Donut parts and apple juice

 

This is the view from my front window, and it never looked better than when I took this photograph earlier this week.  A lovely little Lutheran church.  Though I am a minister, and though I live right across the street, this is not my church- seems odd, I know.  However, because I have become friends with this pastor and congregation, I am invited from time to time to fill the pulpit when their minister must be away.  Today was just such a day.

When I walk out of the door of a parish like this one, I am often left asking myself questions about vocation.  Is chaplaincy (the mode of ministry I currently embrace) my future, or might I someday see myself as a parish pastor?  I used to tell people “never”, and tell them quite unequivocally.  But then I find that I am immersed in the beautiful mystery of the sacramental moment when I bend toward the worshipper at the communion rail, and I wonder.  I touch the top of the head of a child who has come forward with her parent, a child eager for that instant of blessing- I am thanked with a smile, and I wonder.  And as I walk from the narthex back to the study after the service, and I see a table set with donut parts and apple juice (a table that is set just this way everytime I am there, ready for grazing adults and children), I wonder, because I know that this is the stuff of which memory is made.  Sacred memory, at the intersection where God and people meet.  It is hard for a minister not to want to be in the midst of such a place.

Pain on both sides of the wall

 

I pay much more attention now- it took travelling thousands of miles to get me to this point, but it’s the truth. When I see a headline, a picture, a red news alert that refers to Israeli and Palestinian relations, my attention is held fast. Should I have cared like this sooner? Yes- but I can’t deny that, at least for me, a sense of place makes a difference. A long time ago I was taught to think of myself as a world citizen but I still gravitate toward the countries where I’ve been more than others. Obviously I care about my native land, the United States of America, but Mexico and Canada matter to me too, as do India, Pakistan, China. My mind is still crowded with images of those places, snapshots that line up alongside of Austria, Germany, England, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea…and, now, Israel/Palestine, with a nod to what I could see of Jordan, just over the border.

When I saw the slideshow today on the msnbc.com site (I recommend checking it out), I saw pain on both sides of the walls that have been built. For every grieving Palestinian mother, there is an equally raw Israeli father; there is a hole from a rocket in the roof of an apartment in Israel, and there is a wall blown away in a domicile in a Palestinian settlement. Trading blows, exchanging angry, violent messages is now a daily practice. Had this happened a couple of months earlier, I may not have been able to travel there at all…I would likely not care as much as I do today.

What do I do from here? Ten days of presence certainly doesn’t qualify me as any kind of expert, it only grants me a smidgen of increased understanding. For now perhaps that is enough, for understanding can breed compassion, education, and conversation, and understanding can be the seed of greater prayer for peace. Let it be so.

Sweet Caroline at the YWCA

 

I had to read the e-mail five or six times yesterday, this news that Caroline Kennedy was coming to our local YWCA.  If I lived in a borough of New York City, I would not consider this to be the stuff of late-breaking news; I’m told that she takes the bus there.  But I reside five hundred miles to the west, just on the periphery of what can be considered greater Cleveland.  It is home to me, but I am realistic about how hot this little spot is to most people.   So you’re tellin’ me that four blocks from my workplace, less than one mile from my house, we’re to have an audience with something close to American royalty?  O.K., I’m a little starstruck.

But it is now more than that, some six hours after the fact.  I’ve seen her in the sturdy old Y building where I go for board meetings, experienced her eloquent and honest speech, grasped her hand and spoken face to face, even grabbed an autograph.  What means the most now is knowing that she cares about the things that I care about, because knowing that fosters a feeling of cultural kinship, even if we are worlds apart in the details of our two lives.  What I heard her say tonight, it resonated- the importance of solid public education; the absolute necessity of our unity as Americans when it comes to caring for each other, our country, and our world; the difficulty of turning away from one candidate that you long thought you would vote for (Clinton) in favor of another (Obama) because you came to believe that he better spoke to the needs of this nation and world; the echoes you heard of your own father’s voice, echoes growing louder with each person who mentioned that they had seen no one else generate this sense of hope and excitement in the forty-some years since.   I heard this bright and poised woman say all of these things, and they made sense to me.

Thank you, Caroline, for coming our way.