On thoughtfulness and reunions

June 1, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

My friend told me a lovely story today. Over the weekend she received a letter from a stranger, and the opening line read, “I hope this is not intrusive.” The letter was from a person working with the state hospital; the hospital has hundreds of containers of people’s cremated remains, and they are attempting to return them to the family of the deceased.

My friend learned that the hospital had her great-grandmother’s remains; would she like them? She said yes, and plans to take them to the cemetery where her mother and grandmother are buried. She will go with her daughter and granddaughter to the graveside, and there will gather six generations of strong, beautiful women.

As my friend told me this story, I got a little teary. Maybe it was the thoughtfulness of the gesture. I think that’s part of it, but part of it too is this strange thing I have about reunions, even beyond the grave. (Or at the grave, in this case.)

Now I don’t believe that those cremated remains or any decaying body of flesh and bone have any power in them. There is no life there; they are going back to the dust from whence they came. The souls that inhabited those bodies have gone on, I believe, and while the soul makes its home in skin and sinew, it is not confined there. The souls of my friend’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother have gone on.

And yet. And yet there is a poignancy to reuniting these ashes with those of a daughter and granddaughter. I have no idea what happens when we die. Maybe this faith thing has been one big crap shoot and when it’s over, it’s over. Or maybe we fall asleep for a while, and wake up when Gabriel blows that horn. Or maybe we die and boom we go to heaven and the reunion is instantaneous.

If we die and sleep for an eon, imagine the waking up. Imagine my friend’s great-grandmother waking up, and those ashes and pulverized bones coming together again, kneaded back into vibrant form; imagine her waking up and seeing her daughter and granddaughter with her.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Many waters cannot quench love

May 4, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 4 Comments

A few days ago I asked my Facebook world what they were hankering to read a blog about; the answers were few. But two friends both said they wanted to read something about love. One of them, a former college professor of mine and a drama queen in the absolute best sense of the term, said this: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” I don’t think my former professor is a religious sort of person, but her suggestion immediately took me to the Song of Songs.

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.

Death has been around more than usual of late, and I find little mysterious about the deaths nearest me. A member of my extended family died after a long illness, and there may have been some small mercy that he died before the disease took a more humiliating and painful toll. A young child in our congregation’s circle had a brain tumor removed and the family faces a very different future than the one they imagined for her; their original dreams have died. Little disappointments add up to small deaths. And all this in the midst of Eastertide.

Death has not felt mysterious lately, but I know that it does feel that way sometimes. To be with someone in his last hours; to sit with a family as tears pour out when their 102-year-old aunt steps through the veil, tears of gratitude and relief; to walk a cemetery like a tourist, an unintentional voyeur of another’s grief: there is mystery in death. It’s not the mystery of why lungs stop inflating and deflating or why a heart stops beating. It’s the mystery of the silence after, the vacancy of a life. It’s the void that some of us fill with hope that there is more. It’s the moment after the conductor picks up the baton, before the music begins.

Love usually feels mysterious. On any given day I would be hard-pressed to say why I love my spouse and child. I could tell you what I love about them, but if you asked my why I love them, I’d likely stammer out, “Because I do.” It’s a privilege to love others in the cloud of mystery – some bosom friends, a parent or two. Some loves defy explanation. I will not name their names in order to protect the innocent, but I have two relatives, married to each other, and for the life of me and everyone else in the family, we cannot figure out what ever got them together, but fifty years later, there they are, tending to each other and bickering and getting creaky together.

Maybe love is more of a mystery because unlike death, we cannot always point to its work. We see the still, yellowing body and we know that death has come; mystery solved. But we see a garden, or a child, or we stand in a field in the middle of nowhere and look up at the shimmery night sky, and wonder if love made those things come to be. We watch the protests, and volunteers going through the rubble, and watch the watchers of the Supreme Court, and wonder if love is the force that weaves them together.

Would I say love is stronger than death? I would. I believe I have evidence to support the claim. But I would rather join Oscar Wilde in saying that the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. It is in the mystery where we find ourselves without answers or solutions or our usual bag of tricks. It is in the mystery where we have only ourselves, and those few friends who will stay with us in the uncertainty, and for some of us, the Divine.

It is the mystery of love where I find my greatest hope, because if I cannot explain it, then it must be true.

For Jim and Zinnia, with love

Handing over what is not mine, or, Learning to let go

April 18, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

I was up worrying the other night. It happens. Worry is a spiritual gift I received from my mother, and I have worked hard to perfect that which was passed on to me. I also work not to pass it on to my daughter, but I worry that I am failing in that.

Anyway, I was worrying the other night when what I really wanted to be doing was falling asleep. It was the end of a long day, the house was quiet, all other living creatures under our roof were asleep, and there I was, worrying. Someone once defined worry as “misuse of the imagination.” Yes, it is. Finally my desire to sleep won over my need to worry, and I decided to hand it all over to Jesus.

Now I really don’t consider myself that kind of Jesus person. I usually don’t hand it over to the Lord, nor do I think that he walks with me or talks with me in the “In the Garden” sort of way. My prayers tend to be to God, not to Jesus. I mean, I’m good with him, but I do like to keep my distance. But that night I decided I really needed to hand it all over to him. So I pictured what I was handing over, and it was a spherical-shaped thing, a tangle of worries that might best be represented by barbed wire, lima beans, the insoles of my daughter’s summer Keens, and all those random electronic cables you stick in a drawer because you have no idea what they’re for. Roll all that up into a ball, and those were the worries I wanted to hand over to Jesus. Lucky him.

So I did. In my mind’s eye I pictured handing him this messy, sharp bundle, and I pictured him taking it. And then a funny thing happened. As soon as he took it, it turned into a beach ball- one of those big plastic, colors-in-pennant-shapes beach balls. It was like he was taking all my worries so very lightly, like he was saying, “Hey, I know there’s stuff that’s getting you down but I think we should go play on the beach.”

What the hell, Jesus?

Okay, not really.

But somehow, it worked. He took my ball of lima beans and barbed wire and turned it into a beach ball and I fell asleep. Not only that, but that night I dreamed I was about to marry George Clooney. (I did confess that to my husband the next day and assured him that George Clooney was no match for him.)

The next day I had coffee with a friend who is a 12-stepper. I am remarkably proud of her, and often inspired by the rigorous and truthful way she looks at her own living. We talked about whatever step it is where you let go and let God, and she talked about the deep meaning the serenity prayer has for her. While I listened, I was having my own internal conversation about letting go and the whole Jesus-turned-my-worry-into-a-beach-ball thing. Here’s where I ended up.

Sometimes, in order to sleep, in order to get the rest our bodies, minds, and souls need, we have to let it go. (Apologies for cueing that particular song.) It’s not always ours to keep, the things we worry about. But sometimes, after that rest, we take some of it back. Some of it is mine to carry, or to deal with, or to wrestle with. But maybe when I take it back, there are fewer lima beans and more grains of sand.

Confession of faith, sung

April 13, 2015April 21, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

“O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be
Let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wand’ring heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal if for Thy courts above.”

The Sunday after Easter is such a relief. I do love all the pageantry and crowds and flowers of Easter, but somehow the Sunday after Easter feels more real and more to the point. There are no processions to organize, no flowers to maneuver around, fewer handshakes and smiles after the service, and no eggs to clean up. It’s normal worship again – or as normal as worship ever gets – and the folks who are there are there because it’s their church and they come rain or shine, flowery holiday or regular holy day.

Which is not to say that things cannot be wonderful and gut-wrenching and good.

It was the offertory that got me. Our choir (who did not take off the Sunday after Easter because they love singing in worship) sang a beautiful arrangement of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Now I love that hymn. I love the poetry of the words and I am a complete sucker for any tune out of the Southern Harmony tradition. So the choir starts in, the women first, and a little organ interlude, the men coming in on a new verse in a new key, a cappella. And then it gets going with the culmination of that line “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be” and it hit me:

That is why I do all of this.

That was my first sense of call, my push toward ordination, the thing that motivates me week after week and year after year to be a part of the gorgeous flawed thing called church and to be a member of this hilarious and weird and flawed thing called the clergy. It’s because I am indebted to the grace of God every single moment of my life, and in gratitude and penance and hope I do this Christianity thing and I do this ministry thing because grace has overpowered my will, my guilt, my ego, my sense of worthlessness, my sense of awesomeness, and all the misery the world can throw at me. That is why I do all of this.

We have an ongoing conversation, the congregation and I, about the Apostles’ Creed. Some aren’t happy we ever say it, some wish we said it more, and I insist on saying it when we have baptisms. As I said, it’s an ongoing conversations and nobody’s really budging. But that’s okay. Last year our choir sang Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass as the sermon one week, and the Credo in that is pretty much spectacular. One of our folks, one of the ones who wishes we would never say the Apostles’ Creed again, did admit that if we could sing that Credo instead of saying the words, she’d be good. But we don’t – not yet, anyway.

But what if our creed were those words Robert Roberston wrote in 1758? What if our creed were the admittance of our utter reliance on the grace of God, and the hope that God would fetter us, and that all of this life is just part of sealing our hearts for something more? What if those words were our confession of sin, and our profession of faith, and our proclamation of the good word, and our marching cry every week? Would that my heart were tuned to sing that grace.

The grace of the saints, and they didn’t even know it

April 5, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

Well, Easter is over; at least, Easter Day services are done and it’s “get a latte and put on comfly clothes and maybe take a nap” time. For all of you who are church people, who in some way did something to help make this morning beautiful, thank you. Thank you, flower arrangers and communion setters. Thank you, sound system gal/guy, ushers, van drivers. Thank you, coffee hour servers who had double duty today. Thank you, bulletin stuffers and tenors, altos, basses, and sopranos, and organists, and choir directors, and custodians. Oh, God bless all the custodians. Thank you egg dyers, and banner makers, and families processing with azaleas and eggs. Thank you, all you who showed up. And thank you, all you who celebrated LIFE today.

I was a bit under the weather on Holy Saturday, and tentative about how I would be on Easter. Admittedly, it was a slow start, but by the time the second service began, it was all good. The sermon was early in the service, which meant that I got to worship without worrying for the last half. My colleagues offered a beautiful invitation and beautiful communion prayer. Our elders helped serve the bread and cup. And then the saints showed up.

The woman I’ve never seen before carrying up her sleeping toddler. The woman now using a cane, but by God she was here on Easter despite the recent stroke. The man who’s mother is dying more quickly than any of us would like. The person who is still a bit put out with me over a recent unpopular decision, who did not avoid my station but received the bread from me. The teenager who was just confirmed a few minutes earlier. The grandpa with his whole family in tow, even though they go to other churches they came with Dad today, because it’s Easter and because they miss their mom who died a few years ago. Our administrative assistant who makes so much run so smoothly, bringing her mom. The woman who prays without ceasing for all of us. My daughter. Her friend. The strangers, the leaders, the wondering, the wandering, and the lost. The saints showed up.

I had one critique after the service, from someone who doesn’t come that often. She regretted that in my sermon I didn’t mention that Jesus had risen. I thought I had, but perhaps too obliquely for her. All the same, whether or not anyone there thought Jesus showed up this morning, spanking-fresh and resurrected, I will tell you this: the saints showed up this morning. Thank you all.

And for good measure: He is risen! He is risen indeed.

The Wound in His Shoulder

March 25, 2015March 25, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 4 Comments

“It is related in the annals of Clairvaux that St. Bernard asked our Lord which was His greatest
unrecorded suffering, and Our Lord answered, ‘I had on My Shoulder, which I bore My Cross
on the Way of Sorrows, a grievous Wound, which was more painful than the others,
and which is not recorded by men. Honor this wound with thy devotion….'”

I have been thinking about the wounds people carry, those unbearable weights that take their toll on our bodies and hearts. I think of the old but not elderly woman who complained for months to her doctor about a cough, and when he finally got around to taking her seriously, discovered that cancer had taken over. She was told she has only weeks to live. It is a wound of not having been taken seriously, as if facing death were not wound enough.

I think of the acquaintance whose young nephew has leukemia, his wearing those large, dark-ringed eyes and bald head of children living with chemo and cancer, her bearing worry and hope at the same time, the soul-vertigo that causes.

I think of that parent in Nigeria, those last shards of hope disintegrating, living in fear of Boko Haram and knowing that rage will only cause more trouble.

I think about the invisible responsibilities people choose to bear – the responsibility of caring for a brother who is mentally ill and a hoarder, who could at any moment be thrown out into the streets. The young mom, a professional in a high-profile position, diagnosed with breast cancer and having to be the gracious face of positivism and faith when maybe, inside, there is terror and an absence of God. The many who have put their hope and trust in the church only to have that trust broken in ways they believe can never, ever be mended.

People carry so much. It takes a toll.

There’s the other weight, too – the weight of not being able to do one damn thing about the suffering. It’s a secondary weight that is as heavy as the primary one, maybe: the weight of being left behind, alone; the weight of being powerless, the weight of not having stopped some part of the tear in the fabric of the world.

Our Roman Catholic friends have a novena about the shoulder wound of Christ – the wound caused by the weight of the cross he was forced to carry. My shoulders ache at the thought of that.

It’s where our tension finds a home – the shoulders, the neck, the hardening of the occipital ridge. It’s the pinch between the shoulder blades where those invisible weights claw dully at us, reminding us of our responsibility, of our need to carry some of this, of our need to own some of this.

Where is the relief? Surely letting go of the burden lessens it some, but there is perpetual tension in those muscles. Massage, heat, stretching, meditation: a relief, yes. But a cure?

Perhaps we are never truly unburdened, at least not on this side of the grave.

Grounded

March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 3 Comments

It’s rare that my chiropractor and my spiritual director offer me the same advice, but when they do, I think it’s a sign that I’m supposed to pay particular attention.

Early on, my chiropractor would harp on me about having my head in the clouds and disassociating physically, and she would tell me I needed to connect with the ground. Literally. Put my feet on the ground and feel them connect to the earth. Our bodies are built to be sustained that way, with large leg and hip bones and calves and quads and glutei maximi. It was only when she said this that I figured out I have spent so much of my recent years feeling more like a marionette – being lifted up by the shoulders. Which, of course, doesn’t work at all.

When I begin my spiritual direction sessions, we always pray, and my director makes sure that my feet are on the ground. We’ve not talked about why we do that, but every spiritual director I’ve ever had does this, and they are all smarter than I, and it works. As I settle into prayer, my chiropractor’s voice echoes in my head. So I’m working on being physically spiritual, or spiritually physical. One of those. I think.

A few years ago during some continuing education, I learned that the word in Genesis 2 for “earth” is best translated as the “topsoil of the fertile ground.” That’s the stuff the writer of Genesis says we’re made of – the topsoil. We come from the ground that is beneath our feet.

To pray with feet firmly planted is to reconnect with our best selves, the selves made at creation in the image of God. Maybe that’s the part of us that does the healing, too, when we are hurt. We are at our best and strongest when we are grounded.

The word “grounded” reminds me of liturgy, too, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday – “remember you are dust/earth/topsoil, and to dust/earth/topsoil you will return.” Most beautiful and true for me, though, is the funeral liturgy: “You are immortal, the Creator and Maker of all. We are mortal, formed of the dust, and to dust we shall return. All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

I am grounded. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Talking with my child about race

March 7, 2015March 8, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 1 Comment

Last night my daughter and I attended a one-woman show that our church was sponsoring. Damaris Webb, a native Portlander and actress, presented “The Box Marked Black: Tales from a Halfrican-American growing up Mulatto. With sock puppets!” If you live in the Portland area, I urge you to google Damaris Webb and see her next show.

On the way over to church, my daughter said, “Mom, I’m the only one in my class who doesn’t know what the N-word is.” On the one hand, it occurred to me we might be getting something right – she doesn’t know that word, and she’s never heard us say it. On the other hand, I’d like for us to teach her about that word. So I told her that she might hear it in the show, and we would talk about it on the way home.

And so we did. She heard the word twice, but I’m not sure it registered with her as much as the scene with sock puppet Kizzy from “Roots” and sock puppet Laura from “Little House on the Prairie”. (It made sense within the show, and was rather hilarious.) We talked about the N-word, and how she was never allowed to say it. The closest parallel I could make for her was that using the N-word is like Hermione Granger being called a Mudblood in the Harry Potter books. I’m not sure she knows the B-word or the C-word, so I thought Harry Potter was a safer reference.

And then, because it came up in the show, we talked about the mini-series “Roots”. She knows a little bit about slavery and the Civil War – she knows more about the Civil Rights Movement. I said to her, “Do you know how people got slaves? They were captured in Africa and crammed into ships and taken to the United States where they were sold.”

“That’s TERRIBLE,” she said. “They are human beings! They aren’t things.” Then we talked about the people who knew slavery was wrong and fought it for a long time, and we talked about the Civil War. “Mom,” she said, “if we hadn’t won the Civil War and if the slaves weren’t freed, there would be so many people who wouldn’t be in my class. There would be so many teachers who wouldn’t be at my school.”

When my daughter was a toddler, I read an article saying the right thing to do was not to teach your child to be color-blind. Rather, allow your child to see the differences, and talk about them. So that has been our approach in teaching our child about race. Yes, people look different. That doesn’t mean they should be treated differently. But because some people look different, they are treated differently, that’s wrong.

I hope we have more of these conversations, and I hope I said the right things to a nine-year-old. The conversation will be different when she is 12, or 16, or 21. I hope she continues to feel the injustice of slavery, of racism, of prejudice.

But I think our upcoming conversation will be a little different: we passed a sign that read “Best Ass Contest”; she said, “Mom, that’s so funny but I don’t think it’s about donkeys.” God, help us parents.

Preaching resurrection in the middle of Lent

March 2, 2015March 3, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 2 Comments

I am a big fan of the liturgical calendar.

As someone who plans worship, knowing what season it is helps. It helps us with the colors, the themes, the hymns, the scripture, the tone of worship. That being said, I must also admit that the liturgical season is an entirely human construct. We invented it to help us know God. God did not invent it to help God know us.

Yet I find myself in a seasonal muddle this year. In the past week I conducted two memorial services and they were not particularly Lent-y. The opening hymn at the first was “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” The choir sang Beethoven’s “Hallelujah” from The Mount of Olives at the second. A few weeks ago, our retired soprano section leader, a helluva woman in her 80’s, sang an introit and a benediction response that were full of Alleluias. My own husband, giving the benediction at the Ash Wednesday service, spoke out his usual “Hallelujah, hallelujah, Amen.”

What’s a liturgical-seasoned girl to do?

The funny thing about the liturgical calendar, and holidays/holy days, is that it’s all play-acting. We’re pretending Jesus is born again; we’re pretending the Holy Spirit has lit a flame on the apostles’ heads; we’re pretending Jesus is walking toward his execution as if we have no idea what might happen next. But we do know what happens next. That’s why we’re in this story in the first place.

It’s always with a little guilt over my own pretense that I approach the Good Friday service. We know what happens next, so if there is genuine sorrow, it is about the sorrow in life right now, in the world today. Maybe. I suppose we can – and do – feel sorrow for tragedy and suffering, whether it is the suffering we are going through right now or the suffering of innocent victims scattered among the pages of history.

Is my sorrow over Jesus’ death mediated by my belief that he rose? Does the joy at the end of the story erase the pain near the end of the story? What does it means to utter alleluias and preach resurrection in the middle of Lent?

The second memorial service this past week was for a woman who had been a matriarch of the congregation. She loved butterflies, and so in her memory we hung our Easter butterfly banners, and in my homily, I quoted “Life Lessons from a Butterfly” which had been among her keepsakes. ““Let go of the past. Trust the future. Embrace change. Come out of the cocoon. Unfurl your wings. Dare to get off the ground. Ride on the breezes. Savor all the flowers. Put on your brightest colors. Let your beauty show.” The words might be a little twee for some, but they reflect a sweeter approach to life held by more than one woman I’ve known in her 90’s. They are Easter words – “come out of the cocoon, put on your brightest colors.”

But if we take the season of Lent seriously – if we take this time before Easter as a time for reflection, repentance, and change – maybe these are Lent words too. Let go of the past (and stop doing things that hurt others because of hurt done to you in the past). Embrace change (repent, turn around, choose love instead of hate, trust instead of fear). Unfurl your wings (do not put your light under a bushel). Dare to get off the ground (follow Me).

There is no Lent without resurrection; we invented Lent after the Easter event. We might see the three crosses, but we see the tomb and the garden just beyond them. Maybe, then, knowing the life after death awaits us gives us courage to face the hard pieces of our lives. And maybe an ‘alleluia’ or two in the midst of repentance is not a bad thing.

He is risen! Take up your cross and follow Him….

Gratitude and poop, an Ash Wednesday meditation

February 17, 2015February 17, 2015 / Beth Merrill Neel / 5 Comments

I recently began seeing a spiritual director, something I’d been thinking about and finally committed to after a colleague who reads my blog sent me the kindest message which read something like, “Honey, I just love reading your blog and I’m wondering if you would like a spiritual director.” I could just hear that silent prayer “Bless her heart.” One of our ordination vows is to be a friend to our colleagues in ministry and I’m grateful to this friend in particular.

So in our first meeting my spiritual director and I started talking about meditation. I confess that I spend about as much time meditating as I do working on my core and learning Italian, which is to say, no time. I think my spiritual director got my number pretty quickly and she suggested working meditation into something I do everyday, to be mindful as I go about that task, to breathe in gratitude and breathe out beauty or hope or something as I go about this daily thing. Really, it’s multi-tasking, which I love. I don’t know if it’s good for my spirit, but we’ll see.

Every morning I take our dog Max out for his morning constitutional. Rain or shine or wind, light or dark, out we go. We’re like the U.S. Postal Service. Except for ice. I always make an exception for ice. Anyway, every morning I take Max out so that he can pee on every bush that all the other dogs have peed on and so that he can sniff All Things. We make it over to school and he chews on some grass, and growls at the other dogs who have the temerity to pee on his bush. We keep walking until he poops. Then I pick it up, and we head home with less peeing and sniffing.

So I have incorporated mindful breathing and meditativeness into my morning walk. I breathe in gratitude – gratitude for the abundance of sun we’ve had this winter (and as soon as that negative thought about ‘this means a dry summer’ pops into my head I send it scurrying off); there’s gratitude for my sweet dog whom I love, for the crocuses and daffodils that are blooming so early, for my neighbors and neighborhood, for the gentleman down the street whose morning fire always smells so good, for the kid who was sent out to pick up the trash that didn’t stay in the garbage can, for the school full of amazing, crazy kids, for so much. I am just bursting with all that gratitude I’ve breathed in, and pray that I’m breathing out all that hope and love and grace or whatever it is I’m supposed to be breathing out.

And then, the dog poops.

The whole point of the morning walk is to get the dog to poop so that he does not do that inside while we’re at work. It is the culmination of the walk, the finale, the big finish. It should be greeted with confetti and kazoos and huzzahs and treats. But I greet it with a sigh and the compostable green plastic dog poop bag. And we head home, the denouement of our time together.

But I must admit that picking up the poop grounds me – really – in the way that saying “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” grounds me. There is an earthiness to life that we cannot avoid, and everybody and everything living thing poops, and everybody and every living thing will die. To dust we will return. And hopefully no one will pick up the dust that once was us into a little compostable plastic bag, a sad denouement of a life well-lived.

Obviously, I have some work to do with my spiritual director, but I think some how with all that breath going on, and little groundedness will help. A good Ash Wednesday to you.

p.s. I will not be giving this meditation at our Ash Wednesday service, but if you’d like to see the liturgy I wrote, go to my Liturgy page and the sub page of “Random Liturgy.”

Hold Fast to What Is Good

A blog and some art and some liturgy