"It Was White."

"White," I wrote. "The dress was white."


I have changed in 35 years.


I was loving all those hats. The wedding guests' hats. Victoria Beckham. Princess Mathilde of Belgium. Tara Parker Tomlinson (socialite and TV presenter). Her brilliant blue was a knock out. Carole Middleton. Even the Queen in lemon lemon lemon yellow. Zara Phillips. Princess Letizia of Spain. Lady Frederick Windsor. Sophie, Countess of Windsor. I was all over those hats. In fact, I have a fun little "fascinator" myself. I planned to wear it while sitting up here in bed watching the wedding in my pajamas, but really, it felt ridiculous. The cowboy hat seemed a better choice. Or the NYU Mom cap. Or bed head.

Some things have changed. I now officially enjoy fashion. Not always so.

When the wedding program was provided to the public yesterday, my fascination was with the music. Rhosymedre. Bach. Vaughn Williams. Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. Ubi Caritas. I was excited. The thing was, we didn't get to hear most of it. I would have traded a half hour of chats with the crowd in the park for the chance to hear the prelude. All of it. Oh well.

It feels good to know that I've grown, expanded my senses, my sights. I like music and hats!

When I was married 35 years ago next month, the town my parents still lived in, where I had grown up, printed elaborate wedding stories in the local newspaper. They had a form I was to fill out, describing the details. There were several lines for a description of the wedding dress, the attendants' dresses (God-awful would have covered it), my mother's dress (yellow), and other details of the cake and reception.

I didn't care about any of that. Requested to describe my own wedding dress, I wrote, "White." That's it. "White." It was a beautiful dress. Lace empire style with cap sleeves, a flowing skirt with a short train. Lovely. I wrote, "white."

What I did write about in detail, however, was the music. Every piece of the prelude, the anthems, the congregational hymns, the postlude. That's what I cared about. It was the substance, not the style that mattered.

Well enough. But what I have come to understand over these years is that both -- or all -- have their place. And that style can represent substance. And vice versa. All the senses. I would wear a brilliant blue hat. And describe it gladly. And I'd tell about my dress. And every piece of music. And the liturgy (as in, no "Man and wife!). It all matters.

We are created to delight in all of it! Every bit of it! It feels so good to know that now.

I especially loved the trees! The trees were green. "Leafing greenly spirits of trees."

_____(e.e.cummings)

"Out of the rot and the ruin comes a rumor of resurrection"

Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed!


There is no other story.

This story of death as the door to new life is the paradigmatic human story. We can't get 'round it. This is the way it is done. New life.

Choosing death, choosing one's own death as distinct from insisting on pimping off the death of others. The gate, the way, the door. Dying to death, to deadly half-life and allowing oneself to be swept under. Only to be risen, to be in the flow of rising and lifting and, my favorite way of putting it, "auferstanden." Does that not sound like it is, standing up again.

I believe I've written it here before, I'm pissed at Jesus for making it look so easy. Not the dying. That is pure hell. But the rising. An angel, so the story goes, rolls away a big rock trapping him in a tomb and by some divine power, tada, he's up.

Not always how it works for us. Not often how it works with us. Slow, up and down, in and out, back and forth. But it is, nevertheless, relentless.

Relentless. The trajectory of our lives is resurrection. That is the way we're moving. It's the road we're on. Some days we run, some days we may sit on a bench and simply trust that the next steps we're ready to take are headed that way. Resurrection. Auferstanden. Getting up. New. Life.

Whomever we are, however we walk, we are connected to this paradigmatic way of being. It has claimed us. Set our feet on the path. Or set our butts on the bench along the path. But in any case, it's a gravitational pull.

"Out of the rot and ruin comes a rumor of resurrection." That's us.

No signs of trouble here

The people all look so normal.

Kids are laughing as they flirt and wander home from school. They stop at the corner store and get a snack, joking and boasting as kids do. David lingers a little to walk with Rachel. He's clearly hoping for more.

The Schmlzers are dropping off a casserole at the neighbor's, helping out while Amos is laid up. Old Joe offers to fix the Meyers' fence. Eunice and Eva are over cleaning things up getting ready for the weekly services.

You ride through town. Everything looks just right, as it should. Tidy, even clean. Well manicured, the people and the houses. Nothing menacing or scruffy. On this lovely spring day people are out sprucing up their yards and weeding their gardens.

You go to the market, mill around, everyone is polite. Nothing seems amiss. Even the fruits are perfectly ripe and the vegetables firm and crispy. The meat is fresh and the butcher, Ruben, has a big smile and an extra bone for your dog. The day is feeling mighty good.

Traffic moves right along. Nobody gets cut off, nobody flips the finger. No one is being too noisy. The sun is out, the sky is clear. The wind is a pleasant breeze, no more, no less. Idyllic, really.

No one acts rude or impatient, life moves along smoothly. Men go to work. Women share their news. The children are in school or out kicking a ball down the street.

To drive through, to be part of it, you think, no signs of trouble here. All is well.

But the day goes on. Stories circulate. Not many, certainly not most, but a small crowd gathers. They're easily stirred up. At least today they are. And before you know it, a larger mob is shouting, "Give us Barrabas."


But looking at it all, before, you would never have guessed. No sign of trouble here.

And so it goes.


"And the crowd cried, 'Crucify him!'"

"Love me tender, love me true"

"Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go.
You have made my life complete and I love you so."

Maundy Thursday. From the Latin: commandment. And that commandment is,
Love each other. That's all, That's it, That's enough. That is everything:
Love each other.

"Love me tender, love me true, all my dreams fulfilled.
For my darlin' I love you and I always will."

Love. And imagine this. Sing this softly and imagine the Spirit of Life,
the Love of the Universe, G-D, Life itself, singing this to you:

"Love me tender, love me long, take me to your heart.
For it's there that I belong, and we'll never part."

You. At the center of God's heart. At the heart of God's love. Hear
the lullaby, drift off knowing that the One who is all is all about you.

"Love me tender, love me dear, Tell me you are mine.
I'll be yours through all the years, 'til the end of time."


Not sure Elvis ever had this quite in mind, nor Vera Matson as she wrote the text, but it works, it carries the message we all need.

"Love me tender, love me true, all my dreams fulfilled.
For my darlin' I love you and I always will."


May you know deep in your bones the lovely sense of being loved, of being the one who fulfills God's dreams, makes God's life complete.

Southern Exposure

It comes without warning. No alarm bells, no whisper in the ear. Just boom! And there it is.


I am writing to you from inside a full-blown post-traumatic attack. If you can imagine a person writing from inside the fetal position, circled around a laptop, on her bed, under the covers, subsiding bursts of sobbing, aqua towel at hand to dry the tears, you've got the picture.

I blew it, actually. I talked about my trauma. What happened. How it felt, feels, some consequences. To the safest group of friends I could imagine. Implicit trust. So what's the problem?

At first, driving home, yes, I did drive the four blocks home, I thought it was the awkwardness of exposure. Period. We all feel awkward and uncomfortable letting pieces of our stories out into the ether of conversation from time to time. You don't have to be drunk or have PTSD to come to your senses after and think, "Geez, did I tell them that?"

Even with people we know well, or have known a long time, we withhold significant bits of information, whole chunks, whole continents even. And a time comes when it seems right to reel ourselves out slowly, revealing more and more. As I did tonight. And it felt safe. I felt heard, respected and caringly received. I didn't wallow in my stuff any more than anyone else did. In fact, I spoke less than most. But what I said was significant. Exposure. What it's like to be me.

The thing is, our book group read two rather different books about Alzheimer's Disease. And tonight we discussed them. And that led to lots of rather personal conversation about end of life decisions, living with a terminal disease, living with awareness that you aren't yourself anymore, "I miss me," one of the women in the story said about living with her Alzheimer's shredding more of herself everyday.

I said I could really identify with her comment.

And here and there, popped in and out among others' comments I said a few more things. About brain injuries. About dignity. I don't even remember what I said. Simple things, though. No details about an attack, no images of bloated raging red faces in mine. Just a few comments about being totally "out of it, not knowing who I was," for awhile.

Turns out there are a few things about PTSD that might raise the matter of Alzheimer's to mind. For example, just a few,

Cognitive and conceptual gaps, holes, failures. For the life of me I couldn't process the concept of what a number was for months. Numbers are abstractions, symbols. They meant nothing to me. And tonight, back in the heart of the beast, they are impossible to connect to anything real.

You think your computer processes material slowly sometimes? Let me tell you, I could take an hour to get from "In" to "the" and by then forget all about "cabinet." It took an age to reboot, if rebooting was possible at all.

Continuing the computer analogy (see, now I'm capable of some sort of complex thinking!), files were scrambled and lost, wires were all haywire, going in the wrong directions, or no directions at all (oops, mixed metaphors). My memory was shot. Did I already say that for periods of time I didn't know who I was?

Scary stuff. And that's in addition to the basics: feelings of constant panic, anxiety, the sensation of cortisol or adrenaline filling up my limbs to the point of bursting, inability to tolerate light, sound -- including voices of my family talking, noise, inability to concentrate, failing muscle strength, lack of coordination -- how many times did I fall down the stairs? and this, the worst, no trust.

Beyond the narrowest circle, of three, Dave, Kaia, and Annika, I trusted no one. No one. Including myself. Isolation was my goal as much as possible. And I was in a constant state of terror. Of another attack. Of bad people, bad behaviors, danger, threats, death.

The only thing that survived intact was my sense of humor, though it warped severely. But that surviving sense of humor is the reason I survived at all. To somehow laugh at the absurdity of what I had become, what had happened, was my salvation.

Good Friday fell on April Fool's Day one year and I thought that was perfect, the ultimate God's "gotcha" on the devil. "You think you be winning, kid? No way in hell."

I'm writing through this tonight for one specific reason. Our book club, these witty wonderful women, every one of them a diamond of wisdom, decided that people really need to talk about the hard things more often. Tell the truth about ugly realities like Alzheimer's and ALS and strokes and how it breaks your breast bone when they use the paddles on your heart to restart it after you code, about living for days or weeks or months intubated so you can breath, when the diagnosis is terminal and the patient is begging to be let go, about the noxious awfulness of chemo, about death, and dignity, and decisions that create space for truth and intimacy and, yes, dignity, even in the most dire situation.

This is but one example of the hard things we need to talk about. So we can understand each other better, respect one another more, care more tenderly.

My arms are pulsing so strongly right now that I have to stop writing and let them calm down. Dave has made me some tea and that helps. I am back in my safe place. There is classical music, barely audible and lights that are dim. I am beginning to calm down. I might be able to add up 4+6 before the hour is up.

I had another reason for wanting to write this now and I'm forgetting what it is. Hold on, it was important. I'm not looking for pity, god forbid that, or sympathy. I'll be glad to be empathic with those who know from the inside just what I'm talking about. Oh, it's coming, this other reason, had it close a second ago.

Oh, this. I am learning from my highly skilled, expert new therapist that it is actually not good for someone who has been traumatized to talk about the trauma. Just talking about it is retraumatizing.

Here, I thought the cure for everything was to blah blah blah. Get it out, get it out, get it out. Well, there is a way to get it out but it is not the casual blah blah blah. Or even the well-intentioned blah blah blah.

The way I'm learning to process (god, I hate that word) the trauma I experienced is in structured settings where talking about it is done within safe perameters (therapist, doctor) and with these wonderfully magic tools, like EMDR and the one I mentioned weeks ago, with the wand. Brain spotting.

So, however tempting it seems to be honest and forth-coming and help others to understand what this life is like from the inside so you might be empathic to those who would like your caring attention, I need to just shut up.

And wish you peace.

"Pass me not"

There were no leeches.

It always seems like there should be leeches. Is there anything worse?


Do you remember all of the pestilences that plagued the Egyptians as the Hebrew people were liberated from slavery?

Boils. Frogs, the frogs that "shall come upon thee and thy people and thy servants." Frogs. Do you know how slimey creepy awful that would be? And more. Water turned to blood. Lice, for god's sake. Swarms of flies, worse than Maine or Minnesota in June. Disease ruined the cattle and the camels and the asses and the oxen and the sheep. Thunder and hail, sadly familiar around here. Locusts. Locusts are disgusting, and, as I did once before, locusts would cause me to drive my chariot off the road. Darkness: it's only upside being to hide the locusts and the ugly boils but it would make me shiver out of my skin knowing about all those frogs everywhere.

And finally, the death of the firstborn child.

Tonight our Jewish friends celebrate this passover, and we wish them the blessings and fruitfulness and peace that were clearly meant for them as they escaped into a new land, one of "milk and honey," of freedom. An exodus from awful to, as it turns out, initially perplexing,then annoying, and really really long.

It is impossible for me, who did not grow up within Jewish culture, to know emotionally what that means. Exodus. Christians have been stealing the Jewish passover seder for years, trying to truncate it into something about Jesus who, in fact, was Jewish and did celebrate Passover but not the passover that his followers have invented to feed their own theology. Passover is a Jewish cultural and theological event, a celebration that comes from the inside. And the fact is, I'm not inside that culture.

But it always does make me think. And every year it is about something different.

This year I am struck by the reality that none of us gets passed over, not finally, entirely, completely. Not even Jews. We all end up suffering from boils or frogs or lice and gnats or swarms of flies or locusts and most certainly darkness. And some of us suffer the death of the one most close, our firstborn or first-loved or most beloved parent.

None of us get out of this unscathed. (None of us get out of this alive either but that's a story for Sunday.) Egyptian or not, there are lice in our forecast.

Tonight I'm identifying with the Egyptians. And the Jews who later again had to suffer. We all do. We create suffering for others, we watch and feel helpless, we cause conditions that make others suffer. We're in it up to our necks. There are not enough bitter herbs to cover the bad taste.

But, as we suffer, we do so not without hope. We are freed to make our suffering redemptive, to make it count, to make it benefit others, and to work for others to make it go away.

We face suffering with hope. Why? Because that is the way it is. Suffering brings us to the heart of the ultimate, or Ultimate life, where we are healed, freed and made new.

When I was a child we sang a song at church, especially on Wednesday nights, at prayer meeting, that went something like this, "Pass me not O gentle Savior. Hear my humble cry. While on others thou art calling, do not pass me by." A different kind of passing over. A prayer for healing, for courage and strength. Stop here. Heal me, too. Give me the gifts of life, too.

I don't think that really has much to do with Passover but it is authentic to my culture, my tradition, and it is my prayer this night for you and all whom you love, all who suffer. Peace.

"Don't be so humble; you're not that great"

"Don't be so humble, you're not that great," Golda Meir once told one of her government ministers, or a visiting diplomat (sources disagree).


It is another disappointing Palm Sunday. No pastor on a donkey. Yet another year has gone by and I missed seeing it.*

Now, this could be because no self-respecting pastor would have the cajones to get up on a donkey and be Jesus.

Or it could be that I just didn't go to an egoist's church.

If it happened once, and it did, in the congregation I served, about 20 years before I got there, I have to think it has happened again. Somewhere out there in Christendom is a pastor who not only believes that "in order to be like Jesus you have to pee like Jesus," (with a penis, standing up, ergo, no women allowed), but that if you're going to represent Jesus you get to copy his most glorious moment. The adoring crowd, "blessed be the Son of David, the Messiah, the One who comes in the name of God! Hosanna to you!" Yes, I followed a pastor who abrogated to himself that kind of power and glory.

And abused it every chance he got.

There are a lot of pastors who spend time riding around on asses. Or as asses.

But.

BUT there are a lot of pastors who don't. Most don't. In fact, most pastors are humble (but not that humble, they know they're not that great), hard-working, loving, kind, tender-hearted, generous, forgiving and forbearing women and men who work 80 hours a week and never stop thinking about their parishioners' problems and spend extra hours every week thinking and praying and pondering how to be helpful.

Most of us know that given everything we are way out of our league. We know how much is at stake in people's lives, how much death there is stalking them, stalking us all, how much anxiety, avarice, usury folks are suffering. Most of us clergy do not serve the top 1% of U.S. society, the 400 richest people in America who collectively earn more than the bottom 150 million altogether. We serve the unemployed and the sick and the starving. We serve the recipients of Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and subsidized housing. We serve the middle class, squeezed, insecure who live paycheck to paycheck and wonder if their job will be there next week.

Most of us, pastors, clergy, priests, ministers -- whatever you call us know that life is way beyond us, beyond our controlling, even beyond our knowing. Most of us would identify with Karl Barth, a famous theologian, who described himself simply as one beggar showing another beggar where to find bread.

That's most of us. Just paddling our little duck feet under water as fast as we can to keep up. Trying to do, be, accomplish, serve far more than we have the capacity to do. Yet, we try. We work our asses off. And we are humble.

As you know, my speciality within the realm of churchly life is the abuse of pastoral power. Stopping it. Preventing it. Responding to it. Not a vocation I chose. I don't jump up and down for joy that 'it' (or God, I suppose) chose me. But there you are.

I see and tell you about the seedy side of ministry. One we all know too well. It does happen too often.

But not every pastor or minister is an ass. Or rides one. Pretending to be Jesus.

My sense of outrage at the story of one man and an ass, and a penis kept busier than the beer spigot at a baseball game is what it is: Righteous anger about the abuse of power, the abuse of God's people who came for one thing (Jesus) and got a very cheap imitation instead. But. But.

But.

For this week, a Holy Week throughout the Church, I invite you to remember and give thanks for those pastors who are working triple overtime to help see to it that you feel and see and hear and touch and know the power of new life, of Jesus, really Jesus, of life abundant and free, of rising and renewal: Of resurrection. Of Easter. They really want that life for you. They really hope and pray and will give all they have this week to help you see Jesus, see the Life of Life. And be risen with him to new life.

# # #

*Please, please, please tell me you get my wry, sarcastic sense of humor!

On NOT Being A Squid

I am not a squid.

I'm not often confused for one of these odd little creatures. There is not much of a physical resemblance. And if you have noticed one, I don't want to know. Likewise, I don't act much like a squid. And I rarely think of squid.

Squid have this thing they do. They squirt ink. Offensive, defensive, nervous, anxious, angry.

Today I had an squidly impulse.

Deeply hurt, I had an urge to do the squid thing.

I didn't, of course, but that the thought even occurred to me was disturbing. The temptations we face to be vindictive, to return evil for evil, to strike back, to squirt ink into an unspoiled pool are a part of our nature, our brokenness.

The art of being human is managing those impulses.

And this: giving other people the space to be themselves.

Why is that so hard? To simply let other people be who they are.

Barring behavior that is harmful and hurtful and, oh dear, here we go, I'm sliding down the slippery slope right along with you. Where is the line? Who decides? When is it crossed?

I have an idea. How about we tell people.

I'm not talking about the big big things -- although we can talk about that tomorrow -- but about our life together, daily life among friends, colleagues, neighbors, just folks. How about we tell folks what we need, or when they are standing on our feet. Directly. Kindly. Professionally.

I've been thinking about this a bunch. Be passive. Or be aggressive. But not both at the same time.

Passive-aggressive behavior is the biggest block to positive relationships I can think of. If you're annoyed but you can stand whatever it is, keep quiet. And cope with it. If you're annoyed and you can't stand it, for god's sake, speak up. Say something. In a timely fashion. Honestly, kindly, professionally.

Don't be a squid. Don't be passive-aggressive. (Have I ever written so directly?) It ruins so much.

At the same time, passive-aggressive behavior brings out the squid in us. In me. Squids beget squids. I kept my ink to myself.

Until now. A different kind of ink. I'm being direct: Let's live in forebearance, patience, kindness, and grace. That's the ink I have to spill today. Enough.