Fantasy Life

1. Move to island community a couple of hours and a ferryboat ride away.

2. Pastor small church there. Host occasional island retreats of a day or a few. Write.

3. Come into the city for two or three days a week to do part-time chaplaincy at Giant Famous Hospital and some spiritual direction, maybe teach a college class as an adjunct, see my friends and go to dinner or the orchestra or the art museum (not all in the same weeek!).

Needs met: Solitude. Quiet. Church. Migratory birds. Kayak. Intensity of hospital on a reduced-time basis. Just enough big city culture and companionship.

Gifts offered: Worship leadership, preaching, teaching, congregational and hospital pastoral care, spiritual direction, writing.

Questions: Is there even a church of any kind on one of those islands? Would GFH take me on as a part-time chaplain? Would anyone be interested in publishing my writing?

In between me and there: Summer Hebrew. One last year of seminary. One year CPE residency. Debt. The garage that's falling down.

Just some thoughts, inspired by today's Friday Five.

Avoidance

In the past month I have twice avoided people with whom I did not want to discuss our loss. Just pretended that I didn't see either of them.

Today, as I was having lunch with two friends, a dad I knew from our children's many mutual Montessori years ~ in fact, we served together on the board of the school for a lengthy period of time ~ walked up to our table to say hello. He did not know about my own switch two years ago from teaching to seminary, and so I assumed that he also did not know about any of the other recent events in our lives. When he asked about the kids, I sucked in some air and said, "I guess you don't know about what's happened; we lost Chicago Son to suicide last September."

He assured me that he did know and had, in fact, either spoken or written to me last fall. And I acknowledged that I have very little memory of those first months.

That was the second time, I think, that I have had to say it out loud.

I don't even have to go outdoors for the nearly another 48 hours. I'm really glad about that.

Ten Things . . .

over at Search the Sea.

Inching Forward

Church was all right. It was more than all right. For whatever reason, I felt able to handle whatever was lobbed my way for the couple of hours I was there, and very interested in the various conversations in which I was involved.

(I did notice one really interesting thing, though.

Church seemed so BUSY. The service itself was full of energy (Pentecost, after all) but afterward, in the hallways and at the coffee hour -- people are just so BUSY. So many rapid-fire, half-baked conversations; so many interruptions. I don't know whether it's my two years of developing something of a contemplative stance in spiritual direction training, or my two years of (on occasion, anyway) thoughtful assessment in an academic environment, or my nine months of cautious adaptation to pain ~ but church felt hurried and jagged and wound up. I suppose that's another reason I've stayed away ~ an intuitive sense that the pace is just wrong for me right now.

An acquaintance/friend gave me an exquisite prayer shawl that she had made for me and been carting around for months, hoping I would show up one day. It is a lovely, lovely gift ~ but she thrust the box into my arms and disappeared.)

And then late this afternoon, Gregarious Son and I made the two-hour round trip to City South of Here, to figure out where he is supposed to go for the LSAT in another week. One of the things I most appreciate about my two surviving children is their ability to talk openly about our lives as we find them now. At one point I commented on how glad I am that he is signed up for the LSAT ~ whether or not he ever goes to law school, it's a start.

And he said, "We're going to pull through this, Mom."

Steps Forward Steps Backward

Last night we went to a baby shower for the soon-to-be first grandchild of good friends. It was a lovely party -- all of our friends were there, the young couple was beaming, the food was spectacular, and the hosts have been working steadily on their yard for years and have completely transformed it.

We lasted about an hour. It's really, really hard -- everything smacked of middle-aged couples enjoying the fruits of 25 years of labor (no pun intended) -- beautiful home and gardens, children grown and producing their own, everyone our age relaxed and comfortable because the few small children toddling around were the responsibility of the next generation.

I had imagined that we might be planning a wedding in our family this summer, and instead I had to mail off a death certificate before we went to the party. I thought our hour-long drop-by was a pretty good effort, but I'm sure we'll hear about it eventually.

This morning I'm doing the reading in church. It will be the first time in a year that I have stood before a congregation. When the office administrator sent me the reading earlier this week, it was the dry bones passage from Ezekiel. I looked at it in astonishment and thought, "I can't read this." So I tried it out loud a couple of times and thought, again, I need to call and ask them to find someone else. And then I thought, No, I need to just do it. I need to just stand there and read a passage about bones coming to life. Even though they don't.

Then a second email came; new passage: the expected description of Pentecost from Acts. I tried that a couple of times. The list of geographical names makes it almost worse, I thought. But this one I can do. It's a celebratory Sunday for the conclusion of a major church project in which I have not participated, but I can survive that, too.

I feel, all the time, as if I am living two lives. It's like walking down the middle of a road, one foot coming down on each side of the center line. To the right is normal life, in which everything looks and functions as it always did, and no one has any idea that the view from the left is completely altered and the road feels like quicksand.

Or maybe some of them do, in a small way. I encountered a new hazard at the party last night: people we haven't seen since the funeral, or before. They greet me with that hangdog look, but they don't say anything. It would be so much easier if people would just shake hands and say "I was so sorry to hear about your son" or "I've been thinking about you ever since last summer."

I know it's hard to get it right. Do you say something or do you pretend nothing has happened? Are you risking a response in the form of a torrent of tears, or in the form of an offended silence?

I can't think of any other way to do this. I treat myself gently, but each next thing poses a major existential dilemma.

What I would really like is to move to a small cottage with a cat on a barrier island far, far away.

Mount Angel Abbey Revisited

Last fall, I posted about our visit to Mount Angel Abbey, which we more or less stumbled upon when we visited our daughter for her college's Parents' Week-End. We were in no shape to travel anywhere, but we felt that since she had somehow managed to return to college, we wanted to support her with our presence when other families might be enjoying themselves. We had, in fact, a very nice visit, and my encounter with the icon of Christ Pantocrator at the monastery probably kept me wobbling forward for another few months.

I had hoped to spend the night up there at the Abbey, my own private mini-retreat, while we were in Oregon last week, but the guesthouse was full and I concluded that I would have to find another time, another year. As it happened, though, a combination of desire and the time change propelled me out of bed and up to the Abbey for 6:30 a.m Lauds on Friday morning.

I had about half an hour to myself when I arrived, which I used to wander around both outside and in the chapel and then, finally, to settle down in front of "my" icon. Once again, I found the sense of peace and hopefulness that has been so elusive these past nine months. The sky was utterly blue, the chapel exuded a sense of the holy and the still, and the voices of the forty or so monks as they sang the psalms and prayers for half an hour offered a call to clarity for the day ahead.

My prayer in that chapel? ~ it's the only place I've found in which the turmoil and agitation of the past year subsides. Apparently I need to move to Oregon.

Paradox

The Garden of Gethesmane

The Resurrection

When we were in Oregon last week, we visited a place in Portland called The Grotto, a garden of plants and sculpture (that might have been a quiet place for meditation, had we not timed our visted to coincide with that of a wood-chipper going full blast for a couple of hours). I was quite taken by a series of sculptures by a Mary Lewis depicting Mysteries in the Life of Christ (apparently a devotional category with which I am unfamiliar, but perhaps a Catholic reader will enlighten us).

I'm posting images of the two which reflect the moment-by-moment back-and-forth in my own life, along with photos of one of the three sets of sculptures and their titles, so you can get an idea of the setting.