Terrapin Station

Friday Five: Almost Christmas!

Jan says at RevGals: 

In a few days the Fourth Sunday of Advent will be celebrated, immediately followed by Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. A lot of worship and celebrating will be packed into these few days, which for my husband and me also includes our wedding anniversary today (41 years!). So for this holiday Friday Five, let's have a free-for-all: Write 5 items about anything connected with Christmas, which of course includes Advent. Be personal, professional, spiritual or however you are feeling!

1. I attended a Blue Christmas service last night for the first time.  It was lovely and very well done.  I was grateful to have the time and space to sit quietly with the sorrows of this year, the things that are making it hard to feel "jolly" right about now.  All the writing I have read about the Sandy Hook shootings has left me with this assurance: I don't have to feel jolly, now or ever. I have to practice joy, which is a fierce thing, rather than a light and frothy thing. 

2. I have one more gift to buy (unless I am forgetting something), plus a dress to wear to a wedding next week.  The latter is by far the harder thing, but I have enlisted a friend to go with me. She will make sure I do not attend the wedding in jeans.

3. Brandon and his girlfriend are coming on Christmas Night.  Fun!  Now that I know I can start planning a menu. 

4. This campus is SILENT. Almost.  Someone on a skateboard is going by under my window. But otherwise, silent. The department down the hall had a party earlier, with much loud laughing. My phone has rung once today. After 5:00 the heat will be turned off in all campus buildings and we will be in hibernation mode until after New Year's. I'm grateful to work at a university so that my holidays can be configured this way...but it is eerie here. 

5. The birds and squirrels that I feed outside my south window will be fine in my absence. I will look forward to seeing them next year. They are a large part of my daily joy.

Sigh

Here's what I have to say

Whether or not the story by Liza Long about her son's condition is accurate, or whether she has a mental illness herself and is not a reliable reporter, I can tell you this:

I grew up in a home with mentally ill siblings. I did not fear for my own safety, but I know what it is to hide from an altercation in which they were engaged. 

I also know what it is to wonder if you will someday read a news story about someone you love committing a horrible act of mayhem. 

I do have PTSD, and have been treated and have coping mechanisms. But I have spent many years and a good deal of money on it, with medical and non-medical methods. 

** Furthermore:

I also have a family member with Asperger's Syndrome. He is far less likely than I am to ever behave in a violent manner. If you know me, you know the enormity of this statement.  Whatever diagnoses the shooter had, Asperger's did not cause this. 

**Finally:

I believe we must ban assault weapons. I can't think of a good reason why anyone would need one. I've been told some people use them for deer hunting. Okay, if you must, hunt; but if you can't do your thing without that kind of firepower, you don't deserve to be allowed to hunt. 

That's what I have to say about that.

What a Mess...

If you saw my house, that's what you would say. Seriously.  It's what I say every day. 

Somehow, I got out of any kind of routine cleaning practice when Ken was sick.  I tried to keep the area where he was tidy, because I knew it made him feel better.  But I have a sense that in the last 18 months a huge wave has washed over us, the dogs, and the house and swirled around and around.  Now, I think it has finally withdrawn, and it's left all manner of detritus in its wake, just scattered randomly about. 

I have an uncanny facility, in such situations, to stop seeing the mess. It's as if a selective blindness comes over me and I don't perceive the things that are out of place, that need to be scrubbed, that disrupt the potential peace and sanity of our living space. 

You may wonder why I'm not pointing any fingers at Ken...well, it's because almost none of this stuff is his.  It's mine.  And I would be very unhappy indeed if he went about sorting, disposing of, or otherwise messing with it. 

I want to do differently. I want to dig out, and stop living in what FLYLady calls CHAOS (that stands for "Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome.")  For some reason, I'm having a really hard time getting started with this. 

But, if people who got knocked over and swamped by Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, or the tsunami in Asia can get up and start somewhere, surely I can, too. 

I have a week off at Christmas...before I leave for a very special wedding.  So you may find me clawing to the surface, one baby step at a time. 

I'll keep you posted. 

 

 

What is said from the pulpit?

Last year, Dan Savage spoke at our campus.  It was a great thing.  I felt very fortunate to be able to attend. 

One of the things he mentioned in his talk was how kids are growing up hearing from pulpits of churches that "God hates fags." 

A colleague, who was raised in a religion other than Christian, whispered to me, "Do they say that at your church?" I said, "NO!  If they did, I wouldn't be there!" 

I was really rather offended.  Does the person have no idea who I am, at all?  (Actually, probably not, but that's a different story.)

Today I read in Dan Pearce's post "Stoned to Death" about his fear of coming out as bisexual:

...Most of the rocks came in the form of dogmatic religious teachings. Since I was a young child, I was made to sit through countless church sermons and Sunday school lessons which focused on the topic. I was made to attend special events as a teenager where grown men stood before us and insisted that God had declared it… being anything other than straight was a really, really bad sin...

It goes on.  If you haven't read it, you should. 

Part of my failure of imagination in this matter is that I can't conceive of a church where that would even be mentioned.  Right, Episcopal dioceses are splitting up over this issue, but if it has been mentioned from a pulpit in my presence, I was not paying attention. 

Makes me wonder what else I have missed. 

Here is a good story

This past weekend we went to Kerens, where Ken's sister and her family live.  We enjoyed their church's Christmas play and had dinner together afterward.

As I drove home, I thought how lucky I feel to be a part of that family.  Good as gold, they are. 

I didn't realize until afterward the hidden gift of the day.  Ken was telling them that he is feeling better, really he is; better than he has in years.  He would make a typical Ken joke and they would grin at each other and say, "he's back!" 

I have been seeing it in the last few months and weeks, but this was a different kind of seeing: looking through someone else's eyes.  (Four people's eyes, three of whom have all known him much longer than I have.)  The last time we were there was in March, and he was feeling really terrible. 

There have been several periods when he didn't think he was going to make it.  For a while he didn't want to. 

But, today, he is back. 

The Christmas Story, St. Paul's Church, Auckland NZ

I love this so so much. I never want to lose it.

Vulnerability

I love this post.

Love it because

    of the way she describes communion as a remembrance which is also sacramental
    of the kid who responds "Roll Tide"
    of the dance party

and this:  "Communion has a way of flattening things out like that, a way of entangling our roots and lowering our guards." 

It reminds me of a lovely poem recently posted by my friend Martha Spong. 

--

This is the Advent of vulnerability.  I am seeing it everywhere.  It's not entirely comfortable.

I am doing an Advent retreat and one of the first assigments was do to lectio divina on the texts for the week.  The phrase that popped for me, that I had never seen before, was, "The powers of the heavens will be shaken." It sounded very violent and dangerous.  However, as I sat with it, and as I read sermons and commentary on those texts in the next days, I remembered that this apocalypse does not mean Apocalypse Now or The War of the Worlds or any of that.  I have too much of that in my head, lately.  Apocalpyse means revelation, which means un-covering. 

That's what happened to God, I reckon, in becoming one of us.  God got un-covered, stripped down, vulnerable.  Probably intensely uncomfortable. 

Uncomfortable like waiting is uncomfortable.  Like sitting with uncertainty. Like being brave in our parts of things, and standing down from battles that aren't ours.