Prayer

Pressing Matters

~ Everydaystories ~ Leave a comment

My new spiritual discipline is ironing.

Mother ironed a lot.

She was ironing when the news announcer

broke into the afternoon programming

on our black and white Zenith portable tv

to say that J.F.K. had been shot.

I was three years old.

I remember the familiar, cozy-like smell

of sheets and shirts freshly pressed and hot–

steam rising in front of mother’s sad, sweet face.

 

The basement of the parsonage is cool.

It’s quiet and roomy and smells of years of clean laundry.

I set up Mike’s mother’s ironing board to use when sewing

but in recent weeks I’ve started ironing many things:

his handkerchiefs I used to simply smooth with my hand,

pillowcases, our COVID masks, the top part of top sheets

determined to fold over in odd little bits, our worn cloth napkins.

Under the iron, fibers fall in line

a quick spritz of water flattens the fate of recalcitrant wrinkles.

The hot, crisp smell promises all will be well.

 

As if I could iron out the wrinkles in my heart,

the folded over places in my mind.

As if the assassination of reason, the crumpling of decency,

the handkerchiefs heavy with sobs and snot from

demonstrators demeaned and detained by dictatorial bullies

could be spritzed and sprayed and fixed

with a hot iron and steam rising indignant off of sweet faces.

I am sad. I miss my mother.

Turn off the news.

Keep ironing, keep pressing on.

 

Walking with Jesus

~ Everydaystories ~ 1 Comment

My Column for The Elgin Review 3.4.2020

For the first 199, 900 years of human history, give or take a few, we humans traveled, at our fastest, behind good carriage horses, about twelve miles per hour. Or, when walking, somewhere around five miles per hour. It’s only been in the past 120 years since the proliferation of the automobile that traveling sixty-five or seventy miles per hour is normal.

Think of how much more information we are asking our brains to take in and process now than humans ever had to process for almost all of human history before us.

And, for the first 199,950 years of human history, give or take a few, we humans saw and took in only what was around us in the natural world, or what we read on scrolls, or, after the invention of the printing press on a printed page. It wasn’t until the 1950s that we began watching moving images every day on tv, and not until the 1990s that we began to take into our brains mega pixels of information, sometimes for hours at a time, on our computers and smart phones.

Is it any wonder so many of us feel unsettled, harried and stressed much of the time? Is it any wonder Attention Deficit Disorder is rampant in our kids? Maybe in another hundred years our human brains will have time to adapt to the amount of information now being thrown at us, but right now, our evolution hasn’t really been given much time to catch up with our inventions.

For the past 1700 years, give or take, Christians have taken forty days before Easter to give something up in order to open room in our lives to reflect on how we’re doing in relationship with God and to make whatever adjustments we recognize we need to make. This season, called Lent, seems all the more important in our modern, media driven, fast paced age.

At Park Congregational Church our theme for Lent this year is “Walking with Jesus.” In our worship services we are thinking about where Jesus walked and what Jesus did in his ministry. In addition, we are actually walking. Every week I am suggesting different ways of walking our prayers during the week.  I am encouraging folks to give up some of our hurry and our information overload to slow and notice all the things we can see and appreciate at three or four miles per hour that we miss when we’re going somewhere between twenty-five and seventy miles per hour.

Whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey, I encourage you to take some time every day to get away from the steady stream of information overload. I encourage you to walk somewhere, noticing as you go things you cannot notice when you’re traveling at your usual pace. If you are a follower of Jesus, I encourage you to wonder as you walk what Jesus might notice or point out to you were he walking right there with you.

You are welcome to join us in worship, as always. Last week we “walked with Jesus into the wilderness of temptation.” This coming Sunday we’ll “walk with Jesus up a mountain of encouragement.” Worship is at 9:15, ten miles west of Elgin on Hwy 70 and ½ mile south.

 

Snow Angels and other prayers

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They shuffle in, the first two with hair disheveled and bad dye-jobs, locks matted from too much time in their bunks. Faded florescent pink sweats hang baggy on their tattooed frames. Younger than my boys, I guess. Twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps. Another, older, rounder, with a short-auburn bob finds her place at the end of the table, quietly pulling out her chair. The fourth carries a thick red-leather, red-letter Bible in her willowy hands and wears her hair piled on top of her head. Her granny-glasses have lenses so thick her eyes precede her into the room, reminding me of a grasshopper–a very pregnant pink grasshopper. Her stomach swells taut against her sweatshirt, revealing her inside-out belly button below. She talks without stopping to breathe. At the end of this short parade comes a slim, tall woman with curly dark hair cropped like Peter Pan’s, slouching. There’s an energy of anger pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. A thin blue vein beneath her eye twitches in time to her heart beat. Intelligent eyes silently claim, “I don’t belong here” as she curls, like a fetus onto the rolling chair.

The women of the county jail are a motley crew.

I carry with me, on my coat and in my hair, the crisp, fresh smell of snow.

“We have snow!” I say, with the delight of the first blanketing of a season, when the crisp, cold freshness is still novel and exciting, and driving on ice and through snirt (snow mixed with dirt) hasn’t yet grown wearisome and disgusting. “It’s so pretty out there.”

Without windows, the women were unaware of the hushed beauty pillowing the landscape on the other side of the cinder blocks surrounding them.

“I love snow!”

“I wish I could see it!”

“The men may get to go outside to shovel it.”

“I’d love to see it falling from the sky.”

“I’d make a snow angel if I could.”

Five of the six of us laugh.

It is my first visit to the jail to share Bible study with the women. I didn’t know they couldn’t see the snow.

Around an oval conference table in a nondescript interior room, they tell me their stories. Meth and Crack and a parole violation. Dealing in several counties, and jail time awaiting in each one.

Grasshopper starts talking. Five babies taken away, but this one, this one, she is determined, this one, her sixth, (is she even twenty-five?) this one will be born drug-free. She’s going to give this baby the life he deserves. She knows God is with her always has been always will be she just needs to trust in Jesus and get back to church and doing what the Gospels teach and not listen to the people who are always trying to lead her astray and she may have had the other kiddos taken from her because of drugs but not this one because this time she’s getting into the Word and following the Way and she’s not messing up again no way and if the baby daddy doesn’t want to support her and wants her to get messed up again she’ll just leave this time that’s all there is to it because she knows she’s God’s precious child and so is this baby and this time it’s all going to be alright so she’s actually happy to be in jail because it means less time to be tempted to backslide and turn her back on God which she isn’t going to do this time. No way.

Bonnie weeps. When she finds her voice she says she misses her fourteen-year-old boy. She feels so guilty. She really messed up and he’s the one who’s paying the price. “A boy needs his mother. Mine really loves me.” She says. “I really messed up this time” and again she weeps.

Five of the six of us weep.

Stoney silence from Peter Pan.

We feast on stories shared from our lives and from God’s good book. Grasshopper sings, “Jesus Loves me.”

Five of the six of us sing.

Our hour draws to a close. Teeth are starting to chatter and blue goose bumps have risen on the bare thighs of the bleached blonde girl wearing prison issue pink shorts instead of sweats.

I ask how we can pray for each other. “For my boy.” “For this baby” “For my boyfriend” “For me and my court date on Wednesday.”  I ask them to pray for me and my churches and for my six kids.

Peter Pan unfolds her long limbs and uncurls her lips and for the first time speaks very quietly saying, “Pray for my daughters, they’re 16 and 17 and live in Detroit where I am a social worker with a Master’s degree. Oxycontin got me here and I want out.”

Six of the six of us pray.

I step into the blinding brightness of sunlight bouncing off freshly fallen snow.

A holy dance of longing and liberty moving me.

And Was It Cold? A Prayer for the very cold first Sunday after Christmas

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And was it cold, Dear God, when Magi made their way across the desert plains?

And was it cold, Oh Lord, when angels sang to shepherds on rocky terrain?

And was it cold, Redeeming One, when first breath was taken by infant lips?

And was it cold, Light of all Light, when Joseph covered Mary quivering after labor long into the night?

Frigid is the cold outside today, but warm are we, in your embrace and each other’s company.

For those who make their way, exposed to weather’s whims,

For those who earn their living under tenuous conditions,

For those whose breaths and lungs and bodies are vulnerable and frail,

For those who can do only so much for ones they love,

We pray today, warmth of heart, the fire of hope, and the light of love

burning brightly,

newborn.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.