Protected: I save my best work for my mistress

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: catch-up

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: sense

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: in-law fun

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: children touch nature and nature touches children

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: summertime picture post

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: “inch inner life”

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

roots and seeds

The potatoes in my garden have fruited. I’m told this is rare, but there they are–several of the plants have small green fruits, highly poisonous and bearing nothing. It seems strange to me that the same plant contains such familiar and solid nurture as well as such poison.

The yellow potatoes that line my pantry shelf like gold river stones will feed us into fall. They will contain, under their skins, work, and words, minerals, tunes hummed under twilight and the prodding efforts of small children planting in spring. They will feed us on cold fall days, in soups, church potlucks, in simple, tired meals adorned by something green, something containing protein, something to build upon their beginning of a meal. Seed potatoes arrive in the mail in spring, in hopeful cotton bags, shriveled and full of eyes ready to extend gratefully into rich, dark soil. The senseless fruit hanging from the vines now like tiny green eggs–it is a relic, its purpose so many generations back that hardly anyone even remembers it is possible.

Not everything that could poison us does more than show itself occasionally, prove it’s there, inept and powerless on vines that die, as they should, to the ground before the potato harvest is reaped by hands digging into the soil, pulling up the round tubers, each one a tiny surprise ready to be added to an already bulging basket. A seed can be the end of something even more easily than it can be an unwanted beginning, and poison and nurture both can be found in unexpected places. Slowly, I’ve learned to expect less poison and more nurture, and to use that nurture like seed potatoes, never entirely given up or eaten, so that it can multiply like the surest root.

Protected: in defense of four-year-old boys

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

love and mercy

This past weekend, J took the boys camping, and I got to stay home. I was a bit sad not to join them, because I really love camping with my family, but it was a very social time with lots of other people, and after a few very busy and high-pressure weeks at work, I took J up on his generous offer. It was heaven, truly— to putter around in an empty house, work in the garden without checking the clock or rushing, reading while eating dinner at 9 and taking a hot shower at 10 to fall into a deep sleep and sleep in the next day—those things are just my version of heaven. I went to the Farmer’s Market with one of my favorite people on Saturday, made a relaxed 2 hour trip through the library, and gardened at church for a few hours. I re-filled the well of my extreme introvert self.  Thanks to the wonders of cell phones, I knew J and the boys were having a great time too.

On Sunday morning, church was later than usual because our pastor of the past 2 years was being officially ordained. It was a beautiful morning, and the church was full of extra friends and visitors in addition to all of our members and regular attenders. When I had first come in, I noticed that there was a protester out front. “Which issue is it?”, I thought, somewhat irritated, noticing how out of place the angry looking man with the thick beard looked in front of the newly spruced-up landscaping, standing in the sunshine on such a beautiful day. I wondered what had made him get up that morning and come over here, carrying a sign that said “Repent and read your gospel!!” Was it our inclusive stance toward GLBT people, our pacifism and opposition to the war? Could it actually be that a woman was being ordained? I made my way inside, and quickly forgot about it amid all the smiles and greetings, the children circling me, the bustling in the kitchen as I put my potluck dishes in the warming oven. As I slid into a pew—a different pew than our usual one because I like to keep the boys up front so they’re more likely to focus on the service and behave—I was grateful not to have to help the boys stay still and quiet that morning, to have been able to chat freely with friends before the service, to focus on the joyous occasion we were gathered for.

When I’d first seen the date in our church calendar for the ordination, I was surprised. I’d forgotten that she wasn’t already ordained, that she needed the approval of the Menno*nite Confer*ence. It didn’t seem like such a big deal—more like a formality, since she’s already been pasturing with us for two years. That morning, though, I realized what a momentous occasion it really was, a culmination of years of work and a lifetime of working towards a special and important form of servanthood. Our Conference ordains women, but there are churches within it who will not accept a woman pastor, and the Lancas*ter C*onference—the largest Menno*nite Conference in the U.S.—does not ordain women at all. In choosing to remain within the denomination of her birth while following her calling, our pastor also chose to be a forerunner, a leader, and to take a reconciling and loving stance towards those who disagree–something she does particularly well. In that context, the protester was simply a visible reminder that not everyone yet dares to give her that right.

The service went on, and my heart swelled with the sound of our famous 4-part harmony, especially strong that morning because of all the Menno*nite visitors from far and wide. It was the kind of singing that leaves us all smiling slightly as we finish, catching our breaths with the efforts of our contributions. The sermon began, an inpiring message by our pastor’s mentor, also a woman, and she had the congregation’s complete and rapt attention when a shouting was heard from the back of the church. The protester from outside ran down the center aisle, shouting, “This is wrong! Women should be silent in church, not pastors! Repent! This is an abomination!” Some of the older men from our church got up and walked toward him. They ushered him out, making a kind of line with their bodies that pressed him toward and out the door. There was a moment of shocked and scared silence before the preacher deftly regained our attention. She was, after all, preaching about bruised reeds and smoldering wicks.

The sermon was over, and we had collectively let out our held breath when the bearded man again ran into the church, this time quickly sitting down. I can’t remember what he shouted at that point, but the service more or less went on anyway. One of our deacons quietly pleaded with him to remain respectful during the service. The protester was in the same pew as I, and I slid over at one point and offered to hear him out outside, thinking that perhaps he’d yell at me there rather than the whole congregation inside. But he was mostly quiet after that, except for the part of the ordination service when the congregation is asked whether we will support the candidate in her ministry. “We will!” we all said with gusto, and the protester let out a loud, “NO!”.  I will admit that I was a bit scared on and off, trying not to think of the church shootings that have happened in the last year or two. Later, others would say various things—that they’d thought it might be a skit at first, that they felt terrified, or perfectly safe. The rest of us didn’t know it yet then, but the men who’d originally taken him out had probably seen that he couldn’t have been armed before choosing not to call the police and to let him stay. He was wearing tight work pants and a form-fitting shirt, and there was no real way he could have been packing something under them. But he was so angry, so clearly hostile and disgusted. When I offered to listen to him outside, he said “that only annoys me more”, and it was then that I was most scared, glancing down at his pockets to look for evidence of a possible weapon and thankfully seeing only a keyring attached to his belt and the outline of a wallet.

But his eyes were so sad, and he was shaking there in the pew, his somewhat greasy fists clenched hard. How, I wondered, could someone also claiming to worship a loving God and to follow the Prince of Peace think that it could in any way be right to come in to a church and scare and try to bully the people in it? What made him so angry? What had turned him into the hurting and bruised reed I think he probably is? I was filled with sadness, sitting there next to him, but praying to that same loving God, I was also filled with a kind of love and peace. This wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened after all. We wouldn’t change his mind, and he wouldn’t change ours, but not having him thrown out was a kind of peace witness, in faith that our message is clearest without the use of force, by including and tolerating even those who are hard to love, or even accept. We didn’t change his mind, but I don’t think we fueled his hate either. No, I suspect that the worst thing that could have happened (outside of violence, of course), would have been for us to simply erase his inconvenient presence, for us to write him off entirely and meet his hate with hate of our own. It would be so easy to make that angry man into a villain, an object of disgust, and perhaps even our own hate. It would have been easy (though, I’d argue, probably not wiser or safer) to have called the cops, to pull him out by force and just lock the doors. But this is the hard stuff, the turning of the cheek and loving our enemies, that we never know when we’ll be held accountable to as followers of Jesus. We are called, in sometimes uncomfortable, even terrifying ways, to remember that all of us are broken in some way, just as all of us are worthy of grace and mercy. This man was probably just a lot more broken than most of us, and thereby even more in need of grace and mercy. What we do to the least of us, we do to God.

There are many people in our congregation who have far more experience in, training in, or knowledge about peace witness than I do, or have some familiarity with, at least–promoting peace through loving dialogue and through sometimes just listening. Believing in peace and believing in listening and communication are often part and parcel of the same thing. Some people talked to him a bit after the service, and mostly just listened. By the end of the conversation, they exchanged unrelated details, the kind that are usually called pleasantries. At least one person invited him to the potluck. But he left after that, and everyone made their way down to the basement where we ate the best potluck meal I’ve ever had in my life. My boys and husband joined us late, dirty, tired, and happy,  and holding O on my hip with J and N on either side of me, I left there feeling luckier and richer than I’d even imagined my life could be.