Discernment derives from the old Latin word cernere, to sift. I take great comfort in the insight that in some regards, discernment is about making gain through loss. Several years ago at All Saints, a small group of parents and children joined me in a reflection on discernment. I had put a few very pretty pieces of colored glass and lots of flour in a sieve. We took turns shaking the sieve as it made its way around the circle until all that was left were the four or five richly colored pieces. The exercise took several minutes and the reflection afterwards was a rewarding one: you have to shake forcefully but not so hard you make a mess. There really was no way to know what you would end up with until you had finished the sifting. We talked about the fact that the flour, now that it had been sifted, could be used to bake a cake; no one would have appreciated biting on a piece of colored glass if the glass had been left in with the flour. Someone asked which was more valuable, the flour or the pretty glass pieces. The contrast between those few beautiful pieces of shiny glass and the mounds of flour left on the plate was stunning.

That the word crisis also derives from cernere is new to me and oddly reassuring as well. I could accurately describe my life as being in crisis right now. Not all crises are highly dramatic nor do they unfold quickly. Certainly mine isn’t either of those. This midlife crisis—and I have decide that is what I’m in the midst of—has several components. One has to do with my girl.

All is not great with María. It is better than before, and her struggles are taking place in a far safer, healthier environment. But the struggle to maintain self control, to achieve her highest possible level of independence and function is brutally hard for María; progress is millimetric. Her ability to succeed at daily living still depends on an extraordinarily structured environment. María has not been able to internalize the kinds of behavior patterns that can keep her and those around her safe—at least not yet.

Many, many years ago, the psychiatrist who helped us get María on the medications that gave us a fighting chance as a family, suggested we place María in the type of residential program she now lives in. I was furious at his suggestion. I masked my fury in reasonableness and asked how that could help our child when it was precisely the fact that her first 5 years were spent in God-awful institutions that had so damaged her. Dr. Hughes gently and calmly explained that from his perspective this was about triage. The damage to María was real and so extensive that Maria threatened to shatter the whole edifice of our marriage, professional commitments and individual dreams. I am glad we were able to keep chaos at bay long enough to remain as a fairly intact family for several more years but in the end, he was absolutely right.

Now, as Sherod and I begin planning for the next step in our lives, I have to let go even more. When we’ve talked about things like timing, our starting point has been María. We had harbored the hope that if María got a few more years at BARC with all its structure and excellent care, she might be capable of moving into a less structured living situation—a group home, for example. If she could function in that environment, then we could make plans that would include bringing her with us as we moved away from South Florida.

A few weeks ago, at a conference with the behavior specialist who understands us best, she told us categorically that we could not make decisions about our future counting on any improvements of that magnitude from María. We need to plan for María to spend her life at BARC and we need to make the decisions that are best for Sherod and me without including the girl in our plan. This is what triage looks like for our family.

In a situation where triage is necessary, the option of suspended animation does not exist. The lie Sherod and I were telling ourselves was that we could postpone getting on with our own lives so María could catch up. It doesn’t work like that. Sorting out—truth and illusion, self and other, past and future; the sieving shakes me to the core.

In a faithful, intentional process of discernment, some of what slips through and out of your life is as insubstantial and tasteless as flour or cornstarch. And sometimes, it is beautiful, beloved, and of great value. You are heart broken to realize it no longer has the same place in your life. Sherod and I are being called to make decisions about our lives that more than likely will not allow us the privilege and joy of jumping in the car to see María for half an hour in the middle of a busy day. What seemed unimaginable before, that I would need to choose between the family quotidian-ness we’ve held on to, even with her living at BARC, and finding a place and life that is true to the rest of me is life and liberation I don’t much want to accept.

And yet, I must. I continue to make the arrangements to go on a 30-day silent retreat. The only time I took anywhere near that much time away from work was when I went on adoption leave to bring María home from México and get her settled with us. I took 3 weeks off then. But I am profoundly mindful that for this process of discernment to be about choosing life and not inadvertently allowing my soul to be crushed, it must include time set aside to walk and wrestle with the One who created and redeemed me, the only one who will be able to sustain me as I walk through what lies ahead.

God of the present moment.
God who in Jesus stills the storm
and soothes the frantic heart;
bring hope and courage to me
as I wait in uncertainty.
Bring hope that you will make me the equal
of whatever lies ahead.
Bring me courage to endure what cannot be avoided,
for your will is health and wholeness;
You are God, and we need you.

Some weeks, a sermon comes together in a way that feels effortless, like it was simply waiting to write itself out of me.  Other weeks, it is harder than pulling teeth.  And then, there are times, and this was one of them, when preparing a sermon becomes an invitation to follow a path with absolutely no idea where I am going.  I finished reading the Gospel assigned for today early in the week.  The question that I was left with was, “what banquet would I want to be invited to as the honored guest?

I’ll freely admit that I am a shameless fan of Michelle Obama’s sense of style—I imagined a state dinner at the White House.  But I also imagined the banquet given annually in the Stockholm City Hall in honor of Nobel Prize winners—pretty cool to sit at the right hand of the King of Sweden after winning the coveted Nobel Prize, huh?  I would want to win the prize for literature and that made my mind wander away to the realization that I would love to be invited to the home of one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver or, if he were still alive, Pablo Neruda. To sit next to either one of them—what a mind-blowing honor.  And I would also love to be invited to Rowan Williams’ house.  Rowan Williams is the recently retired archbishop of Canterbury.  He made a mess of it in the Anglican Communion in many ways and he also combines the most amazing intellect with a profound spirituality.  To sit next to him, drinking a cup of tea and talking?  Breath-taking to consider

But because the mind—or at least mine can be so fickle and shallow, I veered back from the sublime to something quite trite.  Some people I know, more than acquaintances but less than friends, have a pretty amazing yacht they keep in the Caribbean except when their crew takes it to Cape Cod.  Not half shabby to sit at that table as an honored guest—for a whole lot of meals, as a matter of fact!

And then, somehow, as if my mind had simply gone shallow to try to go deep again, I realized I’d taken another unexpected shift.  The longer I reflected on whose table I’d like to sit at, the clearer it became that my desire is not to rub elbows with the rich and famous and especially not to get to sit at the place of honor in a party that is solely intended for those who want to see and be seen. My heart’s yearnings, it turns out, are different.  My younger brother and I have had a very strained relationship almost all our adult lives.  I would give anything to get to have a meal with him, his wife and daughter in their home, a meal with us reconciled to each other and able to stop walking on pins and needles, able to let go of carefully parsing our words and measuring each other’s reactions, in a state of red alert, ready to get defensive at the drop of a hat.

I could not think of that meal without imagining one that included my mom.  Or my dear friend Michael who died way too soon and before I could say good bye. There’s a fairly long list of people now who are no longer with us who would make the feast complete for me.  The gospel promises a banquet like that but if that promise is true, this is not a feast I will be invited to in the kind of time I know and live in.

Today’s Gospel tells us about the kinds of banquets we get glimpses of in the gossip rags and society pages of the newspaper.  Almost all the meals Jesus attended were distinctly different—they happened on the beach, or on the go, or around a camp fire.  I am convinced they are the meals that we are all invited to, still.

About 6 years ago, two of Sherod’s and my dearest friends, Mike and Mary, came to visit from Indiana.  El Centro was brand new.  We were using one bay in that little strip mall next to the Wings place on Davie—we were proud of our little chapel because there was such beauty in its ugliness.  We had hung a lovely cross from the ceiling with fishing line. For services on Saturday evening, we had the altar that’s here against the back wall now, close to the statue of Guadalupe.  We would sit in the white folding chairs that now grace the Parish Hall.  On Monday nights, we would reconfigure the chairs around a folding table and we’d have dinner together.  That particular Monday, I prepared my Lentejitas—a pot of lentils prepared in the simple, country style of Colombia—you serve it with rice and fried plantain.  Sherod, Mike and Mary joined us for that dinner.  Diana, Jaime and Angel were there.  So were about 5-6 other young people who helped start el Centro.

One of the joys of a storefront ministry on a busy street is you fling your doors wide to everyone.  There were a handful of men who basically lived on the streets close to us, all of them struggling with addictions—to drugs, to alcohol.  They were dirty and smelly and they made us all uneasy, but we could all see that coming in to join us for the liturgy or for dinner meant something really good for them. We simply could not close the door on them.  I am pretty sure that that night, Jorge, who had lost an eye, came staggering in and joined the party.  We laughed and talked and kept each other company late into the evening,  a small community of people struggling to get through to the next day who had stopped to eat a meal, literally at the foot of the cross.

I had a similar experience here at St Ambrose one Friday when I showed up to work on my day off.  The “Friday Lunch Bunch” was here, gathered at one of the round tables at the parish hall.  I think that is one of the hallmarks of the heavenly banquet—if there’s a table, it will be round, with no head or foot, just folks, gathered in a circle where the Holy Spirit can move easily.  That Friday, J was being her tart and sassy self.  ML had something she needed to fuss at me about—she does that you know; I need her to keep on the straight and narrow.  J and the brothers were there too and one of them dug around in his bag from Wendy’s and insisted I share a slightly mashed up chicken sandwich with him. We laughed, because you always laugh with the Lunch Bunch.  They had a really arcane question about their current Bible study that sent me scrambling to dig out old seminary text books.  M shared how G, her beloved husband had taken another bad turn under the dreaded shadow of advancing dementia.

I had a sense of belonging and belonging as myself without pretensions.  There was a place for us all at that table and  no one had to demonstrate how smart, rich, capable or above average they were.  I swear, as I blinked, or maybe it was out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young man sitting with us.

As I know life today, I will not get to partake in the heavenly banquet.  But I get foretastes—glimpses.  To be a community of faith means that we get to have lots of parties like these—not just around the altar every Sunday, but when we gather in fellowship.  In these circles of laughter, hope, and companionship, the Spirit of love moves among us, blesses us, builds us up, stretches and pushes and opens us, who are the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, to do the work we have been entrusted with for the sake of the reign of God.

I dreamt in Swedish last night. The only thing I can really remember is standing close to where I took the ferry to go out to Linanäs, talking to some people about how to get to a place called Hötorget. I got up with Sweden on my mind.

I have a long weekend of work–things to get done for at least half of tomorrow, my usual day off, a meeting scheduled at the last minute for Saturday morning. Then, the hardest–I have been asked to do a funeral in Spanish on Sunday afternoon, at a funeral home, for a young man I don’t know who was killed in a hit and run. I gather the family is a mixture of lapsed Evangelical and Roman Catholic folks who have no community or pastor to tend to them in this awful time. I escaped from work early because of all that.

With a quiet afternoon by myself, I cooked in Swedish too–took out my scale that measures in grams and mL measurement cups to make a batch of Kardemummbullar. I am giving them all away except one Sherod and I will share–we don’t need to be eating more than a tiny bit of this kind of food. But oh, the smell in my kitchen.

And somehow, that got me thinking about one of the things I liked the best about the cottage we stayed in earlier this month. For a long time when I was younger, I fantasized about a bathroom with a jacuzzi, one of those ‘rainforest’ showers, a skylight, and a vanity with his and hers sinks. You couldn’t pay me enough to have anything like that now. In fact, I have a new ideal:

There’s a very good washing machine right next to the ‘loo. The shower has doors that swing in and out. They close really tightly when you go in to have a shower so the bathroom doesn’t get all soaked but tuck out of the way the rest of the time. There’s a drain in the middle of the floor which makes it súper easy to clean the whole floor really well. When you aren’t using the shower, it is very easy to load and unload the washing machine. And all the plumbing is out against the wall–maybe not really pretty, but sure beats frozen pipes in the brutal winters of Sweden.

If you want some style, it is not all totally utilitarian–an IKEA sink isn’t so bad to look at. The cieling is lovelyy to look at when you are rinsing the shampoo out of your hair. And of course, those amazingly wonderful towel warmers. I can’t quite capture how utterly luxurious it feels to reach for a towel that’s toasty warm on a chilly morning.

These pictures are going into the ‘wish book’ for life after the life we are beginning to wind down in South Florida. If you come visit in that next place, I hope you don’t want too much luxury. Less is more…

At the end of week before last, I didn’t so much fall off the face of the earth as fall back into my life. Only now does it feel like I am finally coming up at least for a gulp of air.  I came back to the US sick–another bout of bronchitis that I’ve had a hard time shaking.  I have also been far more affected by jet lag than I ever remember.  At about 5:30 or 6 each evening, until this week, I simply could not stay awake.  But on the other end, getting up early has been bitterly hard as well.  Weird!

There was much about my trip that was absolutely marvelous.  There was also far more ambiguity and ambivalence both in the going and in the returning. I think that was clear in my postings while I was in Sweden.  Now that I am back, along with being swamped in work and trying to get better, I am faced with a whole lot of questions that will take time to answer. Sherod’s announcement of his retirement has so many implications.  The space for making decisions is smaller.  The margin of error is tighter–after all, the last major move we made was in 1996, when I was 36 years old.  Making a wrong career move at 36, I could recover just fine, thank you very much.  Now 53, and especially in this economy and with the current state of the church?  Not so much.

Perhaps what is most important and different now, is my own outlook, my own sense of myself.  My mother dying, Sherod and I accepting that it was time to place Maria in BARC, her long-term residential program, represented losses I had no real control over.  Death comes.  Our children grow, their needs change, we start letting go of them the minute they announce themselves in our lives.  But those losses changed me, they cut me loose, they  helped to distill, to really start focusing and crystallizing what matters now, how I want to make the time I have left, count.  One of the hardest parts of all this process of discovery is that I am now at the point not so much of making my peace with what is lost because life happens, as trying to gather  the courage to let go of what no longer works for living the life I have received.

I realize this all sounds vague and murky.  I am still in the very earliest days of putting words around this new place I find myself in. For now, here’s one thing ‘ve figured out: I have to let go of wanting to have it both ways.  Specifically,  that gets played out in a desire to both be liked and still be true to myself.   Recognizing the danger of trying to have it both ways is some of the most basic “clergy well-being 101” kind of stuff imaginable. You start hearing it almost from day one in seminary.  We cannot be true to our vocation and the Gospel if all we do is try to please others.  It is also basic to any emotional health and maturity. But the ability of this internal pushme-pullyou to hide way out of sight is insidious and confounding and right now, I am quite horrified to uncover the extent to which that dynamic has been at play in all kinds of aspects of my life.

Re-calibrating the balance without over-reacting, sorting through what and what relationships matter for the long haul, being willing to take a whole new set of risks takes a lot of energy.  I have returned from my trip aware that I need to clarify my role in our regional ministry in ways that I wish weren’t necessary.  The spouseman and I are going to have to renegotiate the terms of our relationship now that he is headed to retirement and I have a good 12-15 years of work I have the energy and desire to do.  The list goes on.

To willingly let go.  To allow myself a form of free-fall that happens quite slowly and takes me to a place I cannot even begin to imagine right now, rather than hold on to the safety of what I know, that’s my work right now.

So, I never got to church while I was here. Long, rather cautionary tale of what happens to a state church in decline. Nonetheless, I was rather intrigued by a sign outside the parish office at the Ljusterö Kyrka.

When i saw that, I thought, “man, I’m going into Stockholm, the city of free love, all by myself the night before I catch my flight back to the USA. I might have to see if I can figure out what a Pastorsexpedition is.” Then, I found out this is the Swedish word for Parish Hall. And if that wasn’t disappointing enough, I’ve come down with a cold that’s edging into something worse that includes a temperature. A girl just gets no breaks around here.

Now said soto voce:

I WANNA BE HOME!

It isn’t just my dad who is blessed. There was one last cuddle with the niece, tight hugs and now a 2-hour boat ride to Stockholm town. Very grateful…

In Hebrew Scriptures, to live many, many years and have a multitude of descendants is to be truly blessed by God. For the past three weeks, my 86 year old dad has gotten to spend time with his three children and a biological granddaughter who carries his family name. Not many descendants, but enough. Today, my brother, his wife and daughter, my dad and I took a last ferry ride to Vaxholm on a day of crystal clear sunlight and breeze. Tomorrow, I ride the ferry alone into Stockholm and take my flight back to Fort Lauderdale early on Saturday morning. The rest of the crew will return to Stockholm by car on Saturday afternoon to spend a few more days there before my dad returns to Panamá and everyone else to the UK. Today, though, we were here. None of the fights, hurts and disappointments of the past, none of what lies ahead, mattered. We were gifted with an amazingly beautiful day.

My brothers and I went through a John Denver phase as teenagers. As I looked out over the water to the islands and sailboats and seagulls, I kept thinking of that Denver song, “Sunshine”. My dad was very sad for a time on the ferry, taking in the contours of sea and land and sunlight. A hard, hard goodbye, this one, maybe the hardest of all. I realized that though most of his ashes will swirl down the Caldera River to join my mom’s ashes when he dies, I will bring some back to put in the water here when that time comes. This is what he’s made of, this is where the dust shall return to dust. Regardless that he was sad today, regardless that death does await him and there is no denying that, my father has been blessed, deeply, widely, wonderfully blessed.

Glorious day, yesterday. The morning in Vaxholm was simply magical. I have so many more pictures than I would dare sic on anyone, but here are my favorites:

If I could compose a picture of the life I would like to live at this point in my life, this would be it.

And then, of course, I got to meet my niece.

I caught the 6:20 AM ferry to Vaxholm this morning. The light was good and I had wanted to go back to do some more photography. I almost start to think that like families, all beauty is alike around here. But not really. Today there has been a little hint of ice in the wind that’s blowing from the North. The subtle but relentless shift into Fall and Winter is undeniable. But it was easy in the light to ignore all that. I have noticed over and over again, the outdoor living spaces around here. Any space with sunshine becomes a space to claim as home, at least for a while, and I am moved by the little details that celebrate the sunshine.

Sometimes, it seems like the space ends up having to get shared with at least a little chaos. One neighbor has a small green house where she has put an easy chair, and a table and then filled it with flowers. Maybe this is a brave attempt to claim the sun as early as possible in the year, as long as possible come autumns, and from the moment the first rays reach out at dawn.

I sat at a little coffee shop in Vaxholm this morning, having a cappuccino and thinking about these spaces. I have never spent a winter in Sweden. The longest, darkest one I ever experienced was in Virginia–mild in comparison. However, it wasn’t just the darkness outside–I was clinically depressed, borderline suicidal that year, struggling with the disappointment of what had not happened by moving to the USA, needing to make a change but not knowing why or how. The relief I felt when spring arrived, when the decisions were made, for better and worse, is indescribable.

Perhaps when you have moved out of the darkness into spring and summer, when the light has found you and you have found the light, you build your house there. You want to have close to you all the beautiful things that you couldn’t see before. You don’t care how small the space. You eat and drink and laugh and live. And ignore that hint of ice blowing in the soft summer breezes for as long as possible.

That’s a saying in Spanish my dad quotes with some frequency. He has injured his knee, though we don’t really know how. All we know is he woke up in considerable pain day before yesterday and that knee is swollen and painful. Tomorrow more than likely we will have to go get it seen by a doctor. It is particularly worrisome because his other leg is the one really affected by his old back problems–it’s the one that when he gets tired, his foot drags. With both legs compromised, he is very unsteady on his feet.

We were going to meet his old class ‘compis’–his old schoolmates today, at a nice restaurant in Vaxholm. Earlier this week, we found out that one of them, Einar, had been hospitalized after a heart attack. Hans had to bow out because he is still recovering from heart and back surgeries and had had a setback this weekend. But Arne and his wife, Ulla Britta, and Barbro, agreed to come to our cottage for a ‘ficka’–a little afternoon snack. Arne and his wife drove 2 hours to catch a ferry and come on the island. Barbro took buses and then walked for about 1 kilometer. She arrived so early that she stopped along the way to pick a bag of blueberries for us.

In your mid to late eighties, even a year makes a difference. I saw that in all of them. I watched them linger over the coffee, knowing they needed to call it a day so my dad could put his leg up, so Barbro could catch her bus, so Arne and Ulla Britt could drive all the way back to Uppsala. But when you know you’ve come to an end, a real, a final end. When you know this is the last good bye, it is hard not to try to get one more story, one last laugh, one final moment of companionable silence that too quickly will slip into absence.

Since my dad hurt his knee 2 days ago, I have been having a hard time of it. There is little for me to do except tend to him. I go out and bike and walk each day but I would give anything to be able to share this beautiful place rather than explore on my own. Helping Dad carry his grief by myself has been lonely work. My older brother and my younger brother will spend their time here with their life companions and I watched how my older brother was able to draw strength from his partner during their visit. I imagine it will be the same with Nils and Laura. It is a relief that they and my niece arrive tomorrow afternoon, regardless of the “stuff” between my brother and me.

I took some pictures this afternoon. Even in the midst of the blues, I am struck by how beautiful these old folks are–and how dear. It is a privilege not to be taken lightly to be a part of this long good bye.

Arne

Barbro