokes/thistles are best viewed from a distance.
All my neighbors are cutting their yards. I hear tractors and riding lawnmowers all weekend long. It's a drier spring than last year. But I haven't called my yard man yet. Whenever I look out at my back yard full of wildflowers, I am loathe to see them cut down. I am sure my neighbors think I am nuts. (Wouldn't be the first time. For seven years during the 1990s, I had two red Camaros sitting side by side in my garage, and I considered it a mark of how nuts my neighbors must have thought I was, because none of them ever asked me about them.) Where I see beautiful wildflowers, my neighbors in the country just see weeds run amuck: they probably think I should have cut them down before they bloomed and started spreading seed pods everywhere.
But I am going to enjoy my wildflower meadow for another week or so. People pay money to travel to see fields like this in the springtime. I have it right out back of my screened porch. If this is life in the country, I'm going to enjoy it for a little while.
In the frozen North people look forward to spring because they are so sick of winter. In South Louisiana we enjoy spring while we've got it, because things are about to get pretty awful. By May the lovebugs will be here (they have two seasons, May and mid-August through cool weather, and in the late summer they cover the air like clouds; you can't believe what it's like until you've lived through it), not to mention the mosquitoes (which never completely go away), the gnats, and the big black grashoppers the size of locomotives. And the heat and humidity, which go on until mid-October. And then there's hurricane season.
So we love spring while we've got it. And now that I live in the country, I really appreciate it. I live down a country road on three acres. I'm only ten minutes from my church, four miles, but some of my parishioners think I live WAY far away. Oh well.
Life in the country is a huge change for a city girl like me. I still don't understand much about my well or my septic system, except that when the power goes out, I don't have any water. Don't know much about that big silver gas tank in the side yard either, except that you have to be very careful when you lift the lid to read the gauge, because wasps like to nest under there. (Oh, yeah, I left off my list of favorite insects the wasps and the fire ants. I know God put them on the earth for a reason, but God has yet to reveal that reason to me. Maybe to keep me humble.) I do have some of the big-city conveniences like electricity, phone service, Internet access and cable TV. Good thing. I don't think I'd survive without cable and amazon.com.
At any rate...this city girl knows better than to try to keep three acres mowed by herself. I hire someone with a tractor to cut it for me. Last spring was so rainy that I couldn't get the yard cut until it dried out a bit. (We are on the edge of the swamp, too, which doesn't help matters any.) And so last year I discovered, when I couldn't get the yard cut until mid-April, that it would turn into a wildflower meadow in the spring.
Now, I don't really know the names of the flowers. There are little yellow daisy-looking flowers and white sort-of daisy looking flowers with yellow centers, only not big enough to be daisies. And there are some lovely bell-shaped blue flowers, mostly growing in the ditches on the sides of the road. And these wonderful spiky plants I wanted to call wild artichokes, but I found out they are called thistles. Nasty, stay-away-from-me jagged leaves, but the most beautiful cream-and-purple flowers (that look a little like artichokes) that, I discovered the other day, must be scented or sweet because they are full of bees and what look like chinch bugs that fly up in your face when you get too close to the flowers. So the wild artichokes/thistles are best viewed from a distance.
All my neighbors are cutting their yards. I hear tractors and riding lawnmowers all weekend long. It's a drier spring than last year. But I haven't called my yard man yet. Whenever I look out at my back yard full of wildflowers, I am loathe to see them cut down. I am sure my neighbors think I am nuts. (Wouldn't be the first time. For seven years during the 1990s, I had two red Camaros sitting side by side in my garage, and I considered it a mark of how nuts my neighbors must have thought I was, because none of them ever asked me about them.) Where I see beautiful wildflowers, my neighbors in the country just see weeds run amuck: they probably think I should have cut them down before they bloomed and started spreading seed pods everywhere.
But I am going to enjoy my wildflower meadow for another week or so. People pay money to travel to see fields like this in the springtime. I have it right out back of my screened porch. If this is life in the country, I'm going to enjoy it for a little while.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
More on Journeys
After I wrote that last entry, it struck me as a huge theological leap (if nothing else!) to go from Jesus' journey into Jerusalem to my own spiritual journey in, of all things, a red Camaro convertible. I apologize for any flights of fancy there.
But -- all of us are on some kind of journey through life. We get from here to there as best we can, and sometimes along the way (maybe) we stop to reflect on the meaning of it all.
Little Red was my way of affirming life in the midst of a series of misfortunes. I don't know why, but in my own life misfortunes seem to come in waves, sometimes lasting for a year or more. During my first year in seminary, I lost five loved ones. After the fifth death, I went to the place that I go when I need to be renewed -- a favorite beach on the Gulf Coast. I sat on the beach and said, "God, I am tired of starting over." When one experiences a loss, there is grief (with its many aspects), and then there is getting up and going on -- starting new relationships, having new experiences. And after those five deaths, getting up and going on was getting old.
But the next day I went out, and in my travels I found a vision for a new experience. As it turned out, I never acted on that particular vision. But for the immediate future, it gave me hope for something positive in the future, which was what I needed. Sort of like the red Camaro.
Today is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus came into Jerusalem either on Sunday or Monday, depending on whether you read Mark or Matthew. In any case, they both agree that he had a lot of work to do before he came to the upper room on that last night. That's something to remember, at any rate. Robert Frost, in writing about a journey, said he had "miles to go before I sleep." Miles to go and much to do.
But -- all of us are on some kind of journey through life. We get from here to there as best we can, and sometimes along the way (maybe) we stop to reflect on the meaning of it all.
Little Red was my way of affirming life in the midst of a series of misfortunes. I don't know why, but in my own life misfortunes seem to come in waves, sometimes lasting for a year or more. During my first year in seminary, I lost five loved ones. After the fifth death, I went to the place that I go when I need to be renewed -- a favorite beach on the Gulf Coast. I sat on the beach and said, "God, I am tired of starting over." When one experiences a loss, there is grief (with its many aspects), and then there is getting up and going on -- starting new relationships, having new experiences. And after those five deaths, getting up and going on was getting old.
But the next day I went out, and in my travels I found a vision for a new experience. As it turned out, I never acted on that particular vision. But for the immediate future, it gave me hope for something positive in the future, which was what I needed. Sort of like the red Camaro.
Today is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus came into Jerusalem either on Sunday or Monday, depending on whether you read Mark or Matthew. In any case, they both agree that he had a lot of work to do before he came to the upper room on that last night. That's something to remember, at any rate. Robert Frost, in writing about a journey, said he had "miles to go before I sleep." Miles to go and much to do.
More on Journeys
After I wrote that last entry, it struck me as a huge theological leap (if nothing else!) to go from Jesus' journey into Jerusalem to my own spiritual journey in, of all things, a red Camaro convertible. I apologize for any flights of fancy there.
But -- all of us are on some kind of journey through life. We get from here to there as best we can, and sometimes along the way (maybe) we stop to reflect on the meaning of it all.
Little Red was my way of affirming life in the midst of a series of misfortunes. I don't know why, but in my own life misfortunes seem to come in waves, sometimes lasting for a year or more. During my first year in seminary, I lost five loved ones. After the fifth death, I went to the place that I go when I need to be renewed -- a favorite beach on the Gulf Coast. I sat on the beach and said, "God, I am tired of starting over." When one experiences a loss, there is grief (with its many aspects), and then there is getting up and going on -- starting new relationships, having new experiences. And after those five deaths, getting up and going on was getting old.
But the next day I went out, and in my travels I found a vision for a new experience. As it turned out, I never acted on that particular vision. But for the immediate future, it gave me hope for something positive in the future, which was what I needed. Sort of like the red Camaro.
Today is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus came into Jerusalem either on Sunday or Monday, depending on whether you read Mark or Matthew. In any case, they both agree that he had a lot of work to do before he came to the upper room on that last night. That's something to remember, at any rate. Robert Frost, in writing about a journey, said he had "miles to go before I sleep." Miles to go and much to do.
But -- all of us are on some kind of journey through life. We get from here to there as best we can, and sometimes along the way (maybe) we stop to reflect on the meaning of it all.
Little Red was my way of affirming life in the midst of a series of misfortunes. I don't know why, but in my own life misfortunes seem to come in waves, sometimes lasting for a year or more. During my first year in seminary, I lost five loved ones. After the fifth death, I went to the place that I go when I need to be renewed -- a favorite beach on the Gulf Coast. I sat on the beach and said, "God, I am tired of starting over." When one experiences a loss, there is grief (with its many aspects), and then there is getting up and going on -- starting new relationships, having new experiences. And after those five deaths, getting up and going on was getting old.
But the next day I went out, and in my travels I found a vision for a new experience. As it turned out, I never acted on that particular vision. But for the immediate future, it gave me hope for something positive in the future, which was what I needed. Sort of like the red Camaro.
Today is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus came into Jerusalem either on Sunday or Monday, depending on whether you read Mark or Matthew. In any case, they both agree that he had a lot of work to do before he came to the upper room on that last night. That's something to remember, at any rate. Robert Frost, in writing about a journey, said he had "miles to go before I sleep." Miles to go and much to do.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Journeys
Back again to the blog after a few weeks' absence. As Londo said to Vir in Babylon 5, "Are you still here?" Oh well, you'd have to be a B5 fan to appreciate the nuances. Yes, I am still here. Still pastoring in my small-town church, still posting on the Internet.
In church-time, today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. This morning I was talking about journeys. Life journeys, physical and spiritual. Jesus' journey began in Bethlehem and ended on a hillside outside Jerusalem. I would posit that Jesus knew his journey was going to end in Jerusalem. The different gospels each put a different accent on it, but I see Jesus as moving around from place to place, one step ahead of the people who wanted to do him in because he was stirring things up and if he wasn't stopped, he just might cause a revolution and then the Romans would slaughter everyone to put a stop to it. Jesus would preach in a place for awhile, then things would get too hot and he would move on to another town. All the while, he was kind of dancing around Jerusalem. He knew he had to go there, for the final showdown with his enemies. And he knew that Jerusalem was their city, and they held all the power there, and in the end they were going to kill him. But he had to go there. In the end, he just couldn't put it off any longer.
Jesus was on a journey. And so are all of us. Our journeys may take us to some strange places, both physical and spiritual. There will be times when we will wonder how in the world we got where we are, when our original intention was to be...somewhere else.
I've been thinking about my own journeys this week. When I was forty, a lot of stuff happened in my life. I went through a very dark time for awhile. In the space of a few weeks in the late summer and early fall, a whole bunch of things happened. I had a friend, age fifty, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, and the chemotherapy had put her in the hospital with a serious infection; we didn't know if she would live or not. I lost another good friend to cancer around that same time; he was forty-five. He was the one who first suggested that I consider going into ministry.
But I wasn't in ministry at that time. I had a writing and editing business, and I was struggling to keep my head above water financially. (Don't ever start a writing and editing business unless you have a spouse who has a fulltime job and health insurance coverage for the whole family. I didn't. But that is another story.) I had one major client, and that client was downright abusive to me. The client wanted me to sign a new contract, the wording of which concerned me to the point that I hired a publishing lawyer to review it...and was told that yes, it was a bad contract and yes, I should ask for modifications. We negotiated, the client agreed to modify the contract, and then within a week, fired me. In the long run, being out of that abusive business relationship was a good thing, but in the short run, it was financially devastating.
My car was breaking down with Something Major about once a month. And I had a family member who was doing some squirrelly things that upset me very much.
All these things happened in one month, September 1992.
So, what did I do? Two weeks after my friend died of cancer, I went out and bought a red Camaro convertible. Talk about your midlife crisis. It was gorgeous. V-8 engine. Red leather seats. 25th Anniversary logo and accessories package. It was nothing less than my affirmation of life in the midst of death all around me.
I really did need a new car. But I could have bought reliable transportation for a lot less money. But there you go. That red Camaro and I did some serious traveling on my life's journey over the next few years. In 1996 I started seminary, and let me tell you, I had the only red Camaro convertible in that seminary parking lot.
But I was commuting 60 miles a day to school, and after a few years of that, the mileage was really adding up. Little Red started running up some major repair bills. And so I bought an all-American commuter vehicle: I got an SUV. Cupholders galore. Big side mirrors for driving the expressways at rush hour. Extra radio controls on the steering wheel. Lots of storage in the back for hauling 40-pound bags of topsoil and such. I called it the Bookmobile, because I kept all my seminary books in the back seat (who needs a locker?).
And I kept the Camaro. Not out of sentimentality, but because the dealership offered me an insulting amount on a trade-in. OK, maybe there was some sentimentality there.
At any rate...Little Red has been sitting in a garage for almost five years now. I hardly ever drive her anymore. I run the engine to keep the battery up, and every now and then I take her out. But after all those years of driving the SUV, getting back into that ground-scraping car with the teeny side mirrors scares me to death, to tell you the truth.
When I was recovering after my surgery, I couldn't drive for awhile. If you have ever had abdominal surgery and you think about how hard it is to get into a Camaro, you will understand. And so the battery went dead. And the car sat there.
Until a few weeks ago, when I decided to get the house painted. And the garage. Which meant I was going to have to get Little Red out of there.
The tow truck driver couldn't even jump her off. He had to push her out of the garage to the point where he could use the tow truck to pull her around the 90-degree corner at the garage and down the driveway. But we finally got her out of there and down to the dealership.
She needed more than a battery. Five years ago, during a storm, a pine tree branch went through the convertible top (fortunately no one was in the car at the time). And being laid up for five years is not good for a car. Some stuff had rusted, some stuff was leaking. I told the folks at the dealership to fix everything. And they did. The bill was approximately equal to a month's salary...or what I paid for my first Camaro back in 1975.
And so last week I picked up Little Red at the dealership in the city and drove her back to the small town where I pastor the church -- fifty miles. It was embarrassing that I had to hunt to find the window controls and the power door locks...and I still don't remember how to adjust the right side mirror. As I drove the 24 miles across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, I noted how much faster you feel you're going when your rear end is scraping the pavement, and how much closer the side walls of the bridge look, than when I drive the SUV across.
But mostly I wondered what happened to that 40-year-old woman who bought the red Camaro convertible in September 1992, an affirmation of life in the midst of death, a financial craziness right after losing my best-paying client (but in the end the financial stuff worked out). What happened to her, and where did I lose her on the journey? When did this car, that I put 91,000 miles on all by myself, that at one time felt like an extension of my own arms and legs, become a terrifying thing to drive?
Maybe I need to drive Little Red around for awhile and see if that woman turns up again. Or if she's gone for good. And if she is, maybe I ought to sell Little Red. She's a collector's car now, probably worth a bit of money; they don't make Camaros anymore. But if that woman turns up, maybe I'll keep Little Red around awhile longer. And take her out of the garage more often.
What a journey. And not over yet.
In church-time, today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. This morning I was talking about journeys. Life journeys, physical and spiritual. Jesus' journey began in Bethlehem and ended on a hillside outside Jerusalem. I would posit that Jesus knew his journey was going to end in Jerusalem. The different gospels each put a different accent on it, but I see Jesus as moving around from place to place, one step ahead of the people who wanted to do him in because he was stirring things up and if he wasn't stopped, he just might cause a revolution and then the Romans would slaughter everyone to put a stop to it. Jesus would preach in a place for awhile, then things would get too hot and he would move on to another town. All the while, he was kind of dancing around Jerusalem. He knew he had to go there, for the final showdown with his enemies. And he knew that Jerusalem was their city, and they held all the power there, and in the end they were going to kill him. But he had to go there. In the end, he just couldn't put it off any longer.
Jesus was on a journey. And so are all of us. Our journeys may take us to some strange places, both physical and spiritual. There will be times when we will wonder how in the world we got where we are, when our original intention was to be...somewhere else.
I've been thinking about my own journeys this week. When I was forty, a lot of stuff happened in my life. I went through a very dark time for awhile. In the space of a few weeks in the late summer and early fall, a whole bunch of things happened. I had a friend, age fifty, who was undergoing treatment for cancer, and the chemotherapy had put her in the hospital with a serious infection; we didn't know if she would live or not. I lost another good friend to cancer around that same time; he was forty-five. He was the one who first suggested that I consider going into ministry.
But I wasn't in ministry at that time. I had a writing and editing business, and I was struggling to keep my head above water financially. (Don't ever start a writing and editing business unless you have a spouse who has a fulltime job and health insurance coverage for the whole family. I didn't. But that is another story.) I had one major client, and that client was downright abusive to me. The client wanted me to sign a new contract, the wording of which concerned me to the point that I hired a publishing lawyer to review it...and was told that yes, it was a bad contract and yes, I should ask for modifications. We negotiated, the client agreed to modify the contract, and then within a week, fired me. In the long run, being out of that abusive business relationship was a good thing, but in the short run, it was financially devastating.
My car was breaking down with Something Major about once a month. And I had a family member who was doing some squirrelly things that upset me very much.
All these things happened in one month, September 1992.
So, what did I do? Two weeks after my friend died of cancer, I went out and bought a red Camaro convertible. Talk about your midlife crisis. It was gorgeous. V-8 engine. Red leather seats. 25th Anniversary logo and accessories package. It was nothing less than my affirmation of life in the midst of death all around me.
I really did need a new car. But I could have bought reliable transportation for a lot less money. But there you go. That red Camaro and I did some serious traveling on my life's journey over the next few years. In 1996 I started seminary, and let me tell you, I had the only red Camaro convertible in that seminary parking lot.
But I was commuting 60 miles a day to school, and after a few years of that, the mileage was really adding up. Little Red started running up some major repair bills. And so I bought an all-American commuter vehicle: I got an SUV. Cupholders galore. Big side mirrors for driving the expressways at rush hour. Extra radio controls on the steering wheel. Lots of storage in the back for hauling 40-pound bags of topsoil and such. I called it the Bookmobile, because I kept all my seminary books in the back seat (who needs a locker?).
And I kept the Camaro. Not out of sentimentality, but because the dealership offered me an insulting amount on a trade-in. OK, maybe there was some sentimentality there.
At any rate...Little Red has been sitting in a garage for almost five years now. I hardly ever drive her anymore. I run the engine to keep the battery up, and every now and then I take her out. But after all those years of driving the SUV, getting back into that ground-scraping car with the teeny side mirrors scares me to death, to tell you the truth.
When I was recovering after my surgery, I couldn't drive for awhile. If you have ever had abdominal surgery and you think about how hard it is to get into a Camaro, you will understand. And so the battery went dead. And the car sat there.
Until a few weeks ago, when I decided to get the house painted. And the garage. Which meant I was going to have to get Little Red out of there.
The tow truck driver couldn't even jump her off. He had to push her out of the garage to the point where he could use the tow truck to pull her around the 90-degree corner at the garage and down the driveway. But we finally got her out of there and down to the dealership.
She needed more than a battery. Five years ago, during a storm, a pine tree branch went through the convertible top (fortunately no one was in the car at the time). And being laid up for five years is not good for a car. Some stuff had rusted, some stuff was leaking. I told the folks at the dealership to fix everything. And they did. The bill was approximately equal to a month's salary...or what I paid for my first Camaro back in 1975.
And so last week I picked up Little Red at the dealership in the city and drove her back to the small town where I pastor the church -- fifty miles. It was embarrassing that I had to hunt to find the window controls and the power door locks...and I still don't remember how to adjust the right side mirror. As I drove the 24 miles across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, I noted how much faster you feel you're going when your rear end is scraping the pavement, and how much closer the side walls of the bridge look, than when I drive the SUV across.
But mostly I wondered what happened to that 40-year-old woman who bought the red Camaro convertible in September 1992, an affirmation of life in the midst of death, a financial craziness right after losing my best-paying client (but in the end the financial stuff worked out). What happened to her, and where did I lose her on the journey? When did this car, that I put 91,000 miles on all by myself, that at one time felt like an extension of my own arms and legs, become a terrifying thing to drive?
Maybe I need to drive Little Red around for awhile and see if that woman turns up again. Or if she's gone for good. And if she is, maybe I ought to sell Little Red. She's a collector's car now, probably worth a bit of money; they don't make Camaros anymore. But if that woman turns up, maybe I'll keep Little Red around awhile longer. And take her out of the garage more often.
What a journey. And not over yet.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The Dark Side of Small-Town Life
I'm a city girl. I was born in a city and spent most of my previous career working in an even bigger city. When I came to a small town to pastor a church, I thought I knew a little about small towns because I had lived in a town with a population of 47,000 twenty miles outside the big city. I didn't know squat. I had been living in a bedroom community of a city, with all the amenities of a city close at hand. And 47,000 is NOT a small town. A small town of 6,000 people is a whole 'nother ball game.
To complicate matters, the local area where I live now is one of the poorest in the state. And when you live in a poor area, housing prices are low, property taxes are low, and there isn't any public money available for some of the things you take for granted in the city.
My little church has been blessed in the last year to be hosting a group of developmentally disabled adults during the week. There are six or eight adults, with a supervisor who is training them to do meaningful work. They use our education building, which otherwise would sit empty all week long.
Great. But then we started to have plumbing problems. The toilets would overflow every time we had moderate to heavy rain. And in our part of the state, let me tell you, we are famous for getting a lot of rain.
We had a plumber come out. He did what he could. We got someone from the town to check the town's side of the sewer line. The upshot of it all seems to be this: years ago, maybe in the 1940s, the town installed "temporary" sewer lines under the streets. And after sixty years or so, "temporary" just can't handle the rainwater anymore. I don't think rainwater and household wastewater are supposed to be in the same line, and excess rainwater should not be making toilets back up, but I am not a sewer expert. I just know that the experts are telling me the rainwater is backing up our toilets and when it rains, you can't use them. And we have people in wheelchairs, working all day long at our church, and they can't use the bathroom on a rainy day.
My personal solution to the problem is to go home from the church office. I live out in the country, and I have a well and a septic system. No problem. At least not yet. But the folks working at our church don't have that option.
I'm told the town doesn't have the money to fix the sewer lines. "There is nothing we can do," they say. "Many areas of the town have this problem. We just can't afford to fix it." And if I can get past my outrage that the town can't seem to find the money for as basic a service as this -- and let's face it, this is a public health issue and darn well ought to be a priority -- I take a deep breath and stop and remember how poor the area is. And if they say they don't have the money, well, they probably don't. Big cities have budget crunches too, I know, but not this bad. In a city, the newspapers and the television stations jump on the bandwagon and keep pestering and embarrassing the city officials till some budgets get juggled and the problem gets addressed. In a small town, nobody has that kind of clout. At least, I don't think so.
But I'm not giving up. I used to be a journalist, by golly, and one of our favorite expressions (now kind of quaint in the era of the Internet) was, "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel." I'm going to do a little legwork here and try to figure out what I can do. Some people think all the minister should do is preach on Sunday and visit the sick, but this one comes under the heading of social justice. People living in a community deserve basic services. And a sewer system that works is one of them.
To complicate matters, the local area where I live now is one of the poorest in the state. And when you live in a poor area, housing prices are low, property taxes are low, and there isn't any public money available for some of the things you take for granted in the city.
My little church has been blessed in the last year to be hosting a group of developmentally disabled adults during the week. There are six or eight adults, with a supervisor who is training them to do meaningful work. They use our education building, which otherwise would sit empty all week long.
Great. But then we started to have plumbing problems. The toilets would overflow every time we had moderate to heavy rain. And in our part of the state, let me tell you, we are famous for getting a lot of rain.
We had a plumber come out. He did what he could. We got someone from the town to check the town's side of the sewer line. The upshot of it all seems to be this: years ago, maybe in the 1940s, the town installed "temporary" sewer lines under the streets. And after sixty years or so, "temporary" just can't handle the rainwater anymore. I don't think rainwater and household wastewater are supposed to be in the same line, and excess rainwater should not be making toilets back up, but I am not a sewer expert. I just know that the experts are telling me the rainwater is backing up our toilets and when it rains, you can't use them. And we have people in wheelchairs, working all day long at our church, and they can't use the bathroom on a rainy day.
My personal solution to the problem is to go home from the church office. I live out in the country, and I have a well and a septic system. No problem. At least not yet. But the folks working at our church don't have that option.
I'm told the town doesn't have the money to fix the sewer lines. "There is nothing we can do," they say. "Many areas of the town have this problem. We just can't afford to fix it." And if I can get past my outrage that the town can't seem to find the money for as basic a service as this -- and let's face it, this is a public health issue and darn well ought to be a priority -- I take a deep breath and stop and remember how poor the area is. And if they say they don't have the money, well, they probably don't. Big cities have budget crunches too, I know, but not this bad. In a city, the newspapers and the television stations jump on the bandwagon and keep pestering and embarrassing the city officials till some budgets get juggled and the problem gets addressed. In a small town, nobody has that kind of clout. At least, I don't think so.
But I'm not giving up. I used to be a journalist, by golly, and one of our favorite expressions (now kind of quaint in the era of the Internet) was, "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel." I'm going to do a little legwork here and try to figure out what I can do. Some people think all the minister should do is preach on Sunday and visit the sick, but this one comes under the heading of social justice. People living in a community deserve basic services. And a sewer system that works is one of them.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Interlude
Last night I was talking on the phone to a member of my church, and at the end of our conversation he said, "By the way, Galaxy Quest is on." And that was the rest of MY evening. I have seen the movie before, although it's been a few years. If you've never had the pleasure, let me recommend it to you. If you are a science fiction fan, you will bust a gut. There is a scene -- if you are a fan, you know exactly which one I'm talking about -- that had me laughing so hard the first time I saw it that I couldn't catch my breath. Even if you have never watched Star Trek (I actually met someone once who had never seen the show), you will laugh.
There are a lot of in-jokes and scenes that are reminiscent of different tv shows or movies, so if you are a fan, you will get them. Tim Allen even looks and sounds a lot like William Shatner, fer cryin' out loud. As for the scenes at the fan conventions -- well, they're not so far off base. Back in the early 1990s, I was privileged to live in a city that had at least one or two science fiction cons every year, and I would go with a group of my friends. We got to see most of the cast of the original Star Trek, plus a number of the actors from Next Generation. For a mere twenty dollars, you could spend a Saturday far, far from your mundane life, in a hotel ballroom transformed into a wonderful world of imagination and creativity, surrounded by folks who loved the same shows that you did, and some of them would even sell you stuff related to your favorite shows that you'll never find in Wal-Mart. I have original fan art of charactes from the shows, non-authorized-by-the-copyright-holder mousepads, t-shirts, tote bags, bootleg videos of a British show starring one of my favorite actors, you name it. I get emails from "lists" of fans of my favorite shows just about every day. So, yeah, I am a fan, and I have gone to these fan conventions, and I still go when I can.
And I will tell you, my friends who used to accompany me to these "cons" had a rule we all adhered to: Never make fun of someone dressed as a Klingon. These people are serious. And they carry bat'leths.
But I digress. Galaxy Quest is great. Watch it if you get a chance. My special delight last night was discovering that one of the actors is Tony Shahloub. Since I last saw Galaxy Quest, I have become a fan of Monk. Shahloub's role in this movie is almost a predecessor to Adrian Monk, who, in case you're not familiar with the show, is a detective who has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Someone who is obsessive about details makes a GREAT detective, but he is also hilarious in his compulsion to neatness (cleaning up a crime scene in the middle of an investigation, for instance).
So, this blog has absolutely nothing to do with theology. We all need a little fun in our lives. Or, as a character in another of my favorite shows put it, "Everyone needs to have a hobby." Enjoy.
There are a lot of in-jokes and scenes that are reminiscent of different tv shows or movies, so if you are a fan, you will get them. Tim Allen even looks and sounds a lot like William Shatner, fer cryin' out loud. As for the scenes at the fan conventions -- well, they're not so far off base. Back in the early 1990s, I was privileged to live in a city that had at least one or two science fiction cons every year, and I would go with a group of my friends. We got to see most of the cast of the original Star Trek, plus a number of the actors from Next Generation. For a mere twenty dollars, you could spend a Saturday far, far from your mundane life, in a hotel ballroom transformed into a wonderful world of imagination and creativity, surrounded by folks who loved the same shows that you did, and some of them would even sell you stuff related to your favorite shows that you'll never find in Wal-Mart. I have original fan art of charactes from the shows, non-authorized-by-the-copyright-holder mousepads, t-shirts, tote bags, bootleg videos of a British show starring one of my favorite actors, you name it. I get emails from "lists" of fans of my favorite shows just about every day. So, yeah, I am a fan, and I have gone to these fan conventions, and I still go when I can.
And I will tell you, my friends who used to accompany me to these "cons" had a rule we all adhered to: Never make fun of someone dressed as a Klingon. These people are serious. And they carry bat'leths.
But I digress. Galaxy Quest is great. Watch it if you get a chance. My special delight last night was discovering that one of the actors is Tony Shahloub. Since I last saw Galaxy Quest, I have become a fan of Monk. Shahloub's role in this movie is almost a predecessor to Adrian Monk, who, in case you're not familiar with the show, is a detective who has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Someone who is obsessive about details makes a GREAT detective, but he is also hilarious in his compulsion to neatness (cleaning up a crime scene in the middle of an investigation, for instance).
So, this blog has absolutely nothing to do with theology. We all need a little fun in our lives. Or, as a character in another of my favorite shows put it, "Everyone needs to have a hobby." Enjoy.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Ash Wednesday
This is the meditation I gave at our Ash Wednesday service last night. It struck me as more a blog post than a sermon, so I share it with you.
Lent has a reputation for being the grimmest season of the church year. What positive things can you say about a season that begins by bringing the partying of Mardi Gras to a crashing halt at midnight on Tuesday by sending everyone to church to get ashes on their foreheads? That continues through forty days of giving up chocolate or something equally desirable, and builds to a crescendo on Good Friday as we are asked to contemplate the torture of Jesus, who had nails pounded through his flesh and who hung by those nails on a cross? And then, thank goodness, we come to Easter. Easter, yes, Easter is great, but getting through those forty days of Lent is another story. Does it all have to be, so, well, depressing?
Let's hope not. The key word here is "hope." The season of Lent -- and the Christian life, for that matter, could be seen as just one depressing event after another if we didn't look at it through that prism called hope: hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have to begin at the end in order for the whole thing to make sense: Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, and it is in him and him alone that we have our hope.
What we do here tonight -- the imposition of ashes on the forehead as a recognition of our own mortality -- would be the most depressing thing in the world were it not for that hope. "Hey, forget it, life has no meaning, you are just dust, and to dust you shall return." No, we have hope in spite of the fact that all of us, at our own appointed times, will face death. Jesus himself has given us that hope by his death and resurrection. Because he lives, we shall live also.
In Genesis we are told that God created a human being from the dust of the ground -- the Hebrew word "adam" is a play on the words for "earth" and "human" -- and breathed the human creature into a living being. Human beings weren't created out of gold and silver, sorry to say, just plain old dirt, lest anyone get too enamored of themselves. And at the end of our earthly lives, we return to that earth from which we were created. There's a symmetry to it, humbling though it may be.
When we read the New Testament, we need to keep in mind that the people of the early Christian church lived each day in the stark realization that it might be their last. They were being persecuted by the religious and civil authorities for their faith in Jesus Christ and their refusal to worship the Roman emperor. Also, they expected that Christ would return at any time; the apostle Paul recommended that people not marry if possible, because the time was so short. So for them, hope in Christ was what they lived for.
All of this can seem very remote to us, something that was written down centuries ago in the world of the Roman empire, among people whose lives and expectations were very different from ours today. And then, something can happen and it all seems a whole lot closer, a whole lot more relevant.
One of those "somethings" happened to me in the past couple of weeks. Maybe it has happened to you at some time in your life. A doctor tells you that something has turned up on a routine test. It might be cancer. It might not. More tests are needed. If it is, it means surgery...
A-GAIN? I HAVEN'T GOTTEN OVER THE LAST SURGERY YET! ARE YOU CRAZY??
And so for a week, I lived in the world of not-knowing, as I had more tests done and waited for the results. Maybe you have been through this too. For a week, I didn't know whether I could make any plans for the future or not. And in that week, a few thoughts came to me, and they were the kind of thoughts that might be appropriate to consider on Ash Wednesday:
1. We are all mortal. Nobody gets a free pass out of this one. Some of us have more days than others, and that is the Creator's call to make, not ours. During the week I waited for my test results, more young soldiers died in Iraq, and so did the longest-married couple in our state, who died within three days of each other at the ages of 101 and 103, respectively.
2. What we do with our lives determines how we will be remembered. A Jewish Roman citizen in Palestine, two thousand years ago, made tents for a living. But the apostle Paul is remembered, down through the ages, for his faith in Christ and the remarkable letters he set down that established the foundations of our understanding of the cross and what it means to follow Jesus.
In your own life, who has influenced you for good? Who has made a difference in your life? Who has helped you on your journey of faith? And what have you done, what are you doing, what can you do to make a difference in someone else's life?
3. Jesus is Lord. That's the bottom line. Afraid of death? Jesus has been there, done that. Do you trust him with your life, or not?
The most modern confession of our denomination, A Brief Statement of Faith, begins with these words:
In life and in death we belong to God.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel,
whom alone we worship and serve.
It is as simple -- and as complex -- as that. It's a matter of trust.
At the end of one of the darkest weeks of my life, the doctor called and said the additional tests were giving some very different results. It didn't look like cancer after all. No surgery in the immediate future (THANK YOU!!). I could make plans again.
But as you know, if you have ever been in this situation, no matter what the outcome, you are changed. You think differently about day to day living. I am still sorting it all out -- this has all happened very recently -- but I have a whole new appreciation for trusting in God. It isn't about trusting that God will fix everything the way I want it to work out. It's just about trusting God. Period. No matter how much we like to think that we are in control of what happens to us, guess what: we're not. And to be able to trust our lives to God is...well, it's a blessing. It's a blessing of the Christian life.
Lent has a reputation for being the grimmest season of the church year. What positive things can you say about a season that begins by bringing the partying of Mardi Gras to a crashing halt at midnight on Tuesday by sending everyone to church to get ashes on their foreheads? That continues through forty days of giving up chocolate or something equally desirable, and builds to a crescendo on Good Friday as we are asked to contemplate the torture of Jesus, who had nails pounded through his flesh and who hung by those nails on a cross? And then, thank goodness, we come to Easter. Easter, yes, Easter is great, but getting through those forty days of Lent is another story. Does it all have to be, so, well, depressing?
Let's hope not. The key word here is "hope." The season of Lent -- and the Christian life, for that matter, could be seen as just one depressing event after another if we didn't look at it through that prism called hope: hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have to begin at the end in order for the whole thing to make sense: Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, and it is in him and him alone that we have our hope.
What we do here tonight -- the imposition of ashes on the forehead as a recognition of our own mortality -- would be the most depressing thing in the world were it not for that hope. "Hey, forget it, life has no meaning, you are just dust, and to dust you shall return." No, we have hope in spite of the fact that all of us, at our own appointed times, will face death. Jesus himself has given us that hope by his death and resurrection. Because he lives, we shall live also.
In Genesis we are told that God created a human being from the dust of the ground -- the Hebrew word "adam" is a play on the words for "earth" and "human" -- and breathed the human creature into a living being. Human beings weren't created out of gold and silver, sorry to say, just plain old dirt, lest anyone get too enamored of themselves. And at the end of our earthly lives, we return to that earth from which we were created. There's a symmetry to it, humbling though it may be.
When we read the New Testament, we need to keep in mind that the people of the early Christian church lived each day in the stark realization that it might be their last. They were being persecuted by the religious and civil authorities for their faith in Jesus Christ and their refusal to worship the Roman emperor. Also, they expected that Christ would return at any time; the apostle Paul recommended that people not marry if possible, because the time was so short. So for them, hope in Christ was what they lived for.
All of this can seem very remote to us, something that was written down centuries ago in the world of the Roman empire, among people whose lives and expectations were very different from ours today. And then, something can happen and it all seems a whole lot closer, a whole lot more relevant.
One of those "somethings" happened to me in the past couple of weeks. Maybe it has happened to you at some time in your life. A doctor tells you that something has turned up on a routine test. It might be cancer. It might not. More tests are needed. If it is, it means surgery...
A-GAIN? I HAVEN'T GOTTEN OVER THE LAST SURGERY YET! ARE YOU CRAZY??
And so for a week, I lived in the world of not-knowing, as I had more tests done and waited for the results. Maybe you have been through this too. For a week, I didn't know whether I could make any plans for the future or not. And in that week, a few thoughts came to me, and they were the kind of thoughts that might be appropriate to consider on Ash Wednesday:
1. We are all mortal. Nobody gets a free pass out of this one. Some of us have more days than others, and that is the Creator's call to make, not ours. During the week I waited for my test results, more young soldiers died in Iraq, and so did the longest-married couple in our state, who died within three days of each other at the ages of 101 and 103, respectively.
2. What we do with our lives determines how we will be remembered. A Jewish Roman citizen in Palestine, two thousand years ago, made tents for a living. But the apostle Paul is remembered, down through the ages, for his faith in Christ and the remarkable letters he set down that established the foundations of our understanding of the cross and what it means to follow Jesus.
In your own life, who has influenced you for good? Who has made a difference in your life? Who has helped you on your journey of faith? And what have you done, what are you doing, what can you do to make a difference in someone else's life?
3. Jesus is Lord. That's the bottom line. Afraid of death? Jesus has been there, done that. Do you trust him with your life, or not?
The most modern confession of our denomination, A Brief Statement of Faith, begins with these words:
In life and in death we belong to God.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit,
we trust in the one triune God, the Holy One of Israel,
whom alone we worship and serve.
It is as simple -- and as complex -- as that. It's a matter of trust.
At the end of one of the darkest weeks of my life, the doctor called and said the additional tests were giving some very different results. It didn't look like cancer after all. No surgery in the immediate future (THANK YOU!!). I could make plans again.
But as you know, if you have ever been in this situation, no matter what the outcome, you are changed. You think differently about day to day living. I am still sorting it all out -- this has all happened very recently -- but I have a whole new appreciation for trusting in God. It isn't about trusting that God will fix everything the way I want it to work out. It's just about trusting God. Period. No matter how much we like to think that we are in control of what happens to us, guess what: we're not. And to be able to trust our lives to God is...well, it's a blessing. It's a blessing of the Christian life.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Stand up, stand up for...God
God gets a bum rap sometimes. God tends to get blamed for everything that goes bad. Sometimes the blame is expressed in pious terms, such as "I must have done something bad for God to be punishing me like this," or even "God never gives us more than we can handle." But in the end, it's still God getting the blame. And, well, I have a problem with that.
One of my personal sayings is "It's a good thing you can't sue God," often accompanied by a sad shake of the head. So often people look for someone else to blame, someone else to "pay" for what happened to them.
Not that God needs me to defend him, or her (God deliver me from writing words like Godself in this blog in an effort to avoid gender-based pronouns). God is big enough to deal with any slings and arrows we puny humans may toss in the Almighty's direction.
This week in our Wednesday Bible study my least-favorite verse came up. (I know people always ask the minister, "What's your favorite verse in the Bible?" but you seldom hear anyone ask "What's your least favorite?") It's 1 Samuel 16:14: "Now the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him." [NRSV] The first time I came up eyeball to page with that verse, I stopped and said, "Wait a minute! When did the the Lord start sending evil spirits on people?" (BTW, whenever you see the word LORD in caps and lower case in a Bible, it means the underlying Hebrew word is the divine name which is not supposed to be uttered, but which we Gentile yahoos blithely call Yahweh, or YHWH.)
I have had this verse explained to me in a number of ways, including the suggestion that the evil spirit was some sort of mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder. (Think of the descriptions in the Gospels of Jesus casting out demons from people; some of those demonic episodes sound a lot like epilepsy.)
But the notion that God sends out evil spirits really troubled me. One teacher suggested that in the worldview of the writer(s) of that time, everything came from God, both good and evil, so God was perfectly free to send an evil spirit on Saul if he wanted to.
One of my seminary professors brought to my attention a terrific book on this subject called Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Ominpotence, by Jon D. Levenson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, 182 pp.]. On the subject of this verse about Saul, Levenson says, "To be sure, Saul, like Pharaoh, is not an innocent man, and the 'evil spirit' that YHWH inflicts on him is at least partially punishment for disobedience...Here we confront the insidiousness of the Evil Impulse...the element in humanness that frustrates obedience to God and casts a shadow of doubt upon the purity of God's benevolence in the act of creation." [pp. 45-46]
Now, I am talking here about a theological issue that the theologians have been wrestling over since, well, since theologians were invented: if God created everything, and if God's creation was good, then where did evil come from? Like, y'know, that serpent in the garden of Eden, like, where did it come from? Where did this "evil spirit from the LORD" come from?
Well, far be it from me to say, being just a humble M.Div. and all, not even a PhD, and certainly without a string of academic publishing credentials to my name. But when God created human beings, s/he didn't create us perfect. And somewhere in that imperfection the Evil Impulse turns up. And God didn't create us with perfect bodies, either, no matter how hard we work out at the gym. Sooner or later, all our bodies give out on us, either by natural (old age) or unnatural (accidents, murder, etc.) means.
And God didn't create us with perfect knowledge. We don't make perfect decisions, and we don't know what the future is (thank you, God, for that one, in spite of how handy it would be in picking winning lottery numbers). So we build our houses in a spot where the earthquake or the hurricane or the tsunami will strike 15 years from now. If we knew it was coming, we wouldn't have done so. But we didn't know. And so when it does come to pass, we say, "How could God let this happen?"
Levenson also says, "The world is not inherently safe; it is inherently unsafe." [p. 17] Yeah. What he said. God's creation is good, but that doesn't make it safe. Somehow we have confused the two.
So, today you came here looking for a blog, perhaps some ramble about a tv show or a book, and this time you got a sermon. Well, that's why they call me Pastor Kathy. Warning to my congregation: you may end up hearing more on this subject some Sunday from the pulpit. Maybe even this Sunday. Stay tuned.
Pastor Kathy
One of my personal sayings is "It's a good thing you can't sue God," often accompanied by a sad shake of the head. So often people look for someone else to blame, someone else to "pay" for what happened to them.
Not that God needs me to defend him, or her (God deliver me from writing words like Godself in this blog in an effort to avoid gender-based pronouns). God is big enough to deal with any slings and arrows we puny humans may toss in the Almighty's direction.
This week in our Wednesday Bible study my least-favorite verse came up. (I know people always ask the minister, "What's your favorite verse in the Bible?" but you seldom hear anyone ask "What's your least favorite?") It's 1 Samuel 16:14: "Now the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him." [NRSV] The first time I came up eyeball to page with that verse, I stopped and said, "Wait a minute! When did the the Lord start sending evil spirits on people?" (BTW, whenever you see the word LORD in caps and lower case in a Bible, it means the underlying Hebrew word is the divine name which is not supposed to be uttered, but which we Gentile yahoos blithely call Yahweh, or YHWH.)
I have had this verse explained to me in a number of ways, including the suggestion that the evil spirit was some sort of mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder. (Think of the descriptions in the Gospels of Jesus casting out demons from people; some of those demonic episodes sound a lot like epilepsy.)
But the notion that God sends out evil spirits really troubled me. One teacher suggested that in the worldview of the writer(s) of that time, everything came from God, both good and evil, so God was perfectly free to send an evil spirit on Saul if he wanted to.
One of my seminary professors brought to my attention a terrific book on this subject called Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Ominpotence, by Jon D. Levenson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, 182 pp.]. On the subject of this verse about Saul, Levenson says, "To be sure, Saul, like Pharaoh, is not an innocent man, and the 'evil spirit' that YHWH inflicts on him is at least partially punishment for disobedience...Here we confront the insidiousness of the Evil Impulse...the element in humanness that frustrates obedience to God and casts a shadow of doubt upon the purity of God's benevolence in the act of creation." [pp. 45-46]
Now, I am talking here about a theological issue that the theologians have been wrestling over since, well, since theologians were invented: if God created everything, and if God's creation was good, then where did evil come from? Like, y'know, that serpent in the garden of Eden, like, where did it come from? Where did this "evil spirit from the LORD" come from?
Well, far be it from me to say, being just a humble M.Div. and all, not even a PhD, and certainly without a string of academic publishing credentials to my name. But when God created human beings, s/he didn't create us perfect. And somewhere in that imperfection the Evil Impulse turns up. And God didn't create us with perfect bodies, either, no matter how hard we work out at the gym. Sooner or later, all our bodies give out on us, either by natural (old age) or unnatural (accidents, murder, etc.) means.
And God didn't create us with perfect knowledge. We don't make perfect decisions, and we don't know what the future is (thank you, God, for that one, in spite of how handy it would be in picking winning lottery numbers). So we build our houses in a spot where the earthquake or the hurricane or the tsunami will strike 15 years from now. If we knew it was coming, we wouldn't have done so. But we didn't know. And so when it does come to pass, we say, "How could God let this happen?"
Levenson also says, "The world is not inherently safe; it is inherently unsafe." [p. 17] Yeah. What he said. God's creation is good, but that doesn't make it safe. Somehow we have confused the two.
So, today you came here looking for a blog, perhaps some ramble about a tv show or a book, and this time you got a sermon. Well, that's why they call me Pastor Kathy. Warning to my congregation: you may end up hearing more on this subject some Sunday from the pulpit. Maybe even this Sunday. Stay tuned.
Pastor Kathy
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Left Behind?
No, not the series of books that purports to be about the Revelation to John. I'm talking about people of a certain age. Like the man said, I'm talkin' 'bout MY generation. You know, us over the hills.
I recently read an article in the AARP newsletter (yep, I joined when I turned 50...been wanting to get those nice discounts on hotels and stuff for quite awhile now...I know my friend who writes Darwin's Cat hates AARP but if we have any chance of saving Social Security, they're the ones with the clout to do it...but I digress) about writers in Hollywood filing a class action lawsuit against the major studios, charging them with age discrimination. I had been reading for a number of years in Writer's Digest magazine that if you wanted to write for Hollywood, if you were over 30, you could just forget it. Not that I ever wanted to write for Hollywood, mind you, and if I had, I guess I would have moved out there long before I was 30.
One of the people quoted in the article (sorry, I don't have it in front of me), a baby boomer like myself, said that back in the days when movies like The Big Chill and shows like thirtysomething were popular, the writers assumed that, being baby boomers and the biggest group in the population and all, that there would always be a market in Hollywood for their writing. That the people who were writing about the angst of boomers in their thirties (getting married, having babies, the struggles of the career jungle) would later write about the angst of being in their forties, fifties, sixties, etc. No one, said this writer, ever expected that one day the studio executives would all be in their 20s and looking across the table at these writers and thinking, "These guys are old enough to be my parents."
But that's how it worked out. The writer interviewed in the article complained that these studio execs think that older writers can't write for younger audiences. We can, we can! he insists. But they won't hire us, so how would they know!
Weeelll...
Baby boomer and child of the 1960s, I well remember my favorite TV shows from back then (many are on cable these days, and others are on DVD, and some that are not, well, there are bootleg copies out there). And I remember some of the fortysomething writers on some of my favorite shows trying to write scripts to appeal to us up-and-coming teens, circa 1964-1967. If you are old enough to remember those years, you will remember that EVERYTHING changed in America during that very short period of time. And friends, on my favorite shows, the scripts, the dialogue, the direction, the production, the costumes, all of it was just plain embarrassing. Those folks didn't have a clue what we kids were thinking, or saying, or doing, or even wearing. So...I of all people hate to say this but...the twentysomething studio executives may have a case here.
For a long time I couldn't figure out why the television/movie market was so saturated with shows for the very young when we aging boomers make up so much of the population. Then one of my marketing savvy friends pointed out that it's all about advertising. We aging boomers have been around the block long enough to figure out what products we like to use, and we use them. We like X soap and Y car and so on, and we buy the products we know and trust. Younger folks are still trying to figure out what they like, so they are more open to advertisements for different products. And then too, hate to say it, younger folks go out more than we do. They go to the movies every week (I remember when I used to do that...and I don't anymore). So movies are geared to the young crowd that likes to go.
There are so many shows on TV and so many movies that I have absolutely no interest in seeing. "Reality" shows in particular: I can't figure out why anyone would want to see people get humiliated...or humiliate themselves. But there is a younger crowd that apparently is eating this stuff up.
I don't know how the class action lawsuit is going to turn out -- the age discrimination seems to be pretty blatant, but who knows. It is discouraging to realize that hey, maybe you really are over the hill.
BUT: if all this is so, why is it that I can sit and read Harry Potter books all day long? These are children's books, and they deal with children's themes: going to school, dealing with the angst of growing up (what do you say to that girl that you'd like to know better? how do you deal with that gang of bullies? what do you do when your teacher is unfair?). So why do they resonate with me -- and with a lot of other adults, from what I hear?
For one thing, they are well written. Hooray for J. K. Rowling (and her editor)! For another, they deal with universal themes: Harry isn't dealing with anything at school that we boomers didn't deal with (okay, leaving out the magical parts! I mean the childhood/teenage angst issues). We adults can even relate some of Harry's challenges to our own as adults if we consider them metaphorically (facing a dragon is a wonderful metaphor).
Maybe Hollywood could use some better writers. Writers who can write for all of us. Let the advertisers shake it all out. Don't assume that because I'm over 50, the only thing you can sell me is a Craft-Matic bed and burial insurance. Remember, advertisers, I'm now in the age group that has the most disposable income. You can sell me cars and computers and high-ticket items. Well, you can try, anyway.
Pastor Kathy
I recently read an article in the AARP newsletter (yep, I joined when I turned 50...been wanting to get those nice discounts on hotels and stuff for quite awhile now...I know my friend who writes Darwin's Cat hates AARP but if we have any chance of saving Social Security, they're the ones with the clout to do it...but I digress) about writers in Hollywood filing a class action lawsuit against the major studios, charging them with age discrimination. I had been reading for a number of years in Writer's Digest magazine that if you wanted to write for Hollywood, if you were over 30, you could just forget it. Not that I ever wanted to write for Hollywood, mind you, and if I had, I guess I would have moved out there long before I was 30.
One of the people quoted in the article (sorry, I don't have it in front of me), a baby boomer like myself, said that back in the days when movies like The Big Chill and shows like thirtysomething were popular, the writers assumed that, being baby boomers and the biggest group in the population and all, that there would always be a market in Hollywood for their writing. That the people who were writing about the angst of boomers in their thirties (getting married, having babies, the struggles of the career jungle) would later write about the angst of being in their forties, fifties, sixties, etc. No one, said this writer, ever expected that one day the studio executives would all be in their 20s and looking across the table at these writers and thinking, "These guys are old enough to be my parents."
But that's how it worked out. The writer interviewed in the article complained that these studio execs think that older writers can't write for younger audiences. We can, we can! he insists. But they won't hire us, so how would they know!
Weeelll...
Baby boomer and child of the 1960s, I well remember my favorite TV shows from back then (many are on cable these days, and others are on DVD, and some that are not, well, there are bootleg copies out there). And I remember some of the fortysomething writers on some of my favorite shows trying to write scripts to appeal to us up-and-coming teens, circa 1964-1967. If you are old enough to remember those years, you will remember that EVERYTHING changed in America during that very short period of time. And friends, on my favorite shows, the scripts, the dialogue, the direction, the production, the costumes, all of it was just plain embarrassing. Those folks didn't have a clue what we kids were thinking, or saying, or doing, or even wearing. So...I of all people hate to say this but...the twentysomething studio executives may have a case here.
For a long time I couldn't figure out why the television/movie market was so saturated with shows for the very young when we aging boomers make up so much of the population. Then one of my marketing savvy friends pointed out that it's all about advertising. We aging boomers have been around the block long enough to figure out what products we like to use, and we use them. We like X soap and Y car and so on, and we buy the products we know and trust. Younger folks are still trying to figure out what they like, so they are more open to advertisements for different products. And then too, hate to say it, younger folks go out more than we do. They go to the movies every week (I remember when I used to do that...and I don't anymore). So movies are geared to the young crowd that likes to go.
There are so many shows on TV and so many movies that I have absolutely no interest in seeing. "Reality" shows in particular: I can't figure out why anyone would want to see people get humiliated...or humiliate themselves. But there is a younger crowd that apparently is eating this stuff up.
I don't know how the class action lawsuit is going to turn out -- the age discrimination seems to be pretty blatant, but who knows. It is discouraging to realize that hey, maybe you really are over the hill.
BUT: if all this is so, why is it that I can sit and read Harry Potter books all day long? These are children's books, and they deal with children's themes: going to school, dealing with the angst of growing up (what do you say to that girl that you'd like to know better? how do you deal with that gang of bullies? what do you do when your teacher is unfair?). So why do they resonate with me -- and with a lot of other adults, from what I hear?
For one thing, they are well written. Hooray for J. K. Rowling (and her editor)! For another, they deal with universal themes: Harry isn't dealing with anything at school that we boomers didn't deal with (okay, leaving out the magical parts! I mean the childhood/teenage angst issues). We adults can even relate some of Harry's challenges to our own as adults if we consider them metaphorically (facing a dragon is a wonderful metaphor).
Maybe Hollywood could use some better writers. Writers who can write for all of us. Let the advertisers shake it all out. Don't assume that because I'm over 50, the only thing you can sell me is a Craft-Matic bed and burial insurance. Remember, advertisers, I'm now in the age group that has the most disposable income. You can sell me cars and computers and high-ticket items. Well, you can try, anyway.
Pastor Kathy
Monday, January 17, 2005
Life, Interrupted (Again)
No, I haven't abandoned this blog. My life got interrupted again just after New Year's, when I ended up back in the hospital with complications from my surgery last month. Do you have a half gallon of milk, juice, whatever in your refrigerator right now? Go in there and take it out. Give it a good heft (if it's full). Weighs a few pounds, doesn't it? That is how much fluid I had removed from around my right lung over a two-day period. No wonder I was in pain and having trouble taking a breath.
I have been getting better day by day, now that the "stuff" is out of me. I was able to go back to work last week and preached on Sunday, which was something I really needed to do. Check out Psalm 40. I had planned to make that my sermon text anyway, but it took on new meaning after those long days at home and in the hospital, going through test after test, wondering when I would ever feel better again.
"I waited patiently for God.
He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure."
How many people, down through the ages, have read that psalm in times of trouble and taken strength from it? That desolate pit is a nasty place to be. You feel alone, everything looks dark, and you don't know how you're going to get out of there. So you wait patiently for God. Sometimes God comes in the form of a doctor with a six-inch needle (fortunately I never saw the needle) who draws all that fluid out so you can breathe again (but at first you feel even worse...and you have to trust that it will get better after the inflammation clears up).
During my week of tests and hospitalizations, I read another book. Readers of this blog will recall that after my surgery I read The Sparrow, a science fiction novel about (I kid you not) Jesuits in outer space. As I was headed out the door on my way to tests and hospital, I grabbed the biggest unread novel I could find in the house. It was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, number 4 in the series, weighing in at 700 plus pages. I read the entire thing in that week. Now, I know there are two different opinions among Christians about Harry Potter. Some Christians think these books are the devil's spawn because they deal with witches and wizards and witchcraft. Other Christians look at the books and point out that they deal with issues of good and evil and how to discern one from the other, and they say Harry Potter comes down solidly on the side of good and Christians won't be led astray here. (By the way, I have seen ads for a book called The Gospel According to Harry Potter, but I haven't read it, so I can't comment on it.)
Well, I have now read four of the five published books (number six comes out this year) and I don't think I've lost my faith over them. The only objection I had to anything in the whole series was in book two, I think it was, when a spell went wrong and Harry's friend Ron started erping frogs. Still makes me queasy to think about it.
I kinda saw a lot of parallels in the first book between Harry's getting ready to go to Hogwarts and my getting ready to go to seminary. Harry had to go to a special place -- Diagon Alley (diagonally!) -- to get his books, cauldron, robe, and wand. Well, when you go to seminary, you can't exactly get the stuff you need at Wal-Mart. You too have to go to special stores to get your stuff. There's the seminary bookstore, and there's Cokesbury (yea, Cokesbury! I well remember getting fitted for a robe there) and there are specialized catalogs for some of the books you have to read (you won't find that Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon in your neighborhood Barnes & Noble). I confess I didn't take the Hogwarts Express from platform nine-and-three-quarters to get to the seminary, but I spent many a morning sitting in traffic making the 30-mile commute.
A couple of years ago I was back at the seminary for some continuing education, and I as I walked past one of the dormitories, I saw that someone had printed out an elaborate coat of arms and taped it to a window. It said, "Gryffindor" -- which is Harry Potter's house at Hogwarts. I laughed myself silly: somebody else had seen the same parallels too! Sadly, not one of my good buddies from seminary got the joke. None of them had read Harry Potter.
Anyway...in my week of illness, I actually found some inspiration from Harry Potter #4. I hope this isn't too big a spoiler in case you haven't read the book yet, but there is a part where Harry is preparing to face a dragon. He knows when it will happen and he thinks he knows what he will do when he faces it, but it is nerve-wracking to wait for the dragon. And so he paces up and down and frets because the time passes much, much too quickly when you are waiting for something you are not looking forward to.
And there I was, knowing that the pulmonologist was coming sometime after lunch to put that six-inch needle in my back. I really, really was tired of hurting and really wanted to get this over with...but I sure wasn't looking forward to the procedure. The lunch tray came. I picked up the cover and looked at what was on the plate: macaroni and cheese and a piece of fried chicken. (My diatribe on the high-fat, high-cholesterol diet that constituted a "regular" tray in this hospital I will save for another blog.) Even the smell of it was more than I could stand. I moved the tray to a chair across the room and saved the iced tea and the chocolate chip cookie for "after." I could just see myself throwing up my lunch all over the nurse, so I decided to pass. At that point, food was pretty highly overrated as far as I was concerned.
I survived the needle in my back, which surprisingly hurt a lot less than I expected; pressure mostly. And like Harry, I was very, very glad when my encounter with the dragon was over. And the chocolate chip cookie and the iced tea with the ice long melted were very, very good.
And so now I am trying to regroup, trying to remember where I was when life was interrupted, and trying to get back into a life that does not revolve around trips to radiology for another CT scan or x-ray. It is good to be back.
Pastor Kathy
I have been getting better day by day, now that the "stuff" is out of me. I was able to go back to work last week and preached on Sunday, which was something I really needed to do. Check out Psalm 40. I had planned to make that my sermon text anyway, but it took on new meaning after those long days at home and in the hospital, going through test after test, wondering when I would ever feel better again.
"I waited patiently for God.
He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure."
How many people, down through the ages, have read that psalm in times of trouble and taken strength from it? That desolate pit is a nasty place to be. You feel alone, everything looks dark, and you don't know how you're going to get out of there. So you wait patiently for God. Sometimes God comes in the form of a doctor with a six-inch needle (fortunately I never saw the needle) who draws all that fluid out so you can breathe again (but at first you feel even worse...and you have to trust that it will get better after the inflammation clears up).
During my week of tests and hospitalizations, I read another book. Readers of this blog will recall that after my surgery I read The Sparrow, a science fiction novel about (I kid you not) Jesuits in outer space. As I was headed out the door on my way to tests and hospital, I grabbed the biggest unread novel I could find in the house. It was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, number 4 in the series, weighing in at 700 plus pages. I read the entire thing in that week. Now, I know there are two different opinions among Christians about Harry Potter. Some Christians think these books are the devil's spawn because they deal with witches and wizards and witchcraft. Other Christians look at the books and point out that they deal with issues of good and evil and how to discern one from the other, and they say Harry Potter comes down solidly on the side of good and Christians won't be led astray here. (By the way, I have seen ads for a book called The Gospel According to Harry Potter, but I haven't read it, so I can't comment on it.)
Well, I have now read four of the five published books (number six comes out this year) and I don't think I've lost my faith over them. The only objection I had to anything in the whole series was in book two, I think it was, when a spell went wrong and Harry's friend Ron started erping frogs. Still makes me queasy to think about it.
I kinda saw a lot of parallels in the first book between Harry's getting ready to go to Hogwarts and my getting ready to go to seminary. Harry had to go to a special place -- Diagon Alley (diagonally!) -- to get his books, cauldron, robe, and wand. Well, when you go to seminary, you can't exactly get the stuff you need at Wal-Mart. You too have to go to special stores to get your stuff. There's the seminary bookstore, and there's Cokesbury (yea, Cokesbury! I well remember getting fitted for a robe there) and there are specialized catalogs for some of the books you have to read (you won't find that Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon in your neighborhood Barnes & Noble). I confess I didn't take the Hogwarts Express from platform nine-and-three-quarters to get to the seminary, but I spent many a morning sitting in traffic making the 30-mile commute.
A couple of years ago I was back at the seminary for some continuing education, and I as I walked past one of the dormitories, I saw that someone had printed out an elaborate coat of arms and taped it to a window. It said, "Gryffindor" -- which is Harry Potter's house at Hogwarts. I laughed myself silly: somebody else had seen the same parallels too! Sadly, not one of my good buddies from seminary got the joke. None of them had read Harry Potter.
Anyway...in my week of illness, I actually found some inspiration from Harry Potter #4. I hope this isn't too big a spoiler in case you haven't read the book yet, but there is a part where Harry is preparing to face a dragon. He knows when it will happen and he thinks he knows what he will do when he faces it, but it is nerve-wracking to wait for the dragon. And so he paces up and down and frets because the time passes much, much too quickly when you are waiting for something you are not looking forward to.
And there I was, knowing that the pulmonologist was coming sometime after lunch to put that six-inch needle in my back. I really, really was tired of hurting and really wanted to get this over with...but I sure wasn't looking forward to the procedure. The lunch tray came. I picked up the cover and looked at what was on the plate: macaroni and cheese and a piece of fried chicken. (My diatribe on the high-fat, high-cholesterol diet that constituted a "regular" tray in this hospital I will save for another blog.) Even the smell of it was more than I could stand. I moved the tray to a chair across the room and saved the iced tea and the chocolate chip cookie for "after." I could just see myself throwing up my lunch all over the nurse, so I decided to pass. At that point, food was pretty highly overrated as far as I was concerned.
I survived the needle in my back, which surprisingly hurt a lot less than I expected; pressure mostly. And like Harry, I was very, very glad when my encounter with the dragon was over. And the chocolate chip cookie and the iced tea with the ice long melted were very, very good.
And so now I am trying to regroup, trying to remember where I was when life was interrupted, and trying to get back into a life that does not revolve around trips to radiology for another CT scan or x-ray. It is good to be back.
Pastor Kathy
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Thoughts at the End of the Year
You will see beneath this post one that just has a capital T. Such are the vagaries of working with a laptop (brand name I won't mention) that does weird things with the cursor should your hand inadvertently wander around in the vicinity of the touchpad. (If you own one of this brand, you probaby know exactly what I am talking about.) The capital T was as far as I got with this post...then it decided to post, and nothing could stop it or delete it. Be careful what you write on the Internet!
Thoughts at the end of the year...
I am still recovering from surgery, not as quickly as I would like. I am an energetic person, and this forced incapacity does not sit well with me. I want to get back to work and play and all the things I normally do. It is a humbling experience to have to ask someone to take out your garbage because you can't drag that big can down your 200-foot driveway. Midlife is an adjustment; old age is going to be really, really hard.
I have been working on a sermon series for January. I generally work from something called the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a selection of scripture readings for each week of the church year; it runs in a three-year cycle. This is year A. Each week's readings include an Old Testament lesson, a passage from the Writings (generally a psalm), a reading from the Epistles (New Testament), and a Gospel lesson. For the first four weeks of January, I'm going to preach a series on "New Year, New Life." New life in Christ, that is. These passages for the next month have so many references to hope and newness and God's promises. One of my seminary professors was always talking about "God's radical newness" and I am unashamedly borrowing the phrase for one of my sermons. It is so easy to think of the Bible as a dusty old book with nothing new to say to our modern day world...or to be so frightened by a world that is changing rapidly that one insists that the text have only one meaning, only one way to look at it, and that God has nothing new to say to us.
God's promises are new every morning. There are new discoveries, new insights to be found in scripture even today, if one will only be open to them. There is still that strange dimension to reading scripture that we call the Holy Spirit, which scares the hooey out of a lot of folks in my denomination because it tends to defy control and definition. But we do believe that the Spirit -- also known as the breath, or ruach, of God -- inspired the people who wrote the Bible and inspires the people who read it, even today.
The first chapter of Genesis says that when God began to create the world, the spirit, or breath, of God moved across the waters. That's the Hebrew word ruach. The Greeks call it pneuma. When Jesus talks about sending the Spirit to the disciples in John's gospel, that word is pneuma. Powerful thing, that Spirit of God, and not to be ignored. Maybe more on that later.
A new year is coming. In many ways, January 1 is going to look a lot like December 31, I predict, but in other ways, it can be a time of newness, if we will only let it.
Pastor Kathy
Thoughts at the end of the year...
I am still recovering from surgery, not as quickly as I would like. I am an energetic person, and this forced incapacity does not sit well with me. I want to get back to work and play and all the things I normally do. It is a humbling experience to have to ask someone to take out your garbage because you can't drag that big can down your 200-foot driveway. Midlife is an adjustment; old age is going to be really, really hard.
I have been working on a sermon series for January. I generally work from something called the Revised Common Lectionary, which is a selection of scripture readings for each week of the church year; it runs in a three-year cycle. This is year A. Each week's readings include an Old Testament lesson, a passage from the Writings (generally a psalm), a reading from the Epistles (New Testament), and a Gospel lesson. For the first four weeks of January, I'm going to preach a series on "New Year, New Life." New life in Christ, that is. These passages for the next month have so many references to hope and newness and God's promises. One of my seminary professors was always talking about "God's radical newness" and I am unashamedly borrowing the phrase for one of my sermons. It is so easy to think of the Bible as a dusty old book with nothing new to say to our modern day world...or to be so frightened by a world that is changing rapidly that one insists that the text have only one meaning, only one way to look at it, and that God has nothing new to say to us.
God's promises are new every morning. There are new discoveries, new insights to be found in scripture even today, if one will only be open to them. There is still that strange dimension to reading scripture that we call the Holy Spirit, which scares the hooey out of a lot of folks in my denomination because it tends to defy control and definition. But we do believe that the Spirit -- also known as the breath, or ruach, of God -- inspired the people who wrote the Bible and inspires the people who read it, even today.
The first chapter of Genesis says that when God began to create the world, the spirit, or breath, of God moved across the waters. That's the Hebrew word ruach. The Greeks call it pneuma. When Jesus talks about sending the Spirit to the disciples in John's gospel, that word is pneuma. Powerful thing, that Spirit of God, and not to be ignored. Maybe more on that later.
A new year is coming. In many ways, January 1 is going to look a lot like December 31, I predict, but in other ways, it can be a time of newness, if we will only let it.
Pastor Kathy
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
What to read when you're recovering from surgery
As I was headed to the doctor two weeks ago (with a hunch that she would put me in the hospital), I stopped at the mailbox at the end of the driveway. My package from amazon.com had arrived. It contained a set of DVDs of The Vicar of Dibley and a novel. I began reading the novel in the hospital. I started watching the DVDs after I got home and, sad to say, the Vicar of Dibley's jokes began to wear thin on me after about four episodes. Your mileage may vary.
But the book has proved to be quite the choice during my recovery. It is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, published in 1996 (New York: Fawcett Books, 408 pp.). Technically it's science fiction; as you see by my profile I am a science fiction fan -- Return of the Jedi is one of my favorite movies (not for the blaster battles, but for Luke's struggle to understand his father and to deal with his own dark side). But The Sparrow is about a lot more than science fiction.
In a way, it kind of takes the premise of Contact and runs in a whole different direction with it. Sometime around 2019, radio signals are received from somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. It turns out the signals are music. There is much excitement in the scientific community about this. And then a private group decides to launch a secret expedition to find the senders of the music.
And who is this private group? Think for a minute. Who were some of the great explorers of North America, around the seventeenth century, who are still around today? The Jesuits. Yes, the Jesuits decide to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri. My first reaction was, in this day and age, if any "Christian" organization decided to do such a thing, the only ones that would have that kind of money would be the televangelists. I can see Brother Billy Bob Whoosis on tv doing a big fund raising telethon to raise money to bring the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens of Alpha Centauri. But the book makes a quite logical case for the Jesuits doing this: their long history of intellectual inquiry and exploration. The author makes it all somehow make sense. In my hometown, the Jesuits operate an outstanding high school and a well-known university, so even though I am not a Catholic, I am well aware of their reputation.
So, a team of four Jesuit priests and four laypeople go to Alpha Centauri, and they do find intelligent life there. From the beginning of the novel (the book is arranged in flashbacks), we understand that only one priest survived the mission, and he has been badly injured and traumatized by what happened on the planet. The book is his story. But it's not just about a science fiction expedition to another planet. It's about one man's faith journey and how he comes to a deeper relationship with God -- and it's not all wonderful. He is a broken man. Somehow, starting to read the book as I began to heal from my surgery, I could identify with him.
So -- I commend this book to you. I haven't finished it yet, but it is powerful reading, and I don't think the ending will let me down.
Jesuits in outer space. Who woulda thunk it?
Pastor Kathy
But the book has proved to be quite the choice during my recovery. It is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, published in 1996 (New York: Fawcett Books, 408 pp.). Technically it's science fiction; as you see by my profile I am a science fiction fan -- Return of the Jedi is one of my favorite movies (not for the blaster battles, but for Luke's struggle to understand his father and to deal with his own dark side). But The Sparrow is about a lot more than science fiction.
In a way, it kind of takes the premise of Contact and runs in a whole different direction with it. Sometime around 2019, radio signals are received from somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. It turns out the signals are music. There is much excitement in the scientific community about this. And then a private group decides to launch a secret expedition to find the senders of the music.
And who is this private group? Think for a minute. Who were some of the great explorers of North America, around the seventeenth century, who are still around today? The Jesuits. Yes, the Jesuits decide to launch a mission to Alpha Centauri. My first reaction was, in this day and age, if any "Christian" organization decided to do such a thing, the only ones that would have that kind of money would be the televangelists. I can see Brother Billy Bob Whoosis on tv doing a big fund raising telethon to raise money to bring the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens of Alpha Centauri. But the book makes a quite logical case for the Jesuits doing this: their long history of intellectual inquiry and exploration. The author makes it all somehow make sense. In my hometown, the Jesuits operate an outstanding high school and a well-known university, so even though I am not a Catholic, I am well aware of their reputation.
So, a team of four Jesuit priests and four laypeople go to Alpha Centauri, and they do find intelligent life there. From the beginning of the novel (the book is arranged in flashbacks), we understand that only one priest survived the mission, and he has been badly injured and traumatized by what happened on the planet. The book is his story. But it's not just about a science fiction expedition to another planet. It's about one man's faith journey and how he comes to a deeper relationship with God -- and it's not all wonderful. He is a broken man. Somehow, starting to read the book as I began to heal from my surgery, I could identify with him.
So -- I commend this book to you. I haven't finished it yet, but it is powerful reading, and I don't think the ending will let me down.
Jesuits in outer space. Who woulda thunk it?
Pastor Kathy
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Life Is What Happens...
You have heard it said: "Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans." Two weeks ago, exactly halfway through the season of Advent, my plans got turned upside down. God tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Pastor Kathy, I'm taking you out of the game for awhile."
What started as a bad bellyache never went away, and after three days I ended up in the hospital. The following morning I was having exploratory surgery. Turned out I had appendicitis. Of all the things I might have had on a list of "dread diseases I worry about getting in my lifetime," that one wasn't on it. I had a good surgeon and it was all over before I had time to work myself into a lather about it. It's just the recovery that's taking forever.
At midlife, you give thanks that you're not, well, seventy or eighty years old. You can still get yourself to the bathroom after surgery and manage a shower by yourself after a couple of days. But when the surgeon tells you, "Just remember, you're not twenty years old anymore. It's going to take some time for you to recover," well, it doesn't do the ego a whole lot of good.
After three days, I came home. Friends helped me with ordinary stuff that was suddenly outside my ability to handle: like taking out the garbage, and even tying my shoes. (I never want to have a hysterectomy.) I settled in on the sofa for the duration.
The night I started hallucinating on the pain meds (I can't believe some people use hydrocodone as a recreational drug), that was the end of them. It was pretty tough trying to get by on Advil after that, but I didn't have the slightest interest in going back to la-la land, where I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. After a couple of days I was able to get up, shower, wash my hair, and put on clean clothes. I felt like the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8) after he had been healed by Jesus: clothed and in my right mind and sitting at Jesus' feet. The story says that when the people of his community saw the healed demoniac, they were scared out of their minds and asked Jesus to leave them. Anyone with that kind of power, to cast demons into swine and send them over a cliff, might get mad at them one day and turn on them. Jesus was about as welcome as a nuclear power plant. So he left. The healed demoniac begged him, "Pleeease take me with you" (beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here?) but Jesus told him to stay in his community and tell everyone what God had done for him. And he did.
When God knocks you on your rear end exactly halfway through one of the busiest seasons of the church year, you know it's no accident. The best thing you can say at that point is what the old prophet Eli told the boy Samuel to say to the voice speaking to him: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." And so I did. God and I have had some interesting conversations this week. Had I not been immobilized on the sofa, I might not have been listening.
I haven't given up on the blog. I just haven't been able to sit at the computer for two weeks. I'm back in action. Stay tuned!
Pastor Kathy
What started as a bad bellyache never went away, and after three days I ended up in the hospital. The following morning I was having exploratory surgery. Turned out I had appendicitis. Of all the things I might have had on a list of "dread diseases I worry about getting in my lifetime," that one wasn't on it. I had a good surgeon and it was all over before I had time to work myself into a lather about it. It's just the recovery that's taking forever.
At midlife, you give thanks that you're not, well, seventy or eighty years old. You can still get yourself to the bathroom after surgery and manage a shower by yourself after a couple of days. But when the surgeon tells you, "Just remember, you're not twenty years old anymore. It's going to take some time for you to recover," well, it doesn't do the ego a whole lot of good.
After three days, I came home. Friends helped me with ordinary stuff that was suddenly outside my ability to handle: like taking out the garbage, and even tying my shoes. (I never want to have a hysterectomy.) I settled in on the sofa for the duration.
The night I started hallucinating on the pain meds (I can't believe some people use hydrocodone as a recreational drug), that was the end of them. It was pretty tough trying to get by on Advil after that, but I didn't have the slightest interest in going back to la-la land, where I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. After a couple of days I was able to get up, shower, wash my hair, and put on clean clothes. I felt like the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8) after he had been healed by Jesus: clothed and in my right mind and sitting at Jesus' feet. The story says that when the people of his community saw the healed demoniac, they were scared out of their minds and asked Jesus to leave them. Anyone with that kind of power, to cast demons into swine and send them over a cliff, might get mad at them one day and turn on them. Jesus was about as welcome as a nuclear power plant. So he left. The healed demoniac begged him, "Pleeease take me with you" (beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here?) but Jesus told him to stay in his community and tell everyone what God had done for him. And he did.
When God knocks you on your rear end exactly halfway through one of the busiest seasons of the church year, you know it's no accident. The best thing you can say at that point is what the old prophet Eli told the boy Samuel to say to the voice speaking to him: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." And so I did. God and I have had some interesting conversations this week. Had I not been immobilized on the sofa, I might not have been listening.
I haven't given up on the blog. I just haven't been able to sit at the computer for two weeks. I'm back in action. Stay tuned!
Pastor Kathy
Thursday, December 02, 2004
I didn't take that course
Ever since I graduated from seminary, I have been threatening to write a set of encyclopedias called "Things They Didn't Teach Us in Seminary." I think most ministers starting out have their own outlines for a set of encylopedias on this subject. They don't teach you how many rehearsals to have for a children's Christmas pageant or when is the best time to schedule them, for instance.
Seminary teaches you Greek and Hebrew and Bible and theology and the history of Christianity and pastoral care and that sort of thing. To my surprise, apparently a lot of people in congregations think seminary teaches you how to read minds. My least favorite comment to hear is, "But I thought you knew." I thought you knew X was in the hospital. I thought you knew X died two days ago. As if this information were magically transmitted over the airwaves into the minister's brain by, say, the Holy Spirit. Dang, I didn't take that course in seminary.
I have a phone at church, a phone at home, a cell phone -- and voice mail on all of them, so that you can leave a message even if the line is busy. Also email, at home and at the church. And yet I am told, far too often, "We couldn't get hold of you." Often I am told this by someone who has caller ID but no answering machine or voice mail -- and yes, I do know that these people screen their calls and sometimes don't pick up when they see it's me calling.
"But we came by the church and you weren't there." No, I was out in the world, doing ministry. I was at the hospital or the nursing home, or I was at a member's home or office, or I was at a meeting of a community organization. I may have been dealing with a confidential pastoral care situation that I can't discuss with you. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. That thing in your house: it's called a telephone. Use it.
Sorry, this is a rant. A brief one. Mind reading does not come with ordination. God knows what goes on in the human heart, but I am not God (thank God) and I don't. I can have a hunch (I am a solid "intuitive" on the Myers-Briggs scale) but I am often way, way wrong.
Tomorrow: another subject they didn't teach me in seminary.
Pastor Kathy
Seminary teaches you Greek and Hebrew and Bible and theology and the history of Christianity and pastoral care and that sort of thing. To my surprise, apparently a lot of people in congregations think seminary teaches you how to read minds. My least favorite comment to hear is, "But I thought you knew." I thought you knew X was in the hospital. I thought you knew X died two days ago. As if this information were magically transmitted over the airwaves into the minister's brain by, say, the Holy Spirit. Dang, I didn't take that course in seminary.
I have a phone at church, a phone at home, a cell phone -- and voice mail on all of them, so that you can leave a message even if the line is busy. Also email, at home and at the church. And yet I am told, far too often, "We couldn't get hold of you." Often I am told this by someone who has caller ID but no answering machine or voice mail -- and yes, I do know that these people screen their calls and sometimes don't pick up when they see it's me calling.
"But we came by the church and you weren't there." No, I was out in the world, doing ministry. I was at the hospital or the nursing home, or I was at a member's home or office, or I was at a meeting of a community organization. I may have been dealing with a confidential pastoral care situation that I can't discuss with you. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. That thing in your house: it's called a telephone. Use it.
Sorry, this is a rant. A brief one. Mind reading does not come with ordination. God knows what goes on in the human heart, but I am not God (thank God) and I don't. I can have a hunch (I am a solid "intuitive" on the Myers-Briggs scale) but I am often way, way wrong.
Tomorrow: another subject they didn't teach me in seminary.
Pastor Kathy
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