Reverenda Rosa

Friday Five: Seasons Change

Reverend Mother is leading us in the Friday Five today.  She reminds us: it's Labor Day weekend here in the United States, also known as Summer's Last Hurrah. So let's say goodbye to summer and hello to the autumn. (People in other climes, feel free to adapt as needed.)

1. Share a highlight from this summer. (If you please, don't just say "our vacation to the Canadian Rockies." Give us a little detail or image. Help us live vicariously through you!): 

Going out to Elliot Key on our new boat,  One More Chance.  Elliot Key is at the very top of the Florida Keys, though you can only get there by boat.  The place is beautiful.  Spouseman and I spent Thanksgiving of 1998 with Spouseman's son on our sailboat Promise, hanging off the anchor at Elliot Key, snorkeling, swimming, exploring, eating take-out Turkey and trimmings.  I was learning what kinds of fun adults can have, just playing and hanging out (I'm a slow learner!).  This is only one of many other happy memories of times at Elliot.  Then, after Light of My Life came into our world, we lost Elliot Key, and we also lost the ability to play.  We were struggling with cancer and the hard work of adopting an older child, and a huge job change, and life was just turned upside down.  In a most unexpected and graceful way, this summer, buying the new boat gave us another chance to go back to Elliot and we find that we have come full circle and now get to play with our daughter and it is just one step short of heaven.

2. Are you glad to see this summer end? Why or why not?  Here in Florida, where the seasons are so much more subtle, it is hard to feel like summer has ended.  I am not so much sorry to see the summer (or any of the seasons, really) end, as I am more fiercely aware now of the preciousness of each day, wanting to not taken any single one of them for granted.  Lordy, I start to sound old!!!

3. Name one or two things you're looking forward to this fall.

Looks like we are starting a new, "blended service" that will allow some more room to explore how people of all generations can participate more actively in the Eucharist and try a broader range of liturgies.  That will be way cool, I hope and pray.

In early November, I get to go be with my friend M as she is consecrated bishop out in California.  I have never attended a consecration.  And I get to see Carmel and Monterey.  I am renting a car and hope to drive along at least some part of Route 1.

4. Do you have any special preparations or activities to mark the transition from one season to another? (Cleaning of house, putting away summer clothes, one last trip to the beach)
I switch from light colored sandals to dark colored sandals...

5. I'll know that fall is really here when

Our pool is too cold to swim in any longer

Little Boxes Made Of Ticky Tack

I don't remember my parents moving furniture around in our house.  We moved into the house they built when I was about 6.  For the next 30 years, some furniture was changed out--when my grandmother died there was lots of new furniture to fit in but that's different than playing with the way rooms look, adding and subtracting, pushing things this way and that.  I don't imagine our family was too different from others.  The Spouseman likes change and especially earlier in my marriage he'd go on a change tear and leave me anxious beyond belief.  Once there was a box...

I am only 5'3" feet tall. I have always struggled with my weight.  Word has it that when the doctor held me up right after my birth, someone said, "she's got her mom's big fanny and her dad's long feet."  I do.  There have been times when I have lost weight and looked a little different, but as people who deal with obesity know, you get used to thinking you are fat--that's how you define yourself, that's what you build your life inside of. A box inside a box. 

Let me count the ways in which my hip stuff became walls within walls within walls:  the cast I was in for so long.  The fact that I could not do any high impact excercise--except for physical therapy, there was not much of anything I could do that involved actively moving my body.  The pain--the pain that kept me on 600 mg of Motrin a day for 25 years.  The shame and sense of being different--and not in a good way at all.  A safe box--kept things from falling apart, real or imagined, but small and hermetic.  Suffocating.

I'm into my second week of serious 1-1 Pilates training.  Some of it is familiar.  I've done excercises to tone and strengthen my core muscles before, though never with such relentless precisio and intensity.  It's the stretching that's so new, the stretching.  Today I was sitting on a pad with my legs open and out straight, my feet perpendicular against bars.  I reached out with my right hand to hold a trapeze bar on a spring.  My left arm was folded across my stomach.  I had to use my abdominal muscles to curl my back and lie down flat on my back.  Then, I had to raise my left hand (still holding onto the trapeze bar with my right hand) and hold on to a strap above and to the right of my head.  And then cross my right leg over my left leg.  Oh my God, that felt good.  There's a party going on in my body, that's the only way I can describe it.  There's so much more than the boxes I've been living in. One of the keys to to walking without a limp is standing very tall--Tonka keeps saying "reach for the cieling with your back".

Folks, I'm busting out of these here boxes...Yes I am. 

Correction

My friend's mom did not die at the airport.  She died at home; my friend was able to administer last rites, and we agreed today that it is the way of life that sometimes events come together in epic ways.  Her mother was so frail.  The work my friend will have ahead equally arduous.  She leaves knowing her mother is safe in the arms of her Good Shepherd.  There is blessing amidst the pain.

Two of my church buddies and I, who know all about Southern-style funerals, will take dinner to the family on the night before the funeral.  Casserole.  Home-made carmel-apple pies.  Salad (though we did agree, co-cola congealed salad would not be appropriate), pimento cheese spread (and not that nasty kind that tastes like processed plastic).   Wine and co-cola.  If some of this doesn't make too much sense, you might want to consult my all-time favorite reference book for these matters... 

What Is it About Life????

I was incredibly busy last week.  Along with VBS, and the ministry work I do with the Centro, and getting the wheels rolling to consider starting a new blended service on Sundays in our parish, I had agreed to sort-of head the party team for a big hoopdeedoo last night.  I actually had really wanted to do this.  We were having a celebration of the ministry of the remarkable woman who has been elected Bishop of one of the Episcopal diocese in California.  Taking a wild stab of a guess, we planned and prepared for 350 people, not having any idea how many would show up. The service was beautiful, the party great fun.  Even so, I felt my eyes tearing up several times.  M has been a good friend, a wonderful fellow sojourner as a clergy woman.  In her diocesan role, she made a huge difference at a critical juncture in my process leading to ordination.  Earlier this summer I wrote about how hard it is watching her leave.  With battles raging in the Episcopal Church, I have not felt joy for M;  I have felt pride, and respect but not joy.  The phrase "pick up your cross and follow me" describes much of the work she has ahead.  But I am grateful that her calm, strong, reconciling voice joins in with the other voices that now make up the House of Bishops.

So we gave each other one final tight hug last night, when the party was winding down.  I confirmed that I'd be coming to her consecration later in the year.  Today, after VBS was over, after the Eucharist had been celebrated, after I'd done my mandatory mingling at coffee hour, I went back to the parish house to finish the last bits of "house blessing" (a.k.a. cleanup) I needed to do to put the party to bed.  I was tired.  My cell phone rang.  It was a friend.  This morning, M was leaving early in the morning to fly west.  From what he told me, M's mother, frail with Parkinson's, had gone out to the airport to see M off, I imagine with other folks as well.  Right after M got through the security gates, Mrs. G died.  She just died.  In the airport.  So before M begins her new life work, she must bury her dead.

What turns life takes.  How final our decisions sometimes.  What mystery.

Friday Five: Christ and Culture

Sally, an active member of the RevGalBlogPals has just finished a week of summer school where she studied the Gospel and Western Culture--that included looking at the way the Gospel and art, literature, music, film and popular culture shape each other.  She brings us a very cultural Friday 5:

Name a

1. Book:  Anne Sexton's Awful Rowing Towards God and especially the first poem in that collection, "Rowing"

A story, a story!
(Let it go. Let it come.)
I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender
into this world.
First came the crib
with its glacial bars.
Then dolls
and the devotion to their plastic mouths.
Then there was school,
the little straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over,
but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.
Then there was life
with its cruel houses
and people who seldom touched -
though touch is all-
but I grew,
like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,
and then there were many strange apparitions,
the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison
and all of that, saws working through my heart,
but I grew, I grew,
and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes
and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyeball,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it was his two hands
and embrace it.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
This story ends with me still rowing.
Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Towards God

2. Piece of music: Allegri's "Miserere".  The music is exquisite.  And I was introduced to it by by my brother, who has a doctorate in semiotics and culture studies, who is as implacable in his critique of all things establishment including religion and faith, as anyone, and as gentle and tender a brother as anyone could hope for.  He has found a way of meeting me and my world view through music. 

3. Work of art: The Nun by Fernando Botero.  It is a sly, witty picture of a person of faith.  A copy hung in my room in seminary and when I started on my doctorate in theology at Vanderbilt.  It reminded me not to take this all so seriously.

4. Film: Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman.  It helped me understand the way my Nordic heritage has shaped my faith.  It was the first time I listened to God talk in Swedish and felt so connected to that conversation...

5. Unusual engagement with popular culture:  Colombia is one of the few countries that still had a concordat with the Vatican when I was growing up there.  Holy Week was a particularly bizarre time, at least through the eyes of a child of agnostic Swedes.  All popular music stopped playing on the radio, replaced with funereal classical music.  There were processions each night, with religious brotherhoods carrying bloodied, suffering statues of Christ.  On Good Friday, people climbed up a very steep mountain that had three crosses at the top. They climbed on their knees, keeping fast.  We were told that if you bathed on Good Friday, your hair would turn to snakes.  At 3:00 PM everyone sat still for at least an hour.  And Easter Sunday was strangely anticlimactic, although our Easter Baskets were always spectacular and completely out of context either with our family's lack of faith, or the Roman Catholic ethos of our community.  As I said, bizarre--and colorful and such a part of who I am...

That have helped/ challenged you on your spiritual journey.

What about you???

Something New

Less than a month after my hip surgery earlier this summer, I thought I had closed a chapter in my life.  In one sense, I had. I crossed the Rubicon when I traded in my own bone and sinew for something new.  But I also mixed wishful thinking with an overwhelming sense of relief, making it easy to say, "that's it; the strife is over, the battle is won.."  At a deeper level, I did what I have been doing all my life--I put my body back out on its own, relieved that I could ignore it a little more, now that there is no pain.

That illusion is getting stripped away.  The truth is that the surgery was the easy part.  The discipline of continuing to strengthen and retrain my muscles is much, much harder for me.  I am still walking as if my left leg were shorter than my right leg, even after all of these weeks of therapy. The discipline of keeping my weight down is also wearing thin. I have found myself making all kinds of excuses for letting go with the food, eating what I shouldn't, not planning as I must, after a lifetime of eating in ways that are not healthy. Not long ago, I caught myself doing something I'd been able to stop last year when I finally began to work on my weight:  before bedtime, I took a Pepcid A/C, anticipating that I would have heartburn during the night.   That one small action cuts to the core of how easily I separate out "me" and my body.  I didn't want to hear the message that heartburn would have been trying to send. 

Yesterday, I went to see Tonka.  Tonka is a highly skilled Pilates instructor and trainer of Pilates instructors.  She is particularly interested in working with people who are trying to heal from injury or trauma to their bodies.  My physical therapist and I had discussed Pilates as a good way for me to keep working on strengthening my body.  My time with Tonka yesterday was strenuous, enlightening.  She had me walk for several minutes and then, in a lovely, lilting Eastern European accent said, "Your poor body is so afraid of all the changes it is going through.  We must help it realize this is all OK."  She knocked the breath of out me.  I assume that I know what fear feels like:  the tightness in my chest, the racing thoughts, the shallow breath, the clammy hands.  We all recognize those symptoms.  But there's another reaction, much more insidious, and for me, destructive:  numbing. 

During the assessment yesterday, and then again today, during my first Pilates workout, I had to be aware of even the most minuscule movements my body was making--the opposite of numbing out.  The idea is to isolate and stretch or exercise very specific muscles with tremendous precision and control. And I thought physical therapy was rigorous!!!   In Pilates they talk a lot about the body core--how it is the locus of our strength.  Truthfully, I really want to not have to deal at all with my abdomen which is sort of the core of the core, except to put food in it.  Pilates insists that I transform that weakness into strength to make available to all of me.  I hated all the effort and attention we have just given my abdominal muscles.  At the same time, everything in me understands how critical it is that those muscles become strong for my continued healing and rehabilitation.

I have always been so scared of my body and in my body, that I have only looked at athletic, really fit people with envy, telling myself that would never be me.  Now I am having to revisit that fear.  I have to decide if it is a fear, along with a whole slew of coping mechanisms, that is worth holding on to.  Is something new out there for me that goes beyond getting a new hip?  I don't know the answer.  I do know that I will be back working with Tonka this Friday, and then again on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week.  My body as the expression of hope and faith.  Please pray for me that I will continue to have the will to persevere. 

Quick Quick

• Small sources of joy:  a new linoleum floor in the Centro.  A parishioner offered to have the floor installed for us.  We'd been planning to do it, though none of us really knew how to do it.  The installer was this amazing, sweet guy who actually does most of his work on yachts and mansions, laying down marble.  He did it so beautifully.  The space is now light, and airy and joyful.  All we have left to do is put back the baseboards and the transformation will be complete. 
• How we are all connected:  When you've lived long enough in hurricane country, you become more aware of what happens to the weather when a big one is churning out there.  All these many miles away from Dean, clouds racing past us, gusty breezes, the soupy humidity--they all make me uneasy, even knowing I'm safe because they are part of the hurricane system. 
• Once a year, cute is great.  We started VBS this Sunday.  We're using Great Bible Reef so we've made this cool mural of a reef that's pasted up on a bay window.  The window seat is covered with cellophane and crepe streamers to look like water and populated with small stuffed and plastic sea critters.  We decorated cookies in the shape of fish, octopi(??) and crabs, and offered them at coffee hour.  As a I said, one a year, I love cute.
• School morning heaven:  Sitting with a good cup of coffee, Light of My Life on my lap, letting me love on her and comb and fix her hair.  Taking her to school, past the canals and the New River, where the sunlight is dancing and the breeze is just barely rippling over the water.  Singing together at the top of our lungs, "Before the beginning, before there was time, God loved you and me."  Feeling her butterfly touch on my arm as she gets out of the car and hearing her say, "thanks for the ride mom" sounding so mature that it makes my heart scrunch up and puff out all at once.  She's growing up...

Man, I love my life...

Friday Five--Word Association

This one is patterned off an old Friday Five written by Songbird, our Friday Five Creator Emerita:

Below you will find five words. Tell us the first thing you think of on reading each one. Your response might be simply another word, or it might be a sentence, a poem or a story. (Each of these appears in one of the readings from this Sunday's lectionary.)

1. vineyard: Biking through the countryside in France. I want to do that.  Bad....

2. root:  Actually roots, plural.  What I have now in the unlikeliest of soil.  We were back on the water today, back down on Elliot Key.  We traler our boat and use a boat ramp at a county marina called Blackpoint.  Once in the water, we have to go out a fairly long channel to get on Biscayne Bay.  Along one side there is a seawall holding a small piece of land in place.  Right at the end, there's a mangrove.  Small, weatherbeaten, defined by tenacious roots that insist it will live, and live there.  That's what loiving is like for me in South Florida.  Pardon the typo--it was unconscious but I think I've found me a new word.

3. rescue:  I'm growing up.  Less and less am I in need of rescue.  Though it does mean that more and more, I am in need of help all along the way...

4. perseverance: What it takes to be a mangrove

5. divided:  Loving and living.  And they shouldn't be...

What about you?

Bible Study Gone Astray

There were 10 of us last night.  We've been working on Acts since June, slowly.  After our meal, we decided we'd rehearse a piece that we will be performing at a celebratory Eucharist at the end of the month. 

We agreed: just one quick song.  Then it's time to get back to our study.  But it had been a hard day.  Several of the Mexican men share one room in a duplex up the street from the Centro.  Last week, the owner rented the other room to a young American couple who either fight or have sex in the kitchen, in the living room, in all the common spaces of the small duplex with no regard for their house-mates.  They regularly steal the food the Mexican men buy.  Like my brothers can afford that.  Another participant who thought she was on the verge of getting her residency documents has suffered a very major setback.  She's scared.  Yet another one got some bad news about a process of certification she's been going through and spent a lot of time and energy towards. The list goes on but I get depressed just writing these few bits down.

So we rehearsed the piece, one person playing the guitar, everybody else singing, quite a few voices not quite on key.  It sounded so good we practiced again, and then one more time.  Someone asked that we sing another hymn.  Then another. And we kept going. Light of my Life, who was with us since school has not started yet and she can stay up late, was radiant.    Some of the hymns we sang had that undertone of eschatological yearning that makes me want to cry.  But mostly, they were hymns of praise and joy.  Our little worship space is in a bay of a larger building.  We share the building with a  Pentecostal faith community that has a lot more members and makes a very loud and joyful noise unto the Lord sometimes driving us to distraction.  At one point someone in our small space said, "they're going to knock on our door at any moment and ask if we've converted!"  We dissolved into laughter.  And then sang some more.   We stopped singing when we started getting hoarse.  We never made it back to the Good Book.  We had, however, found a voice to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land. 

Of Angels and Archangels

One of my recent posts was about a member of the Centro Hispano de Todos los Santos who needed to have dental work and none was available except at full price.  Well...there aren't only Archangels (or at least folks named after Archangels) in our midst.  There are also angels.  Yesterday, a pair of them dropped a very handsome check in the collection plate to help cover the unexpected dental expenses I had written about.  How blessed we are...and how grateful.