The Beat Goes On

I’ve been an associate pastor at the same church now for over nine years. You might say that over time I’ve developed a sort of Sunday morning routine. Of course, the unexpected is bound to happen. A child won’t stop crying during your sermon. Someone drops the plate holding the communion bread, and it goes everywhere. One time, years ago, I had to preach without my microphone because it was on the same channel as a doctor at a local hospital who was performing surgery—and using his own microphone to communicate with someone. All I know is that instructions for removing someone’s gallbladder were coming over our loudspeakers, and we had to shut the whole system off. Still, for the most part, one Sunday morning looks pretty much like the last one. That’s not a bad thing. We all need to know what to expect from our rituals.

But today, friends, I did something I have never done before—ever. I played a drum. I, along with some other recently educated percussionists, played a djembe, which is a kind of African drum, during a song from Zimbabwe that we sang as the offering was collected. I didn’t even know how to play a drum until last week, when I took a course at a Worship and Music conference that I attended. By no means am I even that good, but it was fun.

Every Friday night there is a drumming circle that happens in downtown Asheville. The folks who are there are the kind of folks you would expect to find at a drumming circle. I doubt many are Presbyterian. Or clergy, for that matter. No big surprise there. We’ve walked by this circle on many occasions, and stopped to watch for a bit. Some folks have trance-like looks on their faces. Others, you can tell, are feeling the rhythms with their whole bodies. It’s like watching an organism work. Everyone is doing their own thing, but each is somehow dependant upon the other. Now I (kinda-sorta) get it. I love to sing. Singing is usually how I worship, since I’m often leading parts of the service and it’s hard to lead and worship at the same time. Drumming is different than singing. There is something obviously primal about beating a drum. But what I didn’t expect is the way that you have to focus. You do this one thing, over and over again. These rhythms take over and all you can about is the way it sounds and the way the drumhead feels against your hands. Distractions are more than a nuisance—they break every bit of concentration you have going. I can’t think of the last time that all my energies were focuses so intently on one particular thing. Labor can do that to you. This is a LOT less painful.

Our drumming was a big hit on Sunday. And I am totally blown away by the fact that this is something that I had to offer to God. All this time of the same old same old. But today was different. The drumming was a gift, but the difference was a gift, too. It’s going to make me expect more of myself. And I needed that.

Budgeting

The division of labor that happened when my husband and I married broke down along lines of interest. Me: house cleaning, laundry, paying bills. Him: grocery shopping, cooking and mowing the yard. It’s been working great so far, but now that there is a baby in tow, I’m working less, and we’re paying for child care, we’re going to have to stick to a BUDGET. And I have no idea how to make that work. And it’s my job to figure it out. I’m good at making sure the bills get paid, but I’m not good at saying, “No, we can’t afford that right now.” New running shoes? Sure. Extra baby car seat? Well, we NEED two. Help! Any good advice out there?

Two Things I Love and One That Makes Me Sad

I love watching my daughter when she doesn’t see me. Yesterday, I was folding clothes in the laundry room, and I could peer around the corner and watch her eat her dinner. Expect she wasn’t eating. She was methodically moving all the veggies from one end of the highchair tray to the other, and moving the mac and cheese in the opposite direction, one piece at a time, until both food groups had switched positions in front of her. Apparently, in her universe, vegetables belong on the right and starches go on the left. Then she started dropping stuff on the floor for the dog to eat. One pea for her, one pea for Rufus. One noodle for her, one for Rufus. I could have stood there all day.

I also love laundry. I love clean laundry, I love doing laundry. I love the start and finish of it. I love putting dishes in the dishwasher, pulling them out all clean, and putting them away. I love tidying up the floor at night before going to bed, so that it won’t be messy when I wake up first thing in the morning. I have a good friend who is a neat-nick like me, but he’s also got an OCD. I’m not compulsive (although my husband, perhaps the messiest person to walk the face of the earth, might disagree). It’s just nice to be able to start and finish something, to see the results of my labor. So much of it seems to go down a black hole. But there is always, ALWAYS laundry waiting.

I’m sad to find out this morning that the Blue Moon Bakery in Asheville has closed. I taught a class there every Sunday morning for at least five years now. We called the “Coffee Class.” Folks would walk over from church, get a cup of coffee and some yummy baked goodie, and we’d read an article and talk about life. Isn’t that what a good coffee shop/bakery should be all about? They didn’t ask me first if they could close. Now what am I supposed to do?

Mommy Moment

Totally had one today. Fell apart on the day care worker in my daughter’s classroom because she wouldn’t let me leave a white noise machine to help my one year old nap. This is her second week in child care, and the transition has not been easy on either of us. I come home tired, cranky, and needy with a tired, cranky, needy child. The sweet, content, bubbly baby of my dreams seems to be gone for the moment. Well, that’s not exactly true, but standing there, pulling up on the coffee table and mashing raisins into it is now a child with demands of a mommy who feels she has less to give. I think my tears were partly about being a mother who knows exactly what her child needs (a two-hour nap during the day), knowing full well that my choice to leave her in the center means that she won’t get one. That’s part of it. The other part is just this general growing awareness that seems to come into sharper focus each day—that it’s all about trade-offs, from here on out. I work more, baby sleeps less.

God-Talk

These days, I call my Mom all the time. I mean, all the damn time. We used to have a rule in my family that we would talk every Sunday at 2:00. The appointed hour for the weekly family conversation was scheduled at a time when the rates were at their lowest. But cell phones and motherhood have become the means and the desire for me to connect regularly with the one who bore ME into the world. A friend of mine has suggested to me more than once that you truly understand how much your parents love you once you have children. All I know is that it feels like I’m falling down this bottomless pit. It is simultaneously the most wonderful and frightening experience of my life, and I want to talk to my Mom about it, because I know she knows.

Just last week I was in the car, and I did what I often do when I’m driving around town. I pressed “8” on my cell phone, which then speed-dialed my mother’s cell. As her phone was ringing, I had a flash of insight. Now that I write about this moment, it sounds kind of goofy, but it truly convicted me at the time. The thought was this: I bet God wishes that I’d want to talk to God like I want to talk to my Mom. I know, I know, it’s a bit dumb. But the truth is I’m pretty terrible at prayer. And I’m supposed to be a “professional.” I’m great when I’m praying with others and for others, but when it’s just me and God, I find it very hard. Yet, at that moment of insight, I could compare my impulse to talk to my mother and the impulse that I wished I felt to talk to God, and realize that they should be relatively the same. The longing for connection is not just with anyone, but with the one who made me.

Some have said that God creates in us a God-shaped hole that only God can fill. We can try and stuff it with all kinds of things, but ultimate satisfaction comes with filling that space with a relationship with God. I think that part of my problem is that I love relationships. If this hole actually exists, then it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that the gift of relationships in my life is not something of an expression of God’s love for me. But being in relationship is not the same thing as being in prayer, and prayer doesn’t become optional because you find that the people in your life ultimately satisfy many of the same desires that prayer would.

And then there is the silence. The times when I have found a genuinely prayerful moment are the times when I have centered myself and shut up my inner voice. I don’t know what else to say except that there is a reason why they call it a discipline. The silence is hard to get to, but when you do, it is extraordinary. In those rare moments of holy silence, I am overcome by God’s genuine longing for me. Me. The whole shebang. If my mother loves me and wants every juicy parenting experience I have to share, then God wants it all, including my realization that it is all so very frail. If prayer forces me to admit that I’m not in control of the free-fall, then no wonder I don’t want to go there. But I am not in control. That is the truth, plain and simple. And who better than God to talk to about it?

Homebound

On Sunday afternoons I frequently take communion to homebound members of my church. I find these services consistently moving—three or four of us gathered around nothing more than a cup of grape juice and a slice of bread. I can see in the faces of those I’m serving a look of recognition; they see before them the very things that have nurtured them on their faith journeys. I guess the look is one of both recognition and relief, and hunger, too, I suppose. If faith is a journey then communion is the rest stop along the way. Most of these folks are getting near the end, and they know it. Talk about Jesus’ death and resurrection can often lead to talk of your own. Folks want to talk about their own stories in relationship to his. It’s the only way they can make their suffering make sense. The brokenness symbolized in the elements points to the promise of wholeness, and when you know that your body or your mind isn’t going to be made whole again by medicine or the healing process, then you need another narrative.

One of the parishioners I visited last Sunday has declined so much since the last time I saw him. He used to lean forward in his chair and give me a hug when I walked in the room. On this day he hardly moved. His ankles looked painfully swollen, and he made very little conversation. His condition broke my heart. Sometimes I think I see too much, and it skews my perspective. I spend so much time with the elderly and the sick that I’m becoming afraid of getting old. This problem of overexposure runs in my family. My father, a physician who has treated cancer patients for almost forty years, did an internship a an inner city hospital, where they brought all the drug addicts and shooting victims from downtown. Even though he eventually practiced medicine in a small town, this inner city setting was a backdrop for my childhood in many ways, simply because I believe he saw every worst case scenario imaginable and spent my rearing years trying to protect my sisters and me from them. My youngest sister worked for a couple of years as a Child Life Specialist in another hospital. She saw so many children with head injuries that she, to this day, thinks kids ought to wear helmets all the time until they turn five.

I’ve got plenty of experience figuring out what there is to be afraid of. Death ranks right up there at the top. I heard someone say on the radio just a few days ago, “Heaven is my home, but I’m just not homesick yet.” There is very little about the condition of these folks that I can relate to, and plenty I’d like to run away from. Yet there is something about gathering around the communion elements with someone who is dying that feels nothing like the ominous approach of death. The only thing I can compare it too is traveling to Ireland on my sabbatical and visiting some of the holy sites of the ancient Celtic church. Places like Iona and Innish Mor. Liminal places. Thin places. Places of pilgrimage where those who longed to know God more deeply would travel. Places where it is believed that the realm of God comes close, and that by being there, you could be in both places at once. In these moments of communion I find, if I’m honest, that I’m incredibly hungry, and maybe even a little homesick, and I realize what a gift and a privilege it is to be there.

Emotional Justice

Well, here I go, diving head first into the world of blogging. It's a school night for me--Saturday night. My husband rented Troy and has been giving me the blow by blow (literally) from the living room as I work to set this up. I can't stand to watch all that fighting, but it seems to be cathartic for him, so I let it go. Last night we tried to watch Spanglish, but we both fell asleep on the couch. Not too long ago, I listened to an story on This American Life about a conference held specifically for romance novelists, and one of the interviewees mentioned the importance of emtional justice in the world of romance writing. A good romamce doesn't work if there is no emtional justice, the coming together after the pulling apart. I like emotional justice. It's trustworthy. You might stress a little, but you don't have to worry about who is going to die in the end. Give me a little interpersonal tension and a happy ending, some popcorn and a coke, and I'm more than happy to suspend my reality for an hour or two.