I hit a wall last Sunday in the early afternoon, when I’d led a class, a church service, 2 meetings and still had to go home, prepare some notes and head up the road to a town north of Montgomery, where I’d accepted an invitation to be Lenten speaker that evening. I thought, “that’s it, I’m taking tomorrow off because I am exhausted.

I did household work that following morning, planted some lilies of the valley, washed and ironed and folded and put away, moved winter clothes upstairs and summer clothes downstairs. Monday was also when I got my girl her Easter Basket and was the day I took my dad to get his monthly pedicure. He got out of the car a little more slowly, walked a little more carefully, seemed a little more stooped over than usual. I chuckled a bit, watching him walk into the nail salon, thinking he’d been home a week and still wasn’t fully recovered.

A week earlier, Sherod, my husband, got up at 3:20 in the morning, threw on some clothes, and went over to gather up my dad and his roll-on bag. I imagine they rode into Montgomery in silence, and Sherod pulled up his truck right to the door of the Greyhound station in one of the very seediest parts of town. He watched and made sure my dad got inside safe and sound before heading back home.

At 4:45 a.m., my dad was on a bus, settled in for a 10-hour ride to Gainesville, FL where he would meet the special lady friend he left behind in Panama when he moved to Lowndesboro in 2015. They still email and Skype regularly.

When Dad got to Gainesville, he arranged for an Uber ride that dropped him off at the Airbnb he’d rented for the long weekend he and F were going to spend together. When he told me his plan, I teased him a bit, told him about all the news about Airbnb hosts secretly videotaping guests and posting videos on social media. I ended with the admonishment that I didn’t want to see a video of the weekend on Facebook and my dad blushed the deep red of a freshly picked, ripe tomato.

I picked him up at the Greyhound Station at the backend of his trip; he looked very happy and very tired. We haven’t talked a lot about the weekend; it feels important to respect his privacy and he hasn’t been very forthcoming. He’s still happy and has still been catching up with himself, now two weeks later. But that makes sense. After all, this is my 92-year-old dad. He astounds me. More than 30 years younger than he, I would feel hip and cool to be able to tell the above story about my own self. And he navigated the technology and distances with no help from my husband or me, except for the rides to and from the bus station.

His friend needed to come up for some medical tests so this happened on her timetable. However, I want to believe that with so much life bursting out all around us, with spring in full bloom, my dad was inspired and strengthened to go be true to love. I know for my own self, this is the time of the year I get to thinking of trips I might take and places I might see. But even more–it is he who inspires me and reminds me that even when we grow old, life has a way of being full and rich and overflowing with unexpected opportunities that we can say yes to or not. I hope I will still find the way to say yes if I live to be 92….

We have had very little contact with María since January. Sherod was down and actually had a couple of pretty good days with her at the beginning of March, was there on her “Gotcha Day” on March 4^th. I will go see her for her birthday in the middle of May. In the meantime, there have only been a handful of calls, a couple frantic, with her wanting us to reassure her that we are still alive. There has been one single one that felt like we were actually connected like we used to be, so much history carrying us through all kinds of conversations and laughter in spite of so much separation. I ask myself: if I sing to her in Spanish will she remember? Is there a right word, a right tone, a right response that makes it better? How about an Easter Baske? I can buy her an Easter Basket—put all the things in there that remind me, and maybe remind her, of the way it used to be.

Today I bought what I needed to put together the basket.  

I had taken today off after hitting a wall yesterday at about 1:30 PM: I finished the third meeting of the day and knew I had sm notes I needed to make for myself before heading to Wetumpka, a town north of Montgomery, to be the last speaker for the Lenten Program of the Episcopal church up there.  I realized I had to stop. Just stop. So this morning, I did. I told my mind to quit jumping around so much, I made a list of the simple household tasks I could get done.

I was already moving quickly by 8 this morning and it was glorious. I planted some lilies of the valley. I washed sheets and made up beds. I ironed and went out to pick one of the last cabbages of our winter planting and then came in to cook.

After lunch, my dad and I headed into Montgomery. He needed a pedicure, and his sweet old dog that continues to hang on, Pía, need a refill for the pain meds for her arthritis.  I had time to kill, and that’s when it hit me actually; my gosh, I’ve been working on my Palm Sunday sermon and it’s not quite 2 weeks until Easter, and I have to get something in the mail to María. With World Market close to where my dad gets his pedicures, I dropped him off and headed on a scout and scavenge journey for my girl.

The basket is ready. Tomorrow, Sherod will see to it that it is properly packaged and will coordinate with María’s behavioral specialist so he can ship it and make sure our girl gets it her goodies in time for Easter. I can’t stop and wonder if It will have any meaning for her. I know better than to hope that it will draw her closer, out of the place she has withdrawn to that keeps her so far away from us now.

I have to be truthful, mainly with myself. I could reach back to another time, remembering how much Easter baskets delighted my brothers and me when we were little.  I could giggle when I found a silly little lamb, there was a tiny snow globe with a little chick inside; I stood and shook it for as long as I dared and then added it to my cart. For those 20 or so minutes I spent shopping, and then the other 10 I spent here at home putting it together, all that mattered was I could do this one small thing for my girl.  

And then, for an instant, the black hole opened up and for the first time ever, I wondered what it would have been like to have a 23 year old daughter who could engage with me or roll her eyes and tell me she was busy, if I tried to talk about my Holy Week sermons.  I fled as fast as I could from that thought.  Magical thinking is not the way forward.But neither is that horrible, insidious game of ‘what if.’ What there is that can’t break, can’t be erased or forgotten or denied, what there is is so much love and if the only way I can love her today is by putting this silly gift together, I am thankful for what I have.

All kinds of new beginnings and steps forward. On March 1st, I became the Rector at Holy Comforter. The property we had used as a rectory has sold, some new potential partnerships are emerging that would add life and light to the amazing space we have. Even our Holy Week bulletins are close to being put to bed, several weeks ahead of schedule, so Holy Week should be a time of holiness and not exhaustion.

As a parish we’re still vulnerable. And maybe that is what makes this small community a lot bolder about the things we are willing to consider for ourselves. I feel almost embarrassed to admit that it is only in the past week that I realized our chapel, perhaps my favorite space of all, is called “The Chapel of the Resurrection”. The symbolism was right there, in the stained glass window above the reredos, if one had eyes to see. I don’t know what resurrection looks like for Holy Comforter or in my life, but that is the ground of my faith.

There is great joy for me when I go in and sit quietly in the chapel, not because I know what the future holds for my daughter, for my parish, or for me, even though–or perhaps precisely because–there are no certainties for the path ahead. Instead, the joy arrives because there is the kindest of breezes dancing today. The sunshine is drying sheets to crackling, fragrant, radiance. And I get to hear these tiny, persistent little pio, pio, pio’s as I sit and write.

And five new little chicken girls have come to join the clan, all of them Eggers: Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rock and Rhode Island Reds

So yes, now, spring.

I had the privilege several years ago to go to a writer’s workshop where I met Kate Bowler. She is well-known for her work on the Gospel of Prosperity and for what she has written since being diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer at 34. With immunotherapy that has worked remarkably well for her, it would be more accurate, at least for now, to describe her condition as chronic, rather than terminal, but there is no way to know how long that will be the case.  Kate is as kind, generous. and insightful as anyone I know.  There’s a phrase of Kate’s that has become part of the fabric of hope and consolation in my life. With no pat answers for the why of illness and suffering, she says, “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”

Eighteen years ago this week, I was putting a car seat in the back of the Volvo I had bought a few months earlier. I had chosen the safest car I knew of because I would soon be carrying a precious little girl in the back seat through the awful traffic of Southeast Florida.  I had washed about a dozen skivvies and t-shirts for a 24-36 month old toddler, and little socks, too, and jammies and overalls. Friends at work and friends at Sherod’s church had thrown a pair of lovely showers for us so Luz María’s room was filled to overflowing with gifts, from the practical to the utter frivolous and fun. Mary, the woman who first got to know Maria and helped bring us into her life and she into ours, had made a beautiful bed skirt for the small brass bed I’d slept in as a child. I’d sewn matching curtains and together with Sherod, had made a contrasting, upholstered window cornice. Neither my heart nor her room in our home in Fort Lauderdale could contain all the hope, joy and expectation with which we waited to bring our girl to her new forever family.

Last week, we got word that Mary, the friend who found our girl and brought her into our life, has been moved into hospice after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer and all kinds of complications.  We lost touch years ago when she and her family moved, and then Sherod and I went off in our own new adventures, but I have always harbored the hope we’d reconnect and she’d get to see Maria as a young adult.  

 There’s the regret that I did not make more of an effort to stay in touch with a woman who changed the trajectory of my life. Even more, these days, there is growing concern for my María.  For two months, she has been slipping away from us in a new and unexpected way. First, we began to hear her tell  somewhat bizarre stories, like that she’d gotten married and was pregnant.  Then, she stopped talking to us almost completely. She had been calling, sometimes several times a day, and it just stopped. We call her daily as well and now, she refuses to come to the phone. The one time I’ve spoken to her recently, her affect was way off, her voice was shrill, the content of the conversation deeply disturbing: “Mama!!!! You are alive! I brought you back from the dead”.  No gentle challenge from me could convince her otherwise.

Yesterday, we had a phone consult with her support team.  Like us, they thought at first this was a new attention-seeking strategy. After all, María has been endlessly creative in her quest to get all the attention she could. But in the past, when ‘psychiatric symptoms’ manifested themselves, we had an effective plan that would quickly help her stop trying to get attention that way. This time it has not worked. It is more accurate to describe her now as quite frequently delusional, and possibly, hallucinating. The affect is too different.  The withdrawal is too real.  Later today, the next consult is with her psychiatrist.

There are more questions and fears than I can put words around. There is also all the accumulated joy of small and simple, and sometimes breathtakingly grand moments, with my daughter over the past 18 years. On March 3^rd, when I am at Cursillo and Sherod is with María to celebrate her “Gotcha Day,” I know I will once again be overwhelmed by the knowledge she is the best thing that ever happened to us.  Kate has said it best: “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”

The weather has been crazy around here: two weeks ago, a tornado that flattened a lot in a town close by. Then, days that started in the low twenties and today, a high of 78 and tomorrow it goes up to 81.  I am not the least bit fooled, at least not this season.  The climate is changing and within my life time, it is possible our world will be so turned upside down that everything we knew about the seasons will be unrecognizable but we are not there yet. That’s why, on February 6^th, 2019, I am not fooled; we are yet in that time when winter is still winter.

For now, spring is the smell of wild garlic, sharp and pungent. It announces itself as I walk out the front yard, to put things in our trash bin close to the road. It’s there when I stand out on the deck in the back of our house, waiting for Tux to do her business, alert because when I got up this morning, the coyotes were howling their laments too close by for comfort.  Some evenings, I lean down and clip a handful of delicate stalks poking out through the browned grass of winter and go in to add them, chopped, to my baked potato, a simple meal turned into a feast of brightness.

At first, spring does not smell sweet and subtle; spring smells loamy and penetrating and persistent.  Maybe that’s because before it can be sweet or gentle or kind, it has to be strong and persistent.  I didn’t know that spring takes so much effort. Pushing through the dark earth towards the light can only happen bit by bit, with pauses because the cold is so cold and more has to be asked of the earth for a seed to keep growing. What I most remember about my first spring here is the day when I looked around and all manner of flowers were blooming and the grass had stopped being lifelessly brown, and the trees had the green glow of a million tiny new leaves that had finally broken free, into the sunshine. 

This time around, I want to urge the buds and the shoots not to quit, to resist the urge to curl up in a ball and keep the dreary cold at bay.  I appreciate the guidance wild garlic gives me, the places that smell invites to go look for that may need my quiet non-cheerleader cheers. I follow my nose and then keep going a bit more, bump into our cherry tree that was stripped bare months ago. It might not look like much, almost like just another part of winter, but look again. The bumps and swells along stems: they are decidedly not about winter. 

I may think I can urge the growth to happen, the winter to part in two so more can come rushing in, but that’s nothing but foolishness on my part. I have to wait. Before it can be anything else, spring is a promise.

Today, life began to slow down; enough that I was able to go out and do some photography and then sit down to write this post.

It has been a month since I’ve been here, a month so densely packed that there weren’t enough hours in the day for all that needed to be done. Our first Christmas without Maria was even harder than I had anticipated it would be and in the end, was filled to overflowing with the beauty, grace and wonder of sharing a first Christmas with the people of Holy Comforter. This parish I now serve is vulnerable in ways that maybe most, if not all, Episcopal churches are vulnerable. I experienced the truth about us, that the vulnerability in no way diminishes the courage and goodness with which we spend our days. Each Sunday in Advent seemed to add a new layer of meaning to our preparations for Christmas.

Christmas Eve showed me what a liturgically bold and curious community I am a part of. Not only did people notice that I had chosen an alternative Eucharistic prayer for our service, held in the early evening, but were so lovely about telling me how much it had meant to them. It’s a prayer that is more inclusive, that uses powerful images of Mary and her role in the story of redemption, and does so in a way that manages to be both solemn and joyous at the same time. The simple service on Christmas morning, when sunshine streaming through our chapel windows made the nativity set my mom gave me shortly before she died luminous, had all the gentleness and silence one might have hoped for as Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus stirred at the beginning of a new day.

Then, on Epiphany Sunday we were our most playful selves at Holy Comforter, with three kings in the procession, one of them swinging the thurible most majestically, I must say. At the end of the service, the entire congregation followed the choir and altar party out of church, playing orff instruments, dancing (a little modestly) and singing Siyahamba–“We are marching in the light of God.”

I received a beautiful Epiphany practice from the previous rector at Church of the Ascension and I am thankful for having been able to bring this gift with me to Holy Comforter. Right outside the red doors of the church we stopped long enough for me to clamber up a ladder to follow the old, old tradition of blessing the lintel: 20+C+M+B+19.

The letters each remind us of one of the wise men (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar). They are also an abbreviation for Christus mansionem benedicat; Christ bless this house. We marched some more and then stopped, this time at the doorway to our offices. And then, we were on the move again, this time going almost all the way around our building to bless the door of the food pantry where 300 neighbors and their families each month receive food that keeps hunger at bay. I heard one parishioner comment that he had not been back in that part of our church for 20 years. Sometimes, when you follow the Epiphany star, you end up in places you never thought you would come by again.

We bless our lintels using chalk and over the course of the year, the elements will slowly, but surely, wash away the signs of the blessing. I love that all we ask for is a fleeting blessing. After all, what we have is a next step we can take, and sometimes that step is very small. Each step we take is particular, a response to what we only see dimly now. Who knows what we might need and ask for when, once again in 2020, we stop as a new year begins, to ask for yet another blessing. Over time, there is blessing asked upon blessing, so many layers of hopes and dreams and fears of ordinary people trying to be faithful. The blessings we ask for bring us very close to the promise of the Prologue to John: that from the fullness of God’s love we receive grace upon grace.

All kinds of other things have happened–on Wednesday of last week, out in the chill of morning, I found myself digging a small grave that would hold the ashes of member of the parish who we were burying that afternoon. I was struck all over again by all that is both beautiful and bizarre about being a priest in a small parish.

Today, a leader of our food pantry and I began to make plans for how to respond to our neighbors when the SNAP payments stop at the end of this month and are unavailable to food vulnerable people during the government shut-down. We’ve had our vestry retreat and next week we’ll have our annual meeting. Intense days of work and prayer, of surrender and response. Days when sometimes all I could do was look for the light, days when the light washed me in warmth and consolation, and days when the light lightened our darkness enough to keep marching.

It was another stunning Florida ‘winter’ day with the gentle breeze, the dry air, the temperatures in the very low 80’s. María and I walked and shot hoops (we’ve both gotten better at it, go figure?!) a lot. This afternoon, we sat on a porch swing outside A House, where María lives. She wanted me to braid her hair, and then to use lotion to give her a hand massage. Incarnation. It is all about incarnation and how it must have been like for Mary to marvel at the soft skin of her new born child, tending to him as best she could given her circumstances..

My iPad allowed us to use YouTube to listen to the Christmas music that we’ve known from ‘before the beginning, before there was time’–I imagine some of the folks who walked by behind us had to cover their ears because we couldn’t help but sing along. A bit loudly, I’m afraid.

I ran up to Mr. D’s Pizza in the late afternoon–that’s the pizza place that delivered pies to our home when we lived in Fort Lauderdale. Four years later, the man who delivered our pizzas is still there–I ran into him as I was coming in to pick up enough pizza for the staff and residents in A House. Just a little bit later, I sat at one of the dining room tables with my girl, 2 young women in their late teams who are profoundly autistic, and with S, who wears a protective helmet all the time, is about 50 years old I’d guess and has no teeth. She smiles with the innocence of an infant and she melts my heart. Usually she just flat out hollers. Tonight though, she ate her pizza with gusto and then wanted to know if I am married and kiss my husband. I couldn’t understand her but there were plenty of people around her who know her well enough to provide translation services. She beamed when I told her that yes I am married, and yes I kiss my husband.

I could name each of the women who make a home with Maria in A house, and tell little stories about each of them. Spending time at BARC has allowed me to get to know each woman-child, at least a little. I took great delight watching them all enjoy the pizza and then, the cookies I’d bought for them. But too soon, the meal was over and María was in charge of loading the dishwasher. We’d agreed this morning that that’s when I would leave and so I did. Dinner was as lovely as any Christmas meal, and Lord knows, I needed a little Christmas, right this very evening.

Now, it’s time to get cracking on what comes next–3 sermons to write and plenty else. So that’s what I will do but isn’t my María’s picture, shoved into my hand just as I was leaving, amazing? How can you not have the merriest “Chrissmiss” ever with such a gift.

In 2012, the year we finally had to place Maria in her current residential program, she was not able to come spend Christmas with us at home. Instead, on Christmas Day, we took her presents and went to spend the day with her at BARC.  She was into basketball in those days and she and I had a running argument: as we shot hoops we bickered endlessly about who was Little Bow-Wow, and who was LeBron. LeBron was playing with the Miami Heat and we were both whooshed by him, each of us wanting to claim his name for herself.  It was not the day we would have hoped for and it turned out to be just fine. The weather was the most perfect SoFla weather imaginable on Christmas Day: sunny, mild, a cool, gentle breeze blowing.  It was so good to be able to reach out and hug that kid who still had (and has) the capacity to take my breath away in the fullness of her beautiful and miraculous self.

This year, with the distance that separates us and our girl’s continued struggles, we will not get to be together on Christmas Day. I head to Lauderdale for a very quick visit later this week. Her presents are wrapped and ready to go with me. I’ll deliver them to the social worker at BARC who will see to it that Maria gets them on Christmas morning. One of the gifts I will carry is a new electronic picture frame. Sherod has loaded over 150 pictures in chronological order—the story of her life since the day we got custody of her in México in 2001.  On Wednesday, the day I get to spend with her, we will have some time to look at the pictures together and tell stories. Even if we don’t, Sherod and I have had the frame up for the past 2 weeks and I have stopped often to look at all those snapshots of her life—and ours.  

The pictures remind me that Sherod and I have tried awfully hard, been so determined to do everything we could to give María the best life possible. At one level that is no consolation—life continues to be grim for our girl, with no end in sight. At another, though, I can see moment after precious moment, when, for however briefly, María has known herself loved and I have gotten to experience grace beyond counting mothering her.  Sadness? Yes. Regrets? How could I regret love?

I sit writing this on Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of Rejoicing, as Advent wobble and tilts towards Christmas. Tonight, my dad, Sherod, and I had dinner as the flames on a pink and two purple candles of the advent wreath on our dining room table burned steadily.  We share more meals with Dad these days and last night, we had also eaten together, though at the kitchen table.  There, I had candle light, but also the fun, silly light of a small string of star shaped lights I picked up at Michael’s earlier this month. I’d wrapped it around a vase and filled the vase with greenery.

I’m back at that table now and if I look outside, or into our living room, I see lights as well—the plain white lights on the Christmas tree inside, Sherod’s tomato cage forest outside. Each year, he wraps quantities of colored lights around tomato cages and sets them up out by the edge of the front garden. Some of them hang low from a tree and if there is a breeze, they sway gently against the dark darkness of a country night, all of them together a kind and persistent insistence of joy even in the midst of sadness. Though we don’t use María’s first name, Luz much, each small light, or luz in Spanish, that shines in my home this year is a reminder not just of the “Light that is come into the world,” but of my daughter as well.

  I listened to a podcast yesterday that included a story about a person who worked as a counselor with people trying to recover from heroin addiction. The counselor explained that in her experience, as heroin addicts finished getting through the worst of their withdrawal symptoms, they seemed to find great comfort in empty spaces. She wondered if those empty spaces represented the hard truth that addiction brings with it enormous, sometimes catastrophic loss. Could it be, she said, that standing in a room with nothing in it might be a way of acknowledging the grievousness of such loss?  I don’t know. But yesterday, it gave me a way to understand why I have so strongly resisted pulling out all our Christmas decorations. The Christmas tree just has lights on it, along with  3 ornaments I was given this year. The advent wreath and a Christmas-y table cloth and placemats are about as much as I can bring myself to have out in acknowledgment of the season. My girl is not here and everything else feels like clutter.

And here’s the thing–the miracle, actually…the emptinesses of this Advent have been startlingly rich.  I’ve had time to spend with friends. Time I didn’t spend in the busy-ness demanded by our culture has been time I’ve gotten to do a bit of extra work with my new parish, work that has delighted and amused and been wonderfully meaningful.

And today, after church, I led a vestry meeting that ended with some social time to welcome incoming vestry members and bid farewell to the ones who are rotating off. As we were sitting around the conference table shooting the breeze,  I heard someone come up to the door behind me so I turned around to look. One of the women I worked with at my previous church had come to bring me a gift. It’s a gift she and some of my parishioners made for me and it’s hard to describe what it is except to say it is part of one of my most favorite presentations from the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.  I could not have been more surprised, nor could I have been more joyfully thankful than I was at that moment—for the gift itself, for generosity of time on the part of the people who helped her make it, and above all, for my friend’s beautiful heart in bringing such a gift, that in its own way is also all about the light.

It is true that empty spaces can offer us the consolation of being real about all that has been lost. And. And it is equally true and life-giving to remember that the emptiness can be filled in the most unexpected ways and most surprising moments. So yes. It is Gaudete Sunday. 

Holy Comforter will offer a series of intergenerational programs on the Sundays of Advent.  On the first Sunday, participants will have the option of walking through a labyrinth in our ever-so-beautiful chapel. If they prefer, they can help write a prayer for each of the Advent Wreath candles. Both are quiet, gentle ways of entering into this season where darkness melts into light.  For the second Sunday, we we will work on a collaborative art project that explores words used to describe Mary. Just the colors we will use for the project are vibrant and luminescent.  I smile every time I look at them.  The third Sunday is tree-trimming time, and for those who prefer something more quiet, the materials to make Christmas greeting cards for the peoplea we serve through the food pantry and the Communities of Transformation program.  And then, on the fourth Sunday….There will be good hot cocoa with peppermint sticks, marshmallows, and whipped cream, and our organist/choir director will graciously gather us around the piano in our parish hall so we can laugh and sing things like ‘the weather outside is frightful.’ 

These first two Sundays, I will also wrap up the “A Time for Listening” program which has been a marvelous way to start getting to know the people Holy Comforter, the memories, the hopes, and the dreams that are harbored in our parish.

Our church, like so many others, faces all the challenges of our denomination: an aging congregation, the loss of some of our financial base, a neighborhood that keeps changing in ways that feel bewildering sometimes.  Precisely for that reason, I am convinced we have to take the time to prepare to receive the Word made Flesh with our whole self–muscle and bone and voice and the steps we take carefully on a labyrinth journey and the feel of the hot cocoa sliding down our throats, and with eyes able to feast on rich, gorgeous color.  I have spent the day preparing to prepare with my new faith community–my body tells me so with some soreness.  It also tells me, with the little skip my heart takes, that we are about enter to into enter Advent, my most favorite season of all…