One Day at a Time

Well, I thought I avoided it. My boys fell first. They missed a few days of school with an awful bug that included a sore throat, body aches, dizziness, ear pain, congestion. Steve fell next, and hardest. He's really been completely miserable for almost a week now. But somehow, as each of them fell, I was still functioning just fine - even still out running on the rail trail everyday - hey - I even achieved 2.5 miles for the first time this week! I really thought I'd avoided the whole thing by my clean and healthy living. (Aren't I so special) But today I was humbled. Sore throat. Muscle and joint aches, and now here I am on the couch, the final victim in our house of the virus.

Here I sit, pretty groggy, wondering if I'm going to get better enough to enjoy Palm Sunday and Holy Week (the craziest and most demanding week of an Episcopal priest's year), or if I'm going to get worse and become as sick as Steve is. I'm drinking lots of fluids and getting lots of rest. What else can I do? I've been in my jammies all day and wrapped in a cozy blanket.

But one thing I've noticed is that my Al Anon program has really helped me in this situation. I'm not letting myself get anxious about what might happen tomorrow or Sunday - or next week. I'm just going to deal with today. I'm going to take as good care of myself as I possibly can moment to moment and turn the rest over to God. Whatever happens will happen and I will deal with tomorrow when it arrives.

I suspect that being too sick to care about much of anything makes this a bit easier. But I can really tell that my program is helping. I would not have been this serene coming down with a bug two days before Palm Sunday in the past. This year I know in a really new and liberating way that Easter will arrive with or without my help.

Lenten Thoughts - Week 5

Being faithful means more that just 'believing right' or 'thinking right.' Thoughts and stated beliefs only go so far. Until your thoughts and beliefs are embodied in your life, your faith doesn't add up to much more than an idea. In other words, you have to do more than think the think. You've got to walk the walk of faith. In Lent, we're challenged to get walking. We're invited to intentionally add things to our daily routine that bring us closer to God and also to intentionally remove things from our regular routines so as to open up more room for God to enter our lives. Lent is about allowing God to take the wheel of our lives. It is about getting out of ourselves. It's about letting go and letting God. In our Eucharistic prayers during Lent we say, "God, You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast." These words have caught my attention this year, because I know there are many ways to cleanse the heart, and I am encouraged to think that my Lenten preparations are to be done with joy.

So this brings me to Steve - who this week stopped thinking about the rotting corner of our porch and decided to get to work. He's been thinking about it since we moved in last summer. He's looked at it from many angles. He's drawn up diagrams and made supply lists. He's considered the many options. But this week, suddenly, he said, "You know, pretty soon the bugs will be out. I'm just going to do it." And from morning until after dark he went at it. He set up the circular saw, he went to the hardware store, he pulled out all of his beloved power tools and dug in.

There's nothing my husband loves more than a handyman project. It's a way that he gets out of himself. It's one of his 'timeless' activities - those things that take you up so completely that you just lose track of time doing them. This happens to me whenever I write or sew. And I believe that when you do the things that you enjoy so much you lose track of time, you are closer to God. After all, God planted our desires and talents within us in the first place. So even though it's common to think of Lent as a time to deny yourself, maybe spending more time doing the things you really love is one way to practice Lent. It's a way to fast from your usual "have to's" and to make room for God to enter your life through creativity and timeless joy.

So, inspired by his porch project, I think I'll put other tasks from my to do list on the back burner this afternoon and go out and start working in my yard. Pruning is definitely one of my timeless activities. I hope I will find God, and God will find me out in the overgrown forsythia bushes.

Signs of Spring

After days and days of rain and wind and a storm of epic proportions, yesterday and today have been some of the loveliest spring days in my memory, and I am writing this from a spot on my front step in the sun. Although the spring solstice is still a few days away, and although the weather will probably get colder again before spring actually arrives, there are definitely signs of spring all around - warm sunshine, sprouting bulbs and even peepers singing in the woods behind the rectory last night.


There are also signs of spring in my parish. We had a great vestry meeting on Tuesday. The new vestry members were on time for our first official meeting together and obviously ready to go. We had some really good conversations about what our work as leaders would be in the coming year and I felt the sprouts not only of hope, but also excitement peeking out of the dark, cold ground of over a decade of difficulties and hardships as a parish. I also felt a hint of spring last Sunday, when I finally succeeded in persuading the congregation to sit together toward the front of the church instead of being spread out like molecules in their 'regular seats.' From my vantage point at the back of the church before the procession, I saw my whole congregation together in worship for the first time. This was a joy for me, and it also certainly presents a more positive picture of who we are as a community to any newcomers that might happen to visit - we now appear to actually like each other and want to be together. I know this to be the truth beneath our isolated seating habits. Why not make it show?


And there are signs of spring within me, too. I felt great about my church leadership this week, and about my plan to begin delegating tasks and sharing our ministry. It's all well and good to singlehandedly put some steam under some new projects to get the ball rolling and the momentum of hope started, but I've known from the beginning that this church will not live or die by anything I manage to do by myself. It is what we do together that will determine our fate. So I feel a new era of our life together beginning this spring - a time in which we move into mutual discernment and leadership and discover together who God wants us to be. Perhaps after a pretty cold and gray winter I'm longing to stop worrying and to start trusting. For me, I think this spring will be the right time to let go and let God at Grace Church.

Lenten Thoughts - Week 4

I'm homing in on finishing my latest pair of socks. I started knitting them about when Lent started, and it looks like I'll finish them just about as it ends. This pair of socks has the 2010 Winter Olympics knitted into them, as well as a lovely time of silent retreat. In those stitches are also some wintery Mondays spent by my fireplace, some great Al Anon meetings, as well as a few days of a stomach bug. Knitting is definitely one of my ways of marking time - kind of like a clock that displays the seasons of my life.

I was talking to someone recently about how it seems that our collective sensibilities are becoming so digital these days. The glowing red numbers on a digital alarm clock tell us it's "6:32" as if this moment in time is discreet and unconnected to any other moment. Sometimes it seems our lives are becoming more and more like a collection of discreet unconnected moments, too. Our information comes at us from so many different directions at once in sound bytes and tweets and status updates, we have become used to receiving things in random order, as they come, out of context with the many other bits of information that come our way.

An analog watch or clock, on the other hand, shows the time of day not just as one discreet moment in time, but as a position within a larger context. The second hand sweeps the clockface once a minute. The minute hand goes all the way around in an hour, and the hour hand makes its slow march in twelve hours. Each moment in time is built on the one before it and is headed to the one that is next. Time is even spoken of differently with analog clocks. At 6:32, it could be 'just past 6:30' or 'about twenty-five minutes to seven.

Every couple of weeks, we get the chance to experience more analog time as our knitters, crocheters and needleworkers sit together on Knit One, Pray Too nights. There's a sense of continuity as each stitch brings the pieces we're working on closer to completion. Our digital thoughts pop up and come out of our mouths in a random way. But all our ideas and stories get knit together by the context of relaxed community, and our time together as a group gets stitched into our work. Our group has certainly become a part of this pair of socks I'm knitting.

Time is not really either digital or analog, but a dance of both. Like any dance, there needs to be tension and balance between partners. It seems that at this point in time, digital time is taking a strong lead, but analog time is still dancing. Living a life of faith means exploring the both/and tensions in the world. And it strikes me that the season of Lent itself is a good example of the both/and dance of time. In this season of practicing prayer, fasting and almsgiving, we receive many random experiences of God - sometimes popping up at the least expected moments. But although each day brings many new and unexpected experiences, each passing moment is still one more step in the journey - one more stitch in the sock. At the end, we will be closer to God than when we started, no matter at which point we began, only to discover that God was right there with us all along.

Lenten Thoughts - Week 3

As I listen to the dryer and the furnace humming below me in the cellar, I am reminded of just how many noises surround me everyday. Some are comforting, like the calm snoring of my dog, and some are annoying, like the repetitive music from a computer game. Many sounds are so familiar to me, I don't even hear them anymore. But when I really stop to listen, I begin to notice how noisy my life really is.

This week I took a break from all my usual noises and went on a silent retreat. The only time I used my voice was when I was in the chapel praying or singing. There was no one with me, so I didn't hear anyone else's voice either. I had no music, and didn't watch TV. It was pretty darn quiet! And the place where I was staying was really quiet, too. Camp Washington is the diocesan camp and retreat center here in Connecticut, and it's off the beaten path. Every now and then a car drives by, or you hear an airplane fly over, but when I went out to take a walk, all I heard was the woods. I heard no highways or roads in the distance - no motor sounds at all. That is very unusual for this region. At night, it was pitch dark, and there was not another soul at the camp but me. I stayed in the Transfiguration Lodge, a beautiful building with its own beautiful chapel. There are beds for six in there, but only mine was taken. Like I said, it was pretty quiet.

With all that silence, I found that I began to hear the noises inside me that are usually drowned out by the noises all around me. Silence tends to do that. It tends to allow stuff to bubble up and be noticed. It gave me the chance to feel, to acknowledge and to pray about things I hadn't made the room for lately. It slowed me down and woke me up at the same time. I had a few good cries, three great nights of sleep and lots of relaxing time by the wood stove, listening to the crackle of the burning logs. I took focussed time with all four daily offices each day, with the Rule of St. Benedict and some Al Anon literature. I also took long, quiet walks and wrote pages and pages of stuff in my journal. All of these things are ways I've found to be in conversation with God. God and I had some real quality time together this week.

During Lent, we've been putting more periods of silence into our worship services at Grace Church. I tell everyone that in this noisy world, Lent is an important time to make some room in our busy lives for for more silence. And it is. The silence wants to talk to us, if we'll make the room to listen.