Funny, I don't feel older.

Why haven't I posted here in so long? I could make countless excuses, but that's all they'd be. Certainly there's been lots going on in my life, most of it extraordinarily good and wonderful and to me a sign of God's love in my life. Gary and I have enjoyed so many concerts and movies and dinner with friends and celebrations with colleagues, I truly feel blessed to have such an abundance of joy in my life.

But it hasn't been a time free from stress or strife. Our closest friend Joan became very ill last April. Two days after we brought home a new puppy, Papagana http://www.dogster.com/dogs/638311 Joan broke her leg and was hospitalized for several weeks. We took care of her pets and home while she was gone, She returned home for almost a week before going into septic shock and having to return to the hospital via the emergency room. The next day, Sunday, we visited her after church. She looked bad, but the staff didn't indicate how serious her condition was. We left after an hour, only to be called by the hospital a short while later to be told she might not survive the next few hours. It was a time of feeling completely helpless.

We scrambled our plans to get back to the hospital, by which time she had rallied somewhat, and the prognosis had improved to where if she survived the next 72 hours, she had a good chance for recovery. Next, they told us if she lasted out the next week, she might be transferred out of intensive care to a step-down unit. And so we learned to live our lives in measured units, always praying with gratitude for the small signs of improvement, and that the time frames might be less, rather than more. After finally being discharged to a physical rehabilitation center in June, she finally made enough progress by late August to return home. Her youngest dog, a little over a year old, had lived without her for almost a third of her life, and didn't respond to her mistress at all the first few weeks.

We have been challenged to meet all of the needs of a friend in this situation. Gary has more time working from home, and so has been the primary care giver. We live two plus blocks away, so we are not able to be with her all the time, and she has resisted the home care givers mightily. We would finally get aides and therapists on board to begin helping her, and she would refuse their services we would get angry because we spent so much time getting the house cleaned up while she was hospitalized, and once home, she just didn't care about letting it be kept clean and safe (to our minds)

It's been tempting to walk away from our friend at times. It's been difficult to understand why she doesn't want to do things the way we think she should (after all, don't we know what's best for her) . While we have talked about ways to get "order" restored in her life, we haven't talked about what "order" means to her. We've danced around discussing our perception of her need to maintain control over her life, without establishing what that means to her, and the accomplishability of that happening. After all,she wasn't working with the physical therapists. She wasn't letting the home health aides take care of essential things like emptying the commode.

Now, I should have mentioned earlier, Joan is a very accomplished woman. She has a phd in history and has taught at a local univerisity long enough to have retired several years ago. I don't know why we started treating her less than her stature simply because she was so sick, but I know we did. I know we started to feel our evaluative skills were better than hers. But while we were worrying about the things that she wasn't, someting amazing was happening which we were unaware of: Joan was pushing herself to get better.

Suddenly, we have discovered that she can walk without devices like walkers or wheelchairs. She has been managing her medications as prescribed, despite our fears. She's resumed paying her bills and ordering her groceries and caring for her pets. She has returned to what makes her happy, even if she doesn't have the full use of her home yet, I beleieve she will in the near future, becasue she has faith in herself.

I guess where this was all going for me, is we spent so much time reacting to the demands the situation put on us, we didn't allow much time to ask what this all did to our friend. By forgetting about that, we made ourselves into gods whose "standing" was above our friend. I pray that God will forgive us, and that Joan and each of us will be able to return to our previous mutually dependent relationship.

FWIW, I began this before the end of my 57th Birthday, and would like to commit to much more regular postings to this place.

Storm 2

The storm raged on until late Friday night. Driving home from work was slow going, but people were all driving pretty sensibly for a change. I had really wanted to stop at the market for some fresh fish for dinner (we've been going meatless on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent), but I really didn't want to get out of the car until I was back home.

The house was cold, and I wished that I had something to put in the oven, but without going through a lot of work, that wasn't going to happen- so I made ravioli and doctored up some canned tomato sauce with olives and capers and anchovies, and we ate dinner while listening to the hail pelt the windows.

I found myself feeling really tired, and really cold. I suspected I was coming down with something, Gary was in the mid-stages of a cold, and people all around at church seemed to have something. I decided to go to bed early and read until I fell asleep. I read a lot in bed. There are always at least a dozen books I'm in the process of reading next to my bed. I read just before falling asleep, or to help fall back asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Despite a sweatshirt, sweatpants,and four blankets, I could not get warm enough to hold a book on Friday night. ( and it was a Guido Brunetti mystery, by Donna Leon- one of my favorite authors) I shivered uncontrolably, listening to the driving "pings' of the hail strikng the windows and the wind howling throught the trees just outside the window. The tree has a windchime hanging from it, which was clanging mercilessly in the gusts.

"How do people do it?" I thought to myself. "How do they survive being outside on a night like this? How could anyone possibly continually experince feeling this cold? "

Three nights previous, when the temperature outside had reached 60, Frank, the outreach worker who helps our Feast guests with referrals for shelter and health issues, had speculated that we had seen the last of the "Code Blues" (where the city police are empower to forcibly bring people in from the streets for their own good) for the winter. Now we were experiencing the most extreme combination of winter weather of the year.

I don't remember ever having the cold feeling leave me before I finally fell asleep. I do remember praying for others who have to live in penetrating cold all the time. Maybe I fell asleep feeling better about myself for being empathetic with those who suffer the extremes of the elements.

When I awoke on Saturday, I stayed under the covers along time, afraid to get out from under them. I sort of rememberd the thoughts I was having the night before. But I realized no matter what, I wasn't really that cold, and, certainly, I wasn't at any kind of risk. But the only way that I could ever appreciate what it must be like to live through a winter like this, out of doors, unable to shake the feeling of cold, would be to ask they people who do it, day after day.

I'm not sure that I'm brave enough to do that.

Storm

Yesterday a winter storm socked the East Coast. It wasn't too bad at church during the day (we keep the building fairly cold when it's not occupied) , although I put my coat before going in to the sanctuary to pray and meditate on the Stations of the Cross. It's a good thing I did, by the time I was done, I was pretty chilled. I prayed the stations by myself (it's not a well-established Lutheran practice), so, rather than use one of the many pre-written liturgies we've collected, I felt free to craft my own prayers around the things touching my heart that day.

The stations at UniLu are mounted at the ends of the pews, on pieces of copper pipe fitted into our pew torch holders. They are not as carefully mounted as I would like them to be this year, some lean one way or another, but I have come to accept that I can't have everything my way and it's more important to encourage other people to participate than it is to have everything perfect.

The first station, attached to the pipe by a wire through a loop on the back of the casting listed strongly to the left. A wire wrapped around the base to the pole would straighten the whole thing out...I fought the urge to go to the sacristy and get a piece of wire, and began my devotion instead

The first station: Jeus is condemed to death. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

I began to meditate on the crooked station. I noticed how the weight of the much heavier figure of Pilate shifted the icon all out of allignment. A small child is at Pilate's ear, adding to the weight of the left side of th icon. Is the child representing us, pleading for Jesus' life to be spared?

It's the weight of power, power over life and death, I conclude, that makes this station sit there so offesively to my senses. I still want to stop what I'm doing and go back andget the tools to straighten it out. But then I notice what I was too blind to see, that in all the worldly representation being weighted on the left side of the icon, the figure of Christ is lifted up.

I thought about the people who come to our Tuesday night meal Feast Incarnate, a meal for people are homeless and affected/infected with HIV/AIDS. I thought about how much the system is stacked against them, in their access to adequate health care, their difficulty in finding employment paying a livable wage, the difficulties they experience in their relationships with their families, and most of all, in a legal system they are often unable to access or navigate.

It struck me that these were all of those difficulties missor what Christ says in Matthew 25:40 "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."

And then I thought, if we are that little child, and we are pleading in Pilate's ear for justice for the oppressed, we can change the balance of power, and we can elevate Jesus who is the Christ among us.

Amen

Why?

So, I guess I should have given more thought to why I started this. It was, I think, a divine accident (or an example of my IT ineptness) .

I was following a blog by Rev. Megan Rohrer, (llgmlhr.blogspot.com) a pastor who ministers to people in San Francisco who are without homes. She is spending this week, (March 10-17) on the streets, as a Lenten retreat, living as those she ministers to. I have been touched deeply by her witness, and her ability to transcend the temporal nature of her time on the streets compared to those she is among. She has opened my eyes to some preconceptions I battle in our ministry here in Philadelphia.

As I attempted to respond to a posting Megan made on Thursday, suddenly I found myself with this brand-new opportunity. I couldn't respond to her post without starting this. So here I am.

Our work (at University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation, or, UniLu, as I will hereafter mention it here) is to several different communities simultaneously (as most urban ministries are) . Sometimes the differences between those groups cause tension, in us individually, and sometimes corporately.

I guess that what I am praying and hoping this experience of blogging might be for me (and, I pray, for those of you reading it), is an excercise in relationship building: between those various communities who are part of life at UniLu; between myself and others online; between myself and the Creating One.