My new year's resolution this year was to read a poem a day. I don't like to set myself up for failure in choosing New Year's resolutions, but this seemed possible, and given that it's late February, and I'm still reading poems each morning, perhaps it was a resolution that "took." One of the ways I made this possible was buying several new books of poetry. I've been reading from Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, (Hyperion, New York, 2003). One of this week's poems really caught my heart and I share it with you.
Variation on a Theme by Rilke
(The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1, Stanza 1)
by Denise Levertov
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of the noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
My bookshelf also includes Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, New York, 2005), so I decided I would look up the inspiration.
The Book of Hours, Book 1, Poem 1
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Da neigt sich die Stunde and rührt mich an
mit klaren, metallenem Schlag:
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fühle: ich kann –
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.
Nichts war noch vollendet, eh ich es erschaut
ein jedes Werden stand still.
Meine Blicke sind reif, und wie eine Braut
kommt jedem das Ding, das er will …
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
One of the things that I like about this edition is that it has the German original on the facing page to the English translation and my two years of German in college feel useful. While I like these translations for the most part, what is missing in this translation that Levertov highlights in her poem is "ich kann" = "I can – I grasp and shape the day." Perhaps what rang true for me is that Levertov articulates calling: "it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can."
This poem was a necessary antidote to some of the continued data analysis that I did this week. Letting the data speak: this graph represents placement and tenure in a given church, based on the 2008 directory of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. So there are two men still serving churches as senior or solo pastors where they were called in 1976, there is one woman still serving a church where she was called in 1989. In 2002 there were twenty churches filled, all by men. In 2007 there were nine churches filled by men and two by women, and in 2008 there were ten churches filled, half by men and half by women. In this data set, seventeen percent of the senior or solo pastors are women.
I also spent time this week writing the essay for American Baptist Profile System: 3000 characters that must fit in no more than 37 lines that give churches a reason to set up an interview.
"What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can."
My prayer is today is one of thanksgiving for those people who affirm that calling for me in the various places where I am ministering, those who edited my profile essay, those who remind me to pray for myself and who pray for me, and for poems and poets who awaken me to the possible and to the "I can."
In 1977, I graduated magna cum laude from a prestigious New England women's college convinced of my ability to be a leader. I had been a student leader of a number of organizations on campus, in addition to working and doing well academically. That fall I enrolled at an equally prestigious graduate school of business in the Midwest to pursue a master's degree to give me the credentials and education toward a career in which I saw myself as a leader. (Playing in the background as I write—Ray Charles and Willie Nelson singing It was a Good Year from Genius Loves Company, "When I was 21, it was a very good year…) My business school entering class had 25% women, who were bright, articulate and energetic.
One of the first experiences I had, literally as I was moving into the townhouse where I would rent a room for the two years of graduate school from a divorced Jewish woman who was a legal secretary, was an encounter with two young evangelists who were canvassing the neighborhood. Imagine their surprise when they asked if I was saved, and I said yes. What followed was an invitation to their house church/bible study group, and my disclosure that I was enrolled in an MBA program. Somehow out of that came some discussion about women's roles in church, where we had some disagreement. The next week they came by and left a pamphlet arguing their case: women should submit, keep quiet in church, etc., authored by some man I had never heard of with a copyright in 1929. That was probably the final confirmation I needed at the time that church had no room for a woman who was and wanted to be a leader. I did not regularly or even occasionally attend church for another fifteen years.
Also in 1977, the Ministers Council of the American Baptist Churches USA commissioned sociologist Edward C. Lehman to study the receptivity of congregations and denominational and lay leaders to women in ministry, looking at the barriers both individual, cultural, denominational, and organizational to women in ministry and factors for placement of women as pastors. The study surveyed and/or interviewed all of the ABC women seminary graduates for 1977 (31 in total) and all of the ABC women seminary graduates from 1972-76 (70 in total). The study included a sampling of male seminary graduates in similar numbers, all of the 117 executive and area ministers, 500 laity, 100 pulpit committee representatives and 2160 members of American Baptist Women. [Project SWIM: A Study of Women in Ministry by Edward C. Lehman, Jr. and the Task Force on Women in Ministry of the Ministers Council, American Baptist Churches, 1979]
Of course, my immediate reaction to this study was to wonder if things have changed at all in the past thirty years. Key points:
• There were few fence sitters—people either were receptive to the idea of woman in ministry or they are not. This was across denominational leaders and laity, although proportions varied within the groups surveyed. (p. 30)
• Higher education and income were the highest demographic factors that would correlate with receptivity to a woman pastor, not gender, age or occupation. (p. 41)
• The East was more receptive than the Midwest, which was more receptive than the West (not a significant sample size in the south where American, formerly Northern, Baptist churches have little presence). (p. 42)
• Church members who emphasized the importance of the "conversion" function of the church were least receptive to women in ministry, while church members who emphasized "social reform" functions were most receptive. (p. 45)
• Similarly, those who advocate Biblical literalism were much less receptive to women in ministry than those who interpret Biblical literature in more complicated ways. (p. 45)
• Respondents who were not receptive were least likely to think that women should perform "church-specific" roles, roles that symbolize church: senior pastor, deacon, leading worship, preach, conduct funerals and weddings, or administer baptism or communion, while they had less issue with women who took on the elements of a pastor's job that were more traditionally female and not as symbolic of church: religious education, youth, teaching. (p. 36)
• Churches with declining membership were more receptive to women in ministry than churches that were holding their own or growing. (p. 40)
• Cultural stereotypes around women in professions carry over to women in ministry. Perceiving women as incapable of providing strong leadership to make churches flourish was strongly and consistently associated with lack of receptivity to women in ministry. (p. 50)
I'd be happy to hear other's perceptions around this list, but I don't think these elements have changed as the factors around receptivity of women in ministry—the proportions of people becoming receptive may have shifted somewhat as cultural acceptance of women's equal rights has gained ground, but these are the dividing factors still.
Those are individual and cultural issues. There are also social and cultural organizational issues about church and American Baptist churches that also contribute to receptivity.
• American Baptists prize local church autonomy, so denominational national leaders and state executive/area ministers have much less influence when making suggestions for change than local leaders. (p. 54)
• People who were receptive to women in ministry perceived that their local leaders were as well, and opposition to that was just being caught up in tradition or being "old and set in their ways." (p. 59)
• People who were not receptive perceived that their local leaders were not receptive too, and their opposition was based on theological reasons or that "women were not qualified." (p. 59)
• Churches are voluntary organizations where people are free to leave, and take their support with them. This makes churches less willing to risk controversy because it will damage the stability of the organization. Women in ministry were perceived as controversial at the time of this study. (p. 60) Is that still the case?
The study also included some interesting information about the factors that influenced success for women seminarians in placement. I'll have to come back to those, because one of the key success factors is participation in the American Baptist Placement System and I have to go and work on that profile document now. :-)
We are creations of the times in which we live, as well as being creators of the times in which we live. My own recollections of 1977 confirm what this study, now an historical document, reveals. How has that changed?
My prayer for this week, as I begin to write an essay for the placement profile that describes who I am as one called to ministry, is for clarity and for freedom from thinking only inside the box, whether it's a box that others put me into, a box that I create for my own safety and comfort, or the boxes that I use for others without recognizing their complexities too.
Other people have pastimes that absorb them during odd moments—knitting, puzzles, talking on the phone, reading, watching TV—add your favorite. One of mine is data analysis and pattern analysis. I can spend hours manipulating a block of data looking for the information in it. This past week I thought I would see what the church directories could tell me about women in ministry. I downloaded the most recent published online directories from the websites of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts (TABCOM) and from the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ (MAUCC). It's a lot of data to organize. I made it about a quarter of the way through a first pass on each of these data sets, so any conclusions are subject to change as the data set becomes more complete.
Out of the 77 ABC churches in this first data set which comprise three of the eight associations, with settled pastors, 25 out of 65 of the male pastors had been their church more than 10 years, and 3 out of the 12 female pastors had been in their church more than 10 years. In this incomplete set of data, 15.5% of the settled pastors were women, with an average tenure of 6.5 years, while the men had an average tenure of 10.9 years. There are only eight churches, or less than 10 percent, who have more than one minister—an indication of size. None of the five interim pastors in this sample were women. I leap to no conclusions from this data because the sample is incomplete. I'll keep you posted.
In the first set of UCC data comprising two regions of the state, I've looked at 107 churches. There are more UCC churches in Massachusetts and at first glance they have larger memberships. About one-third of the settled senior pastors are women in this set, but when you include associates and interims the number goes up to fifty percent. There are 144 ministers for 107 churches, so a significant number of women are associate pastors, and interim pastors, and many more churches have more than one pastor. I think that the tenure dates might not be so different for this list, relatively, although I did spot one women who had been in her church since 1980. One question to explore is whether women do have more of the smaller membership churches in the UCC, although one of the largest UCC churches has a woman as senior pastor.
But I have lots more data to organize for mining. What I hope to gather from this data are directions for questions to ask lay people and clergy. What prompted churches or rather congregations to hire women? Was it a conscious choice or simply the best available candidate at the time? What keeps them from hiring women as pastors? The ABC has a lot more ethnic churches—is it obvious what role culture plays in this vs. theology? What is it like to be the first woman minister in a church, or the second or third? How long did the search process take for women vs. men?
Along side this data mining, I just started reading the results of a 1993 national survey and study among Protestant denominations on women in ministry, published in Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling by Barbara Brown Zikmund, Adair T. Lummis, and Patricia M. Y. Chang. This brings some historical perspective to my data mining. They divide their results "into three denominational clusters that reflect the differences in how authority is perceived and located within these denominations: congregation-centered, institution-centered and Spirit-centered." (p. 7) Allowing for the fact that all of these typologies are arbitrary, I will be focusing my study on congregation-centered denominations where " the essence of the church is found in the gathered people, the congregation. In these denominations, authority centers on local congregations." (p. 8) They include American Baptists, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalists, and Christian Church/Disciples of Christ among these denominations in their study, and also look at Southern Baptists and Brethren.
What they found true among institution-centered denominations (Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church) is that if the hierarchy/tradition, where authority is more centered, although slow and thoughtful and orderly in wrestling with the idea, embraces the idea of women in ministry then "as a consequence, once institution centered denominations make the decision to affirm the ordination of women, they live out the new order with remarkable vigor." (p. 12)
Where the authority rests in the congregation, rather than in the institution/hierarchy, as my initial data mining confirms, affirmation and acceptance of women in ministry is much more varied. I will say that my perception is that the hierarchy in the UCC is much more supportive of women in ministry and has more influence on congregations than the denominational relationships with congregations in American Baptist Churches, and might that go some way toward explaining the higher number of women ministers in UCC churches? Where is influence being used to support women in ministry?
Today, the Executive Minister of TABCOM visited my church on his rounds and was expressing a vision for local association reorganization and of affiliation of ethnic churches and mission focus. One of our members, who attends ordination councils as our church's representative, said that many of the ethnic church leaders opt not to participate in the association of local churches because the association is allowing ordination of women. Now what do we do with that?
My prayer this week is for clarity and insight as I look not only at patterns and data, but also at the human hearts, dreams and fears behind those patterns. How can I remain both centered in my faith and hopes, and visionary in thinking about church in the 21st century?
During this fifth and final year of my M.Div. career I have been looking forward. In the summer I wrote copious essays for the Center for Career Development in Ministry and had a two day psychological and career evaluation resulting in a report that will go to the Committee on Ministry as part of the ordination processs. I began Watchcare: an American Baptist mentoring relationship that is part of the ordination process—an experienced pastor meeting monthly for 8-12 months with me as the ordination candidate. In the fall I went to Green Lake, Wisconsin for a five-day denomination sponsored conference for American Baptist seminarians and new pastors. I wrote to faculty following that conference:
I recently attended the Introduction to American Baptist Life conference for seminarians and new pastors. While there I attended a session on women in ministry where national staff shared some rather depressing statistics about placement for women in the ABC-USA: only 413 churches out of 5500, or 7.5%, have women as senior or solo pastors, with another 1100 women ordained as music ministers, CE directors or associates. One person said that admissions officers had an ethical obligation not to accept women into seminary if they didn’t think that placement would be likely or possible. One faculty member from Northern Theological said that she is in charge of placement for American Baptists and is having great success placing women, because theology now trumps gender—a 24 year old woman with moderate to conservative theology can be placed more readily than a liberal man with experience—of course that’s in the Midwest.
A couple of us convened a welcoming and affirming Baptist group ad hoc during the conference and fully half of the people attending and supporting welcoming and affirming churches were from ANTS, and three-fourths of the identified GLBT folks were from ANTS—there were four in total who felt safe to identify as GLBT in that circle.
Those things certainly gave me pause. I have one final elective course to complete in order to graduate in May 2009 (concurrent with an extended unit of CPE). I am writing to the group of you in hopes that
1) the idea presented briefly below can be approved for a directed study for Spring 2009, and
2) that one of you will leap at the opportunity to be my faculty partner in this study. I am sending this to faculty who are either American Baptists and/or sympathetic to women's or GLBT issues.
This journal/blog serves as a reflective part of that directed study, which was approved and supported by a number of the faculty. I plan to be posting weekly during this spring. More about the study will be forthcoming.
Yesterday I heard an investment advisor discussing the precipitating events that brought us to our current economic crisis. She called the first a "housing bubble" where nationally we were buying houses we couldn't afford, lending without understanding the value of what secured the loans, and investing in derivatives of both of those too good to be true practices. I suspect I have been living in my own "bubble" during my time in seminary: I did my field education work under the mentorship of a woman pastor, in a welcoming and affirming congregation, have studied in an ecumenical and progressive seminary environment, while attending and being sponsored to the ministry by a church where radical social action and progressive views are the norm.
In October at the seminarians conference, coincident with the run-up to the national elections and the economic collapse, my bubble also burst. It was clear from the range of political and theological views expressed that I, and most of the colleagues from my seminary, along with two-three other seminaries in the Northeast, were in a minority as progressives. We found each other, and could occupy one or two tables. The American Baptist Churches-USA, as a denomination, is a place where pastors who are uncomfortable with the extreme fundamentalism of more conservative Baptist fellowships are migrating—those were the new pastors I met, and is a denomination, like many others, that has been torn by the question of how to deal with people whose sexuality is not heterosexual. I know that some Southern Baptist women ministers moved their affiliation to the ABC-USA when the Southern Baptist convention said that they would no longer support ordination for women. Being uncomfortable with extreme fundamentalism, however, does not make you a progressive or even a moderate, and I would judge that a majority of the seminarians and new pastors and leadership at that conference are well to the right of center—there seemed to be more people excited about Palin than Obama, even among the sizable contingent of black seminarians.
There were a lot of women at the conference—maybe even half. If American Baptist churches aren't hiring women as pastors, what happens to us? Fifteen years ago, women made up 5% of senior/solo pastors in the ABC-USA. Today it is up to 7.5%, while many seminaries are up to more than 50% women.
I remember from my own experience in blowing bubbles, after you blow bubbles and they pop, after a while the floor becomes covered with a soap film that can be slippery and treacherous. It becomes hard to remember and appreciate the iridescent beauty of that gently floating bubble, when you slip as you step.
Today my prayer is for balance, both as I step forward in slippery territory and as I remember and claim the beauty in the bubbles of ministry that I have done and am called to do.
Last week I went to a book signing by Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, for his new book, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God, and in his remarks, he noted how supported he has been in the U.S. Episcopal House of Bishops by the women bishops and by those bishops who are people of color. The success of that support has been because they are recognizing oppression as a common cause, not as a comparative exercise. That is, the women aren't saying, well, sexism is worse than homophobia, and the blacks aren't saying, racism is worse than either of those, but together they are saying we are all beloved children of God and deserving of love, respect, and equality. In coming together they can work against systems of oppression, rather than being divided and fighting against one another about whose pain and troubles are worse. He writes that one of the reasons he suspects that there is so much focus on homosexuality in the church is that it's a way to avoid talking about sex, sexism, misogyny, and heterosexism. More on this when I've finished reading Gene's book. I started his book this morning and it's pastoral, engaging and folksy, much like Gene himself, a Kentucky native who has been a priest in New Hampshire for over thirty years.
A few weeks ago, my college alumnae quarterly sent out a note that they were going to have an article on aging and elder care issues. Since I work for an aging services agency and have an aging parent, I responded that I might be able to contribute to such an article. So, this past week I spent some time at work responding to questions about my own experience as a caregiver and family conversations about aging, and giving a broad overview of trends in elder care. As a long distance caregiver for my mother, who has been relatively healthy, my experience of confronting aging and disability and being a hands-on caregiver has not been so hard. But like varieties of oppression, experiences of caregiving and experiences of disease have some things in common. I'd like to share my responses here to some of the questions posed by the person who will be writing the article as preparation for another blog posting that I have been trying to write on the impact of diseases of all sorts on the relationship of caregiver/friend/colleague with the person who has a disease or chronic illness.
1. Did you talk to your parents or spouse about what their wishes were for their care in their later years? If you didn't, do you wish you had? And what would you talk about? How do you recommend bringing it up? Would conversations like this make a difference in your decisions about care for your parents/spouse?
When my father died at 63, twenty-five years ago, as a family we were really unprepared for that experience. It was unexpected and he had made no plans or legal or financial arrangements. Despite having a history of heart disease, he thought he'd just keep working and that everything would continue on like it always had. The reality for my mother was quite different--within two years, she'd lost her life partner, she lost her home, and she had no income except social security. I wanted to think that now we are more prepared to talk about issues of aging and death, but about five years ago, I tried to get my two brothers and my mother to have a conversation all together about what my mother's wishes were: did she want heroic measures, for example, to be put on a ventilator or life support if something happened or did she want a "do not resuscitate" order? Where did she want to live if she could no longer live alone? What things did she want her funeral to include? Who should make decisions for her if she couldn't? Who gets what? Despite making that attempt for the week while I was visiting, my older brother avoided the conversation every time I brought it up. Finally, my mother, younger brother and I had the conversation one evening before dinner. I gave my mother the Five Wishes form to complete, which I would strongly recommend to everyone facing aging (that would be all of us). It gives a way to guide the conversation. As far as a way in, there is always something: someone dies, someone is sick, or you read something in the paper. You just need to start and have the conversation.
I suspect that this summer it will be time to check in again on all of these issues, and some new ones, when I visit. My mother has macular degeneration and says that she can see well enough to drive only when the sun is really bright--she lives out in the country and can't get to the store or to the doctor without driving. She has some significant hearing loss and can't afford hearing aids. These are different issues than the ones we talked about before. How do we help her deal now? When do we take away the car keys?
Often it is not just the big things, it's the little things. My mom lives close to my brothers and two thousand miles away from me, but sometimes I think that she tells me things that she doesn't tell my brothers--maybe it is the mother/daughter thing. She had a hip replacement several years ago, and can't reach her toes to trim her toenails, so she either has it done when she goes to the doctor to get her corns and bunions treated, or she waits for my annual visit. Last summer we had a wonderful conversation about foot washing as an inspirational rite of service while I trimmed her half inch long toenails and washed between her toes, but I also found the local pedicure shop and have bought her gift certificates for pedicures, which she absolutely loves. My older brother sees her almost every day, but she would never ask him to trim her toenails.
Of course, that also makes me wonder what she's not telling me...
2. What has been the best source of support for you during this experience?
I have friends whose parents are aging, and we talk. Because I work in the field of aging, I am fortunate to have a wealth of information in my colleagues. I think my work provides the opportunity for my friends and for people at my church, for example, to start conversations about aging, and while I'm providing information, I'm also getting support. It's important to talk about the demands placed on you as a caregiver, and the role reversal that starts to happen when you have to take care of things for your parents, or aunts and uncles or older friends, while still understanding that your parents are adults who deserve respect and the right to make their own, good or bad, decisions.
It's astonishing the number of people I know whose parents have Alzheimers, for example, and while we have a program at our agency that consults with people on what to expect, I think it's really important for family who are dealing with a disease and situation like that to talk to other people about how to deal with the day to day things, not the medical things necessarily. Aging sneaks up on us all, and many of us are thrown into crisis mode by some acute episode and don't know where to turn, but the truth of the matter is that there are thousands of our friends, neighbors and colleagues who are also dealing with it, if we just start the conversation, and lots of resources available.
3. What has been most surprising to you about this experience, something for which you wish you had been prepared, or from which you learned something important?
Perhaps it is the little things like trimming toenails that I didn't even think about, and I think that my mother just accepted as one of the costs of getting older, and didn't complain about it. I don't know whether baby boomers will complain more or not, but I think we don't have to accept these little things as a necessary part of aging, but it also takes a fair amount of energy and research, and sometimes money, to find the ways to work around and through some of the "little" things that happen. Those were things I wasn't prepared for.
The other piece is the tremendous emotional cost of the losses I see my mother having: not only the loss of sight, hearing, and mobility, but the losses of lifelong friends who are her support network, the loss of identity as the go-to person, as the care provider herself, the social isolation as she can't get out as much on her own schedule, the loss of hobbies and pastimes because she can't see as well, bend as much, hear as clearly: reading, gardening, going to church become less enjoyable.
One of my friends who has a memory disorder (undiagnosed as to cause or type) has been grieving the loss of his identity as a smart person because he just can't remember things now. He was not yet 60 when it started, and he now can't have a job because he can't remember many things in the short term. For his wife, the first couple of years were very hard as it crept up on them. Imagine living with someone who can't remember what you just said five minutes ago or whether they ate breakfast or whether they read the paper--it changes your entire relationship, and when it's a gradual change it takes time to come to terms with it for both of you.
My boss says it takes courage to grow old and to survive the losses. I took a class on death and dying for my M.Div. program, and one of the things I learned from that was that people who do better as they get older have learned to grieve better--they feel it, deal with it and accept it. My mother is actually a big support for me as I face her aging because, for the most part, she has a real acceptance of death and aging as a part of the natural cycle--that comes from living on a farm and near nature all of her life, and she has her faith which is that something better awaits her after death.
4. What do future caregivers need to know or think about before the elder care stage of life begins for them and their parents? What makes sense to work toward? What might have to be let go?
Caregiving is hard. We find that among elders it is often the caregiving partner in a couple that dies first because they are not taking care of themselves and getting help and relief from non-stop caregiving. Ask for help. There are agencies that provide services, but you don't even necessarily have to go to an agency. It might not be a big deal for your parent's neighbor to mow their lawn when mowing hers, or for a friend to get groceries when she goes to the grocery store. But people can't help if you don't ask. People don't know what's going on unless you communicate.
The average age of our clients is 85, so people are staying healthy longer. That's the good news. The bad news is that what often triggers a pretty rapid decline is one acute, and unexpected, episode and as a child who comes back onto the scene you have no idea what medications your parent is taking, who are their doctors or other professionals, where they are banking, where are assets, or who are their friends who need to know things.
So part of handling aging well is perhaps applicable to handling growing up well and handling being in the middle well: organize your stuff so that you and others can make sense of it, and communicate to your family and friends about the people and things that are important to you. Make lists of medications, passwords, account numbers, addresses, and professional service providers. Keep the list in a safe place, but let at least a couple of people know where the list is. Have a local emergency contact and check in buddy who has a house key: neighbor, pastor, or friend, and make sure your child knows who that person is. Have a check in plan: someone that commits to making a daily email or phone call, especially for a person who lives alone.
Aging does not mean that you have to give up. You don't have to let go of anything that's important to you. You might have to change the way you have done it. But one of the things that we want to do is to transform community understanding of what it means to be getting older. I have someone working for me now who is 82, and she isn't interested in retiring. She finds her work meaningful and her colleagues supportive. I have another colleague who is almost 65 and chomping at the bit to retire in two weeks because she wants to travel and do other things while she still has her health. Choices that people make as they age are as varied as people are. Some people will give it all up and sit in front of the TV, and others want to continue to work, live, learn, love, laugh, and cry.
There is a saying that I adhere to that God is in the details. As I was sitting outside one evening, I began to wonder how God planned the details of the first hot almost summer nights and the sultry, sensuous smell of honeysuckle as it begins to bloom.
The smell of honeysuckle is very memory evocative, as substantiated by this selection from Dr. Edward Bach, famous for the Bach Flower Remedies. He prescribes: "Honeysuckle is for people who live in the past instead of the present. They feel that their best days are behind them and that there is little to look forward to, and as a consequence they prefer to dwell on past happinesses (or past misfortunes). At a more minor key, homesickness and nostalgia are also Honeysuckle states. The remedy helps the person in this state to learn from the past without needing to relive it, so that the person can progress on into the present and take joy from today and tomorrow."
Dr Bach's description: Those who live much in the past, perhaps a time of great happiness, or memories of a lost friend, or ambitions which have not come true. They do not expect further happiness such as they have had.
-taken from The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies.
Further research brought up this also apt horticultural description:
"When the internet is capable of producing smells, then an article about honeysuckle will be able to do justice to this flower. The wonderfully fragrant white blossoms of Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) make up for its extremely invasive habit. After starting with a 6 inch sprig, we now have thick vines encompassing the compost bins and a large segment of fence. The plant sends out new shoots which seem to grow several inches every day, as well as ground runners that sneak around behind fences and through the grass. An interesting feature of the blossoms is that they start out white, then turn yellow as they age. Every so often, sections of the honeysuckle vines die and must be trimmed away. The woody stems can be rather thick, but they are soft and easily cut. When extra shoots are cut away from the main stems, the new growth is more profuse the following spring."
Not to anthropomorphize, but what did God intend to do with honeysuckle? Hot nights magnify the smell, and it's an almost primal reaction, perhaps at the level of pheromones. The memory it evokes does not seem like my own, but older, a tribal/race memory perhaps. Perhaps that it is one of its details: it's good to have things that connect us in kinder, gentler ways to our collective memory and past.
Beyond that, did God the Creator (God is in the details, after all...) think about the perfume, the shape of the flower, how it would fit a hummingbird's beak, the lush profusion of green with scattered white and yellow blossoms climbing up the fence? Did God the Creator consider how a hot, sweaty night might be enhanced with the smell of honeysuckle? It's an evocative flower in many ways. And as Dr. Bach suggests, can the honeysuckle essence help a person "to learn from the past without needing to relive it, so that the person can progress on into the present and take joy from today and tomorrow?"
If you have your own profusion of honeysuckle to enjoy, I hope that it brings you both memories of and surroundings for joy and a wonderful scent/sensual pleasure in creation. If you don't have your own honeysuckle, please feel free to come by my yard some evening. And then, as we inhale a deep breath of warm honeysuckle scented air, let us take joy from the day, and thank God for the details. (And hold and savor the moment for when we need it next January....)
Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
Isaiah 58:2-12
A portion of this scripture was read at the baccalaureate service at Andover Newton Theological School this past weekend, and a smaller portion also appears on the ordination announcement that I just received from a Unitarian Universalist friend. Such synchronicity I believe is God's way of calling my attention to something. But what?
I happen to have been "sort of" fasting the past 36 hours—drinking only fluids in preparation for a colonoscopy appointment. For those of you who have done this, you know that the liquid diet follows several days of giving up seeds, nuts, fruits, raw vegetables, peas, beans, corn … foods that form the core of my usual high fiber diet. A day of only clear liquids also precedes taking some vile concoction designed to clean out your colon. Fasting is not a part of my low-church Protestant heritage or early farm upbringing. Celebrating the abundance of the harvest and of God's love and extending hospitality to others to share in that abundance forms one of the bases of my own theology. Thus, I had considered that this modified fasting would be just a rather curious and unpleasant medical preparatory procedure until being confronted by the prophet Isaiah. "Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself?" Certainly, colonoscopy prep is humbling, giving up control over food and over bodily elimination processes.
But when I do this kind of fast, however unwilling, I am claiming my privilege of being able to have preventative medicine, food, and water. I am particularly conscious of this in the wake of the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China. In those countries there are people who are fasting, without food and potable water, not by choice, not out of privilege, not with access to excellent medical care, with food waiting in the refrigerator and cupboard, and with water on tap and all sorts of beverages available. Particularly in Myanmar, they are fasting because they have been struck by disaster and that has been compounded by the kind of self-serving interests and oppression that Isaiah condemns.
What Isaiah is calling for is not really about fasting or any other show of piety, but rather the prophet calls us to look around at where we are, to understand the gifts we have, and to do something about the brokenness in the world. Perhaps we must break things to make things whole: breaking yokes of bondage may help repair and restore the buildings and streets in Myanmar. We are called to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and clothe the naked. We are even to repair relationships with our kin.
I wrote a check for relief funds to go to Myanmar because my church and denomination both have long standing ties there. We had a visiting professor from the Myanmar Institute of Theology who came to my church and to school this week and I was able to ask him personally how his family was. The Institute's buildings and books were destroyed in the cyclone. There will be much work to be done. What else can we do to repair the breaches in those walls? But … we all have heard some variation of this before. How do we stretch ourselves beyond writing a check?
Is that all of the fast that I choose? There may be other things that will occur to me, but probably not that I can do before going to the doctor's for this exam. Short of travel to Asia immediately, however, there is one other thing that Isaiah reminds us to do: to pray: "you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am." Pray for the people of Myanmar and of China, for the fast that they did not chose, that they will get the help that is trying to get to them, that the money we can give can turn into food, shelter and clothes that the people can use. They have been and will be daily in my prayers.
So, I commend Isaiah 58 to you the next time you have a colonoscopy, and a fast that you don't really choose. It offers an opportunity to refresh one's own compassion for those in need, and reminds us to do something that is the kind of spiritual practice that really matters. Blessings on your fasting, and blessings on your knowledge of God's abundant love that we are called to share.
