wide-eyed and laughing

I made croutons!

2008-07-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

All by myself! Without a recipe!

I was turning the bean salad I made for the 4th into a soup for dinner. (Another talent I'm developing and excited about - turning leftovers of one meal into a totally different meal.) The salad recipe mentioned the idea of soup, served with croutons. I thought, "hmm. I do not have croutons. But hey! I have a quarter loaf of slightly stale baguette. If sliced baguette baked at 400 or so makes crostini, I bet I could make this into croutons."

And I could! I just cubed it up, laid them out on a pan, drizzled them with a tiny bit of olive oil, sprinkled them with salt and a little Italian herb mix, and popped them in the oven.

Then I tasted the soup, decided it was still a little bland, and seasoned it excellently. The soup and the croutons were both awesome.

As a bonus, it was really nutritious - beans, fresh tomatoes and herbs, not too much salt, good bread, just a little olive oil - and I wouldn't have noticed that it was healthy if I hadn't cooked it myself. Which I did!

I feel like I'm finally becoming the person I've always wanted to be, but didn't know how.

Must be summer

2008-06-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

I ate well-balanced meals all day, including cooking a new recipe. These meals involved considerable fresh produce. I had time both to ponder and to enjoy them. Dessert hinged on introducing a campfire favorite to my house-friend. Surely, it must be summer.

As I am drastically out of practice on this thing, I will now list for you what I ate today. I promise I'll try to do better on the next post. For now, my day of healthy, well-balanced deliciousness:

Breakfast - Fake bacon and decaf cappuccino
Lunch - Hummus, pita, and a Jerusalem falafel sandwich
Dinner - Asparagus with fried eggs and cheese, and a side of tomato slices
Dessert - Pear boats!

For those who haven't been to Girl Scout camp in a while, fruit boats involve half a pear/apple/canned peach, or a whole banana, stuffed with chocolate chips and other goodness (tonight featured marshmallow pieces, peanuts, and raisins), wrapped in foil, and stuck in the hot embers. Or, in the magical world of indoor cooking, a hot oven. Then when the foil starts to puff or scorch - or, indoors, when you smell caramelized pear juice dripping - you take them out, and if you're lucky, as we were tonight, you have soft hot fruit with melty goodness on it. (And peanuts, if you're us. The peanuts don't really melt.)

Woe to you who are preaching now...

2008-02-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

Perhaps that's not really consistent with the biblical Beatitudes. It feels right, though. I've just discovered that all the concrete, juicy parts of my sermon for Sunday are actually an incipient sermon on Matthew 27:25. Which would be fine, except that I'm preaching on Matthew 4.

This would also be less frustrating if I hadn't had to spend this morning recreating the work I did on it yesterday morning that somehow didn't save; or if I weren't in class 1-9 today and 9-3 tomorrow; or if I had any real idea where the other part of the sermon is going; or if it weren't my last sermon (last day, in fact) with this conregation; or if there weren't so damn much going on in my life that isn't currently preachable material.

I suppose it's good for me to stretch, but I'm usually a big believer in the "whatever you're feeling, just dance it" school of sermon writing. It's hard to figure out what I feel strongly enough about to preach when everything at the top of my mind I can't say in this sermon. (Some other sermon, someday, but not this one.)

In other news, I'm not sure how much I'm really back from hiatus yet (see "not currently preachable" above). I really need to be focusing all my writing energy on my thesis (draft due March 1; 2 pages down, 48 pages to go), but I have at minimum gender balance awards for both J-term and spring semester to post, so I'll try to pop in again soon.

Sometimes I relapse...

2007-11-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

I am, in general, opposed to much of the Romantic movement. I love nature as much as the next person, but I love it as a wild thing to be cared for but not trusted. Nature can be as brutal as her creatures. But sometimes I relapse into a romantic attitude toward simple things.

My roommates are both gone for Thanksgiving, so I have the house to myself. This meant I got to get up late, watch the first half of the Ohio State-Michigan game in my pajamas, shower on my own schedule, and come back and watch the Buckeyes win. Now I'm curled up on the futon in long underwear and my Ohio State fleece vest, reading Krister Stendahl and Nils Dahl while my laundry runs downstairs, with the Penn State-Michigan State game in the background and a cup of tea at my elbow. And I'm actually excited about spending the day reading for my thesis, something that hasn't happened all fall. Maybe I'll even make some soup tonight - I'm pretty sure we've got stock, potatoes, carrots, celery, and onions at least. Maybe there's even some barley around.

It's a very cozy way to spend a very November day.

Burning question

2007-11-06T12:33:00.000-08:00

For several years now, I've remembered one snippet from a children's/YA novel I once read. I have not, in all those years, been able to remember what novel it comes from. I suspect it was a fairly well-known one. It's now begun to bother me enough to ask - do any of you recognize this conversation?

What I know: It comes near the end of the book. Elizabeth is a young girl - white, I think. Charles is a young boy, her friend - black, I'm pretty sure, and the son or nephew or something of Elizabeth's family's maid/housekeeper/cook, whose name I can't remember. Elizabeth is the narrator.

"Can we have some hot tea with lemon and honey?" I asked.
[Housekeeper] looked at me. "You got a sore throat, Elizabeth?"
"No," I lied. "I just thought Charles might like some. Would you, Charles?"

Shortly after this, Elizabeth sneaks out of the house, I think to look for someone, and they find her passed out in the woods with a high fever. I sort of think the person she was looking for might be dead, but I'm not sure.

Sound familiar to anyone?

"Grandmothers should never be allowed to shop alone"

2007-11-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

My roommate and I were just talking about when our various families begin preparing for Christmas, and what that means to them, and noting that both of us have grandmothers who bought our Christmas presents by our birthdays (both in early October). I mentioned that my mother's mother always wanted my Christmas list before I'd opened my birthday presents to find out what I still wanted, something I always found annoying. She eventually started shopping on her own, which is usually dangerous. My roommate agreed, and said "Grandmother should never be allowed to shop alone."

My father's mother, on the other hand, lost her shopping privileges years ago. The year I was eleven, my Christmas presents from her included two white turtlenecks - one printed with stars, the other printed with hearts. I wasn't mortified, since my parents weren't making me wear them, but I was disappointed. The next year, my parents started giving her lists of things she could buy from catalogs. She fed most of my American Girls Collection obsession for several birthdays and Christmases after that, before my parents started actually shopping for her, and in recent years wrapping for her too. There was simply no reason for her still to be shopping independently for anything. We were all happier with my parents doing the shopping. Grandmothers should indeed never be allowed to shop alone, at least not mine.

Except that my father's mother also died on Tuesday afternoon, and right now I'd give anything to get a white turtleneck with turquoise and magenta hearts for Christmas this year - if it meant she were there to watch me open it.

Poem

2007-10-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

Hugo Schwyzer regularly posts short poems, which I sometimes read and sometimes skip - today's caught me rather deeply, so I'm sharing it here.

Termination for Cause

Sir,
I had thought the terms of our agreement
Were quite clear.
You were to provide me length of days,
Model children by a docile wife, support for same;
Keep far away all disaster man-made
Or act of your own.
And a death if not quite painless
At least sudden, without humiliation.
I in turn would confess You Creator
Of all things seen and unseen, offering customary
Praise and adoration.
Regarding line four above
Your performance has been marginal at best,
And I have now confirmation
From two physicians
Of what I must deem willful disregard
As to length of days and dying.
I therefore recognize no further obligation whatsoever
To provide the aforesaid praise, etc.
Or, indeed, to acknowledge Your existence.
Any further communication should be directed
To my counsel,
Who assures me that he knows You
from of old.

Time...

2007-10-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

*I've written a couple of pages today, and the paper's not due till Sunday. Maybe it's indulgent, but I don't feel the need to write any more tonight, especially since I've pretty much saved my weekend for writing it. (Though I should remember that I don't really have much time on Sundays for schoolwork, between possibly-double church and Top Model.)

*I have class tomorrow, but no reading for it; I have class Monday, but I've done the reading, because it's also for the paper.

*I finished season 5 of Buffy today and don't have season 6 yet. (Besides, I kind of want to sit with the end of season 5 a little.)

*I don't need to do my household chores until the weekend.

*I finished a (short YA) novel today while procrastinating on the paper. This means I've now read through most of the unfamiliar YA novels I've stumbled on in the house.

*I already made and ate a real dinner tonight (pierogies with sausage, onion, and peas).

*I've read blogs - and now I've even blogged.

*I've answered my emails.

*My roommates aren't home, and will likely go to bed or homework when they do get home.

Which leaves me with, um, time to myself. Should I start watching Angel? Should I wander around in search of a new book? (Note to self: need new fiction from public library.) Should I pick up my guitar? My knitting? Scrapbooking? I suppose I could do one of the things that always needs doing: extra housecleaning, thesis research, laundry, raking leaves (ok, maybe not in the dark, but it does need doing an awful lot). It's so rare, though, that I have this kind of time to myself, and I really only have an hour or two before it begins to be bedtime. Maybe I'll pour myself a glass of something and wander around the house until I see something interesting....

Friday Five: Food

2007-10-19T20:02:00.000-07:00

1. If you were a food, what would you be?
Tater tot. Small, delicious, potato, goes well with anything...

2. What is one of the most memorable meals you ever had? And where?
There are a few good options - Easter dinner at Green Zebra, dorm-cooked Thanksgiving in Germany, my last night of resident camp when I was nine - but I think the most memorable meal might be one I had in Paris. My traveling buddy and I wanted to have one dinner in a nice French restaurant while we were there, so we stopped into a small place - I don't remember where. Neither of us spoke French, so we made good guesses at the menu, and since our best guess was that there was probably no veggie entree, I got salmon. I have eaten a fair amount of salmon, but only that once did it melt in my mouth. Everything melted in our mouths that night - the salmon, the mashed white substance that I think might have been cauliflower, the chocolate mousse cake - everything. It was amazing.

3. What is your favorite comfort food from childhood?
Hmm. Most of the foods I grew up on I don't eat any more - chicken soup, roast beef and mashed potatoes, beef stew, even Ramen - but I'm still a big fan of Kraft mac & cheese. When I lived in Germany, I ended up begging my parents for Ramen noodles and Kraft mac & cheese for my birthday, I missed it so much. The other students in my dorm were mystified by this neon orange food product I was making, but I didn't care.

4. When going to a church potluck, what one recipe from your kitchen is sure to be a hit?
Since I never know what other food will be there, I always take something that can be my entree if necessary - usually either Alaqua Pasta (linguine with tomato and fresh mozzarella) or black bean/corn/avocado/tomato salad. Either one is always popular - and both are good at just about any temperature, which is handy for a potluck.

5. What’s the strangest thing you ever willingly ate?
Hmm. I ate a number of things while I was in Japan that I'm not sure I could identify, but squid might have been the strangest. Though others would tell me that tempeh and seitan are stranger than squid, I guess.

Bonus question: What’s your favorite drink to order when looking forward to a great meal? Usually a good red wine - I'm a big fan of Grenaches right now. If it's a great pub meal, though, then a good ale (Eliot Ness, Fat Tire, something like that).

Suggestions Welcome

2007-10-18T20:25:00.000-07:00

So I was driving from Cleveland to Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and it's a fairly long drive, so I decided to listen to my entire Dar Williams discography in chronological order. So I did that, and after 5.5 hours of Dar, I decided I wanted something with men's voices instead of women's voices. So I went rifling through my CDs - all of which were in the car with me - and I couldn't find anything. I'd listened to one Jars of Clay album and both my U2 albums on the way to Cleveland. I had a lot of Beatles and some Simon and Garfunkel, but I was in the mood for something more recent than that. I have one CD with some One of the Girls and some Great Big Sea, but I'd listened to that recently too....

I'd known for a long time that I listen to a lot of women's music, but I didn't realize how few CDs by men I had. So I'm on a mission to start evening out that ratio a little. I went through my iTunes, and I realized that about a quarter of my iTunes library is actually music by men, and that doesn't count all the musical theater stuff I have that's sung by men. It's just not on CDs - partly because a lot of it is downloaded singles, rather than albums. So I'm going to burn myself some of that stuff before I drive home next time, and/or get a working iTrip.

Still, I've been looking for some new music anyway, so I'm open to suggestions. I already wanted to get more U2, so that's covered, but what else should I be listening to? I tend to listen to a lot of women singer-songwriters, but I don't always respond as well to men in that genre. I'm probably more interested in pop/rock/alternative kinds of things - I like U2, I used to like BNL and Blink182 a lot in the 90s, I like Stephen Kellogg, I like both Guster and John Mayer, to the dismay of some of their fans. I'm not a big fan of Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp. Anyway, I'm listening more to the radio for ideas too (especially since I'm also interested in getting more current pop music into my collection), but I'd welcome suggestions from my readership.

As promised

2007-10-15T18:17:00.001-07:00

I preached yesterday at Reconciler - my first time in the pulpit (ok, at the crossing) there. I did it without notes, but I think this text is pretty close to what I actually said yesterday.

***************************************

I’ve had a lot of weird dreams recently. I had a dream about a snout coming out of the ground. I had a dream that I got married, but my mother was wasn’t around to remind me what to do, so I ended up wearing a t-shirt and cut-offs to the reception. And I had one where I was fighting with a close friend, and the fight got bigger and bigger, worse than any fight I’ve ever had with any friend before, and we were screaming and yelling, and then I picked up a ceramic mug and I hurled it at my friend’s head, and it hit him, and the mug broke.
I woke up then, before I could tell how badly the mug had hurt him, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It scared me, a lot. I don’t like to think that there’s a part of me that’s capable of that, that would ever do such a thing - to anyone, let alone to a friend. But I also know that part of me is there, that part that almost craves violence, that threatens to erupt in an angry outburst. It’s always been there, and I’ve spent a fair amount of energy training it to stay back, and also trying to appear to the world as though that part doesn’t exist.
I’ve done a pretty good job at that. Most people think of me, maybe not as a gentle person exactly, but not as a violent one or even an angry one either - at least I think not. And that’s fair, at some level, because I’m really not actually prone to violent outbursts either. I may have dreamed that I threw a mug at someone’s head, but I haven’t actually done it. And mostly, I can be pretty satisfied with giving the impression that that kind of rage isn’t hiding in there.
And then I hear a passage like this one from 2 Timothy. “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” Holy... Really? I can pull the wool over the eyes of the people around me, even over my own eyes a lot of the time. But I can’t trick God. God knows better. God knows my need to be ashamed.
And I know it. Just like I’ve always known that part of me is inclined to uncontrollable anger. I’ve always known that it’s just waiting to erupt. I’ve always been scared of it. And so I’ve always known that need to be ashamed. And knowing all that as I do, I’m very aware of how limited I am in my ability to “rightly explain the word of truth.” And so I wonder - am I really the one who should be explaining the word of truth? It seems like there’s just so much shame standing between me and it.
Except that somehow that’s not quite the end of this story. Because another funny thing happened this week. Someone pointed out to me that that part that could get uncontrollably angry isn’t just a darkness in me. It comes from my darkness, absolutely, and it’s that shadow side that I saw in my dream. But that uncontrollable anger comes from a fire deep within me. And that fire is the source not only of frightening rage, but of power and strength. It’s the fire that allows me, even spurs me, to be rightly angry when things are just really messed up. It’s the fire that made me speak out and then eventually leave the Intervarsity group in college because I couldn’t stand the way they treated my queer friends. It’s the fire that makes me stand up to people at school when I think they’re abusing their power. It’s the fire that lets me speak with assurance when I’m convinced of the truth of something.
And as I realized this, I heard the passage from 2 Timothy echoing in my head again: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” Hunh. If the uncontrollable anger that makes me ashamed before God comes from the same fire that I just said lets me speak with assurance when I’m convinced of the truth of something…. Maybe I’m not incapable of rightly explaining the word of truth after all. Maybe rightly explaining the word of truth doesn’t mean I’m expected to have it all together - or even to have this angry piece of me completely pinned down. Maybe it means doing my best to make sure that that fire is being fed by the Holy Spirit and not the fires of selfishness or of self-hatred, and then letting that fire fuel my speech and my work. Maybe that's how I can present myself as a worker who has no need to be ashamed.
I suspect I’m not the only one who’s known this kind of anger and darkness. I know I’m not the only one who has a fire burning inside like that – I’ve seen it in a lot of you already. I’ve seen it in the way Jeremy talks about international debt and Jubilee. I’ve seen it in the way Kate talks about Jesus. I’ve seen it a lot here. And maybe your fires don’t threaten to burn out of control. Maybe you don’t feel like you need to keep that fire screened in all the time. Or maybe you do. I don’t know.
What I know is this: my dream this week made me wonder whether I was safe to touch - whether I was endangering those around me just by being near them, by being in relationship with them. I wondered whether I ought to pull myself back, separate myself more from the world, in order not to catch my neighbors on fire just by standing next to them. But then I began to wonder also, even if I learned to keep that fire totally contained, or to put it out altogether – would that just change the problem? We need more people to stand up for the voiceless more often, more people to question power, more people to speak words of comfort with assurance more often – not less. We do have to face the possibility that by touching things with that kind of heat, we may set them on fire. But if we can find ways to tend those fires carefully, to let them be fueled by the Holy Spirit – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Hesitation #943

2007-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

One of the multiple reasons I'm not totally sold on an academic future.

Once more into the fray

2007-10-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

I've decided that the thesis proposal is a very odd sort of document. I'm supposed to tell my readers everything I don't yet know about my research (having not yet done said research), and what I intend to conclude (still having not yet done the research), including why I want to do the research (that I'm supposed to predict the results of) and how I intend to go about it.

I do in fact understand why the proposal is a useful thing for both student and committee. It's just also an odd thing.

And, to be fair, it's a thing I just don't really feel like writing right now. Which is of course why I'm actually blogging. I mean, yeah, I could be working on Sunday's sermon or reading for tomorrow's class to procrastinate, but I'm not. I'm blogging and talking to Froggy online.

Observations on my brother's wedding photos

2007-10-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

*Well, first, of course: my baby brother's married!

*I'm short. I knew this, of course, but in the pictures of the ceremony you can barely see me over my sister-in-law, and I'm two steps up.

*There are many, many women in my brother's past who are very sad that he is now married.

*My brother was so not expecting an Ohio State garter. It was very funny, even if I don't much like garters.

*There were hula hoops. I love that there were hula hoops. I love even more that my mother won the hula hoop contest, and I wish very much that I could link you all to the picture of my mother hula hooping.

*There are some very sweet pictures of my father with Heidi. It makes me very happy to see her look happy in the pictures of him kissing her cheek and welcoming her to the family.

*The pictures of my brother and mother, on the other hand, just make me want to cry. In a good, sweet, my-baby-brother's-all-grown-up-but-he-still-loves-his-mother kind of way.

*There were a whole lot of people in the Allegheny picture. Holy cow, do they still have a lot of friends from college. I don't think I could have invited that many college friends when I was in college.

*I'm still bummed that I didn't get to dance with my brother at all that night, being unwilling to stand in line and pay two bucks to take a shot before dancing with my little brother.

*There are very few pictures of family, which is sad. Almost all the reception pictures are of the college group.

Bit thickheaded, here

2007-09-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

So, in Stephen Schwarz's Children of Eden, the snake sings a song called "In Pursuit of Excellence" in which it tries to convince Eve that she ought to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. I've been listening to this music for almost ten years now, and I just now noticed that the snake is plural in this song. That is, I'd noticed that the show's creators have in mind that multiple people will form the snake, with multiple voices, and in that sense I noticed that the snake is sort of plural. But when I've done/seen the show, it's only been played by one person, so maybe I didn't think about it as much?

Dunno. But I'm listening to it now as I read an essay about Genesis 1-3, and I just noticed that in the show, God is very much singular - played by a single man, always called Father - and the snake is very much plural - enough so that it says "be in pursuit of excellence, like us. Yet, in the Bible, God moves back and forth between singular and plural in these chapters, where the serpent is never referred to as anything but singular.

I'm inclined to think still that the snake is plural because it's a good stage device to use multiple people, and with multiple voices it makes certain sense for those voices to say "us." But now I'm wondering whether Schwarz (or someone involved in the show) reversed that plural with any intention....

Have I mentioned that I like having a kitchen?

2007-09-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

I do. I like it that an hour before my housemate has class, we can say "Hunh. What do you want for dinner?" and she can commission me to do something with couscous and asparagus, and I can go throw together whatever we have* and make a delicious dinner in time for her to eat before class.

Someday, our kitchen will have in it a working oven, and then we will be happier still - but there's a lot you can do with a range. Yay cooking.

*Tonight: asparagus and tomato sauteed lightly with onion, garlic, basil, and oregano, and topped with toasted pine nuts, over a bed of whole wheat couscous.

Fall Semester Gender Balance Award

2007-09-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

After the rush of the summer, and a break from both blogging and school, I'd nearly forgotten one very important ritual for the beginning of the term: our Gender Balance Award. Luckily, today one of my professors said to me "I thought of you when I made the syllabus. I didn't want to be on your list again."

So here, gentle readers (and forceful ones), is this term's breakdown, now that I've finally figured out what classes I'm taking.

Anglican Polity: Five books. The Constitution & Canons of the Episcopal Church don't really have an author, per se, but I'm comfortable claiming that the majority of deputies and bishops voting on said laws are men. Certainly those who developed the originals were men. As it happens, the other four books are all by men as well. (One is a compilation, but it's edited by men and I don't think we're reading anything by a woman.) Rating: Unacceptable.

Pentateuch: Four books. One by a man, one by a woman, one by a man and a woman, and one by two men. Rating: Good. Not totally in balance, but a little better than just acceptable. (It's not part of this particular award, but bonus points for racial-ethnic balance as well as gender balance on this syllabus.)

Relevance of Judaism in Modern Times: Um. We don't actually have books for this class. (ducks) But it's a really good class, I swear.

Thesis: Um, it's my thesis. It doesn't really have a syllabus. Neither does it have books, yet, though that will change. But it's not really a contender.

If you've been paying any sort of attention at all, you'll know that Pentateuch is the clear winner of this semester's Gender Balance Award! Congratulations, Frank!

Things I Never Would Have Believed #49, 854

2007-09-09T19:13:00.000-07:00

I never, never would have thought I'd be relieved to hear that Madeleine L'Engle had died. But when my mother called tonight with That Voice, and said "Honey, I'm not sure if you've heard yet, but..." I was expecting way worse. I was expecting to hear that someone younger, healthier, and more immediately and physically a part of my day-to-day life had died.

Two hours later, though, I'm deeply sad. (I know this is a couple days old for many people; I've been offline a lot.) I knew she'd had health issues for the last five years, and that the chances were slim of her ever finishing her (rumored) novel about what happens to Meg Murry after her kids have grown. Still, there's something very final about death, even with resurrection to lean back on. And despite my initial reaction that she wasn't a part of my day-to-day life, she's had more of an impact on me than most people who I've seen more of.

I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was 8, because she was coming to preach at our church. I don't remember a whole lot, but I do remember certain pieces of both the sermon and the adult forum that I skipped Sunday School to hear. I don't think I remember any other sermons until I get to about age 15 or so. I was enraptured enough with both her presence and her writing that I read the whole rest of the Time Trilogy right off, and kept reading her stuff as I could find it. There's now very little of her work I haven't read, though there's still a little left. It's impacted my writing, my theology, everything. In fact, it's quite possible that A Swiftly Tilting Planet may have saved my life at one point in college.

When I moved to Germany for a year, there were five books I decided I couldn't live without: the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Certain Women, and Little Women. Four of those were (at least in part) because of Madeleine L'Engle - despite excellent experiences in the rest of the church, my attachment to the Bible and the daily office come largely from her work.

I'm not sure what to do with this; not sure how to say thank you and good-bye to this incredible woman. I'll say compline tonight, and go to morning prayer tomorrow, and that will be a start, and I'll probably start rereading a lot of her stuff in the coming days and weeks, but all that only does so much.

Yes, I'm preaching again

2007-08-30T19:14:00.000-07:00

Or trying to. I'm supposed to preach at my brother's wedding on Sunday, and I'm having a hard time coming up with things to say about wedded bliss... or marriage in general, really. So here:

You Are a Purple Crayon

Your world is colored in dreamy, divine, and classy colors.
You hold yourself to a sky high standard, and you are always graceful.
People envy, idolize, and copy you without realizing it. You are an icon for those who know you.
And while it is hard to be a perfectionist, rest assured it's paying off!

Your color wheel opposite is yellow. While yellow people may be wise, they lack the manners and class needed to impress you.

What Color Crayon Are You?

Um. Hi.

2007-08-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have no real excuse for not blogging. I've had time for other things, like West Wing and Buffy. And dinners! Yay cooking. And setting up a Facebook account, as promised. But I'm out of the habit, and haven't had much to say. So, um, hi. I'm doing really exciting things like getting a room ready to paint and cooking and looking for things in boxes. Oh, and I have two wedding sermons to write soon. So I'm not really sure how much I'll be around at all. I'm not really in the mood, and I'm not really doing much to speak of. Maybe I'll be around more again when classes start and I have more need to procrastinate.

Spiderman!

2007-08-13T21:23:00.001-07:00

You scored as The Amazing Spider-Man, After being bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker was transformed from a nerdy high school student into New York's greatest hero. Peter enjoys the thrill of being a super hero, but he struggles with the burdens of leading a double life. He hopes someday to win the heart of his true love Mary Jane, the woman he's loved since before he even liked girls. Right now, he just wants to make it through college and pay his bills.

The Amazing Spider-Man

83%

Captain Jack Sparrow

58%

William Wallace

58%

Batman, the Dark Knight

58%

Neo, the "One"

54%

The Terminator

46%

Maximus

46%

Lara Croft

42%

Indiana Jones

38%

El Zorro

38%

James Bond, Agent 007

38%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
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Guess what I have?

2007-08-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

A kitchen!

In celebration of which, I'm having dinner guests as often as possible. Tonight's menu: spaghetti with asparagus, tomato, and lemon. Next time we'll add a little more seasoning, but there will be a next time. 'Twas good.

We now return to our regularly scheduled cleaning.

Made my parents cry...

2007-08-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

Didn't mean to, of course. But here's the sermon I preached this morning that did it. Turns out, it's hard to keep preaching a difficult sermon when you can see your parents crying at it, but somehow I managed to preach this sermon three times this morning. Now, I'm going to bed.

****************************

I remember the first time I heard the Indigo Girls’ music. It was a Tuesday night when I was 11 years old, and I was sitting around a campfire at Girl Scout Camp listening to one of our counselors sing songs with her guitar. And she started this one:

I’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It’s only life, after all

And I was hooked. Partly because I thought that counselor was about the coolest person ever, partly because I liked the song itself. We sang that song every night that week during our unit campfire, and when it came time to go home, I determined to find the song and buy the cassette. I had no idea then that the song, “Closer to Fine,” was the definitive Indigo Girls song, nor did I know what a major role the Indigo Girls’ music would play in my life over the next fifteen years.

And I also didn’t know, that week at camp, that as I was sitting around a campfire learning that song, that same night my grandfather was dying of a heart attack. I didn’t know that he had died until my parents came and picked me up from camp on Friday.

I didn’t have much experience with death at age 11. No one in my family had died within my memory, and I’d never been to a funeral. It was hard for me to wrap my head around my grandfather’s death, hard for me to know how to let go. But I remember standing upstairs with my family and Nick White,* before the funeral began, and I remember Nick saying to us that this service was not to say goodbye, but to say thank you – but then acknowledging, “Some thank-yous are harder to say than others.” I knew what he said was true, but it didn’t help me feel any less sad about it. I missed my grandfather fiercely for a long time.

Of course, I’ve never had an easy time letting go. So it’s a little strange in a way to think that “Closer to Fine” became my greatest musical refuge through middle school, and remains deeply significant to me. Maybe I’m just thick-headed, but you wouldn’t know to look at me that I’ve been listening intently to the message of “it’s only life, after all” for fifteen years. But while I’ll be the first to admit that I still tend to hold onto life with a vice grip, I think it’s made some inroads. And I think there’s something to this message.

Now, maybe this seems like the wrong week to suggest that we need to hold life lightly. 5 people have been confirmed dead so far, with more missing, after Wednesday’s bridge collapse in Minnesota. And while it doesn’t take the rug out from under us the same way that the tragedies of Katrina or September 11 did, it’s still shaken us. Its very ordinariness calls to our attention how fragile and temporary are the things we take for granted – from bridges to homes to our very lives. And while five is not a particularly high body count, each of those five people still had friends and family and acquaintances who must now mourn that death.

So yeah, maybe it’s not the best week for this conversation. But when is it ever the best week? We ought to talk about these things on bright sunny days, when there’s not a cloud of trouble in sight and we can talk dispassionately, prepare ourselves, think objectively about life. But those days are so few that it seems a shame to darken them with such topics.

And even if best weeks came around, or came around more often, I think today’s Gospel warns us that we can’t afford to wait for those best weeks. If we wait until we’ve planned and scraped and taken care of everything else on our to-do lists, we will find that we have run out of time. Today, now, we must begin to loosen our grasp on life.

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. Several years after the Indigo Girls released “Closer to Fine,” Indigo Girl Amy Ray said in an interview that when she first heard the song, the line "it's only life, after all" struck her as being incredibly blasé about something that she felt was so sacred. It took her awhile to see the truth of that line in the context of the rest of the song, but in stepping back and listening to the whole, eventually she learned to sing that line along with her bandmate. I think that’s what we need to do with this idea. It’s not that life is not sacred. I think if we read the rest of the Gospels, the rest of the Bible, that’s clear. Life is incredibly sacred. But precisely because it is so sacred, we need to treat it with respect by holding it lightly. There’s a Madeleine L’Engle character who says “The only way to deal with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

I hold my friends’ lives pretty tightly. But if I have to be willing to die myself in order to be fully Christ’s, then I also have to be willing to trust that even the death of those I love most will not separate me from the love of God – or, perhaps harder, that it will not ultimately separate me from the love of those people. I have to learn to trust that I can indeed hold life lightly – others’ as well as my own – because this life is not our last chance. Our earthly life is not all there is to life.

We know that our earthly relationships can draw us either closer to or farther from God. Yet it never occurred to me until this year that even our healthy, loving, relationships might be among the possessions that can possess us – that when Jesus says “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” that might include people. Of course, we can never truly possess another human being, but we talk all the time as though we can – “Be mine” “He’s taken” “She belongs to him.” Indeed, the world around us often encourages us to tighten our grip on the people we care about, as though we could control either them or the relationship that way. I’m thinking, for instance, of the Eagles song that says

Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody’s going to emergency,
Somebody’s going to jail
You find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail

But hanging on tooth and nail won’t keep the person you love from going to emergency, or for that matter from going to jail. And it has some serious repercussions for the relationship. If you’re hanging on tooth and nail, it doesn’t leave much room for things like gentleness or perspective. It makes it difficult to step back and ask what’s best for either person; to savor the time spent together; in short, to spend that time loving each other. In other words, holding life too tightly not only gets between us and God, it gets between us and those we love.

And really, that seems like just a stupid waste of life. If anything, I’ve probably tried to hold onto my friends’ lives even tighter as an adult than I did at age 11. But earlier this year, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to let a seminary friend watch the video from when St. Paul’s Youth did Godspell the first time around. Some of you know that Emily, a friend of mine who played the Jesus character, has since died. I still miss her terribly. After we watched the last scene, where Jesus returns to his friends after they’ve carried his body offstage, I told my friend, “I just want her to walk back in for real.” And he looked at me and said “It may take an unfair amount of time. But she’s going to.” And for just a moment, by trusting the friend who was in front of me, I was able to loosen my grasp and trust God to hold onto life for me – not only mine but Emily’s and my grandfather’s as well.

*Previous rector.

Friday Five: Pilgrimage

2007-08-03T23:04:00.000-07:00

1. Have you ever been on a pilgrimage? (however you choose to define the term) Share a bit about it. If not, what's your reaction to the idea of pilgrimage?
Yes. In 2002, I spent Lent traveling around England, Wales, and the Scottish Highlands. I'd had a hard time finding anywhere to worship in Germany and being on pilgrimage in English-speaking countries with Anglican churches everywhere was really refreshing.

2. Share a place you've always wanted to visit on pilgrimage.
There are a few - Ireland, Russia - but always the Holy Land, ever since I can remember.

3. What would you make sure to pack in your suitcase or backpack to make the pilgrimage more meaningful? Or does "stuff" just distract from the experience?
I barely remember what clothes or books I took on pilgrimage - but my Bible, prayer book, journal, and camera were indispensible. I don't think my Bible and journal have ever gotten so much use as they did those five weeks.

4. If you could make a pilgrimage with someone (living, dead or fictional) as your guide, who would it be? (I'm about thisclose to saying "Besides Jesus." Yes, we all know he was indispensable to those chaps heading to Emmaus, but it's too easy an answer)

Like Jane, I can think of a few excellent companions, but for a guide? That's tough - partly because I so enjoyed being on pilgrimage without one.

5. Eventually the pilgrim must return home, but can you suggest any strategies for keeping that deep "mountaintop" perspective in the midst of everyday life?

Nope.

Must be preaching time again...

2007-08-03T21:54:00.000-07:00

... 'cause Spud's back online! That's right, folks, camp is almost over and I'm preaching at my home parish on Sunday, so I thought it was about time to get back to procrastinating. I mean, blogging. Blogger tells me I haven't posted since May 28, so here's a brief recap of the summer before I revive my RevGalBlogPals status with a Friday Five.

~Graduated from seminary. Have apparently mastered divinity.

~Got ordained to the diaconate.

~Trained staff

~Directed two core camps and two day camps (Sorry, don't have pictures of that yet. I forgot to bring my camera cable with me this summer.)

~Worked as nature specialist for a day camp that I didn't have to direct

We clean up the camp Monday and Tuesday, with an end-of-camp staff dinner Monday night. Before that I have to finish my sermon for Sunday and write staff evaluations. Oh, and my cousin's wedding shower is tomorrow. And my future sister-in-law's is next week. And I'm moving soon. But before I do that I need to organize and turn in some reflections and recommendations for next year's camps. So, I'm not quite out yet - but there's light at the end of the tunnel. If I can just manage to survive the next four days, I should be able to handle the next couple of weeks after that.