Talk With the Preacher

Sunflowers suddenly spring up in an empty lot previously overgrown with weeds. The weeds were trampled by a huge crane, moved in to pull a hundred-year old oak tree off the house on which it had fallen. The trampling of the crane left a bare lot exposed to sunshine.

Years of wishing something could be done with that empty lot and in the aftermath of destruction come, miraculously, flowers.

There is no Mardi Gras without buckets of Popeye’s fried chicken. Any other kind won’t do, of course, since Popeye’s is uniquely New Orleans. So many businesses have been unable to find workers and thousands of businesses . . . even the big chain stores . . . sit empty and boarded up. How hopeful, then, to see a long line of people standing outside an open Popeye’s, waiting to buy chicken for parade parties. At 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning!

Precious friends, all of whom have lost so much and still press on, certain in the conviction that New Orleans will be rebuilt and that God has not abandoned them. These are real heroes; they came back, they keep working, they hope for recovery. They inspire me.

Not enough police presence to have Mardi Gras . . . that’s what they said. It’s too dangerous to have such a party without law enforcement in excess, keeping the peace and making sure everyone behaves. It could degenerate into total lawlessness!

I, on the other hand, was thinking it would be easier to find parking with not too many police patroling illegally parked vehicles . . . . Someone got a ticket, though. (Not me!) When I saw it I knew something the driver of this vehicle probably didn’t immediately recognize . . . a parking ticket during Mardi Gras . . . a sign of hope!

What about bands for Mardi Gras? All the children have left the city, moved to other places to continue the school year. Poorer, inner-city schools have been devastated by the disaster. Teachers are gone; facilities are destroyed; there are no bands to march in Mardi Gras parades.

It was a true sign of hope to see bands in the parades, many of which came from far away to keep the party going. This band is from Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, Mississippi. They were AMAZING!

The party goes on . . . Mardi Gras krewes threw a traditional party, complete with garish floats, excess throws and a spirit of revelry.

Celebrities turned out in full force for the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. Can you see Willie Nelson up there on top of the float? Also hanging around were Michael Keaton, Harry Anderson, Sean Astin, Elijah Wood and others.

My family, celebrating Mardi Gras, even after all the pain and loss in our former home town. A place to come back to, old memories to recall and new memories to make. To me, a picture of hope.

What my mother-in-law was thinking when she carefully selected this card for me . . . I don’t want to know.

I am a woman who finds true adventure in confronting the questions of life. I love the pondering; I anticipate the wondering; I relish the angst. But lately I find myself devoting a whole lot of time to questions I really could care less about, and this is proving to be a rather frustrating experience.

I don’t suppose it helps to say from the outset that I never . . . ever . . . in all of my life . . . wondered about whether plants grow faster when they are watered with tap water, bottled water or sugar water. And while I am open to the possibility that I am the only person in the entire world who hasn’t, I must say that it never crossed my mind to ask myself what happens when vinegar and baking soda combine.

No one. No one had the decency to tell me that when I chose to become a parent I was also choosing to care about these burning questions.

Most recently our family was involved in the critical query: “Does a remote control car go faster on sandpaper or plastic straws?” (If anybody at the CIA wants to know our results–certainly essential for national defense–just let me know. We’re always happy to help.)

Our task, or, shall I say, Hayden’s task (yeah, right. Our task), involved establishing the question; laying out the procedure; making a hypothesis; conducting an experiment; and evaluating results. And then frantically scrounging around for materials to complete the science project display, including the fine photos pictured here.

What did we get from this grand exploration? Besides a really cute picture of Hayden which we can use to torture and embarrass him later in life, I also discovered the answer to another one of those burning questions we all wonder about.

You know how you have always wondered where the English language phrase “Mad Scientist” comes from? Can’t say that I myself really gave it much thought before this point but, well, thanks to careful employment of the scientific method and extensive experimentation, now I know.

I believe I can definitively prove that the term “mad scientist” is the term used to describe the mother of a sixth grader the night before a science project is due!

For some strange reason that I cannot fully explain, my birthday this year has been something of a rattling experience. Last year I turned 35 and sailed right through it. Today, 36 seems ominously close to 40, an age that I associate with high school memories of my totally uncool parents. And, with all due respect Mom and Dad, I must insist: that cannot be me! Never!

My private fits of anxiety over this crisis came to the surface tonight when a dear friend of mine helpfully pointed out that I am now officially half of 72. 72! In true Christian spirit I quickly pointed out that, while this might very well be true (I’ve never been very good at math . . . even when I was young . . . uh, younger) he is half of 80 and that it looks like very soon we’ll be burning up the halls in some nursing home together.

Hahahahahahahah . .a . . h . . a . . aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

I feel like I’m skidding toward the edge of a cliff with my heels dug in. Or have just taken the bite that puts me over the halfway line in the last Snicker’s bar in my Halloween bag.

And I can’t be at the halfway mark yet!

Not yet!

I haven’t done everything I want to do . . . been all the places I must go, met all the people, had all the experiences. It can’t be half over . . . !

Perhaps some of my musings come from sitting for awhile tonight with a family who has just lost a husband and father. While I listened they talked about the knowledge that the end was inevitable, about relief that his suffering is over, about surprise that the parting hurt so much– even when it was anticipated. Hearing them talk about losing their dad and husband I was reminded again that while it’s true that life is made up of little moments one right after another when you view them as a whole they strangely seem so precious and elusive.

Knowing myself as I do I can say (with age comes wisdom, you know) that my birthday angst is not something over which to be unduly alarmed; I always need some kind of crisis because life (and I’ve learned this even in the short . . . very short . . . amount I’ve experienced thus far) wouldn’t be the same without one. However, I don’t think it is completely unreasonable to pause once a year to take a deep breath and realize how fast it’s all going by . . . and then to resolve again to try to squeeze every bit of life out of the moments I’m living, to love as lavishly as my limited heart will allow, to hold hands, to cry tears and to savor every single bite . . . all the way down to the very last one.

So . . . watch out second half, here I come . . . !

I am rather afraid that, in actually expressing these thoughts, I am crossing the line. And as you know if you read my blog regularly, my “line” is already pretty close to a rather steep precipice. Yet, I decided from the outset that I would always be honest and transparent on this blog, so here we go:

Call me crazy, but I am starting to think that I am spiritually impaired in some significant way. I hate (and I do not use this word lightly) church music which my friend Carol has fondly labeled, “Jesus is my boyfriend music” and I cannot seem to worship in any way, shape or form while it is being sung or played.

You know what I’m talking about, right?

I’m talking about choruses that a lot of people whom I love dearly and respect deeply like to sing during worship. Some of them are okay, but some . . . some just make my toes curl.

“Why?”, you may ask in confusion. Well, I could go into a long treatise about the theology found in some praise choruses, how much of it is shallow and a lot of it is just plain wrong. Or, I could give you a long explanation of the limited musical credibility many choruses embody (I am not really qualified to do that, but all I am saying is that I could).

But the main thing that bugs me . . . the thing that really bakes my cake . . . is the way so many of these songs make me feel like I am not worshipping but rather that I am attending some sort of aerobics class/dating event.

Witness the words to a song I particularly hate, one which is sung quite often and loved by many. Here are the words:

This bothers me, you see, because when I sneakily look around the room while songs like this are being sung, all I see are people with eyes closed, swaying peacefully, hands open and extended, almost like they are in some kind of deeply meaningful spiritual trace.

A prayer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written in prison and published in his book Letters and Papers from Prison:

Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I myself know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, trembling with anger at despotisms and petty humiliation, tossing in expectation of great events, powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me still like a beaten army, fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.

I am one of those people who carries a kind of a restlessness in my spirit, a sense that I don’t really belong where I am, that there’s another place where all the wondering and uncertainty, pain and insecurity of life would be eased completely. I’ve felt differing degrees of this “homesickness” at various points in my life but it seems to be a feeling that is never very far away.

The funny thing about it is that I can’t really define exactly what it is I am longing for. It’s not a place, really. It’s not people, entirely. It’s not certain circumstances, exactly. It’s just . . . something.

And the times I am most aware of this restlessness in my spirit are when I feel a tug in my heart, a wistful longing for something . . . for, I guess, home. Either that or just another good excuse to welcome drama to my life. (I’m always looking for those, you know.)

The irony of these musings is that I would say, in general, I feel more “at home” in my life than I can ever remember feeling. Circumstances seem to fit like a comfortable coat; I feel happy. But I guess I felt a little twinge of longing last week when I got an email from my little brother Matthew (okay, he’s not that little–25, to be exact) with some pictures he’d taken out at the beach. He was diving or surfing or something and took some great pictures (here’s one of a whale). The pictures reminded me of diving with my dad when I was a kid; of bonfires on the beach and bringing baby hammerhead sharks in for second grade show and tell. They reminded me of home. (I grew up in Hawaii.)

So all of those memories were on my mind yesterday when I got off the plane in Los Angeles, where I am spending the week for a meeting of the Lewis Fellows program through the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary. The wave of homesickness hit me as soon as I stepped off the plane and felt the balmy 72 degrees of Southern California. All around me were palm trees and all sorts of tropical plants–the kind that grew in my backyard when I was a kid.

It was all there, all around me and yet I knew . . . as close as I was to home (just a short 4 hour plane ride and I could be there!) I wasn’t really there. All afternoon I felt a nostalgic longing, a little pull in my heart to be back in a place where everything fits me, a place where I know I belong.

I always forget that coming to California makes me really homesick. With the palm trees and birds of paradise all over the place, see, there are so many reminders of that feeling of being at home. And I think that being almost home is sometimes harder than being far, far away, because those feelings of recognition and longing well up and feel, to me, anyway, palpable.

I wonder if Jesus ever felt that way. Surely he could see glimpses of heaven all around him when he walked on this earth, but the circumstances in which he found himself were woefully unlike heaven. He must have felt pangs of homesickness a lot, I’m thinking. I wonder sometimes if that longing for home, for the real place where we belong, where we are fully known and completely at rest is just part of being human. Do you think as we make our way through human living the glimpses of God that we catch in other people make our hearts long for our real home, with God?

I guess in the end I’m glad for the pictures and the balmy breezes, the flowers and the sunshine. I know I’m not quite home, but being almost home reminds me of that feeling . . . the feeling that I am fully accepted and deeply loved.

It feels almost like I’m home.