Reflectionary

I Don't Want to Hear It

(A sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost    July 5, 2009    Ezekiel 2:1-5; Mark 6:1-13)

At our house, it’s not the 4th of July without “1776,” the strange but wonderful musical about our Founding Fathers. Although I grew up in Mr. Jefferson’s Land of Virginia, “1776” made a John Adams fan out of me. In fact, he captivates me. Perhaps it’s because someone long ago coached me to root for the underdog, and in the play, he is certainly that. The musical has a fife and drum overture that appeals to a girl who spent her childhood visiting and then living in Williamsburg, followed by the Continental Congress inviting Mr. Adams to “Sit Down, John!” Sit down, John, they sing, for God’s sake John, sit down!

They are telling him to be quiet.

They are telling him they don’t want to hear it.

And what they didn’t want to hear was the voice that pushed us into becoming a free nation.

What they didn’t want to hear was a prophet.

People, you see, had a sense of what was right and what was proper. On those visits to Williamsburg, we always went to what they used to call the Information Center to watch THE movie: “The Story of a Patriot.” Jack Lord, long before his days on Hawaii Five-O, played a planter and new member of the House of Burgesses, a man who would be won over to the cause of Revolution. But it did not come easily. His family hesitated to sacrifice the ties to England. His mother rhapsodized over a shipment from across the sea—fabric and furniture and blessed tea—saying, “British goods were ever the best.”

She didn’t want to hear her son say otherwise, didn’t want to consider the idea that we might be a different nation, more than a set of colonies, a new and free people making our own society and our own way in the world.

It’s important to remember how many world-changing things have started out that way. A prophet speaks, an eager few respond, but the rest of us? Raise a hand and turn our heads as if to say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

It happens to Jesus in today’s gospel lesson. He’s been all over the place teaching and healing, bringing little girls back from the dead, even, and he goes home to Nazareth, and it’s just no good.  How could that Jesus, Mary’s and Joseph’s boy, dare to put on such airs? Who does he think he is? And the things he is teaching?

“I don’t want to hear it.”

In the church that raised me, women cannot be ordained. In that same place where I walked into the baptistery and let the pastor put me under the water, in that same place where I first learned that Jesus loved me—I would not be talking to you from the pulpit. I would not be able to baptize you or your grandchild, nor could I be the one to offer you the bread of life.

You see, when some people in my childhood denomination suggested women could offer that kind of leadership, others responded this way:

“I don’t want to hear it.”

Maybe some people in this church felt that way, too, once upon a time. But we are comfortably beyond that. We remember the history but are not captive to it. It’s a story, sort of like the one about the patriot I used to look forward to seeing on the wide screen in the beautifully cool movie theatre on a hot summer afternoon.

If you grew up in this part of the country, you were more likely raised on stories of the Pilgrims. Their spiritual leader, John Robinson, died in England before he could come to the New World, but he sent this message to them through their governor, urging them to be open to the revelation of God:

...if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry. For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word… For though they were precious shining lights in their Times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them; and were they now living," saith he, "they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light as that they had received."

It’s certainly true the disciples had much to learn, and in the second half of the gospel lesson, Jesus sends them out to get started, in a sort of unsupervised partnership version of field education. He tells them to prepare to be rejected and to keep moving. They had seen it happen to him, so they had every reason to expect it, too.

We may find this hard to believe. Surely we would have known Jesus was special, wouldn’t we?

Surely we would have recognized a prophet?

Never would we have put our taste for tea or our desire for beautiful things or our old school ties ahead of the rights of human beings to be free…would we?

We’re guilty, too, of being the hometown crowd, of becoming comfortable with the way life seems to have always been, when God is always breaking through with a revelation, as if God knows we are finally ready to understand something new.

Out in front yesterday, during the parade, we saw a number of volunteers from Equality Maine, seeking our support to defeat the referendum question we expect this fall that will try to overturn our new law allowing gay marriage. We took this matter-of-factly; how can we not in this congregation where even without voting it as a policy we live an Open and Affirming life?

But we can’t take for granted that others will agree. On my mind are Lieutenant Dan Choi and Lieutenant Colonel Victor Fehrenbach, both at risk of losing their careers in the military because of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the ultimate attitude of “I don’t want to hear it.” It’s a head in the sand response to people’s real lives that asks them to make those lives a lie.

At an event at the White House last Monday, President Obama told Lt. Col. Fehrenbach that it’s taking time to change policies and laws because there are generational differences in our understanding. I can testify to this. My kids don’t understand why we have such a policy in the first place. They can’t understand that this was considered a step forward from an outright ban on service by gay and lesbian people in the military.

From the generation in the middle, I have to say it’s hard to shake the dust of your feet and move on to leave behind a whole generation. I would rather try to stay and talk it out.

God called Ezekiel speak to Israel in a time of great strife, as Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. To be sure of control, the victors took a large proportion of the country into exile in Babylon. For people who believed the Temple was the one place they could connect with God, this meant a feeling of complete abandonment. Why had God allowed this to happen? Ezekiel had hard work to do, first to convince the people that God had not disappeared and was still reachable, but also to teach them their part in maintaining a relationship with God. It’s clear from Ezekiel’s story that being a prophet requires courage, a sense that the individual is so in tune with what is right that nothing will discourage him or her from trying to get the message across to others.

Even when they say, “I don’t want to hear it.” Especially when they say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

We don’t know what’s coming next, where God will bend us toward more openness and deeper relationship, but we can depend upon it, God will. There is yet more light and more truth. But when the message comes, will we be listening? When the messenger comes, will we receive her, or will we will we be among those raising a hand and turning our heads away, ever so slightly?

We don’t want to hear it. We let ourselves forget that what is familiar now was once new.  We become the ones Jesus faced in the hometown crowd, and among them he could not show his full strength and power.  Our unwillingness weakens the power of his love. Our close-mindedness and our lack of imagination and our limited vision have the power to prevent the Good News from being shared fully.

On the other hand, the one we haven’t used to gesture dismissively, we could welcome the prophet to come among us. We could open the door to new ways of being and to different ways of understanding.

It would be a beginning.

And that I would want to hear. Amen.

The Sun Shone

...and it was good.

Rainy Days and Hymn Sings...

It's raining, a lot and still, and I needed a little boost before undertaking my sermon, so I decided to read a chapter of Alexander McCall Smith. I found Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni headed to worship at the Anglican Cathedral with their orphaned foster children.

Mma Ramotswe read through the service sheet. She did not approve of the day's choice of hymns, none of which was known to her, and she quickly moved on to read the parish notes. (from In the Company of Cheerful Ladies)

Preachers, have we all been there? We choose thematically compatible and theologically sound hymns, only to receive the reaction above: disapproval. And it is hard to recover from that disapproval. It is deeply felt and strongly held and seldom relinquished, no matter how tuneful or simple the hymn in question may be.

This week many of us will face the gulf in hymn preferences when we hold what is known as a "Hymn Sing." If organists are brave and flexible, congregants will shout out the numbers of the hymns they want to sing. I've not had one of these before, mostly because in my first call I had a musician who wanted more time to prepare and it simply hasn't arisen in my interim positions, where we have scheduled a patriotic sing-song at the beginning of the service closest to the 4th of July rather than a free-for-all Hymn Sing.

But my current organist is game, and so we will have one on Sunday to begin the service.

You will note that I am willing to sing the patriotic hymns. I have come to feel that since there is no other place we sing publically in groups, we may as well set some time aside for them, as long as the civic holiday does not push aside the reason we are gathered to worship.

Which is Jesus Christ, in case we'd forgotten.

I recently received a printed list of hymn suggestions, which I happened to recognize as the same list I received in a handwritten version when I arrived at 1FP. It came from a congregational survey several years ago, or so I am told. It includes what I consider to be the usual suspects. We've sung most of them over the past year, so I must admit it bothered me to be given the same list again as if I had ignored it. I love many of the hymns on the list. I choose among them regularly, in fact.

In this particular church, part of the tension comes between those who would prefer to use only the 1950s-era Pilgrim Hymnal and others who want to make use of the mid-1990s New Century Hymnal, both of which are in the pews of both churches I'm serving now. I've been critiqued for using both and either. I've been critiqued for going back and forth within the same service. Really, I've been critiqued for doing my job, which in my understanding is to choose hymns that support the total worship experience by illuminating the scriptures in yet another way.

I sang in a church choir for many years at Large Church, and perhaps that experience ruined me for other churches. The anthems and the hymns there expanded on and expressed further the themes of the lectionary. At Small Church, working with a young and cooperative musician, I helped choose music for the small choir that did the same thing.

I miss that.

I miss the spirit of cooperation and I miss the exploration of the meaning of our faith and our holy texts through the medium of music.

Yes, I like to sing "O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee."

Heck, I even like to sing "Onward Christian Soldiers," or rather, I like to sing the tune, which is one of the most stirring ever written. *I* understand that it is a METAPHOR. The trouble is the foe in some cases is right within the church building. The trouble is being set up to feel like the foe, despite all best attempts to provide faithful leadership in the local church context.

Some of you know what I'm talking about, and I don't mean that you know the secrets of my situation, I mean you've been there, on the receiving end of "helpful" lists of suggestions that are in fact weaponized.

I will resist the temptation to reply with the dates on which the particular hymns have been sung in the past year.

"She did not approve of the day's choice of hymns, which were not known to her."

Yes, there is nothing new under the sun, or under the rain, in my case. We have these issues everywhere. We believe a piece of music or poetry that touches us will open God's word for others, when people want a cup of coffee or a report on the take from the bean supper or the chance to sing a song they know so well they don't even have to think about what the words mean.

This bothers me, because words mean a lot in my life, the words of poetry or hymns or, frankly, scripture. And I wonder what people actually hear. I wonder if they listen. I wonder if they care.

Before I begin to wrap myself in the mantle of John Adams, I will stop. Expect something about "1776" soon, though, because it's that season even if it's not that weather.

Yours on a rainy day,
Songbird

In Stereo

On a Friday morning I slipped into the sanctuary, dark and cool and empty of people. It smells of old wood, reminding me of the Hill House, a historic landmark in my hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia. The Hill family left it to preserve an era of dark, heavy furniture; of inlaid tables imported by father from China; of now-antique dolls displayed in the family cradle; of attic rooms once used by servant girls; of the change from wood stoves and gas lights to their electrical successors. Past and present, for them, lived side by side, just like the images viewed through a stereoscope.

 

And there was a stereoscope, tucked away in a roll-top desk. The tour guides would open the desk to show its many drawers, and the items tucked away in them carefully. Then they would show the stereoscope, careful that no one touch it. Through this hand-held device you could see two pictures of the same image, which when viewed together gave an impression of depth much like a pair of 3-D glasses.

 

If your grandmother happened to be President of the Historical Society, you might get to hold the stereoscope up to your very own eyes, to see the Wright brothers and their airplane just the way the Misses Hill did so long ago.

 

On the other side of heavy drapes, I open the modern door and smell the pies being baked for the Clam Festival. On this particular morning a group of ladies will make 70 fruit pies, aided by a highly effective assembly line system of preparation and the many shelves of the convection oven. Into the patiently rolled crusts go peaches glistening, blueberries edged with purple, tart rhubarb amply sweetened and cold chunks of butter. Crimped just right, browned to perfection, the pies hold the juice of the moment, a promise of summer's heat on a rainy morning.

 

For church people, for most of us, these images connect and make sense: the beautiful sanctuary and the modern kitchen, the memories of Sunday mornings indoors and the anticipation of summer days outdoors. They create a cohesive view of this church, if you have the proper way of looking at them.  

 

But outside, in this very town, there are people who cannot see the whole picture. They do not have the stereoscopic perspective that most of us never had to seek because someone simply gave it to us.  Here the old and the new live side by side; it is a task of faith to share the view with those who have never seen it.

(Written for the newsletter at Y1P)

Travel light

(Thinking about Proper 9.)

He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. (Mark 6:8-9)

Last night I noticed something odd-shaped on the bedside table, the one on Pure Luck's side of the bed. He doesn't keep much there. He pushes aside the funny hanging beaded frou-fy lampshade that matches the one on my side. If he ever has a book, he puts it on the shelf below. Light Princess has been known to bunk in while he's away, and there is a ponytail scrunchy still there as proof. But I had to take a second look to figure out what this particular item might be.

It was a head lamp, minus the strap.

"Honey," I called. "Why were you using your head lamp?"

He had to think about it. I wondered if there had been a power outage while I was away?

"No, I had turned off the lights and I was walking around."

I found this puzzling and pursued it, but got the same answer. The lights were off, he was still up and around, so instead of turning on the lights, he used his headlamp, sans strap, as a flashlight.

He thinks like a hiker.

Probably around the same time, in the woods of a neighboring state, I made my way among cabins on a starless night with a little flashlight of my own. And I watched the kids on the mission trip using their cellphones to light their way in the late evening. We navigated roots and pine cones and picnic tables, the obstacles of the outdoors, while Pure Luck avoided laundry baskets and kitty cats.

Jesus sent his disciples out with even less equipment, into stranger places. He told them to take little, to travel light, to carry a message of healing and love that did not leave room for even a head lamp.

I find this hard. I want to be a faithful disciple of this Jesus, this ideal of divine humanity, this fully completed person, this fully embodied God. I want to travel light, but I find myself bound up by my ideas of what matters and how things ought to be done, by desire for process and closure, by a need for assurances that are seldom forthcoming. I want the insurance of a flashlight to help me find my way in the dark.

As I prepare to leave the 1PF, I want to know they have their head lamp handy. There isn't much more I can do for them. They'll have to turn to one another, as I turned to LP to borrow the flashlight I had given her in the first place.

Now That We're All Together Again

Light Princess: Well, I'm finished with Birth Control Middle School.

Pure Luck (out of earshot): Let's hope she doesn't go to Teen Pregnancy High School.

****************************************************************************

On the last day of middle school, I took the opportunity to talk to the Wonderful Principal of Renowned Middle School, relating the story that a friend in a faraway state heard him in a local radio interview and admired his handling of the questions.

"Yes," he said, "that interviewer asked me, 'Do you really teach sodomy?'"

(You'll forgive me if I colored a bit, at least on the inside, when the Principal discussed sodomy with me.)

He went on, "I told him, if the kids ask, we teach about it. Then I pointed out to him that we have sex education and they don't and that we have a much lower teen pregnancy rate."

Well, that's all right, then.

"Only Connect"--Book # 31, Howards End--and other things, too

Have I mentioned that I love E.M. Forster?

Howards End, written 100 years ago, explores the collision of commerce and poetry, the desire for something more, the need of the whole world for certain kinds of people to act as an engine, and the general discomfort of connecting in ways that may lead to greater depth.

Here's the famous quotation:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Did you hear/see the John Hodgman speech that asked whether President Obama is a Jock or a Nerd? The dichotomy is similar.

I'm a Nerd, essentially (though in my family we prefer to identify as Geeks, and there are nuances), serving in a Jock church in a Jock town. It's fascinating to me. My kids grew up in a Nerd world, a place where we talk about George R.R. Martin at dinner and name our dogs after Hobbits, in a culture of Highbrow Family Values, with as little knowledge of sports as any people could possibly have, with a father *and* a stepfather who follow NO team sports, with a notion of teamwork that comes from school projects and participating in drama or orchestra or band or choir.

We are the Schlegels. But out in the world we meet the Wilcoxes.

My father was a Schlegel, like his mother and his uncles, but his father was a Wilcox, and he somehow learned to straddle two worlds. I've watched my older son do it, surviving high school by learning "to walk among them." I've watched my second son reject them and go away to live in his own universe. I see my daughter wondering how to make meaning out of the difference, assigning the people she meets their Myers-Briggs types to the best of her ability.

The world is full of Wilcoxes. We are Schlegels.

I watched the movie recently, in which Emma Thompson played Margaret and Helena Bonham Carter, Helen. While mostly true to the book, I think the movie made Leonard Bast a little less pathetic, with dream sequences of walking through the woods: he seemed almost a poem himself.

I wondered what I understood of this story when I read it in my twenties. As my friend Ruby once said in a comment on one of the posts linked above, " I wonder if the 67 year-old me will look back at the 47 year-old me with the same rueful affection I feel for my 27 year-old self." I hope so.

A dirty Jesus?

After reading a prayer written by my friend, the Vicar of Hogsmeade, I went to iTunes looking for versions of "Give Me Jesus."

Please explain: why are some of them marked "CLEAN?" What does this suggest about the others? It's disconcerting.

Be Made Well

(A sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost    June 28, 2009    Psalm 30; Mark 5:21-43)

In the midst of a game of kickball so rousing that a youth leader knocked one of our boys right off his feet at first base, I turned to another youth and said, “I may not be athletic, but I am competitive.”

It’s a bedeviling combination. There’s no question I grew up in a time and a place and a family that encouraged a belief that striving would bring success.  Where I come from, everyone played to win, and we expected little children to learn to want it by not having it. Take one not-particularly-coordinated sister and one highly athletic brother together in a family with a dad who was modestly gifted at tennis but no other sports, and you can imagine the attention put on the little brother. Every opportunity to let him show off had to be taken, and this meant many vacation evenings spent on tiny little artificial greens playing miniature golf.

It didn’t occur to me until she mentioned it on the way to Pirate’s Cove the other night that my 14-year-old daughter had never handled a golf club or held a golf ball or walked a golf course. My miniature golf PTSD, you see, made me practice avoidance for my own children. Night after summer night, at Myrtle Beach and Nags Head, my family would drive to the miniature golf course, where towheaded Tommy would hit numerous holes-in-one while his older sister just missed the cup over and over again and took a six more times than she cares to remember.

I did not enjoy losing. I remember the boiling feeling in my stomach, and the intensity of my desire to be better, to beat that darned brother of mine, just once. But just wanting it was not enough to make me win at miniature golf, anymore than praying to remember the Periodic Table will help a science student who neglected to study.

(Yes, that may have been me, too.)

 “I may not be athletic, but I am competitive.”

I like to win.

Although I have been parenting and pastoring in an era of non-competitive games and cooperative efforts, I can’t seem to help it. And while most of us like to win, and there’s probably nothing wrong with being competitive on the court or the field or even the miniature golf course, taken to extremes this perspective on winning can become a problem.

“I may not be athletic, but I am competitive.”

I’ve come to a more nuanced view, thanks to age and experience, but we still hear that philosophy espoused, the idea that people can overcome anything if they simply make enough of an effort.  It’s what keeps teams playing and groups working and individuals studying, researching, and reaching for the goals that matter most to them.

But there is a fallacy inherent in the notion, an assumption that certain rules will always hold true. We may like to forget that every rule has exceptions.

Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, lived a privileged life, at least within his first-century context. To be in this position meant he had the means to practice his religion properly. It placed him at the top of the social order, in a system where your access to the synagogue meant acceptability.

It meant he had some power to determine whether other people were acceptable, or not.

The woman with a hemorrhage was most decidedly not acceptable. As we sit here nearly 2000 years later, we still don’t love the idea of talking about her *too* much, do we? We would rather she had almost any other ailment. Leprosy would be more comfortable to define. But “women’s problems” shut a woman out of society as surely as did a skin disease, because the religious rules governing spiritual cleanliness included physical cleanliness as a component. And a hemorrhaging woman could not be considered clean.

An unclean person lost the privilege of being part of the faith community, as if her illness might soil others. An unclean person might well spend all her resources trying to find healing, and after twelve years of searching, we can well imagine those resources having been spent down to nothing.

Jairus expected to be able to get Jesus’ attention. He knew he could. As a person of importance, he was used to getting what he wanted! It came naturally to him. And certainly, he won his ear and turned Jesus toward his house and his dying daughter.  But something happened, something unexpected, when the woman who needed her own healing, the woman who narrates her own story, reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. Jairus may well have felt the competitive adrenaline, as he saw Jesus turning aside. He wanted the rabbi to move along, to get to his house in time. At the sight of the mourners, he thought he had lost.

There is a danger in taking these stories literally. I believe they have fed the understanding that we get better, that we win over illness simply by asking for healing in the right way, with the proper level of intensity, with the right shade of faith. Just pray a little harder, say your prayers a little better, mean them more sincerely, and you will get what you want. But this is not a history lesson or a medical text. It is a story about our faith, a story that reminds us even when we don’t get the answer we sought, even when we have to wait, the healed attitude matters as much or more than the healed body.

At Wellesley’s Commencement this year, the graduates heard from Kimberly Dozier, a correspondent for CBS News, who wondered aloud why she had been invited to speak:

"You chose a Wellesley grad who spent the first decade of her career broke, begging for freelance work, who constantly heard that she was under qualified or, later, overqualified (that means old) or basically just plain wrong for whatever it was she wanted to do. She eventually ended up with a really great job, doing exactly what she wanted to do, exactly where she wanted to do it: in the Middle East. And she got hit by a car bomb; they nearly took her legs off. She had to come back from the dead, roughly five times, and learn how to walk again. So it tells me a lot about you and your current state of mind that you all thought you needed to hear from me, with whatever lessons I had to offer from those experiences, as you leave college for the rest of your life. In short, you all want to know how to be bomb-proof, right? So, you're right: I learned a lot. Most of all, that every time I ran into a wall, I had two choices on how to face it: hope or fear." 

Friday night I sent my inexperienced daughter off regretfully onto the miniature golf course and I waited with the other chaperones for all our groups to go ahead of us. I determined to make the best of it. And then we started to play.

How many years has it been since I watched the toe-headed boy please our father with his athletic prowess? Thirty, certainly, and maybe more. One way to avoid being challenged is, well, to avoid it! I did not expect to excel at miniature golf. I took a friendly bet that the high-scorer in our group would stay up until all the kids were in their cabins. I expected, cheerfully, to be that person.

And then we started to play. And I realized that while I did not miss a calling to play professional golf, something felt different. Despite three decades without holding a club, despite a bad shoulder and a generally acknowledged lack of athletic prowess, I seemed to be able to get the ball into the cup. And let’s just say that in the end I got to go to bed first.

I have the score card to prove it.

Why was this so different? It’s a small thing, on the surface, but it’s of these small things that the world is made. We fear that we will lose, whether it’s a game or a contract or a person we love or a way of life. We fear the competition from our little brother or the new guy at the office or the country on the other side of the border. We fear the difference in the way he talks or she thinks or they dress. We fear the decay of the way things have always been.

I’ve told you a somewhat silly sounding story about miniature golf, but the pit-of-the-stomach fear of losing I felt at fifteen, the burning desire to not be the one at the bottom or the one left out of things, it hampered me in other areas, too. I wish I could tell you that thanks to a fulfilled and completed relationship with Jesus, I never feel that way anymore, but that would be less truthful than I hope to be in a sermon. In the health of the spirit, healing comes gradually, sometimes so incrementally we don’t even see it. I can only confide that it’s better than it used to be, while admitting that most of the time, the things we fear are not as easy to avoid as miniature golf. Most of the time, the things we fear losing are closer to home.

And in the irrational passion of fear, it can be hard to sort out what we need to do. It can be hard to steady our hands or keep an eye on the ball—believe me when I tell you that—and it can be hard to see the bigger picture, the slant of the green or the irregularities in the landscape. Sometimes we can only see the rough, whether it’s the actual sand trap of the golf course or the faux sand shag rug at Pirate’s Cove or the pits of despair both material and emotional.

They couldn't have been more different, Jairus and the woman who bled for so many years. He embodied power in their community while she lived out powerlessness. They couldn’t have been more different, except in this: in the midst of losing, they chose hope over fear.

Jesus captivated them. He embodied not winning, in the sense of being better than others, but victory over our fear that nothing will ever be right again. And in the moment of crisis, at the near-death of a child, at the bitter end of illness and exclusion, they found in him something different than what the world teaches. He exuded possibility. He radiated hope. And these two people, so differently situated, felt that hope and reached out to touch it.

We can do that, too. And when we do, reaching out from that fearful pit toward the light of hope, we will be made well. Amen.

Weather Report

Our mission work done, we repaired to the conference center beach, only to be banished to the basement of the newest building on campus. Severe Weather Warnings have the Center's Director nervous. Our kids are tired and have broken into two groups to play games. So far the predicted bad weather has not touched us. We had planned a closing expedition to play mini golf, but that now seems dubious.

Meanwhile I an blogging from my Touch, marveling that so much news could happen in 48 hours!

More when I "see" you again,

Songbird

In a Cabin in the Woods

I am in a cabin in an Adjacent State, on a work trip with the Y1P youth group. After a full day of painting, swimming, kickball and Mafia, people are very tired, yet not asleep. Happily, my Touch reached out to find the Conference Center's wifi. I am catching up on the world while girls giggle. Tomorrow: more painting, then miniature golf! As I noted on the kickball field, I may not be athletic, but I AM competitive!!!

Nose of Fire

Late last night, when I had been asleep for a short time but others roamed the house, I suddenly smelled something awful. It burned my nose. I sleep near an open window--only open a crack last night, which was windy and wet, but nevertheless open--and I've smelled skunk in the neighborhood before, but never this strong, never this acrid.

It burned my nose.

That's an important fact in this case.

Pure Luck appeared on the scene and I said, "Did Sam get skunked? I smell skunk."

"No, no. It would be much worse if he'd been skunked. I think there was a skunk in the yard, but I don't think he got skunked."

I went downstairs sniffing everything along the way, rather wildly as one might do when one is not quite awake and has--let the record show--a burned nose on the inside where it counts.

I found Sam under the dining room table, which is the place dogs go when they don't feel happy (except when people are eating dinner, at which time it is the place Sam goes in case food should fly out of heaven and into his good dog mouth). Molly spent her whole recovery from hip surgery under the dining room table, by her own choice, as if it were her crate. Finding him there didn't seem like a good sign, but the only parts of him I could reach smelled okay, I thought.

It burned my nose, please do not forget this important fact of the case.

This morning we arose and took Sam to the vet for a previously scheduled dental appointment. And as we brought him into the examining room, the vet tech said, "Oh, did he get skunked?"

"No, no," we insisted, "although there did seem to be a skunk in our yard or close by last night."

"Maybe he brushed up against something that had been sprayed," offered Pure Luck.

(If it please the court, may I suggest that it burned his nose, too?)

I rubbed the dog, as if to prove he must not have been skunked, and I bent over him, and then I rose up again.

"I think this dog was skunked," I said. "But it burned my nose!!!"

The vet tech nodded, knowingly.

"I'm so sorry to bring you a smelly dog!"

She looked patient, and replied, "Well, it will just be one of many interesting smells."

That burn her nose, no doubt.

In the end, we must plead guilty to burnt noses and general skunk-related ignorance.

And when we got home from the vet's, there could be no doubt that a damp, skunked dog had lately been in our precincts.

I'll be headed out of town this afternoon to join a youth mission trip, already in progress, so the clean-up will be in Pure Luck's hands. I feel badly about that.

If you need the skunk clean-up recipe, this is the recommendation of wiser and more experienced Bernese Mountain Dog owners:

First pat the dog down with paper towels, then make the following concoction.

The ingredients are hydrogen peroxide; baking soda and dishwashing
detergent. The proportions vary according to who you ask, but one recipe I have
calls for a pint of hydrogen peroxide; a small box of baking soda and 1 or 2
tablespoons of detergent mixed into a gallon of water.

Wash it into the dog's fur and let it sit for 5 minutes and rinse out.

The spray is oil-based, so the dishwashing detergent releases it from the fur. The baking soda and H2O2 react chemically to oxidize and neutralize the spray.

Dating Jesus: Book # 30

My dear friend, Jayne, recommended a book to me recently. In fact, she *so* wanted me to read it that she sent me an Amazon Gift card, which I used to order it for my Kindle!

Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl lived up to her recommendation. Susan Campbell, who writes for the Hartford Courant (and appears to have a blog here), tells of her girlhood in the church (small "c") of Christ, and suggests that she could still "throw down" in a Bible Bowl with pastors of any tradition and win. I think that's true, after reading her book. She lives a life informed by scripture, even though her life...well, I don't want to tell her story, except to say that as a woman of a similar age who also grew up in a time and place where women's opportunities seemed to me limited, I could identify with her hopes and her disappointments, even if the particulars of our childhoods were very different.

Funny, well-researched and fully-lived, this memoir goes further to provide context for the developments in American Protestantism as well as Feminism. Any preacher will appreciate her chapter about being asked to speak at a Congregational church. I hope we can add this one to the RevGalBlogPals discussion list, and I highly recommend it for your summer reading list!

Abide With Me

I'm the host of today's edition of RevGalBookPals, where I wrote about Elizabeth Strout's Abide With Me.

I hope you'll come join the conversation!

Summer Festival of Meat Loaf

Some of you have heard the story. Some years ago, while I prepared a menu for Christmas dinner for the extended family, I sought a secondary main course that might suit simpler tastes, particularly those of the youngest cousin, who must have been 7 or 8 at the time. I asked my husband what he might like, thinking I would hear "turkey," because he's not a fan of ham or of the prime rib planned for the rest of us.

But he said, "Meat loaf."

And I said, "But this is supposed to be a festive meal!"

And he said, "I think meat loaf is very festive."

I must admit that meat loaf did not form a staple in my cooking. I tried it when Pure Luck and I were dating, because it's a favorite for him, but after the Event of the Suicidal Meat Loaf -- a Martha Stewart recipe cooked on parchment paper on a baking rack, set aside to do whatever it is they do before you cut them, which somehow upended itself on the kitchen floor, after which he took me out to dinner -- well, I lost my nerve.

Until he told me he believed in the festive nature of meat loaf, and I decided to try again.

Thus came into being the Festive Holiday Meat Loaf celebrated in various forms by our family over the past five or six years. (We've even made a turkey version for non-meat eaters.)

When I shared this tradition with St. Casserole, and she mentioned it to her husband, Mr. C, he misheard and thought she said something about the "Festival of Meat Loaf." We try to celebrate it when I go to visit them, and there has been great hilarity at that festival, particularly the year the potatoes got locked in the oven overnight.

Today, with our non-meat eater out of town on a youth trip, I have prepared the Summer Festival of Meat Loaf, in honor of Pure Luck's return. As is true of most of my recipes, there are eccentricities and variations in the preparation of the Meat Loaf, but it will always and forever be festive.

Below please find my recipe, adapted from various sources and strongly influenced by one's intuitive cooking style:

Summer Festival of Meat Loaf

Ground beef, the 85% fat kind because a nice man at the meat counter once told me that was best, approximately 1.8 pounds because that's how they sell it, and since the recipe calls for one and a half, adjustments are required.

Bread crumbs, 1.5 cups (I used the Progresso plain version)

Milk, 1.5 cups plus a smidge because it was the end of the carton

2 eggs, because the recipe in Betty Crocker called for 1 but this is more meat

1/2 a Vidalia Onion chopped small, but not exactly fine, Vidalia being the key to a SUMMER Festival of Meat Loaf

Salt, sage and dry mustard--rather indefinite amounts, poured into my hand first, less salt than Betty Crocker suggests, but more sage and mustard

Ground pepper--much less than called for because the pepper grinder doesn't work very well

Worcestershire sauce--something like a Tablespoon, but really a little more

Garlic salt--a sprinkle, because I forgot I had real garlic and am just seeing it now

Mix all these things together by hand. I take my rings off, because it would not be festive to find them in the meat loaf later.

Remember that old Martha Stewart recipe that jumped off the ledge and consider the possibility of cooking this immense meat loaf on the roasting pan. Mold it into loaf shape and then remember why you used parchment paper. Get out a loaf pan and hope for the best.

Bake at 350 degrees for 1.5 hours.

We had cooked teeny tiny carrots with a little olive oil and slightly mashed red potatoes with butter, a teeny bit of salt and fresh ground pepper. Pure Luck likes his with ketchup, but I prefer a little barbecue sauce.

Delicious!