It is fiercely cold and fiercely beautiful outside this morning.  The news today is all about the storm that’s coming.  I have set up notifications and stuff because I hope to fly home late this evening.  The last time I was here, I sat at LaGuardia for over 6 hours. Me thinks the same fate awaits me this evening.

I worked close to 12 hours yesterday–intense, sometimes illuminating, daunting, as well. And I have figured this out about New York:  It is an incredibly seductive place to visit.  I feel sort-of like Mowgli when Kaa the python is doing her hypnotic thing in the Disney movie Jungle Book.  Both days, I have had breakfast at a place called Le Pain Quotidien which is on the same block as my hotel.  It feels like coming home to walk into that space with a long communal table, amazing irish oatmeal, and warmth and friendly service.  Of course, this being New York, it’s mine for a price–breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, $15.00.

I had just a bit of time yesterday morning to go to Grand Central Station, right next to my hotel, and there too, there was the sense of rightness.  One thing I can say about this place is, along with being a city with obscenely rich people who create enclaves of privilege that leave me horribly uneasy, it also has incredibly beautiful public spaces that are available to everyone.  I mean, really, to get to complain about a train schedule by going up to this window?

I’m glad I’ve been here.  And now, I hope I get home before the storm.

I did it! I made a snow angel and it was colder than all get out because right under the snow was a layer of ice. I had been talking to a pair of workers who were shoveling snow in Central Park and they drove by on their golf cart just as I got started crossing over a little fence into an area of perfectly untouched snow.  One of the guys was a Salvadoreño whose daughter is studying cinematography at NYU and offered to take my picture.

I also indulged in the luxury of having lunch at the food mall at the Plaza–fresh ricotta and prosciutto on toasted farmer’s bread with chives and a tiny drizzle of olive oil. YUUUUMMMM

The colors are so amazing on a sunny day after the snow has stopped.

And rich people just freak me out sometimes–the window at Bottega Veneta–dolls with enormous heads and tiny, scrawny bodies wearing outfits costing tens of thousands.  Weird sh&t.

I worked very hard this afternoon and still have a business dinner to attend in a while.  The news from back home is that my girl is back on a self-injuring jag, bad enough that today she had to be taken from school early because she had caused two pretty significant wounds on her arm.

I finally figured something else out about rage, grief, loss and life:  I can’t save her. I can’t redraw the contours of her life. I can love her. And that is enough…

I went out and picked the first lettuce.  It was delicious with just some lemon juice, olive oil and salt.  I willed the tomato to hurry up and grow and ripen and then came in to begin packing for my trip to New York tomorrow.  It is snowing up there this evening and tomorrow the high will be 28. The low between tomorrow and Tuesday, 10.  Rather a vivid contrast, what’s here and what’s there.  I may yet get to make a snow angel this year.  To pick fresh lettuce one day and two days later make a snow angel–that would be pretty darned cool. I am staying in a hotel very close to Grand Central Station–maybe I’ll get to take lots of pictures early in the morning, before reporting to my job.  How dare I complain about my life?

The image of wrestling a blessing from God is at the core of my faith experience.  Allowing God to receive what I have to offer, even if it is only rage, and to surrender  to Love’s care is maybe the hardest death of all in my living.

It’s foggy this morning and it’s also Friday.  I have learned a lot in the past few days, I have found a new friend.  Video-conferencing is my new work normal and slowly, I am begin to get a feel for my new work with ECF.  Yesterday a young man from St Ambrose had to have an emergency appendectomy and I was able to see him and his mama between calls.  I neither have to discount nor dramatize the rage–it does have a place in my life and what I want to learn is how to let it fuel my ministry in ways that are faithful.  Sitting in the quiet of the morning, I am reminded of my commitment to this year–to cultivate joy.  It continues to happen.

That Japanese Garden Really Is Beautiful

With New Caution, I Am Thankful for the Memories of My Mom

My Garden Is Growing

The ‘Mater Plant Is Bearing Fruit

And I Love the Fog

I have lit a candle for my friends who are in the midst of great suffering.  I am grateful for kindness; it has come in all kinds of touching ways this week.  Let me not become complacent and hide behind what’s safe.  And thank you for my life.

Happy Friday.

A couple of nights ago I wrote about rage and within five minutes, took the post back down.  In the morning, I had read a piece of writing on the website of Postcolonial Networks.  This organization was founded by my colleague and collaborator in ministry, Joe Duggan.  For the past two years, Joe and I have had a sustained conversation, sometimes weekly, about the ministry I was engaged in and the work of the church. My dialogue with Joe has called me to consider the intersection between my life and the Gospel in ways that quite radically confront my own willingness to accept the status quo and the ways the Episcopal Church defines what it means to be the “Body of Christ”.  

To see my own role in patterns of idolatry, exclusion and paternalism is hard but also the more hopeful part of my work.  On the thirty day retreat, in the “cotidianidad” of my ministry (the daily-ness) sometimes in small, sometimes in really significant ways, I have been my own witness to change and conversion so it is a path I trust and follow with real joy.  My steps falter when I engage the larger structures of power.  Last March, I discovered a blog, Women In Theology, and more particularly a theologian doing doctoral work at Vanderbilt, who gave me a framework for hope.  She identifies herself as Bridget and she has given me a way to stay in ministry by stating  that hope is “the conviction not that things will right themselves, nor that we’ll be able to right them, but that God’s power will work to overturn whatever wrongs our systems can devise” (WIT: Hope In the Storm Tossed Church).

For the place I find myself in, there is both a harsh critique and a glimmer of light.  Even now, I want to right some things that went horribly wrong with the ministry I poured myself into for the past 7 years.  Her critique pushes me to step back, as does the quiet voice of my friend Joe who insists on holding me accountable in ways that are especially tough because they are very gentle and kind.  Over the past two days, I have had to come to terms with the realization that stepping back is stepping into the pathos, almost maudlin, if it weren’t so caustic, of what it means to live through a failure in ministry.  Now, for some, that I should say the work has been a failure will be offensive.  After all, the programs are still running on the campus of St Ambrose, we sing and pray and break bread together every Sunday, I still sit with grieving families to plan funerals and celebrate the children in our program who made honor roll this quarter.  But we are also at what can only be described as a dead end and I can no more imagine what comes next for the ministries I have so loved than the two disciples on the way to Emaus could imagine two days after the crucifixion.

I learned to receive and accept the grief that accompanied the losses of the past few years in my life–losses that are the inevitable consequence of loving a mother, loving a daughter.  Especially in the past two days, and especially after reading the conversation between Joe and Jason Craige Harris, this time, in the midst of loss, I am aware of rage.  Deep, powerful, barely contained rage.   I don’t do so well with rage.  And at least part of the work I have been given to do now is to allow the rage a place in my life.  I can no longer hide behind the magical thinking that claims I can’t rage because somehow that will prevent me from righting the things that went wrong within the NRRM.

I have also been looking at the workspace I created for myself in the past few weeks–the carefully calming blue, the clean white lines of my desk, the thoughtful cards on one of the shelves right in front of me, the chair and small table I set up to come to for refuge.  Day before yesterday, after reading Joe and Jason’s work, I took some extra time to buy irises and daisies, a combination of flowers I’ve always loved.  I put them in a small Swedish crystal vase I got from my mom when I was very young–maybe 10 or 11.  It has an etching of a little girl sitting with her lips poked out; when se gave it to me, my mom told me it was fine, signed piece of crystal and described it as one of her gifts for my “Hope Chest” (?!?) for the day when I had my own home.  That pretty little piece in turn reminded me of the two snuff bottles I inherited from her as well, that have been carefully put up to stay out of harm’s way in a household of dogs with big wagging tails and ham-handed husbands.  I set them out on the table as well, and sat for a long while looking at that pretty still life tableau.

I had been filled with white-hot rage all morning and somehow, I thought what I was doing was a small act of self-consolation.  My hermeneutics of suspicion now question that motive.  I wonder if, along with a lot else, I inherited from my mom the instinct to surround myself with fine and beautiful things because that would help me contain and suppress anger.  At the very least, I have been trained well because I sure would not have hurled those beautiful miniature works of art against the wall, though that was exactly what I wanted to do on Monday.  I wonder: have I created this pretty–and bland–work space to quell and silence my own self more effectively than anyone else could?

There is plenty of academic research that disputes the value of cathartic rage, of allowing anger to spool out  unchecked.  I see the effects of rage up close and personal with the members of the marginalized community I serve, where domestic violence is devastating. All that makes me cautious.   Besides–always wanting to do things right, and be constructive, I want to do rage right as well.  But for now, I have a sense that it is crucially important to my own spirit that I allow rage an honest space in my life.  Last night, when I was out walking, I called one of my dearest friends and we got to talking about all this–he had actually read my previous rage post before I took it down.  Len is a gifted artist and pushed against my impulse to gloss over and change the subject when it all started getting raw again as we talked.  He also gave me the link to an artist from Mexico who explores death and devastation in some astounding ways.  She works with pastels–the quintessential medium of demureness–in the most beautiful, powerful, subversive, raging ways.  This morning, I have been spending time with her Juarez series. A small first step.

There are areas of South Florida that are wonderfully, tropically lush. My back yard with its orchids and Meyer lime and ferns has that kind of exuberance that reminds me of Cali and Boquete. It doesn’t take much though, to realize that there is plenty of hardscrabble, arid landscape as well, and when it mixes with the concrete monotony of the suburbs in this part of the world, my soul just wants to wither and die.

Early this morning, I picked up Maria and then went to the dealership where I had an appointment to get the oil changed in my car.  We were in the landscapes of desolation I can’t wait to leave behind.  She and I had also agreed that we would go on an outing of some sort when my car was ready.  After the past few days I suggested we go to a Japanese garden I had heard about but never actually visited in Boca Raton.   Quite a while ago, I wrote about a “Bell Sound Meditation” I had been doing after stumbling across it on Krista Tippet’s On Being program.  Today I felt a pull to the kind of spaciousness I had found in that meditation and I had some kind of hope that I would find something similar at the Morikami Gardens.

It is quite lovely.  If I had been alone, I could have spent a long time at one of the rock gardens but with my girl with me, it was not fair to try to make more of this than a chance to ‘come and see’.  I got a membership and I look forward to lots more times visiting Morikami in the time I have left in Southeast Florida.

I did get to sit long enough in one to realize that I needed neither lush nor arid landscape. My soul was tended to by the austerity of these kinds of spaces–so precise, so mindful, so stripped down to the essentials.  Each of those carefully drawn lines through the stones implied all the other ways the space could have been filled and probably filled stunningly and wasn’t.  Today, it was the severity and simplicity I found beautiful.

Tomorrow in the Episcopal Church, we read about the presentation of Jesus in the Temple.  All week, I have found myself asking, “what was it that Simon saw that day when a couple came in carrying a baby?”.  Today, I went looking for answers in the smooth stones and empty spaces at Morikami Garden.

As a young child, I had an almost pathological fear of losing my parents.  For years, I suffered from insomnia and would get up regularly to make sure both were breathing.  The memory of those last few moments, walking carefully in the dark towards my parents’ bed, steeling myself for the very real possibility that one or the other of them had stopped breathing, that I would touch the cold and lifeless body of a beloved parent, still evoke the raw and absolute terror of powerlessness of that young child.

In my last conversations with my dad, it was clear that his health problems have brought his mortality to sharp focus.  In fact, earlier this week, my brothers and I got an email from him that included  a series of pictures of all the luggage he owns.  He continues to be determined to sort through and let go of as much as he can so we will have less to do after he dies.  In his email he wondered which of the pieces of luggage we wanted him to hold on to that would be helpful to us as we brought home pieces of his and my mother’s home after he dies.  My first response was of mild irritation–a bit of drama, Dad?  Then of uncomfortable guilt and sorrow–I struggle with my inability to get down to see him more frequently, knowing how we both are blessed by those times sitting in front of the fireplace, visiting or simply reading together.  And there is respect for a person who is so determined to face into his own death with such a degree of dignity and concern for his children.

At about the same time I got the email from my dad at the beginning of the week, I found out that two women–both mothers of members of the parish I still am privileged to serve–and who had gotten very ill, were now reaching the end of life.  With my new schedule and fragmented responsibilities, getting to visit with each family was important and more than a little challenging.  Before, I would have dropped everything and just gone to see them.  Now I couldn’t. Now I had to arrange my schedule, coordinate and flex enough to meet the other responsibilities I had.

I got to a hospice room in one of the large hospitals in town a day later than I had hoped;  the minute I saw the person in the bed, I knew she did not have much time left.  Her family had come in from many different places and while I was first visiting, got awful news about another very close family member who had suddenly died.  After absorbing that loss, we gathered around the bed.  In the Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer, provisions are made for the clergy person to lay hands on a person who’s sick and say a prayer over them.  It wasn’t my touch she needed–I had never met her and it was so obvious how much her family loved her.  The prayer itself approximated my sense of what needed to be said but only if I modified it, asking not for healing as much as release and freedom from the illness that had snuck up on an extraordinarily active 84 year old and in a matter of three weeks had become fulminating.

Everyone laid hands on her.  Instead of saying, “I lay hands”, I said, “we lay hands.”  Those were hands of about 10 angels of love who held her in the presence of her maker as we prayed. I left with the sacred hollowness at my very core I’ve come to know as a grace, no words, not much of anything, but awareness of what an honor it is to be allowed presence in those thin spaces.  Less than half an hour after I left her room, she died.

She died while I was in visiting another mom, this one a mom I got to know in my time at St Ambrose.  She knit booties and a cap for my niece when she found out my brother and his wife were expecting a child.  She has been a parish matriarch.  I have come to love her son and daughter deeply.  I walked into her room in the nursing home and was struck by how much ground she had lost since my last visit.  I don’t think she recognized me but she was profuse as she thanked me for coming to see her.  Gracious to the very end.

I was on a video call for my other job yesterday morning when I got word that she was fading fast.   We were covering critically important stuff on the call and I simply could not just hang up.  I called the mama’s daughter and promised her that as soon as my call ended, I would get up to the nursing home.  And when my call ended, an agonizing 10 minutes later than scheduled, I hauled up the road in heavy rain, praying I wasn’t too late.  I came into the room right at noon.  This beautiful mom, parishioner, grandmother, had lost so much more ground in less than 24 hours.  Her children, granddaughter and I spoke for a few minutes and then I had a strong sense that it was time to pray.  Again, the prayers our BCP instruct me to say were not the right ones.  There were others that expressed what we all needed–even though they are the ones for a vigil after a person has died.

I guess I’ve been a priest long enough to know I needed to trust myself.  So we began an extraordinarily beautiful set of prayers and responses.  And while we were praying, without making a fuss of any kind, my friend slipped away.  A bit later, a rabbi friend came and visited, sang to her a lullaby he sings to his children.  Then he said the prayer of the Jewish faith at the time of death. I was struck by how very similar the words were to the ones we’d said a few minutes earlier.  I watched the hospice nurse who’d been a part of the family in this in-between time tend to the earthly remains of a woman who had lived very generously.  The nurse was so gentle and knew so much about how to tend to that frail and newly emptied vessel.  The way she laid E out was homage and blessing.  It was extraordinary and it was also extraordinarily ordinary–just the commonplace things you do because death is always in the midst of life and life in the midst of death.

Someone once said that everything we do in life is about learning how to die.  Along with figuring out how to grow lettuce and put a home office together and get a keyboard tray installed on my desk, I am learning, still learning.

A Prayer

Dear Friends: It was our Lord Jesus himself who said,
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will
give you rest.” Let us pray, then, for our mother, E.,
that she may rest from her labors, and enter into the light
of God’s eternal sabbath rest.

Receive, O Lord, your servant, for she returns to you.
Into your hands, O Lord,
we commend our mother, E.

Wash her in the holy font of everlasting life, and clothe
her in her heavenly wedding garment.
Into your hands, O Lord, 
we commend our mother, E.

May I hear your words of invitation, “Come, you blessed of
my Father.”
Into your hands, O Lord, 
we commend our mother, E.. 

May she gaze upon you, Lord, face to face, and taste the
blessedness of perfect rest.
Into your hands, O Lord, 
we commend our mother, E.

May angels surround her, and saints welcome her in peace.
Into your hands, O Lord, 
we commend our mother, E.

Almighty God, our Father in heaven, before whom live all
who die in the Lord: Receive our mother E. into the courts of
your heavenly dwelling place. Let her heart and soul now ring
out in joy to you, O Lord, the living God, and the God of
those who live. This we ask through Christ our Lord. Amen.

As I was falling asleep last night, the solution to my keyboard travails found me.  I would attach the two brackets that I had to take off the desk to the tray again.  I would affix the tray to the two brackets that were staying up.  I would tape the tray or use clamps of some sort and then I’d drill in the remaining bracket screws.  Taping or clamping the tray in place did not work well.  And Sherod is well enough that he could come and sit at my desk to hold the tray up while I did the last bits. And so this morning, I am writing with a keyboard on the tray, so much more comfortable typing than in ages.

The work I am doing with ECF is still very limited.  I have a sense that the scope and reach of what I will do in this program will be very different from my ministry here in Fort Lauderdale.  Earlier this week, I prepared a report for one of our funding agencies.  The measures we use to track our students’ progress in the school success program showed we are doing really good work with them.  One of the parts of my ministry that has been so hugely meaningful was being able to say, “I made a difference for this specific child, for this specific mom, in this specific situation.” Childrenwho were in kindergarten when we started are moving into middle school after this school year. I have watched them grow, struggle, some of them actually get to the point where they make honor roll regularly at school.  Of course, if at ECF we design good leadership programs, there will be results to show for as well.  But when a child who is learning to read really well also comes to the altar and we share communion week in and week out, there is a connection I am hard pressed to explain and is the essence of grace to me.

These days, as I let go of this ministry and learn about my new job, what I can accomplish is so much more modest.  It is raining today in Southeast Florida and the lettuce I planted is growing. There are three blooms on the tomato plant in the planter and my house is neat, the floor vacuumed enough to look decent.  God’s grace is in all that too, and in the humility of small projects and even smaller triumphs.  My wrists are certainly glad…

I began the morning full of sass.  I’d found a keyboard tray I was pretty sure would work with my new desk.  The first few steps on the instruction sheet were simple and straightforward. Everything went swimmingly and I only had one more thing to do. According to the instructions, the brackets are attached to the tray first and then to the desk.  That wouldn’t have been a big deal with an extra pair of hands.  But that was not a possibility today and since that whole thing of doing things myself is such a big deal right now, I decided on an alternative that allowed me to do it all by myself.

Still in my pretty Eileen West nightgown, I lay flat on the floor under the desk, put the tray up against the bottom of desktop and used a Sharpie to mark where the bracket screws needed to go.  Then I dismounted the brackets from the tray. I went digging in what I call the “Heart of Darkness”–the part of our garage possessed by my husband and filled with deeply mysterious things that look like they could do far more damage than good, though I know that isn’t the case.  The picture above suggests far more light than can really find its way to that space when the garage door is closed.  Occasionally, there are the rustles and scurries of other living creatures and even a possum has been known to find its home there.  It is a mark of just how brave I’ve become that I dared to go digging around in there.

Armed with a power drill and determination, I went back into my office space and began mounting the brackets.  The desk is just high enough that I couldn’t lie flat and use the power drill.  I worked my abdominals till I got cramps.  The daggum blasted screws kept falling off right before I’d begin to drill, mostly they fell on my face.  With all this incarnational stuff, I am discovering a whole new, far more satisfying dimension to cussing.  I am not sure why, but when you are sweating, and your muscles are cramping up, and your arms hurt and shake and the screw won’t cooperate, a few choice words of remonstrance against the universe and the elements are extraordinarily comforting and just. so. very. right.

I got one of the brackets up.  And then my arms were too tired, and I had places to be and things to do so I got up and headed for the rest of my day.

There was much about work that was tough.  We are all in transition, there are some pretty big pastoral needs brewing, a to-do list that doesn’t get shorter, and in fact, just the opposite, offhand comments that cut to the quick, a frustrating sense that I am not doing anything particularly well, that I am fragmented and scattered.  I got home feeling defeated with a to-do list waiting for me as well, including some stuff I had  not planned or wanted to do.

I decided I would stop and finish my keyboard tray project. It would do me good, I said.  I’d feel great, in a masochistic kind of way, making those abs work hard again.  The B-words, as Maria calls them, would give me a sense of righteous vindication.  And then I would have a keyboard tray so my laptop won’t keep biting into my wrists.  I got on with it, stopping quite frequently to let my arm rest or dig around the floor for a screw that had gotten away.   Then, I went to attach the tray to the brackets.  It didn’t work.  I swear I measured right this morning but obviously, I didn’t. And I ignored the 1-10-1000 rule they taught us in the 90’s when TQM was so popular. Stop and check your work a lot. Catching a problem early avoids all kinds of trouble.

The brackets are about 3/4 inch too far apart.  I will have to take two of the brackets off and try again.

The cussing is fun.  Working my muscles, problem-solving, learning all these new things is really great.  But there is also loneliness.  Whether in this new place I find myself with ministry, or running our household while Sherod heals, or taking responsibility for the things that need to be done so I have a functional office space, doing it by myself makes even this off-the scale introvert long for companionship and laughter, a sense of community.  Including because more than likely, someone else would have gently prodded me to check and check twice.  I’ll try again tomorrow.