Reflectionary

Apr 30, 2013

Scratching the Itch

It starts with little red bumps on my forearms, just above the wrists. At first they are so faint they seem to be beneath the skin. Untreated they rise above the surface and become dry, red patches.

All my life, I’ve had eczema. At its worst, in a flare, it spreads all over the place. The last time it was that bad, I found myself quite unconsciously rubbing my shoulder blades up and down a door jamb.

Job and the Missus (Jusepe de Ribera, 17th Century)

It felt awful enough that I thought of Job and his potsherds. The terrible itch came up from deep places; it needed digging out and scraping off.

The trouble is scratching makes the itch worse.

Before we launch into dozens of chapters of poetry, Job is a short story, a fable about a man coming to grips with undeserved suffering. He scrapes at his sores while sitting on the ash heap. When his wife comes to him and, in her own excruciating grief for the loss of their family, tells him to curse God and die, Job remains faithful.

I want to be that person. I strive to be that person, receiving even suffering with equanimity where God is concerned.

But sometimes I still end up rubbing my shoulder blades against the door jamb.

Here’s the thing: almost all suffering is undeserved; almost all suffering simply arises from the human condition. We have an auto-immune disorder. We lose the baby. The roads were slick. The other driver was drunk, or inexperienced, or simply driving too fast. Life itches, and scratching the itch hurts us more.

I remember Job when the little red bumps reappear. I smooth salve on my forearm. I breathe. I take the bad with the good. I pray for patience. I breathe again and try not to make things worse.

(A reflection on Job 1:1, 2:1-10. This is one of my reflections for The Abingdon Creative Preaching Annual for 2015, the project I’m working on right now.)

Filed Under: Abingdon, Job, Pentecost 19C, Revised Common Lectionary ·

Apr 27, 2013

On my ball cap

By Martha · 5 Comments

Last week, while the world focused on Boston, I drove to another part of Massachusetts with my high school Senior daughter. At our destination, we celebrated her college choice with a trip to the bookstore to purchase flag swag for the whole family. I came away with a ball cap clearly identifying me as a “Smith College Mom.”

Meanwhile, two other ball caps drove the search for the Boston Marathon bombers. The white cap, in particular, stood out in photos. In a scene out of the movies, the FBI and other authorities gathered in a hotel to scour thousands of images and videos from private surveillance cameras, professional and amateur photographers, and the offerings of ordinary people much like me who can’t stop snapping pictures with their phones. In this time-stamped world, some picture would surely show enough to make a case. Some image would reveal the perpetrator’s identity.

My identity is multi-fold. I am a Christian pastor (UCC flavor), a writer, a wife and mother, a Bernese Mountain Dog obsessive, a knitter of mostly socks, a Virginian by birth, an adoptee, a recovering Southern Baptist, a coffee drinker, a lesbian latecomer, a lover of books and music, a Volvo owner, a registered Democrat and a soon to be Smith College mom. Observing me on last week’s trip to Northampton might have provided insight into a few of these things. I drove the Volvo. I bought the ball cap. I shopped at WEBS, America’s Yarn Store. I pretty much chased down a woman walking a Bernese puppy.

If you asked my new neighbors in Pennsylvania about me, they might be able to get as far as the Volvo.

Since last week, we’ve heard stories from classmates and neighbors, car repair clients, guys at the gym. We’ve seen school pictures and boxing profiles and heard about a scene made at the mosque. In Cambridge, people proud of their diverse community cannot understand. They include everyone. There is so much variation of language and culture, religion and national origin. How could this happen?

We don’t know all the pieces. I left some off my list: raisin hater, New York GIANTS fan, trained Interim Minister, short, grey-haired, brown-eyed. On a hot dog, I like all the condiments. My ears are pierced, but it took more than one try.

Do you have a better picture of me now?

When I heard the news on Patriot’s Day – there’s another thing, for 25 years I lived in the only other state that celebrates it – when I heard the news, I first thought, “Please, whoever did this, let them not be Muslim.

Please, O God. Let it be someone else. Their perceived otherness is too easy, too reflexive and accustomed. Let it be a man whose wife left him for a marathoner, or a faux-Baptist or a white supremacist. We could identify with them instead of running the risk of condemning a whole religion. We could question our culpability, our resentments and prejudices and past injuries, all the things that can influence human behavior toward darkness.

For a short time, I felt close to the situation. I listened to the Thursday night press conference on NPR, in my Volvo, driving home from Smith. When I heard photos would be released, that they would be pictures of two young men, I wondered for a long, hard minute what it would be like to see my son in such a picture.

I have a son in Boston, age 22, studying at New England Conservatory. (There is no ball cap for a conservatory mom.) He was on the Orange Line with his clarinets, A and B-flat, when the bombs exploded. When he arrived at school, getting off the T at Mass Ave, he heard the news. His cellphone didn’t work, so we messaged on Facebook.

A few days later, for a long, hard minute, I pictured my son’s face. I had a heart for some other mother.

Soon we heard words associated with that mother’s family: Chechnya, Dagestan, places I’ve heard of but needed Google Earth to locate for sure. I hear Chechyn and remember a rebellion against the Soviet Union. I hear Chechnya and think violence. Despite my sympathy for people formed by countries where violence is so daily it is hardly news — imagine that — despite my sympathy for their suffering,I feel immediately free to take a big step back. Her cap says Marathon Bomber Mom. Not mine.

This change, this freedom, comes at a primal level, the one where I considered my own child’s safety last Friday morning, texting him before 6 a.m. to say the T was not running, learning he was already halfway to the station, breathing deeply again when he returned to his apartment. I would do anything to protect him, just as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan’s mother is trying to do in a press conference from Dagestan today.

In my higher mind, I continue to wish the bombers were not young Muslim men. I think about how it feels to have your name mispronounced, an experience familiar to me. I listen to Robin Young’s nephew talk on “Here and Now” about his high school friend from Cambridge Rindge and Latin; I see the picture of the two boys dressed up for prom. I reflect on the desire to celebrate his capture, certainly understandable and especially in Watertown, and the celebration of law enforcement. I feel relief that the tone of the local conversation is less about Islam than one might expect. I note the uniquely local ritual acts, Neil Diamond’s appearance at Fenway Park and the Red Sox in their uniforms proudly and simply reading Boston.

I wonder if either of the brothers ever wore a Red Sox cap?

I ponder the very small differences between first century Jews and Samaritans, and how from those small differences grew an abiding hatred. Jesus told a story about a Samaritan, encouraging his listeners to look beyond the identifying marks that bias us to the actual hearts of people.

It’s hard to make ourselves want to look into the hearts of young men who set their backpack bombs down next to children. I can’t pierce that darkness. It’s so easy to condemn reflexively. People I know to be intelligent and thoughtful Christians murmur about Islam, “I don’t like the attitude toward women.” “Isn’t there something … violent … there?”

But wait! Isn’t there something violent about many practitioners of *our* faith? Aren’t their people wearing our team colors who also oppress women? I don’t like to be identified with them anymore than imams in Boston want to be identified with the Tsarnaev brothers.

After a week of listening to news and commentary, here’s what I know about the young man in the white cap. He is 19, and in the hospital. He is in terrible, terrible trouble for committing a horrific act while automated cameras unwittingly made a record of it. His identity will forever be Murderer, Terrorist, Bomber.

I admit, I find it hard to pray for the young man in the white cap and his mother. I’m interested in the psycho-social mysteries that beg for solving. Deservedly disgruntled immigrants? They wouldn’t be the first. Displaced persons who never found a sense of home? Sleeper agents? Pursuing these theories keeps me at a distance, and that dark distance of perceived differences breaks the world in pieces.

I find it hard to pray for him, for his dark heart. If he knew what he was doing — how could he not know what he was doing? Yet the hope of forgiveness extends to him, by God’s grace.

My heart is pierced, but it took more than one try. God can pierce our darkness. Forgiven. It would look pretty smug on a ball cap, but it’s assured for all who open their hearts to God. That’s my hard-won prayer for Dzhokhar, that someday he will wear a different cap. I have a picture of it in my head, a white cap with red letters, a sign of the hope and grace we all need, an identity God grants to every one of us.

(Also posted at There is Power in the Blog.)

Filed Under: Disaster, Forgiveness, Mothering, Politics ·

Apr 16, 2013

Things We Cannot Unsee

By Martha · 8 Comments

I’ll admit it. I’m a news junkie when disaster strikes. I don’t watch a lot of TV at other times, and not when younger children are around. But when the coast is clear, I cannot turn it off. On the evening of 9/11, my then-15-year-old insisted on it. “Why are you watching this? They just show the same things over and over.”

There’s something compels me. I suspect I’m looking for a crumb of reason in the unreasonable, a word of sense in the insensible, a thread of comprehension in the incomprehensible.

I had been watching for just a few minutes when I said aloud, “Oh, whoever did this timed it for the ordinary runners to be coming by.” When FBI profiler Clint van Zandt said exactly the same thing on MSNBC an hour later, did I feel better? No. I felt sadder. But I kept listening.

I’m trying to understand. It’s a coping technique for a crisis. It makes the time go by until the shock passes. It might be better to turn off the TV and cry, I realize that. But that feels dangerous and helpless, and I want to be informed and useful. I’m actually not watching most of the time. I’m listening to the talking, not looking at the images.

Last night, I got in bed, alone because kathrynzj is on a mission trip being actually useful, and instead of closing my eyes, I kept reading the Twitter feed and the Facebook newsfeed, and the live blogs for the Boston Globe and the New York Times (Boston Marathon stories free from both, now! for a limited time!). Real journalists are pretty good about warning readers away from graphic images, but self-described social media stars don’t have rules, and tweets only have 140 characters, and who knows why people do what they do, but I clicked on a link, and I cannot unsee what I saw when the next window opened.

I expected a story, because I was looking for a story. I think words will solve something.

I knew better than to click on anything that labeled itself twitpic or anything similar.

But there it was, on a screen held close to my face, an image I cannot unsee.

a puzzlement

Now, seeing it is nothing compared to living it. In parts of the world where these things happen more often, average folks are looking at the gruesome pictures and not holding back, because they’ve seen horror in the street, maybe in the front yard, and they are hardened to it. I don’t want to see these things. I actually can’t take them in very well. I’m a word person. I was looking for words, but I realize that all my efforts to gain some intellectual understanding of the events of yesterday, all the theories and the family stories and the eventual solution to the puzzle we will someday hear will do nothing to change them.

Tonight’s news featured a mother talking about how wonderful her daughter was, her daughter who is now dead. I find this excruciating, the testimony of grieving mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. Maybe it makes things real for them in a way that nothing else can? Maybe the attention of the world makes them feel they are not alone. I don’t know. I do know I cannot unsee them, unfeel them. They make me look at the giant jigsaw puzzle of currently indistinguishable pieces. They make me feel what happened instead of trying to listen to it gingerly.

I wonder what drives the people who do these things, what words are in their heads, what images are in their minds. What is it they cannot unfeel, what is it they cannot unsee that drives them to destruction?

This is the place where I should preach, isn’t it, where the essay turns to God, where I refer you to Revelation and the wiping away of every tear, or to John and the notion that sheep who actually hear Jesus’ voice would never do such things, but I’m not there yet. It’s trustworthy that I will be, at some point, in that Revelation place, or walking through the valley of shadow fearing no evil in Psalm 23, and yes, these are the texts this week.

But I always have to try and solve it myself first.

I don’t recommend this strategy.

Adé Béthune’s Good Shepherd

Better to turn to the other words, to murmur the version you remember from your grandmother’s funeral, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shalt fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Actually, just typing them comforted me, so much that I’m not going to check and be sure I got the King James Version exactly right. There is some comfort in knowing them, in an illogical sense of connection to uncounted women and men and children who have done their crying out to the same incomprehensible God who we try to size down to a shepherd, knowing that somewhere, someone else felt comforted, too.

I want to think it helps more than telling a story on TV. But maybe television testimonials are the Psalms of Lament for the 21st century, the rite of mourning that makes us part of the community.

The one I loved was kind and lovely and thoughtful and fun.

Why, Lord, why?

The end of her life came too soon.

Why, Lord, why?

He never did a thing to hurt anyone.

Why, Lord, why?

I cannot understand what’s happened here.

Lord, where are You?

Why is Your world so terrible and so beautiful,

all at the same time?

Where are You?

Have we done too many things You cannot unsee?

Filed Under: Disaster, Easter 4C, Good Shepherd Sunday ·

Apr 4, 2013

“All the tribes of the earth will wail.”

By Martha · 2 Comments

“He is coming with the clouds…“

I know, I know. It’s a pre-scientific worldview, gnostic even. We know better than to think heaven is out there; we know the cosmic expanse of space and the composition of clouds and the conflict between belief and knowledge.

Spooky Jesus on the Cloud Elevator

But look! He is coming with the clouds!

Today in South Central Pennsylvania, the clouds were thin, not much more than a veil paling the blue spring sky. Trees are budding, although it has been terribly cold at night, which is hard on pansies. The sun shines, even so, and we embrace the idea that spring is coming, is here, despite the chattering teeth and winter coats at the Little League field last night.

We’re waiting on something we want, desperately. We want warm weather, daffodils in bloom, an April that makes sense.

After twenty-five years in Maine, I’ve grown more patient, even philosophical.

After many more years watching for Jesus, I am also patient.

“All the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be.” (Revelation 1:7, some of it)

We don’t want that.

We don’t want the days it’s too humid to go outside, either.

We’re seeking a snapshot moment — Jesus returns! Look, the tulips! The baby can sit up by herself!

The next thing you know, she crawls away, mosquitoes bite, and the tribes wail. We can’t hold the ideal moments. They always lead to something else.

(20, 11 and 15-wow)

In my backyard in Maine, everything came late — first the forsythia, then the flowering apple tree, then the lilacs. As spring turned the corner toward summer, the rhododendrons out front finally bloomed, the last ones in Portland because of their shaded environment. We took a lot of pictures in front of those rhododendrons, vibrant purple and overgrown long before it was our house. Day came when we had to cut them down lest they grow across the front steps — a moment that felt apocalyptic — an ending.

The tribe wailed.

What’s the platonic ideal you seek, the snapshot moment? On Patmos, John dreamed of the day Jesus would return on the cloud elevator and set things right, so beautifully and clearly God’s own self and Jesus at the same time that no one could ever question it again. It’s a pretty cool dream if you don’t like things the way they are, if you’re hungry or homeless, oppressed or neglected, or very very sure your particular Jesus team is the right one.

It’s also a primitive dream, isn’t it? Someone said he was lifted up to heaven, in the clouds, so to get back, he has to come down again.

For us, the cosmology feels all wrong.

But I’m a cloud-watcher anyway.

Also a pansy-watcher.

It He’s around, I’m determined to see Him. And if I wait, I’d like to think it will be with relief.

Filed Under: Easter 2C, Revised Common Lectionary ·

Apr 3, 2013

Risking Thomas

By Martha · 2 Comments

They locked the doors.

We’ve locked the doors and sat around our own tables, fearful, haven’t we?

Will our neighborhood ever feel safe again?
Will the storm knock out the power?
Will the Soviets attack and invade and change our way of life?

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, “Red Dawn” version of that last fear, the one that had people in my house reading books about living off the grid, my excuse for buying copies of all my favorite children’s books so my children (some merely speculative at that time) could read the classics when the libraries were turned into God-knows-what.

Anxiety gets us worked up enough; when there’s a good reason to be afraid, for real, our brain chemistry can rearrange our judgment.

It had to be that way in the house where the disciples locked the doors. According to John’s gospel, Jesus drew attention and trouble from the beginning of his ministry. Their Jesus waltzed into the Temple in Chapter Two and laid it down. When he returned later, he vanished his way to safety, inspiring murderous rage in the religious leaders.

The disciples knew it. They felt it. Jesus was dead, but things were no better.

They locked the doors.

But someone went out to get news and supplies. Someone had to do it, like my wife making the last trip to the Giant in the freezing rain a few weeks ago. Better get it done.

Since someone particular missed the visit from Reappearing Jesus, no more restrained by locked doors than by death, we may deduce the one who went out for whatever they needed was Thomas.

So when you go to preach this Sunday, or you sit in the pew and listen to this passage being read, remember he did more than doubt.

He risked.

He offered himself up to die with Jesus. (John 11:16)
He asked the direct, even obvious, question. (John 14:5)
He left the safe house. (John 20:24)

He even risked when he expressed his doubts. Imagine how hard that must have been, in the midst of his rejoicing comrades!

Listen and read carefully. Does he ever touch the wounds? He risks one more time, declaring “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28)

You Won’t See Me Jesus gives him one more push; he gives it to all of us. “Believe in me,” he says, “whether I appear in body or not. That’s faith.” (John 20:29, Revised Songbird Version)

But they kept looking, and John tells us they had breakfast with him on the beach, and maybe other places, too.

In this liminal time of the Fifty Days of Easter, I’ll be looking for Him. You never know what might happen when you go out to get the paper.

Filed Under: Easter 2C, Revised Songbird Version ·

Mar 31, 2013

While It Was Still Dark

By Martha · 6 Comments

While it was still dark, two women met at the coffee pot.

“I believe!” said one.

“Have you lost your mind, Honey? Go back to bed.”

But I hadn’t lost my mind. I was groping, like the women so long ago, to express my joy at the unexpected. I’ve lived on the intellectual end of the theological spectrum, that place where we don’t believe a lot of the things we were taught as children, where we don’t take things literally, where we wonder, as I did on my first Holy Saturday as a preacher, what we believe about the bodily resurrection.

The choices I made in my personal life only added to the confusion, the rationalizing, the justifications. I believed something, but I didn’t want to be pushed too hard on it. After all, did it really matter? This man who was God — well, at times, I may have hedged on that, too. This man, this Jesus, had such an impact on human history. Something magnificent happened. God loves us. Alleluia! Etc.

But I woke this morning, while it was still dark, and in the darkness I read the words of another UCC pastor, backing away from the tomb much as I tried to do, and not to do, in the past, speaking to the doubts people may rightly have, and as I read, I thought, “No. I believe it. I believe it.”

Death had no victory.

The forces of darkness — whether human or supernatural — had no power to hold Him.

Instead of using his mighty powers to flee to the Third Heaven around 11:45 on Friday morning, he died. They buried him. And on Sunday morning the tomb was empty.

It may have sounded strange at the coffee maker, while it was still dark, somewhere between the first pot and the second. It certainly sounded strange on that long ago morning.

But I believe it. Christ is Risen!

Now the forces of darkness have no power to hold me. You either. I believe it. And I thank God for it.

Filed Under: Easter ·

Mar 29, 2013

At a Distance

By Martha · 1 Comment

But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things. (Luke 23:49, NRSV)

They have no names in Luke, the followers from Galilee, the women who stood at a distance. A predictably stressful trip to the big city for the holiday became a disaster, dinner with trusted friends giving way to betrayal, arrest, a night without sleep as they waited for word. The new day brought no solace. They watched the cross carried, saw other women — who didn’t know him — wailing and beating their breasts, maybe the same ones who yelled, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

They watched the lots cast, his clothing divided by strangers, robes they brushed against serving at table the night before.

They watched and listened, heard the scoffing insults, read the sign over his head:

This is the King of the Jews.”

But this was the King of Love, speaking kindly to the criminal beside him. The women stood at a distance; even if they could not hear his words, they recognized his tone and his expression.

Their hearts tuned to his love, they did not run. They blinked back. They swallowed hard. They waited. They waited to see what the authorities would do, watched for a chance to care for his body. When they knew where he would be, they went to prepare the spices and ointments.

At the tomb, we will hear their names, but for today, remember how they followed and stood at a distance, fierce and waiting. Remember their perspective, not just their view of the terrible way he died, but their understanding of his life and their love for him. Remember their witness, their determined patience through the long, hard day.

I imagine they drew strength from him, but I imagine they drew it from each other, too. I imagine clasped hands, familiar postures, shallow breaths, faces set toward Jerusalem just like his.

They waited at a distance to do one more good service.

Filed Under: Good Friday ·

Mar 28, 2013

This Holy Week

By Martha · 7 Comments

I am not writing prayers
composing sermons
designing liturgies

At worship,
I worship

I am not forsaken

But I am perplexed
attentive
seeking

I Google recipes
arrange itineraries
make shopping lists

carrots
asparagus
honey-baked ham

I write the litany of the holiday meal

jelly beans
chocolate bunnies
marshmallow Peeps

not quite a sacrament
but we will take and eat

I am not writing prayers
save this one:

Let the dawn bring life
and light
please
-not just to me-

but I would take some clarity
gladly
gratefully

Great List-Making Mother

if You could spare it

Filed Under: Easter, Holy Week, Poetry ·

Mar 27, 2013

The Open Space

By Martha · 26 Comments

The remote office.

When I agreed to my wife’s suggestion that I take a time of sabbatical after our wedding and my move to live with her, I did it reluctantly. I’ve been pushing hard for ten years in local church ministry, pushing to show I could support my family and pushing to show I could be useful on behalf of Jesus Christ. Laying down both those responsibilities felt strange. While it’s nice for my wife the Presbyterian pastor that I hold a high view of the call to ordained ministry and the duties appertaining thereunto, it took another kind of hard push to detach myself from them, even temporarily. Who would I be without the weekly sermon and all the preparation that contributed to its preparation — the studying and discussing and pondering and praying? the writing itself?

Who would I be without the deadline?

Furthermore, Kathryn and I built a friendship on supporting each other in the sermon-writing process, a foundation we have been inhabiting and expanding upon for almost seven years. Who would we be without that work to share?

Would the one without a sermon to write even matter?

Please be assured, that was my question, not hers.

Now, I know sabbatical derives from Sabbath. In theory, all a sabbatical ought to require is rest and worship, or, at the very least, prayer.

But I’m not wired that way.

Six Word Memoirs — go ahead, click on it.

Remember the Six Word Memoir meme from a few years ago?

Mine was as follows:

Proving I was not a mistake.

That’s a big job. How do you do it and not push?

Taking a break seemed scary.

So I:

thought up a writing project
made the bed every day
did laundry as often as I could find enough dirty clothes to justify turning on the machine
folded things and put them away in drawers and closets
read a lot of books
said yes to everything anyone asked me to do (social invitations, opportunities at Kathryn’s church)
worked on the writing project
learned my way around from the Panera to the many locations of GIANT to the Starbucks and home again
cooked things from scratch, including but not limited to chicken parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, shamrock cupcakes and carrots glazed at least three different ways (maple–yum; honey-mustard–also yum; whiskey–unfreakingbelievable)

Basically I aspired to be the lesbian version of a Stepford Wife.

Again, be assured, this all came out of my head.

Providentially, and referring back to the actual purpose of a sabbatical, I also prayed. This helped in numerous ways, because the past three months also included adjusting to a new family configuration, living far from my daughter, and stressing over where two of my three children will be going to school (college and grad) in the fall.

A little over two months in, I accepted an invitation to supply preach one Sunday at a church in transition. I leaned on what one of our friends calls a Sustainable Sermon, and Kathryn wasn’t preaching, so we missed the chance to prep together. We got up on Sunday morning and went our separate ways. I came home exhausted. I think I cried later. I’ve cried almost every Sunday. I miss LP the most on Sundays. And I miss my identity as pastor and preacher, but not while I’m at church, worshiping. I never miss it then. While I’m at church, I enjoy my new identity as the minister’s wife, as “Kathryn’s Martha,” which again is my way of saying it — such a retro ’5o’s girl I am, turning my tomboy wife into the patriarch. I cry later because I wonder what’s going to become of me vocationally. What does God want from me?

On that day, however, I cried because I faced a realization growing throughout my sabbatical time: a rest from working six days a week meant I didn’t need to rest — literally — as much. I have a chronic, auto-immune disease, and I grow fatigued more easily than the average bird. Let’s just say that when I worked full time, I wasn’t glazing carrots with whiskey or anything else.

“I’m really not up to doing the job, physically,” I confided to Kathryn. I watched the expression on her face, then spoke before she did. “You already knew, didn’t you?” She nodded, slowly, carefully, lovingly.

(LP knew, too, but that’s her story to tell.)

Whatever God wants from me next, it doesn’t seem to be going back into local church ministry.

Accepting this — and there are other reasons to believe it’s true that are not part of this particular blog post — meant rolling over in my head the question of whether I had ever belonged in parish ministry. No need to reassure me. I got over it. But it was an honest phase of my existential angst. I always seem to need to go there, to prove something to myself.

I’ve grappled for five years now with Rheumatoid Arthritis, a noteworthily invisible illness. I kept insisting to myself that I was doing well, that my case wasn’t that bad, proving I could still be useful, pushing back on my fear that I would become the 21st Century equivalent of a bedridden Victorian hymn-writer.

Giving in feels like declaring defeat.

But here’s a story I’ve been saving, from my longtime blogging friend, Milton Brasher-Cunningham (buy his book, it is beautiful and has communion and baseball and poems and recipes, too), who I finally met in person last fall. Over a fantastic lunch at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, he told me about visiting a family member with a young child who played soccer. His relative remarked that the child’s team did unusually well, because of something the coach told them. All the other teams of kindergartners clustered around the ball, moving around the field in a mass of little bodies. This coach told them to look for the open space. He taught them that the open space is where you find opportunity.

The home office.

What does God want from me now? It’s pretty clear what the closed space is, and if I can come out of a three month sabbatical knowing that, I guess it’s something.

In the short term, I’ll test the big decision by covering a friend and colleague’s sabbatical this summer. I’ll be back in the pulpit most Sundays from May 12 to September 1, as well as handling emergencies, all very part time. I’ll be working on sermons across the desk from my wife, and if that’s not a dream come true for two girls who read their sermons to each other over Skype, I don’t know what is.

But mostly, I’m looking for the open space. And when I find it, I’m going to run.

Filed Under: Discernment, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Sabbatical, The Inner Landscape, The New Normal ·

Mar 26, 2013

Coming Out and Coming In

By Martha · 35 Comments

“Marfa?” He was six when he asked the question, all big eyes and enormous dimples. “You love my mom like you want to marry her, don’t you?”

A heavy silence ensued, head and heart and gut all swerving to a stop before I made words come out of my mouth. I tried to keep my face composed, as I looked at his mother and back at him.

“Yes. I guess I do.”

He broke into his most charming smile. “Well, she *is* single!”

We breathed again.

But “marry” remained a charged word as we worked out a plan for bringing our long-distance relationship into one location. We believe in this God: The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 121:8, NRSV) We craved what we kept calling “ordinary time,” to be together in all our comings in and goings out. Would we live on the down low, moving nearer to each other and letting people think of us as best friends? Or would we tell the truth, as clearly as a six-year-old, about our going in and our coming out?

We both grew up in church-attending households; we are both ordained ministers. One of us revered the institution of marriage despite past experience with the father of Mr. Dimples; the other — that would be me — felt some combination of romantic hope and workaday cynicism based on hers. As my mother’s best friend from childhood put it, I made “poor” marriages, as if the fault lay simply in the way I chose or lived them.

But in my late 40s, and after a long time trying to talk myself out of it, I admitted two things to myself: I didn’t like men that way, and I loved a very particular woman. It’s hard to make anything other than a poor marriage when you can’t make that connection of the heart. When my heart connected to Kathryn’s, it all made sense.

As a United Church of Christ pastor, I had long since declared myself an ally for LGBT rights. Now I found myself in the vulnerable position of needing those allies, from among my friends and my family. I found myself in the unexpected position of being the subject of court cases and statewide ballot issues; I found myself in the awkward position of hearing the words I had often preached and applying them to my own situation: you will find your salvation in becoming fully who God made you to be.

I believed it for other people; did I believe it for me?

I found I didn’t have a choice. Love moved me like a wave you can’t resist; you have to ride it or be bowled over by the surf. Keeping a secret from others, once I had admitted it to myself, didn’t feel right. Friends blessed me; my children, from mid-teen to mid-twenties, offered their unconditional love and support. After a period of prayerful discernment spurred on by Mr. Dimples’ query, we decided to make getting married our priority. We decided to come out to our congregations, and come in to the light, and let the rest of the geographical and vocational logistics fall into place from there.

All that involved not only God and two families and two circles of friends, but it also involved two churches. To the people of the North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, who I left to be married, I send my love and thanks. Thank you for being so accepting and gracious; thank you for bidding me such an emotionally generous farewell despite mixed feelings about the parting itself. We know we could have stayed right there and lived in my home in Portland, where an elementary school student with two moms in the household hasn’t been interesting since about 1995. But the call, as we prayed and prayed further, came to make our lives in my wife’s home and in her church. To the people of Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church (USA), thank you. The ordinary ways you have welcomed the minister’s new wife — including inviting me to join the Fellowship Committee — have made it clear we followed the right path.

Because we are very ordinary, even old-fashioned. We fell in love, and we got married in church. We had the resources to do it in a state where we could get a legal license, where going to apply for it was extremely ordinary. I pray the Supreme Court will move our nation toward a time when it is ordinary everywhere, when any two people who love each other can come in to a clerk’s office and ask for a marriage license. I pray my wife and I do honor to the support shown and the blessings offered, in our coming out and our coming in, as long as we both shall live.