Getting on the Ferry to at Horseshoe Bay, BC

It’s beautiful here.  I’m on Bowen Island, a twenty minute ride on a ferry from Vancouver.  In some ways, yesterday was one of the days of easiest travel I’ve experienced since 9/11.  Before the day was over, I had flown for 7 1/2 hour, ridden a train, a Vancouver metro bus, a ferry and I had walked in the rain.  So it was also a day filled with a sense of adventure.

When I got to the airport in Vancouver, I met up with others attending this conference including Keith Oglesby, an Episcopal priest who serves a church in Cumming, Georgia. Keith was also the Vice President of Sales for the FedEx Latin America and Caribbean Division in Miami when I was also working with FedEx LAC so we knew each other back then.  At dinner last night, we had a wonderful discussion about the lasting ways in which our FedEx experience has shaped our ministry.  Connection and community and the discovery of a new-old friend.

Then we did some group work that in some respects was the total opposite of our dinner conversation.  While Keith and I had talked about the kind of clarity and accountability we sometimes miss from our corporate days and laughed at how we keep trying to measure the impact of what we do in ministry, the discussion was framed with this question:  “What is the deepest longing that brought you here today?”  I sat at a table with someone who talked at some length about the song Dust in the Wind which I blogged about here a few months ago.  Somehow the conversation then morphed into the connection between longing and belonging and in one of those moments of clarity that are only possible when you started your morning at 4:00 and now your watch, still on EDT,  says it’s 12:30 the following morning, it struck me.

I keep reflecting on the whole notion of home and I have recently come to the conclusion that for me the path is home. That’s why I adore these outings and little adventures.  So it seemed to me last night that the path is the wind.  Being a small speck of dust carried by the wind is a strangely comforting image, quite unexpectedly.  I ran into Keith after 12 years and that, only after having hardly known him at FedEx. Last night, talking about the SFA and vestries (and only a FedExer would know what I mean and it’s too long and boring to explain)  there was a sense of being at home and belonging.  I sort of like that new idea–a child of the wind.  

My words aren’t holding up so well these days.  I’ve started a number of entries that didn’t amount to a hill of beans.  So I’m hiding out in poetry these days, trying hard to listen.  Here are the three I keep coming back to.

THE ROWING ENDETH
I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boats moored
at many different docks.
“It’s okay.” I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and healed
– saving themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face
and arms like a glue-skin
pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat
and onto the flesh of The Island.

“On with it!” He says
and thus we squat on the rocks by the sea
and play – can it be true – a game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces,
A wild card had been announced
but I had not heard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.

As he plunks down His five aces
and I am still grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
and laughter rolling like a hoop
out of His mouth and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice-Chorus
at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh,
the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs.
The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.

Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal,
gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love. 
Anne Sexton

THE PONDS
Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe
their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them-

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch
only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided-
and that one wears an orange blight-
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away-
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled-
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.

I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing-
that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
Mary Oliver

Allegro
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
Tomas Tranströmer

On Wednesday morning, I got to sit at my desk with a delicious baby boy, Aarón, on my lap while his mama took care of some business with Diana, our family programs coordinator.  Before too long I had figured out a way to get peals of laughter out of him—it is an intoxicating sound, that.  We usually have our girl over to visit on Wednesdays and this week was no exception. After a late afternoon appointment, Maria and I sat side by side and I told her about my visit with the baby and that led to her asking about about another Aarón, one of the first people who started attending Mass at el Centro on a regular basis when we opened the first storefront chapel.

I’d met him down at Vila’s, where day laborers gather to wait for work.  Somehow, he decided to come and see and then kept coming. An extraordinarily quiet young man, he has graced us with his presence. But as with most undocumented people, he comes in and out of our community life and there are times we can’t track him down and my heart goes to my mouth; I wonder if the Migra got him, or something worse happened.  We hadn’t seen Aarón for several months.  Yesterday afternoon, I was in my office when I heard his voice in the front office.  I went out right away and gently kidded him about the fact that I thought he might have been deported.  He hasn’t.  But he had come to tell us that he’d decided to return to Toluca, the city he’s from in Mexico.  That he was leaving early this morning.  Could we help him print his boarding pass, and could we tell him what American Airlines allows with baggage?

Over the years, El Centro has been the closest thing to a safety net he’s had and I was fiercely glad we could help him close out his time in this country in these two small ways.  We talked a little bit more and then we said goodbye because I had somewhere else to be; his eyes filled with tears as we hugged and I made the sign of the cross on his forehead.  There were twenty children about to arrive for our aftercare program so I drew myself up and went on to take care of business.  As the workday was ending, when everyone else was gone and the office was quiet, I sat and wept.

I see the line clearly drawn between who I was before my mom’s death, and who I am now.  One change in me has to do with these kinds of moments.  There had been plenty of goodbyes before June 5, 2011.  When I look back, I realize that more often than not, my response was a combination of grief and despair.  These days there is less despair.  Paradoxically, it makes the grief sharper.  The loss is more real and the things I used to do to defend myself from the intensity of the pain no longer work particularly well.

As I thought about all that, I remembered the 23^rd of December of 1983. That night, I was the chaplain on duty at Southern Baptist Hospital in New Orleans, which meant that I had to respond to any emergencies, Code Blues (cardiac arrests) or any other pastoral needs that came up afer the three other chaplain interns had gone home for the night.  On the following morning, the 24^th, I was flying to Cali to spend Christmas with my family.  In September of that year, my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had had a mastectomy at Tulane Medical Center.  I was still defining boundaries with my family in some fairly tumultuous terms and I was very apprehensive about going home.

On my watch that night, seven people died. It seemed like my beeper never stopped going off, sometimes in the middle of my efforts to pray with people who were in deep shock and horror. One of the men died very unexpectedly and was still on the bed in the emergency room when his brother came in.  They were identical twins and imagine what it was like for that man in his early forties. I had just had my 24th Birthday and had no clue how to minister to him.  There is still a lot of haze and jumble when I think back on those hours.  What I remember very clearly is standing in the nurses break room in the oncology unit, as dawn was breaking, with one of my favorite nurses, Katie.  There were all kinds of Christmas goodies on the table and she looked at me and said, “after so much death you either have to have a great meal or great sex”.  There were some ways in which I thought I understood what she was saying and others in which I was clueless and would be for a while longer.  What I knew for sure was that I was numb.  In fact, I could only be home in Cali for 5 days because of my job, and I slept for the first 2 of those days.

As I understand it now, what Katie was saying was pretty simple.  We have to reclaim life and we have to reclaim it in the way we were created—in all our messy, wonderful, amusing and complicated incarnation.  Certainly sex and a great meal are both ways of saying yes, of receiving life back into those places that have been gutted out by pain and loss.  There are other ways too.  Yesterday, I went out to walk earlier than usual and took a different route.   I park my car at a Walgreen’s next to something called the 17^th Street Causeway—a bridge over the Intercoastal Waterway.  I then continue along the beach access road, A1A, so that by the time I’m through walking, I’ve covered a little over 6 miles.

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It was still daylight and each step I took was an acknowledgment of the deep sadness I felt knowing Aarón was leaving and each step was also a yes.  The breeze at the top of the bridge was quite strong, pushing against my body and I welcomed it.  At the south end of Fort Lauderdale Beach there is a basketball court and every time I’ve walked by it there’s a game going on.  By the time I was walking that stretch of my route, everything was bathed in the light of dusk and my eyes feasted on the color, the motion of beautiful young bodies stretching and jumping and running and turning.  I marveled to listen to several different languages and laughter.  At one point, I almost stopped. A young man and woman sat on a low wall that curves around the beachfront and spoke to each other in perfect Cali Spanish.  I know there are tens of thousands of Colombians in this area, a lot of Caleños.  But I am still always delighted to hear that accent when I don’t expect it.  And then there’s the bracing smell of the sea breeze coming off the water and the deep belly breaths I allowed myself to take watching a small sailboard skim the waves off the beach.  So much to take in.

There was yet one more way in which I realized I was saying yes.  After all these months of walking and paddle-boarding, I can move at a good clip.  I was aware that I had to find ways to get ahead of a lot of people, even after I had walked more than 5 miles, that I was moving more quickly than others.  I also was sort-of stunned to realize I’ve stopped playing a game I’d played for years.  For the longest time, especially when I was most overweight, I looked at other women’s legs searching for the most perfect pair of legs, trying to find the ones I would  trade my own legs for, if that were possible.  I realize that sounds really weird and in a sense it is.   It’s also a little pathetic—wishful, magical thinking in the highest degree.  Each time I made a comparison, I said no to my own self.  It was a form of dissociating myself from me, getting out of my body.

Sometime over these past few months, that has stopped being a necessity for me.  In fact, last night I loved my legs for their ability to heal, and hold me up, for how strong they’ve gotten, for the ways in which they, as part of my body, allow me to make myself available to everything that is involved in saying yes.  Life has come to visit, has settled in and found a place to be at home in me.

On Tuesday morning, my friend Marsha invited me to come with her to an aerobic class at the local wellness center in Selma before walking over to be with my mother-in-law.  There were about 10 women in the class, all of them older than me; the instructor was a retired dentist, a charming man.  They couldn’t have been more gracious and kind in their welcome.  The day before, Annaw’s hospice case manager dropped in for a visit, bringing with her a newly-hired nurse who was obviously in the middle of her orientation process.  Shortly after they left, I went out to get something from the front desk and ended up walking behind them.  The case manager was obviously filling the new nurse in on some of the details about Annaw and I heard her say, “I just love Miss Juanita to pieces”.  Been a while since I heard that expression said for real.  Everywhere I turned, I experienced that almost sugar sweet graciousness the South takes pride in.

The other truth about the South was there in the silences, the absences, the subtexts.  None of the residents at the assisted living facility are anything but white and privileged.  There was no person of color in any of the social functions I attended.  One of the funniest, most charming women residents at CH was sharp-tongued, imperious and sarcastic every time she spoke to one of the staff people of color.  The lines between privilege and poverty, power and marginalization are clearly drawn almost everywhere you look.  I don’t think I saw a single Latino person walking down the street either in Orange Beach or Selma—you can tell the draconian immigration laws of the state have had their desired effect.

I am challenged to re-examine not only the meaning of home, but also the contours of ministry when I consider what it would mean to live back in Selma.  As a very young girl, when I dreamed of coming to live in the United States, I always insisted I’d come but never, ever, live in Alabama.  Of course, that was blown out of the water almost immediately.  Now, a new question emerges for me:  what would ministry look like for me, if I were to end up back in Alabama?

On and off in the past few months, I’ve been engaged in a conversation about tolerance with one of my parishioners.  It started with a quote he’d shared—something to the effect that “Tolerance is an excuse for not discovering that what we believe and hold as true might be wrong”.  When I consider what’s happening in our country, it seems to me that we swing wildly between a kind of values imperialism and a tolerance that isn’t really that, but rather, a fear of meaningful, transforming encounter and conversation.

Right now, the most civil thing I know how to do about the political “conversation” that’s going on leading up to the elections is avoid that topic almost completely, except with people I trust and, more than likely, have a lot in common with me.  My mother-in-law keeps Fox News on, at a high volume, almost 24-7, and what I did, over and over again, during my three day visit was stand up and walk away when I simply could not stand to listen any more.  Of course, I couldn’t engage my mother-in-law.  But I couldn’t even sit still to listen to the people talking on Fox—too offended, too overwhelmed, too filled with despair to stay engaged.  When Sherod and I broached the possibility of  moving to Selma after Sherod retires,  my dear friend Marsha ever so gently asked me if I could stand to live in an area where there are many, many people on the “extreme right” (her words).  I didn’t see any Obama Biden lawn signs  or bumper stickers the whole time I was in Alabama.  I saw plenty of Romney-Ryan signs though, and awful billboards about Obama. I find all that daunting.

So the question really is:  what would it mean to be a priest in that kind of space?  I don’t have many answers yet, but I do have some folks whose footsteps I can follow.  Perhaps the person who most inspires me in this respect is Will D. Campbell. I first came across his work back in ’84, when I started seminary at Sewanee.  He is a renegade Southern Baptist preacher from Mississippi who wrote a memoir called Forty Acres and a Goat.  One of the wonderful voices of eccentricity and courage in the South, he tells the story of how he first worked with Martin Luther King and the Southern Leadership Conference, and then found himself building a strong and pretty amazing ministry among members of the Ku Klux Klan.  By the time I got to know of him and his work, he was living in Mt Juliet, TN, on a farm that included a small guest space where people who needed to could come and hang out at the farm to visit, talk, heal and rediscover themselves and their Creator.

As I reflect on what that might come to mean for me, I can hold on to a few strands of the ministry I am engaged in right now.  One of the biggest gifts and challenges of this ministry is patience.  It takes me a while to get past fear and defensiveness—especially my own.  As long as I am in that space of fear and defensiveness, I am at war, perhaps a very civil war, but nonetheless a war, where most of what I am doing is about winners and losers, the sting of adrenaline that comes from defining so much in terms of life and death.  The lessons I’ve been learning about hosting grief and loss apply here as well.  Sometimes, all I can do is sit with my own self and someone else rather than plan and prepare the escape.  Presence.  It’s one of those clichés of ministry that I dismiss at my own peril.

I got up very early this morning to prepare a special bilingual worship booklet because on Sunday I have 3 baptisms.  As I read the baptismal covenant, first in Spanish, and then in English, it struck me that it all starts with recognizing each other’s humanity.  Will Campbell has known that for a long time  and inspires me to learn the same.  I feel a glimmer of hope that if we do end up in Alabama,  I can come to know that in yet another way and therefore, be able to serve where the need is. And then it strikes me: I’m not in Alabama any longer.  It is still early in the morning here in Fort Lauderdale and there is a whole lot I need to do as a priest here and now.   So that’s where I’m called to be.

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This summer I had a profound sense of homecoming in Sweden.  It was the first time as an adult that I had such a clear sense of belonging, of fitting, of getting to say, this is where I would want to be buried.  It was uncanny, lovely and ever-so-fleeting. Ten days and I was flying back over the Atlantic to that edge town I live in, where I can go to IKEA for a Sweden fix, but I can also go to the “La Antioqueñita” bakery and have a pandebono,  one of the essential foods of my childhood. Where my husband steers his boat up the New River; the place where a river town boy like he is, has somewhere to go when he needs perspective and relief.  In that strange borderland space called Southeast Florida, Sherod and I have been able to serve, raise our daughter, and be married to each other for 16 years.

But after a life-time of living in in-between spaces, I struggle to ever say I’m home.  I love our house and yet I’d sell it in a heart beat if I could.  Maybe that’s because  “home” has always been a promise for me. If I have felt like I lived at the edges, if there hasn’t been the perfect place for me, I’ve always told myself it was because I hadn’t found it yet.  Each time I have moved, each new address that got claimed as mine, has given me an opportunity to reinvent and redefine the meaning of home so I could feel like I fit.  By not ever allowing myself to say clearly and unequivocally, “this is my home” I’ve always left an escape hatch open for myself, a silent reassurance that I am not trapped or—perhaps more important—not too far out at the edges in the place where I live.

Being in Selma makes me stop and reconsider that notion, especially now, when Sherod’s retirement starts entering my line of vision.  We’re staying with Cosby and Marsha and it’s a pretty straight shot from their house to Cedar Hills and my mother-in-law, a lovely 3 mile walk.  I go by the old cemetery and I know that Sherod’s beloved grandmother, his Aunt Flossie, the uncle who died during WWII and whom Sherod was named after, are all buried there.  When you get to visit your dead, you are home in a way that I am not.  We sat in the dining room at lunch a while ago and I heard about Miss Callaway’s husband who had a white Cadillac in the late fifties—one of those with the fins.  Mr. Callaway had put mud tires on his Cadillac and Sherod still remembers watching him drive his Cadillac in the cotton fields.  As much as anything, when I’m here I rediscover that home is where the stories are and the people who remember enough to tell them.

Already in the 25^th year of my marriage, knowing my spouse as I do, if I could wish anything for him, it would be this:  5 acres of land, preferably with a creek running  through, old trees including long needle pines, some biddies, a mama hen and a rooster all full of himself.  Certainly a duck or a goose—Sherod would love nothing more than to see a goose chasing an unsuspecting guest down the driveway.  There’d be a vegetable garden with tomatoes you pick and make a ‘mater sandwich with while they’re still warm from the sun.  An exuberant flower garden.  A front porch, a nice big front porch with rocking chairs and two or three worthless dogs flopped down sleeping.  This homestead would be right here, somewhere outside Selma, the place for Sherod to come back home to,  Selma, where he could pick the story back up and write the remaining chapters for the next generation–the Kevins, Amys, Clays, Nellies, Piersons and Kens–to laughingly, lovingly–to tell about Uncle Sherod.

As for me, I’m trying it on for size.  It is good that we have no immediate decision to make.  How do a tumbleweed and an oak tree with roots that go down deep in search of the Alabama River figure out things like this?

It was a sweet wedding.  The weather was perfect; Clay and Amy were both joyful. Sherod was eloquent and the Episcopal Church knows how to do liturgy, helps us say beautiful, meaning-laden words that take something sweet and make it more than that.

I got to be barefoot at a wedding for the first time ever!

And the children were beautiful…

This morning, the weather has changed; it is cold, windy and overcast. We head to Selma next.

The Wedding Rehearsal

Last night was the rehearsal for Clay’s wedding.   I have never particularly enjoyed big social events but Cosby, the father of the groom, is Sherod’s oldest, dearest friend and I get to watch my husband be himself with these folks in ways that just delight me. I first met Cosby in the summer of 1988.

On our way down to Selma, right after we got married, we stopped at a big university hospital in Birmingham. Harriet, Cosby’s wife, had been diagnosed with liver cancer and was there getting some experimental chemo.  We walked in the hospital room where Cosby was lying on the bed, holding his wife and talking quietly with her. She was obviously so sick. There were layers of awkwardness.  The Carmichaels had been good friends with Sherod and his first wife, Harriet was so sick. Very active, devout members of the Church of Christ with it’s biblical literalism and strict piety, Harriet and Cosby were daunting to me. I felt so out of place.  And they could not have been more gracious.

We made small talk for a few minutes and then Harriet asked Cosby about the presents.  First, he handed me a wedding present and asked me to open it so I did.  It was a handsome knife block that still sits by my stove in the kitchen of our house.  Then, with a somewhat sly grin, he handed Sherod an equally nicely wrapped present.  Sherod didn’t want to accept it.  In fact, it was the first time ever I saw Sherod blush.  It started on his neck and climbed its way up his face till he was beet red.  Still, Cosby, and Harriet, with her soft and weak voice, insisted he open the present.  He finally did.  And when I saw what it was,  I wanted to die.  Gotta call it for what it was:  the biggest, most obscene and awful looking dildo imaginable.  I was so embarrassed I wanted to climb into my chair.

Turns out this was a storied gift.  One year, Cosby’s family invited his close friends to join them at the Tally-Ho restaurant for Cosby’s birthday.  His mama, aunt, children and cousins, everyone was going to be there.  The Tally-Ho was (and still is) the only nice restaurant in town and this was also a special occasion.  So of course, the buddies with nicknames like Bubba, Skeeter and Greasy, decided to make it even more special.  One of them found this nasty piece of plastic and they decided to wrap it up nice, deliver it to the restaurant earlier in the day, and have the maitre d’ give it to Cosby during the dinner.  This collection of bubbas thought an anonymous gift would be just the thing to make it a real classy occasion.

During the day of the party, one by one, each of his buddies realized they weren’t going to be able to make it to Cosby’s birthday dinner.  All their reasons were legitimate—and then there was the moment of panic when they realized the gift was already at the Tally Ho along with instructions for delivering it right after the cake, that the serious and devout Mama G and Big Martha (matriarchs of the family), and little children, would all watch Cosby open this gift and none of his friends would be there to ensure this didn’t become a friendship-ending offense.  Those boys had to scramble to rectify the situation and if I remember correctly, they delivered it while they had their regular breakfast at their favorite truck stop before going out duck hunting sometime after that.  Cosby saved his gift because what goes around, comes around.

So there we sat, in this hospital room in Birmingham, Sherod, Cosby and Harriet laughing their heads off, I learning something more about my brand new husband, both delighted and horrified, with this enormous thing sitting there on the bed like another honored guest.

When we got back home, Sherod hid his gift in the farthest corner of the closet he could possibly find.  Soon after, we had the Senior Warden and his wife to dinner and Sherod made a point of showing Walter where it was and instructed him that if we were killed in an auto accident, Walter was to come in and dispose of that box immediately.  Still a new priest as well as a new husband, Sherod couldn’t make himself get rid of it but was scared to death of what others would think if they found it.  Just that makes me laugh all over again.

By Christmas of that year, Harriet had died and Cosby was the heart-broken daddy of three lovely little boys, Ken, Pierson and Clay.  Right after the holidays, the four of them came and spent time with us in Huntsville and I got to find out some more about just what a wonderful friendship existed between these two guys.  And about 18 months later, Cosby married Marsha, as a good a person as I know,  devoted to Cosby, those boys and the Alabama Crimson Tide.  (Last night as people came in to the rehearsal party, they all greeted Marsha by saying, “Roooollll Tide” and she answered in kind).

A couple of months after Cosby and Marsha got married, another Selma friend hosted a group of us at their lake home for a weekend of merriment and celebration in honor of the newlyweds.  And don’t you know that the awful ‘toy’ got all wrapped up, and brought out to be presented with much fanfare when we were all gathered toasting the new couple.  Cosby blushed as much as Sherod had.

Today, my spouseman is officiating at the wedding of a little boy I met 24 years ago, who was five and lost and heart broken without his mama and who’s grown up to become another pretty cool bubba, just like his daddy and his Uncle Sherod. I wonder when that gift will show back up because I know it’s around somewhere…