I have promised to hang curtain rods and sew a curtain together as a make-shift closet door.  I have promised to go to the bank and to return a child to her house no later than 4:30.  I have promised to clean something–one of many things that desperately need it.  And I have promised myself I will call a friend.  I am on vacation, aren’t I?

And still, I sit here reading through bloggers recently posted on UUpdates, UU agregator.  And crying.

My daughter’s friend was dropped off by her mother and I stood by her car, catching up with her.  Her third grandchild was born in May.  I tell her the story of my dad and in the telling of it, she tears up and then I do and I realize I have become one of THOSE people, you know, the ones who have to tell their sad story over and over and over again.

I think I’m getting bored of it.

But I also feel the need to say it over and over to the different crowds in my life–especially those from whom I have been utterly removed over the last several months.  Explaining my utter removal in a way that makes it acceptable?  i guess.  Still, I find out, coming out of the fog, that my town wants to close all the neighborhood elementary schools and build four at the outskirts of town and I can’t give any reason, any statistics, but my gut says this is a bad idea all around.  And I feel I need to make another phone call to get educated about it so I can fight it, if that’s what’s required.

And then this exhaustion comes over me in waves and tells me to sit down with a bowl of ice cream with fresh raspberries on it and nourish myself for the fight.  And another fight.

I played a computer game over and over this morning and realized what that game allows me to do.  It allows my left brain to be silently engaged in an activity so that my right brain can soar.  If I could only figure out how to write all that right brain stuff down while using my mouse to click on sparkly gems, well, I’d have something.  As such, I have a brain full of imaginative solutions to the problems of my community and my world, but no way to parcel that knowledge out.

Surely I jest; but not really.  My first thought goes to the woman, young, young woman, I helped as she left the Culver’s restaurant that my daughters and I were heading into yesterday.  She was wearing her Culver’s uniform, obviously leaving work.  Obvious, too, was that whoever had the job of watching her daughter that day had to bring her directly to the restaurant, car seat and all.  Here was this young woman of maybe 19, one hand full of baby paraphernalia, the other holding what I later found was the heaviest car seat ever invented, and her daughter who was maybe 15 months old, walking out in front of her, not even holding a hand, or a pants leg or anything.

I saw her struggle, trying to regain her daughter without dropping anything and I simply said, “May I help?”  Seemed like a natural response.  “May I help?” I took the car seat so she could hold her baby’s hand and lead her safely to her car.  Didn’t anybody she work with notice the struggle, I wondered?  Didn’t the person who dropped them all off think to ask “give me your keys and I’ll put the seat in the car?”  Was it all supposed to magically get from one place to another.

We got close to her car which wasn’t far away and she was ready to take the seat from me, but what was her daughter going to do in the parking lot while she was connecting the seat in the back seat of a two-door coupe?  So i stood there and kept the baby from wandering away.

She was grateful and was concerned that she was taking too much of my time.  “I’m in no rush,” I said and left when the baby was lifted and placed in the back seat.

It was the easiest five minutes of my life (despite the HEAVIEST car seat in the known universe).  And I could give it freely because one day, when my two babies were little and it was time to leave the park and one child didn’t want to leave and was causing a scene, another mother came to me and said “let me help you.”  And I did, and she did.

Perhaps this is what I’m learning these days, as I tell my story over and over and over again.  I’m learning to let others help me while learning the power of helping others, in turn.

What help do you need, friend?  How can I be of service?  Oh, that’s right.  There’s the curtain rods and the bank and that long-overdue phone call.  Tell me what you need.  I’ll add it to the hopper. 

I’m starting to feel human again.  Barely.  Waking up in my own bed this morning, with a cat snuggled up against my legs, in a quiet house where four other bodies still slept, I thought only of drinking my favorite Highlander Grogg in my favorite ceramic mug.  There is something about drinking from paper cups for days at a time that is just so, so, so unfulfilling.  I stayed there in the bed, thinking of the coffee I was going to make, just feeling super happy at the thought of it.  And then I found that the water was not just slow as the Water Company warned for a flushing of the waterlines, but nonexistant.  I panicked a bit, wanting that coffee so badly.

This is so silly, I began to think. This is so silly, after spending the last six days in transit and at General Assembly, feeeling buoyed by the words of people of vision and action, feeling inspired to spend part of my hard-won vacation trying to figure out the place where my heart is broken, as Marlin Lavanhar put it in the Sunday morning worship, so that I can find the place where my passion will lead me.  So silly to be worried about coffee.

But when the water came on and the coffee was brewed and ingested and started to clear my weary head, an idea came. I’m still working it out, have to make some contacts, make some plans, but it stems from two stories, side by side in a daily newspaper, about two girls. One beaten savagely will passersby watched; another shot in the head as she sat in her father’s truck–randomly.  One was 15; the other 12. And this was in America, in the Midwest, in the heartland.

When I go to General Assembly, I go to work.  I have attended perhaps three workshops in the four years I’ve gone.  This year I was frazzled and raw from more than work preparation and I didn’t even tempt myself by looking through the program book to see what I might attend, knowing I’d either be too busy, too tired, or too anxious to attend anything. 

But I was fed this year, friends.  I was fed.  The sermon by Victoria Safford for the Service of the Living Tradition was beautiful and I was fed. The Ware Lecture by Van Jones was riveting, challenging us to learn to govern and I was fed.  And the final event before I went back and packed up the booth was to go to Worship.  And I was fed … abundantly.  These three sessions, in and of themselves, would have been enough reason to spend the money to go to GA, were I to spend my own money to go to GA.  These three events made the rest of the week not only bearable, but gave meaning to my work, propping me up when I dare say I needed it most.  Challenging me to make the change the world needs made, but not alone and not in a vacuum.  In community, with my own religious peers and with others who share the vision for a world made healthy, a world made whole for all those people who inhabit that world, a people with whom we are all connected, no matter how we look at it.

It was a long few days, it was a hard few days, but in the end, I think it will be a life-changing few days.  I like to think a world-changing few days, as well.

Just before the Ware Lecture, my husband and I sat having dinner with two friends from our congregation. There had been talk of beginning a fellowship in the town where the four of us live, twenty-minutes from where our congregation sits.  They had talked of it over lunch and had decided to further the conversation.  Then I started in: “What we need to do is find the way to fund a full-time minister …”  There was more to my statement, but one of our dinner companions uttered “We can’t afford that.”  At which point, a little too overdramatically I see in retrospect, I pushed back from the table and said: “You’re right.  Let’s drop the subject.”

I was angry and I explained to her later that I wasn’t necessarily so angry with her as I was with the attitude her words carried, “yes we can’t.”  I am so tired of this view of the universe that says we can’t do what we know we should/could/ought to do were we simply to employ a little imagination and commitment.  Then we went to the Ware Lecture.  Afterward, my friend said to me, “I’ll try not to say what we can and can’t afford anymore.”

We as a nation, as a world, as well as we as a congregation, don’t have the luxury to say “Yes we Can’t” anymore. There’s too much to do, work that can be done by each of us in our own way, driven by the passion of our broken hearts.

This was a very important GA; a pivotal GA at a pivotal point in our nation’s, our world’s history.  For those of you who missed it, please view what you can online.  I think the planners of this assembly should be commended for their selection of speakers, each of whom built upon the other to build, what I think, was one of the most positive yet practical events of my lifetime. 

What will come of this?  All I can say is that I was changed by the experience.  Where that leads me now, I don’t know exactly.  This I do know: the status quo is a place of death and my heart seeks life.

Let us be moved.  Let us be changed.  Let us know the love of the world as we find the will to love it back to life, too. 

Tell me where I heard this phrase, would you? I incorporated it into my opening words (more like, charge to the congregation rather than opening words) and then into my part of the sermon, so I want to know where I read it before I used it. Any ideas?

Here’s how I started today:

A Leap of Commitment

In religious language and in popular culture, we hear people sometimes talk about taking “leaps of faith.” We hear of people who aren’t real sure that what they are about to do will pan out positively or negatively, but they decide to “take a leap of faith” that all will be well.

Sometimes it works out positively, sometimes not. But, as life goes, it always works out one way or another.
Today, I want to ask you to NOT take a leap of faith. Instead, I ask you to take a leap of commitment.
Leap into this faith–feet first.

• Commit to act in the name of love.
• Commit to act in the name of justice.
• Commit to act in the name of community.
• Commit to act.

This faith of ours is not a static faith. It is one that continues to move where and when it is needed. It is not a faith of the status quo, of going along to get along. No, it is a faith that continues to challenge us to make this world better, but not for ourselves alone. We are challenged to make this world better for those who are poor or oppressed. We are challenged to stand up for those without a community of power.

Because that is who we are. Together. A community of power. But only when we make that leap of commitment to this place, to each other and to our children, as well as to the nameless many who need someone, perhaps even us, to act on their behalf.

Those who struggle in China or in Burma (Myanmar) or in New Orleans, still, as a result of natural disasters compounded by willful and ignorant governments. Those whose lives are ripped apart by war, through the loss of a loved one, through the loss of the companionship of a loved one, through the loss of someone who comes home someone else entirely. Those who struggle in poverty whether it is here in Lake County, or next door in Porter County, or in South or Central Africa. Those who struggle with mental illness, their own or someone else’s. Those who work three jobs but still manage to go to bed hungry as they pay for housing, healthcare, and basic human services. Those who are simply unable to speak out for their own needs.

Let us be a community of power for them and all the other nameless many who need someone to speak and act on their behalf.

Let us leap then, together. Let us take this marvelous, tumultuous, and often wrenching leap of commitment. Like that leap of faith, when we leap into commitment, we may not be able to control what the outcome will be. But we control something: our own engagement with that future.

Let us, together, envision ourselves as that community of power and all that that can mean. And then, let us commit to being that community, and all that that can mean.

Let us leap, my friends, with open eyes and limber legs prepared for that bumpy landing—but a landing that shall be cushioned, always, by the love we find, here, in this community of power.

All I needed was a dose of perspective.  Thank you, Lizard Eater and Little Warrior. 

Mostly, when I watch these videos, I cry.*  This one made me laugh, made me realize how precious even the worst of days are.  Especially if you have “a brand new hat.”

*Don’t forget to do a good deed for Little Warrior. I haven’t yet. Been too self-involved. But I think I feel one coming on. Very soon.

There’s an REM song I’ve been listening to a lot lately with the phrase “I’m pushing elephants up the stairs.” That’s how I feel these days.

I have yet to write my part of the sermon for tomorrow and I’m not sure it will get done before 3:00 a.m. tomorrow.  So be it.  I’ve been overwhelmed lately; overwhelmed and overrun by the urgency of everything–as if it matters.

Thing is, I just realized as I drove home in tears last night, wrung out by the urgency of more things than one person can handle, I’m still, albeit partially, living out of time.

I came back from my father’s funeral to a medical emergency with my husband to a string of work-related “have-tos” some of which turned out to not be all that necessary or urgent.  Work has spun out of control and I am not in any way able to face the music of all that I have not done, let alone all that I HAVE done in the short three months since my father died (tomorrow, it is 3 months, I realize as I type this).

I feel as if I’m being pushed to care about stuff as if it matters when my heart is still in a place that reminds me, it really doesn’t.  It may to other people’s goals and desires, but, in the end, and in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter. 

Still, being who I am and responding to external pressure the way I do, I have been rising early and working until it is time to get dressed and go to the office.  And then I put on my jugglers uniform and toss priorities in the air, then leave when I need to come home and be present with the people who love me best, then tuck into my chair with my laptop and work until my eyelids close. 

Through it all, I am pretending to be in control at all times.  But I’m not, and that came across in an encounter with a co-worker yesterday, with behavior on my part for which I am deeply ashamed.  Behavior, I might add, I would not reveal in front of the anyone higher on the food chain.  Behavior, I’m sure, I woud not reveal to anyone at work, at all, were I not just plain-ass worn out. 

I’ve lost things and forgotten things and things have just been pushed to the last minute.  I admit all of this.  I do.  And some of the things I’ve done lately have been flat-out wrong.  I’d say my head’s not in it, but that would be wrong.  My head is in it, but just not fully engaged.

Where do I go with this because it isn’t going to ease up at all for at least three weeks.  There are a few hours here, where I can do laundry and pretend things aren’t urgent, but these will be short-lived.  I will tuck into these hours right now, and do laundry and penance for things done badly or not at all.  I’ll acknowledge my sadness and my grief in a way that is healthy.

And I’ll rest a bit before the next elephant needs pushing up the stairs.

I love this photo of my boy, Tiger.  There he is, in my chair, the morning sun crossing his face as he rests not only on my heating pad, but on my shawl, too.  It was really, really cold that day and I really, really wanted to be him.  Today, too.  Even though it was like 120 dgrees with humidity that would curl your hair (did curl mine, and not in a good way). It would be good to be a big hairy cat who is loved for the fact that he can look so damn happy just to be.  Most of the time.  I love this photo.  Love this cat.  Jealous as snot.  I want to be this cat.

Just thinking out loud for the part of the sermon I’ll be doing next Sunday as we honor our Religious Education volunteers and propose a vision for the next church year.  My hope is that this vision will do what we have not been able to do with regard to religious eduction since we started attending the church nearly 10 years ago: energize more volunteers, more stakeholders in the program.

This has me considering how we enter into relationship with each other at the covenental level. We just had a book signing last week at our church, ushering five more names onto our historic rolls.  The new members stand at the front of the church, sign the book, we give them a flower and we ask them to say some words in unison and together we speak the unison reading about ‘blessed are they.’

But it doesn’t feel like we are really asking anything of them, or giving them a good sense of what membership entails.  I remember when we were being asked if we wanted to become members and I asked “but what does it mean to be a member?”  None of the answers was satisfactory because I had no context for what membership entailed, having never been a church member before.  What I really wanted to know was how much money they expected from us, and being the good kind of dysfunctional congregation, no clear answer was ever given (is it ever given in a UU congregation?).

Here’s what I wish someone would have said to me, when I joined the church:

We expect you to enter into relationship with us, stewarding the physical aspects of the church financially as well as with volunteer labor, as needed. Moreso, we expect you to join with us in a shared vision for what it means to identify yourself as a Unitarian Universalist:

• We expect you to be clear and fair in your dealings with other members of the congregation whether they are serving coffee or chairing the Board of Trustees.
• We expect you to be clear and fair with people outside our congregation, as well.
• We expect you to ask for what you need and for you to understand that the answer will not always be ‘yes’ simply because you asked for it.
• We expect you to be direct; to say what you mean and to understand that you only speak for yourself unless you have been given explicit permission to speak for others, for entire groups, for the entire congregation.
• We expect you to raise your concerns in healthy ways, in ways that respect the process that has been set up to ensure that everyone is treated in competent, fair ways.  Even when you have been harmed by the process,  Especially when you feel harmed by the process.
• We expect you to share your wealth and your health and your time. Each week.
• We expect you to find a way to be a part of the lives of the children in this congregation, even if you do not have any of your own. Hand them cookies on Sunday morning; read them a story during the Story for all Ages; be a part of their religious formation by teaching in their classroom one Sunday per month; ask them about the worship service they just attended, especially when they are young, so they understand that what we expect of them is an engagement with the message, not just time sitting in a pew.
• Engage with the message, yourself.  Do something.  Be active for the betterment of the world. Clean trash on the beach; carpool; buy local and/or organic; march for a cause that is important to you; write letters to the editor; volunteer in a shelter or some other not-for-profit. Have a vision for what it means to be a part of this faith movement, to be a part of the larger world, to be someone who truly wishes to make the world a better place.
• Accept that others don’t always share your passion for action. Do not be discouraged by that as we expect you to meet people where they are, encouraging them to do what they can and no more.  Explain your passion.  Engage your passion.  There’s no better way to lead people to change than to be an energized and cheerful example of what that change looks like.
• We expect you to love life, even when the living of it is painful emotionally, physically, spiritually.
• We expect that you will not always agree with what is said from the pulpit (fair warning:  if you are a person of color with political aspirations, you may want to rethink joining this congregation. Warning not applicable to people in ‘normative’ society). 
• We expect that you will not always agree with what is decided at a Board of Trustees meeting.
• We expect that you will not always agree with what is done in the fellowship hall.
• But, we expect, should you feel compelled to air your disagreement, that you do so responsibly, and directly.
• We expect you to find a home here, and we expect you to deepen your commitment to this home, to society, to each other through your simple declaration of saying “I am a member; I belong.”

We welcome you. We challenge you. We have faith in your commitment to our shared vision.

What other aspects of living, working, being together have I missed?  Or is it enough just to say “Be kind. Love life. Act responsibly. Give and give back.” 

There is work to do, and lots of it. But first, there is my favorite coffee, in my favorite mug, sitting in my favorite chair, facing east, while the sun rises in the place where there are no windows, but casting a rosy golden glow that creeps up toward the bluing sky in a corner of the place where there IS a window.

There is so much work to do.  So many things that can only be done by me, or so it seems.  But first, there is a cat who mews quietly at my feet, to whom attention shall be paid.  For her sake and for mine.

My head spins, considering all that this day will bring. But first, first I shall sit here in the early morning silence, girding my spirit, my will, and my resiliance here, with this cup of coffee, cup of sunshine, and cup of silence.

My heart aches as I find myself letting too much in, unable to process it all and turn it back out into the world in a way that makes sense, even if only to me. It aches because this is what I think I am able to do best: gather, sort, present. But every attempt lately has been thwarted by too many others wishing to do my work as I do it.  Sometimes, I do not play well with others.

But first, there is this: the gathering and sorting and presenting of my own heartaches and desires, my own conflicts with the work I have signed up to do as it conflicts and deflects me from the work I’m certain I’m called to.

There are deadlines to meet, that should have been met yesterday, but first, there is reflection and thanksgiving for the lovely day given me by my husband and my children in honor of my birth–compressed into just a few short hours, but done with such kindness that despite the squabble over the cake cutting (there was cake–and I didn’t make it!), I felt loved, honored, treasured in a way my whole being needed  despite my forgetting how very much it did.

There are tears to shed over this incredibly stressful time in my work life.  But first, there are tears to shed over the things I am missing here, in my family life.

But first, there is much work to be done.

So, this one’s for my mom, who, 45 years and nearly 24 hours ago went into the hospital, ready to give birth for the fourth time.  With two girls and a boy at home, and she felt it necessary to hide the fact that what she really wanted was one more girl. So, when the doctor asked, “what are you hoping for,” my superstitious mother said, “a boy.”  And then, when I came out, fully not a boy, my giddy mother had to work hard to convince that same stupid doctor who asked such a question in the first place that truly, honestly, she was fine with her fourth baby being a girl.

This is for my mother, strength personified, who appears to handle all adversity without caving or crumbling, doing the work that needs to be done.  Not without bitching, entirely, but still doing it.

This is for my mother, my poor widowed mother, who passed along her dark humor and her political outrage.  Who passed on her brown hair and her love of babies.  Who teaches me over and over and over again what loving your children looks like, sounds like, is like.

With a boatload of gratitude, this is for my mother.  Happy birhtday to me.  Thank you for this life.

The cyclops
was not felled
by the sword.
Myopic,
he did not see
it coming.