Another musician of my adolescence has died.  The first concert I ever went to was Earth, Wind & Fire, and so it was with a heavy heart, and an awareness that none of us is getting any younger, that I took in the news of Maurice White’s death.

I cranked up “September” and went back to September of 1979.  That fall I got a new dress, an plum-colored wrap in that wonder fabric, Qiana.  I loved that dress; I felt pretty in it, or at least as pretty as any fifteen-year-old girl can feel.

My memory, as best I recall it, is of me wearing that dress to church one fine September day in Houston, and standing in the courtyard of the church after the service, a little blissed out because my crush du jour went to my church and I got to hang out with him that morning.  He had no idea, to the best of my knowledge.  I liked to keep my crushes secret – easier on the heart and ego, I’d found.

My best girlfriends were at church too, and someone had a tape player and the grown ups were all still inside, but there we were, gangly and dressed up in things we thought were so sophisticated,  with too much blusher and mascara, giggling and spinning and singing “September” and hoping the boys would notice us.

I wonder sometimes how much my youth church experience affected my decision to go into ministry.  I went to a church with a booming youth program, and I was able to do a lot of things there, and was invited to take on different leadership roles.  I was valued and loved and respected.  Not long after dancing in September, a passer-through asked if I’d thought about going into ministry.  That question took a while to ferment.  But here I am.

That church also allowed me to be an awkward, blushing fifteen-year-old who responded to the glories of worship by cranking up Earth, Wind & Fire and dancing with her friends in the courtyard.

“Our hearts were ringing,
In the keys that our souls were singing.”

But dancing with joy, with friends, with hope: maybe that’s the best response to worship, and not a bad way to receive a call.

A year or so ago the story of Jacob wrestling the angel came up in the lectionary.  My husband preached that day, and as he read the scripture I sat up at the last line: “And he was limping because of his hip.”

I limp because of my hip, and a limp is a hard thing to hide when you process up and down long aisles in a church and you go up to the table and the pulpit and the like.  I smiled when he read that line, and the congregation did too.

Since then the image of Jacob wrestling that angel has stayed with me, and I often go to an earlier line of the story: “I will not let go until you have blessed me.”  I’ve found that a helpful image as I wrestle with something, picturing myself continuing in the struggle, and not giving up, and not giving in, until a blessing has come out of it.

Today I asked someone what he would say to God or ask God when he died and presumably went to heaven.  I heard him talk about something he struggles as he tries to live out his faith.  It brings him some anguish, this issue, and part of that anguish is the uncertainty of it and the fact that he would even dare to question God.  So I encouraged him to continue to wrestle with it until he had received a blessing.

I have no idea if my great wisdom made any sense to him, because that’s the thing about wisdom: what seems deep and powerful to us ends up as a poster with the picture of a kitten for someone else.

So maybe the wrestling is just for me.  I’m still waiting to receive this blessing, and most days I wake up feeling like some devious angel has punched me right in the hip joint.  But I will not let go – not yet.  There’s a blessing just around the corner.

Or at least a kitten poster.

 

 

  Sundays in September at church are a glorious thing. About a third of the congregation I serve takes the summer off. They travel, to the beach or the mountains or to other countries. They visit relatives. They go camping. They sleep in and go to brunch and enjoy leisurely coffee with the ever-shrinking Sunday paper. And then, like magic or clockwork, come the Sunday after Labor Day, they’re back in their usual pew, tanned and relaxed and joyous to be with the people again. 

By the second Sunday after Labor Day they have remembered the routine and dress rehearsal is over. They know to come early so they can find a parking place. The pastors robe.  The acolytes light the candles.  The choir processes. The prelude begins and the anticipation of what is to come is palpable. 

Last Sunday I sat up front looking out on the congregation. It’s one of my favorite things to do. There’s so-and-so; those kids grew a foot over the summer; she’s sitting by herself now. We get to baptize that baby this fall. A young couple!  Maybe they’ll come back. 

And as I looked out over the congregation I saw a family I know enter. Grandma, Grandpa, other Grandma, mom, little girl, other little girl who’s lost her hair because she’s going through chemo because she has a tumor in her brain. 

Nothing makes you question the point of worshipping God like seeing a bald five-year-old come into church. 

It’s the hard part of being a pastor and of being a person who believes in God. Terrible things happen all the time, everywhere. Children get cancer. And God lets it happen. 

Tragedy will continue to strike. People will ask why. People will blame God. People will worship God. None of it makes any sense. 

What I know is that on Sunday this family was greeted with love and joy. And we still sang the songs and said the prayers and passed the peace. 

Maybe that child’s presence in the congregation grounded all of us on Sunday, a physical reminder that the world is not perfect. Maybe we all had to dig a little deeper about this God we worship. Maybe we peered into the abyss and saw paradox, joy and sorrow, community and loneliness. 

And maybe I realized why some people take the summer off from worshipping God. 

Sometimes things go wrong that are completely out of one’s control.  Sometimes things go right that are completely out of one’s control, and often we churchy types attribute the latter to God and the former to the human  condition – or Satan, depending on your theological outlook.

Currently I am attending our biennial national meeting of Presbyterians, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (not to be confused with any other kind of Presbyterian, of which there are many.)  I’m here in my role as a Future Volunteer when I will be part of the leadership team providing hospitality to the General Assembly when they meet in Portland in 2016.  This is what I’ve learned so far:

Sometimes things go wrong that are completely out of one’s control.  That may be a God-thing; that may be a Satan-thing; that may be a human condition-thing; or it may just be because the wifi isn’t working.

Here’s something else I’ve learned so far: when something goes wrong that is completely beyond one’s control, how one responds to that is of the utmost importance.  Freaking out is usually not helpful. Calm leadership is helpful.  Sometimes singing is good, and sometimes quiet snarkis good.  And most of the time, having someone who will offer a sympathetic ear, apologize, agree that the situation is messed up, and take a note and see if anything can be done is really the  most helpful thing of all.

Several years ago when on a theater tour in college, one person in the troupe was the designated scapegoat for the tour.  That meant that whenever something went wrong (and something went wrong at least once every day) it was that person’s fault.  Everyone had someone to yell at, to point the finger at, to blame.  And because that person knew that he or she was the scapegoat, he was able to take it.  She apologized for the error, mishap, failure.  He agreed that he should do a better job next time.  She was terribly, terribly sorry.  And then life went on until something else got messed up in some way.

I doubt anyone at this General Assembly wants to volunteer to be GA Scapegoat; in Judeo-Christian circles, being scapegoat usually gets you killed.  So for now, for the the few GA attendees who read this blog, I’ll volunteer.  Yesterday’s wifi overload?  Totally  my fault, and I do apologize.  The need to use paper ballots for the  moderator’s election?  That one’s on me, too.  I am sorry, and if you come by my booth in the Exhibition Hall and mention this blog, I will give you chocolate.  That will fix things – for now.

 

This week marks the one year anniversary of the death of my friend Martha. It’s still so hard to believe that someone whose cup ranneth over with life is gone. The photos of her that have popped up on Facebook and our alumni magazine exude vitality and joy and hilarity that taunt death, in a way. But she’s still gone and we still grieve.

This Christmas my parents graced our whole family with a trip to Hawaii, which was wonderful and restorative, and the sprinkles of (let’s call it) family dynamics were few and far between.

On New Years Eve day, my sister-in-law, my nephew, my daughter and I went to a plumeria farm to pick flowers to make leis for the family as part of our New Years Eve festivities.
The kids loved it, and the flowers were beautiful, and our eco-hippie guide showed us his paintings (which we did not buy) and the coconut cups his son made ( which we did buy), and offered us poi and bananas. We made eight leis and went home. We rang in the new year in various time zones, and discovered that one can bear the weight and fragrance of a lei only so long before the sinuses clog up and the neck starts sweating.

New Year’s Day came and the leis began to wilt. We weren’t sure we could bring them back stateside but it seemed to me that to put them in the trash was a bit of a disservice. So I made a plan. Those who wanted would take the plumeria, freed from their strings, to the beach and toss them onto the waters, and remember those we lost.

In the end, only my husband and daughter joined me, mostly because they are good sports. My sister commented that I love ritual, but that comment was as close as she came to making it to the beach laden with flowers.

So in the surf we stood, my husband and daughter and I, and we began flinging flowers and shouting names over the roar of the waves.

Mike and Bud. Ann and Glen. Ruth and Owen. Beulah and Paul- the grandparents. Uncle George and Aunt Mimi and Uncle Jerry and Uncle Harry. Martha. My dear Martha. Gregg’s dear Carolyn. Marie and Dick, my friend’s parents, because if she had been there she would have been the first one on the beach. And the church people. “Mary!” My daughter shouted, and I added Hank. Janet and Wayne and Anne and John and Betsy and so many. It was great.

And then the plumeria all washed up on shore. Not the ritual I was going for.

You see, the flowers were supposed to go out to sea, in a Bobby Darrin sort of way – a reminder that our loves wait for us beyond the waves. But no. These loves washed up on the shore bedraggled and worse for the ritual.

Then I began to worry that in Hawaii it is illegal to throw anything into the pristine Pacific. “If anyone asks, we have no idea where these flowers came from,” I instructed my people.

I was disappointed, let down by my own petard. They looked so awful now, these pretty plumeria. Beat up, drowned. Dead.

But maybe that’s the point. Those who leave us are dead, and that is not pretty and they are not coming back. What’s left of them does sometimes wash up onto our lives, painful memories of the beauty or kindness or hilarity that are no more.

The next day I went down to the beach, and the flowers were gone, somewhere beyond the sea. Perhaps they have been gathered up, leis again, adorning our beloved a who are indeed waiting for us.