Holy Ink

Let Us Sing To the Lord

2011-10-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem back in 2004 to honor the many wonderful musicians in my church, and read it again today to honor one of our accompanists who blessed us with her amazing skills for the past six and a half years. It was a joy to work with Char. She thought so carefully about the theme of the service and chose appropriate and beautiful music to offer to us.

This poem was published several years back in Alive Now. You are welcome to use it worship services to honor the musicians in your midst, just please give me credit as the author.

Let us Sing to the Lord

To honor the musicians of Boulder Creek UMC, Feb. 1, 2004

In the ancient quiet of this world

one raised her voice and carried a note

she was joined by another

and melody began

harmony followed

spanning the distance between souls.

Song was born
and the drum followed
the rhythm of our hearts
beating outside our bodies
inviting our ancestors to dance

Arms were raised to the firmament
bodies began to sway
feet to jump

Music
our first worship
our earliest praise

Song
so it continues today
rising above our chaotic world
teeming with sound

Music draws us beyond the noise
carries us out of isolation, beyond confusion
satisfies the insistent cry of spirit

The instruments
of voice
of piano
of guitar, drum and flute

They are the instruments of God’s peace

Their notes restore our joy
Their prayers bind us together

We give thanks to you and for you
the ones who offer your voices in song
and make music with your hands
fingering melodies, drumming life
strumming praise, and piping divinity

A testimony that slides in our ears
and sets our spirits singing in return

©Cathy Warner 2004

In The Emergency Room

2011-08-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

I went to the E.R. prepared last night. I brought a sweater, granola bar since I’d missed dinner, and a novel. I brought my sister’s “barf bowl” and a box of Kleenex. A parade of need hit the waiting room at 7 p.m. on a Wednesday night. The boy who might’ve broken an arm at soccer practice escorted in by his mother, the husband experiencing chest pains wheeled in by his wife, they arrived after us and were seen before us. Of necessity the broken, bleeding, life threatening takes priority over pain.

We had a two and a half hour wait in the sea of noise and bright fluorescent lights. I looked at my sister wearing her noise-cancelling headphones, the sash of her robe pressed over her eyes, flinching at the constant slamming of the outer doors as patients kept coming, and thought the E.R. was the wrong place to take someone with an excruciating migraine. I should’ve taken her to a spa with dim lights, a burbling fountain, warm blankets, where people would murmur in low voices, apply a cucumber eye mask and caress her with lavender lotion. A spa where the aesthetician would insert a painless I.V. in the dark and administer narcotics along with hot stones.

The tattooed twenty-something who had fallen or been in a fight and was in so much pain he wanted to kill himself. The heroin addict who’d tried to cut something out of her arm rolled up her sweatshirt sleeve to reveal an arm not round, but swollen square. The alcoholic behind the curtain in the other half of our room (when my sister finally was seen) who’d burned herself cooking drunk was ready to go home. She was freezing, threatening to rip-out her I.V. and belittling her husband when he asked her to calm down while they waited for a nurse. The E.R. was the wrong place for them, too.

Here they would be stitched and salved, patched, shot with antibiotics, and sent home with discharge instructions to get help for depression, addiction, alcohol abuse, which I thought they’d probably ignore. They needed help, but as I’ve struggled with my own issues, I’ve come to believe no one can save anyone else from their brokenness, or themselves. I wasn’t in the mood for compassion. I’d missed dinner and the premiere of Top Chef Just Desserts. I wanted to sit on the couch with my husband, a cat in my lap, drinking a cup of tea, watching a T.V. show where life’s biggest challenge would be who got sent home for poorly tempered chocolate, not immersed in this world of pain and suffering, a never-ending stream of people in and out of the automatic doors and an audible fire alert on top of all the beeping equipment.

Once her meds kicked in my sister dozed for a few minutes, and I took the headphones from her hands, placed them over my ears and tried to block out the alcoholic vitriol on the other side of the curtain. I thought that working in the E.R. must be one of the most horrendous jobs around. Helping people who weren’t going to help themselves. I thought about rescue and saving and power and powerlessness while I read and re-read pages of my book, not really absorbing the words on the pages, or finding clarity in my swirl of thought.

This morning, safe and quiet at home, I think about my lack of compassion, about the barriers I put up in the E.R. so I could separate myself from the patients. Set apart I wouldn’t have to recognize our common humanity or remember Jesus’ words about the least of these. Today I have no doubt that Jesus sat on the arm of every chair in the waiting room, at the foot of every bed, looking at his children, so fragile, vulnerable, broken by the world and their own perceptions. He sat there, willing each one to recognize his presence, to view his or her life and one another through a lens of love and healing, to accept this gift in addition to the medical care they sought.

It is only today that I know this. Last night I was blind.

This Or Something Better

2011-08-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,
My life is changing and so is my blog.
I invite you to follow me at my new blog: This Or Something Better. Click on the title of this post, "This Or Something Better" to be redirected there.
You can sign-up to follow via email on the new blog.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me,
Cathy

Watered By the Spirit

2011-08-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

My graduating cohort from Seattle Pacific University has self-published an anthology, Archipelago. One piece each from the dozen of us. There is some great writing in here. I hope you'll consider buying a copy. Here is the opening to my essay Watered By the Spirit:

Jesus was thirty years old when he plunged. He sought out his cousin, John, a desert dweller who ate locusts and honey and preached to a good-sized crowd to repent of their sins before he dunked the converts underwater. An Armenian icon depicts Jesus’ baptism like this––Wearing nothing but a loincloth he stands waist deep in an oversized jar of water meant to be the Jordan River. Fish nip at his feet looking like swim fins at first glance. The halo over his head is crowded with the hand of John the Baptist, the arms of his future cross, and a dove descending directly below a few fingers that point barely noticed from the top of the frame, as if God is directing the bird to the right man. John, who is standing on dry land, rests his palm on Jesus’ forehead as if checking for a fever. Two angels stand behind John, their enrobed arms extend toward Jesus as if ready to dry off the wet and shivering Beloved by embrace.

Circling God

2011-07-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

The spiral relationship
draws us toward God
nourishing our souls
filling our emptiness
that we might circle
out into the world
and not be shattered
by the brokenness
we encounter there

We can bear hope
riding the ridges
of the spirit’s back
the way may look closed
the lines impenetrable
but in truth
the space Gods needs
to slip into our lives
and the distance
we need to bridge
is thin as breath

Waking to Words

2011-06-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

T.V. would have me believe that families of my generation ate breakfast together, mother at the griddle and father behind the newspaper. My father worked swing and graveyard shifts, my mother kept his hours. I woke to an alarm, fixed my instant oatmeal and read the jokes on the empty packet while standing over the sink eating. If my younger sister joined me, I don’t remember. When I ate communal breakfasts it was with my best friend Katy who lived across the street. We kept the cereal and milk on the table, reading the packaging, learning to pronounce words like thiamine and riboflavin. She was an only child and could convince her mother to buy Lucky Charms and Pop Tarts and other breakfast treats my mother refused. We were thrilled when her mother agreed to buy a box of Super Sugar Crisp––which we weren’t even sure we liked––on the condition that we ate all of it before we tore up the box. Pressed into the paperboard was a real record, a 45-rpm of the Archie’s Sugar, Sugar with a circle of dotted lines just waiting for Katy’s scissors. We read every inch of that box that weekend as we worked our way through the cereal.

I’ve eaten breakfast––and lunch since I left school and office for motherhood, pastoring, and writing––by myself most days of my life, but I haven’t been alone. I’ve always had words in front of me. Reading a book while eating requires using the edge of the plate and clean utensils as book weights, and I worry about a splat of yogurt or drip of orange juice staining a page, especially on a library book. I’m not picky about content when it comes to read-eating, but I prefer magazines because they’re easy to keep flat on the tabletop, and smaller than a newspaper. When I was young, I read what my parents left open, my father’s Herald Examiner, my mother Women’s Day and Family Circle, her copies of People when I was in college. When I was a young mother the only books I could finish were children’s books I read to my babies, but I could work through an issue of Parenting and the Auto club magazine in a month. Now I read the Sierra Club magazine, Real Simple, Sunset, Mental Floss, my husband’s Family Handyman, the free weekly paper, and two devotionals Alive Now and Weavings.

When I became a Christian in my mid-20’s I thought I was supposed to wake at five each morning and read the Bible while the house was quiet and the world had yet to make its evil mark on me. I was supposed to begin each day with ammunition for the battle, like the woman who wrote the book I borrowed from the library about being a Good Christian Wife. But, I’m not a morning person, and the only dark force I was fighting was the alarm clock on a winter morning that was literally dark. I couldn’t imagine read-eating the Bible. It didn’t tuck well under the edge of a plate, the pages were so thin that a spill would saturate an entire Gospel, and it seemed sacrilegious to read scripture while eating toaster waffles. Maybe if I’d been raised with the Bible on the table and learned words like Leviticus and Deuteronomy while eating Captain Crunch, my morning habit might be different.

I still wake up to Words and not The Word, and I’m not sure if I simply have a forty-five year habit or a spiritual discipline. Either way, there is something that feeds my hunger when I read about wine tasting in Livermore, efforts to curb mountaintop removal coal mining, tips for repairing leaky gutters, and rhyming poems about Jesus while I eat peanut butter on gluten-free toast. Wearing my bathrobe, I make tea, sit on a barstool, spread a magazine on the counter before me and connect with humanity. Our pedestrian needs and desires––where to get a good pizza and how to patch a flat tire––mix with more profound––a dozen two paragraph reflections on the phrase Light of the World. When I want humor, I read the poorly phrased police blotter in the local paper and allow my fork to hover over the print, daring my syrup to drip. Sometimes, when I’m finished with breakfast, I push my plate aside and flip through the articles on makeup and fashion, which I have no real interest in, but will read about if I want to procrastinate.

Every morning I taste a variety of writers and styles and purposes while I sip my orange juice. Every day I glimpse another worldview––the foodie, the carpenter, the conservationist, the fashionista––and enter it vicariously through print. I could say my reading is educational, that it’s good for me, that there’s something holy about reading and connecting with the spectrum of the human family. Actually, I am saying that. But I’m also going to say something else about my read-eating and reading in general, something that the early morning Bible reader in all her stoicism doesn’t want to let on. Maybe she doesn’t approve, but I don’t care––waking up to words is fun.

Embodying the Body

2011-05-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

I had minor surgery last week, an elective procedure to relieve excess and increasingly painful menstruation. I had reached my limit in coping with this problem that plagued me for decades. Thinking about what I’ve done afterward, I realize that for most of my life I’ve treated my body as a troublemaker, a problem causer. I swallow handfuls of vitamins and herbs each day to stave off symptoms, to make up for deficiencies and lack, treating my body as something that has failed me.

I had an expectation of perfection. Not that I’d be thin and tan and blonde and wrinkle free forever, but that my kidneys, digestive and reproductive systems, my thyroid and adrenal glands and hormones would function with one hundred percent accuracy, doing all the things they’re supposed to do without error. I expected my body to operate in textbook fashion. When it didn’t I took up acupuncture and chiropractic, donned support hose, cooked vile tasting Chinese herbs and drank the brew, gave up wheat and gluten, eggs, soy, most dairy and half a dozen other foods, and added enzymes and herbal remedies to my diet.

I have learned to accommodate and live with my chronic conditions, but I have not learned to accept and love them, just as I have not learned to accept and love all the aspects of my personality. I judge my feelings and behaviors that are fearful, angry, clingy. I view them as cause for shame instead of extending compassion. In theory, I know that being human means making mistakes and built-in imperfection, but somehow I expect more of myself. Struggling to be good enough/perfect, it’s not difficult to understand why I have viewed my body mainly as something to manage, if not control. I want it to conform to my expectations. Impossible expectations.

I’d like to be able to let go of perfection and appreciate my body for all the ways it contributes to my wellbeing. I’d like to thank it for holding up for nearly fifty years, despite my neglect. I’d like to honor the ways my body communicates to me—warnings of danger, feelings of safety, the ways it tries to get my attention, and protect me—even if I don’t listen well, even when I pop ibuprofen and tell it to shut up. I confess that I have been removed from my body’s messages and its wisdom. I have not paid attention. I have not acted with respect.

I’d like to repent and move toward an attitude of gratefulness and thanksgiving. Without my body, there is no me. My body is not inconvenient. My body does not interfere with me carrying out my plans and intentions. Exactly the opposite. My body is the only vehicle and conduit my mind and spirit have for self-expression. It is only through the body that I live. The body makes me human. Incarnate. And like all humans, I am imperfect. My body is imperfect. I pray that I can learn to live differently––To accept my body and love it exactly the way it is. In doing so my physical issues won’t magically disappear, but acceptance seems the next necessary step to continue my journey toward wholeness. Toward God.

Showered with Blessing

2011-05-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

At a baby shower earlier this Spring we played common party games––cutting yarn at absurd lengths we thought matched the mother-to-be’s belly circumference and surrendering diaper pins to the observant who caught us saying the forbidden word baby. We oohed and aahed at the sweet onesies, snuggly pants and flowered socks the new baby girl would wear and practical necessities—blankets, stroller, bathtub, the new mother received. At was all very nice, welcome and predictable. But before the festivities ended, the mother-to-be’s mother, who was one of our hostesses, took the celebration in a different direction. She asked the guests to gather in a circle surrounding the guest of honor and to offer her a blessing, a prayer for the upcoming birth, and the journey of becoming a family.

We pulled our chairs around our pregnant friend on the floor and told her how much she meant to us. Some of us, her mother’s age, told her it had been such a joy to watch her grow up, to celebrate the confident woman she had become—a labor and delivery nurse––and the gifts she was offering to the world. Her peers laughed at the challenges they’d been through together and how they admired her determination. One young mother, who left her children at home to attend the shower, told her to make time for herself and her marriage in all the demands that would soon fill her life. Other mothers with grown children said that although some days with a baby seemed interminable, they looked back fondly on that special time with an infant, and wished her the ability to appreciate motherhood in the sleep-deprived moments. Some spoke of quiet time nursing their babies in the middle of the night, how precious it was to hold the sweet and holy being entrusted to them, and of how sometimes, especially when there were older siblings, this was the only time they had alone with the new baby. Many of us cried. All of us were moved. How often do we sit in a circle and tell someone what she means to us? And how often do we reflect on what our lives as friends and mothers have meant to us and speak the truth of our hearts with no other agenda than to bless another?

This kind of vulnerability and honesty could feel awkward, especially at a party, and being the center of such intense focus could be embarrassing. The mother-to-be handled all this with such grace, and much of that comes from her mother, a single-mom for many years, with an incredible faith in God and reliance on the Holy Spirit for provision. This mother had to be strong, and she had to be vulnerable, relying on God and allowing herself to ask for and receive help from those who held her and her children in their hearts. She knows the power of blessing, and she called upon us to bestow that gift upon her daughter.

In that circle we offered our prayers for a safe labor and delivery. But our offering and our tender words encompassed each woman in the room, no matter where she was on life’s journey, whether she was a mother or not. We blessed the mother-to-be and we blessed one another with our honesty and our words of thanksgiving. It was a moment of prayerful joy. It was worship. It was the best kind of party.

Squirrel Savior

2011-04-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Our cats were acting suspicious yesterday evening, sniffing around the trunk of a coast live oak in the backyard. My husband heard what he thought was a blue jay. I ran outside, shooed the cats away, circled the tree, and there on it’s back, paws frozen in air, looking dead was a small squirrel. Thinking we would need to either bury it or put it in our trashcan, and remembering all the stern warnings I’d heard never to touch a wild animal, I sent my husband to the shed for a shovel. He returned and as he lowered the shovel toward the ground the squirrel stirred and let out a pitiful squawk. Kevin gently turned the squirrel upright, but it was too stunned to move. I got the cat carrier from the garage and Kevin guided the little thing inside.

We tried to contact Native Animal Rescue, which was closed, so we did what we do best. Internet research. We switched out the towels in the carrier for t-shirts so the squirrel wouldn’t catch a toenail and risk further injury, and got close enough to see his face was bleeding and he was infested with fleas. We put a towel over the crate, a heating pad underneath, shut the door to my office and let the squirrel rest in the warm room until my husband finished our taxes. Before we went to bed we mixed up a rehydration solution and my husband administered it through a dropper while I held the squirrel in the bundled t-shirt. The little thing didn’t move, but did drink some and his mouth was bloody.

I fretted all evening about the squirrel. I wanted to save him, but despite reading rescue instructions we didn’t know how to assess the squirrel’s injuries or conduct the skin pinch test to see if he was dehydrated. We thought his mother was still in the oak tree and wondered if we could get all the cats indoors, put him under the tree and stand guard until she carried him to safety. Instead, we left him inside, safe, but unsure if we were doing the right thing.

The squirrel was still alive at six a.m. when my husband woke up and attempted to give it more fluids. The squirrel was also quite vocal, that blue-jay squawk again, he wanted something—his mother, the outdoors, away from these invasive humans. I began making phone calls at 8 a.m. when Native Animal Rescue reopened, and after an hour and a half, calls with three different women, and answering their questions to determine what was best for the little squirrel, found one willing to assess him and keep him until the baby squirrel specialist got home from work this afternoon.

When I delivered the squirrel to Vicki’s home, she reached in the cat carrier, scruffed him with one hand and scooped him into her palm in a fluid motion. She looked at his wounds and said they weren’t from my cats (quite a relief) but associated with the fall. This squirrel is about five weeks old. His body is quite small, but baby squirrels are top heavy and often land on their heads. Bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth is common. She said he looked quite dehydrated—and most likely something had happened to his mother. When their mothers disappear, the squirrels sometimes leave the nest looking for food and fall. I spotted the nest this morning, a good twenty-feet up, and I saw another squirrel out on a branch and watched it return to the nest. Most likely it’s a sibling. I don’t know how many other babies are in the nest. If their mother doesn’t return, I may find more on the ground (dead or alive) or they will die in the tree.

I think about Annie Dillard who wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book I read for my MFA program and one of our Art & Faith studies. I think about Annie stalking muskrats and insects and watching decay and reporting on death, and I wonder what would’ve happened if her tomcat had brought in a half-dead mouse and left it in her bed one night. Would she have sat there, notebook in hand, recording its blood loss, and labored breathing and timing how long it took to die? Or, would she have stepped back from her observer status and done something? Try to save it, or even try to kill it—quickly, “humanely”?

It’s not lost on me that my squirrel rescue project began on Palm Sunday. I retired from pastoral ministry at the end of June and bowed to the recognition around Christmas that my spiritual journey has lead me out of my local church and familiar context. In the past four months I’ve been waiting for what is supposed to come next. It hasn’t arrived yet. But the squirrel did and I recognize my desire to save, to do something. I see how too often in the course of my personal life and ministry I have wanted to save those I care for from pain.

I’ve wanted to do it, whatever it is, right, and right away. I couldn’t bear to think of this squirrel suffering, and it seems proper and reasonable to seek the help of people with experience and training. I don’t think they or I are in danger of fostering codependent squirrels, of doing for them what they and God need to do. But when it comes to humans, the situations are much more complicated. I think, that like this wounded squirrel, there are times when each of us needs intervention and saving. And, I’m also becoming aware that sometimes that saving really does need to come from God alone, and not from humans acting on God’s behalf.

And so I am changing my usual patterns. I am praying for my long-time church and its members from a distance instead of wrapped in its midst. Coming from a home that broke and broke again, I’ve been desperate for belonging and terrified of being alone most of my life, and would gladly bear anyone’s pain just to stay in relationship. I’m learning to trust that healing is possible, and experiencing in my own life something I preached often––that God can work in and through you and me without any conditions, restrictions or requirements. Giving my life to a church isn’t the same as giving myself to God, and Jesus will drive that message home each day on this journey through Holy Week.

I can’t save a squirrel or myself no matter how carefully I follow website instructions or church doctrine. I can stand on that dusty road waving palms expecting Jesus to do everything I want and end up disappointed.

I desire the squirrel’s healing and also recognize its future is out of my control. I pray for myself, and this wounded world in need of healing salve, in need of saving that we can’t make happen, that is only given us through grace. I walk through this week, already knowing the outcome, and waiting to live it out.

A Good Mother

2011-02-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

My husband and I laid our dog to rest in the little pet cemetery behind our house on February 12^th. Sterling takes his place next to an assortment of rats and mice, three cats––two who were taken by coyotes––and one tiny fish. Small piles of rocks and crosses made from sticks and wooden stakes mark the other graves. We placed a poly-resin statue of an angel on Sterling’s grave. The statue was a gift from a parishioner, out of place in my home with its somber colors. For years, I thought of her as the angel of death and that she belonged outdoors. Now she stands underneath leafless oak trees and atop mossy rocks, the angel after death. Witness and guardian––honoring the life of my dog.

In his absence, I’ve been stunned at how much my daily routine has been altered. Sterling was as needy, difficult, enthusiastic and loveable as any child. With his passing, my nest is truly empty and I have yet to fully understand the implications for my life. True, I have two cats (aged 9 and 15), but their claim on me is less consuming, if not less insistent than my children’s or my dog’s.

I agonized over Sterling’s decline and suffering in his last days, worrying and wondering if and when I should put him to sleep, overwhelmed by the enormity of the responsibility I had been given over this sweet and fragile soul. I was faced with the limits of my humanity––there was nothing I could do to save him from death. The mother in me ached at my powerlessness. And I was Sterling’s mother. God knows why this abandoned dog came into my life with all his insecurities and need for constant assurance. We both needed to know this––I love you and I will not leave you––something essential I missed as a child and he missed as a puppy.

I was too unsure of myself when my children were young to ever think of myself as a good mother. I wasn’t sure I could trust my instincts. I was often overwhelmed, and the only guide I had was what not to do––repeat my past.

As I was sobbing my heart out trying to make “the right decision” for my dog, my husband told me something I hadn’t noticed. “You’ve hardly left his side since we came home from Christmas vacation.” Once he spoke, I saw that my days were ordered around this furry being, and that even though I was keeping up with my writing, the scope of my life had become very small. Could he stand on his own today? How much was he drinking? Eating? In what manner could I administer his antacids to keep the pain of the toxins the kidneys no longer processed to a minimum after meals? I didn’t regret my choices, as unconscious and natural as they had been, for a moment. These are the ways we live out love and walk with our dying beloved, a willing embrace, a pinpoint focus.

I finally understood that there was no right answer, no way to avoid the outcome. I gave myself permission to trust myself, and that my agony meant it was time to end his pain. My dog Sterling taught me that I am a good mother. I might not know what to do. I might make mistakes. But I am all in. One hundred percent committed. I will not leave you, nor abandon you. I will be with you, to hold and stroke you, to offer words of comfort and love, until the end, and longer.

If I, in all my imperfection, can love like this, imagine how well God can love me, can love all of us.

A Long Goodbye

2011-02-02T10:23:00.001-08:00

A Long Goodbye

This afternoon my dog is sitting next to my computer, his usual place. His breathing is shallow and too rapid. I’m awaiting the latest test results from my veterinarian. Sterling is fifteen and a half, ninety in human years. His spleen is enlarged. He’s on steroids for kidney disease and atrophied leg muscles, and is prone to debilitating diarrhea. He almost died when I was vacationing at Christmas. So I wait for the phone to ring as if knowing his kidney values and red blood count can prepare my heart for the fact that he is dying. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe…the truth is I don’t know when. And the not knowing has me wrapped in worry, running like a hamster in an exercise ball, spinning pointless circles, crashing into walls, completely without direction. I’d like to find the right direction. Any direction, for that matter, that can bring me into the present.

Even though it won’t add a day to my life, and even though Jesus promises that like the lilies of the field, I will have everything I need, I spend a lot of time worrying about the future. Planning for the future. I have airline tickets purchased for travel through August and events on the calendar in October. I like to know what’s going to happen and when. On the up side, to the world, I appear highly organized. On the inside, I fear that my incessant planning and future orientation is nothing more than an attempt to buy insurance against repeating a past where chaos felt palpable and imminent. When I was a child I couldn’t control the big things, like whether or not my parents were going to stay married. And I couldn’t stop either my stepmother or stepfather from running away without saying goodbye to me. I exercised the little power I had over the small things. I finished my homework, folded my laundry, and packed tuna sandwiches for lunch.

So now, I return to the small things. I boil pork and potatoes for my dog, who after a lifetime of kibble has said, No More. If one of the few pleasures in his life is eating, I’ll gladly feed him something that doesn’t smell like stale bread and look like dirt clods. I cook. I wash urine-soiled towels, the result of his new incontinence. And I vacuum, taking great satisfaction in sucking wads of fluffy white fur into the machine. Dishes, towels, floors are clean. There is order and control, and my mind is less easily cast into the future when I’m scrubbing my pressure cooker, than when I’m not occupied with concrete tasks.

Night falls; Sterling’s breathing becomes more labored, his pain and fatigue evident. The veterinarian gave me bad news this evening. Kidney failure, worse than we thought. I ask how long, and she is noncommittal. She is not God, but gives me advice reminiscent of Jesus’ words; No one knows the hour or the day and a twelve-step bumper sticker, One day at a time. “When Sterling’s bad days outnumber the good,” she says, not finishing the sentence. I call my daughters, away at college, ask if they’d like to come home this weekend to say goodbye.

I can’t sleep these days, anxious about my dog. I’m afraid to leave him. He’s always been nervous, and his separation anxiety has been manifesting in physical symptoms (loss of appetite and bloody diarrhea) that at this stage could kill him. It’s not that I need to be with him every moment, or that I feel obligated to orchestrate the moment of his demise so that I am there. He could slip away while I’m at the grocery store or the chiropractor and I wouldn’t hold myself responsible. But weeks of out of state travel loom large beginning the end of this month. I have made commitments, paid fees. I’m supposed to follow the plan. This is why I’m fretful. I am torn. The part of me who plans against bad things happening, is afraid I can’t cancel, that to be responsible I need to show up and do what I’ve said, or I’ll disappoint people, perhaps alienate them. But much more of me has a different need. I want to be present for this daily long goodbye. I don’t want to board a plane and let someone else, even someone I trust, shepherd my dog through his last days. Some people might say he’s just a dog. They’re right. He is simply a dog. My dog. For thirteen years he’s been part of my life, and it hasn’t been an easy road. His nervous anxiety, stroke, rattlesnake bite, have challenged and shaken me. His sweet nature, exuberance, genuine affection and smile—really he smiles—have filled our home with love.

I toss and turn until I allow love to rule. I will choose being with him over any other commitment. Finally, I can rest. I close my eyes, and I focus my thoughts on Sterling lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. With each breath I wish him love and light. My he be bathed and swaddled in light and love. I relax and drift to sleep knowing it is my great privilege to take this journey with him.

What it Means to Pray

2011-01-28T17:46:00.000-08:00

A third excerpt from a longer essay:

It’s been more than fifteen years, less than twenty since I’ve had a prayer partner. We began a bit tentatively and I felt awkward at first sitting on my friend’s couch, holding hands and praying. I was used to praying in a church building. It seemed very public and a little unnerving praying together in our homes with all their signs of daily life. Cats jumped in our laps. The phone rang. Someone would knock at the door. We stoked the fire and spread a blanket over our laps in the winter. In good weather, we sat outdoors listening to wind chimes, blue jays and motorcycles in the background of our prayer. We talked about our lives and our children, our husbands, our parents and siblings, and our church, all the things we cared for most deeply. We voiced our fears, our struggles, and our inadequacies.

Together, she and I wrestled with what it meant to pray. Should we offer each other advice? We did, but our advice was infrequent and gentle. We never expected each other to follow it, but to find our own paths. Did we ask God for exactly what we thought we wanted? To heal my father from cancer? Yes. But we also recognized that our will and our desires weren’t really the point of prayer. This was especially true when we prayed for our children. We wanted them to become the people God had created them to be, not the people who would be easiest for us to nurture.

Over time I began to embrace our prayer time because it allowed me to let go, if only for a few hours, of the burdens I carried worrying about my extended family and struggling folks at church. I began to ask less for solutions. Less of, “Please let my sister find a home.” And more of, “Please help my sister to find you, God.”

I began to notice how much lighter I felt after we prayed, and as the years progressed, how much joy I felt in the act of praying. What had once been awkward became something I craved. When we were done talking, we held hands, closed our eyes, and I felt myself both sink and float. I breathed deeply and felt myself settle, my body became heavy, I relaxed as if I might fall asleep. Another part of me floated and I bobbed in a rhythm, connecting to a presence outside myself. Basking in God, wrapped in love. In silence we each absorbed into Spirit, and we would’ve kept that dream state for hours if our schedules had allowed it. Instead, one of us eventually broke the silence, always with thanksgiving for the opportunity to pray together and for this holy time set apart. Often times we cried, releasing our hold on one another to reach for Kleenex, blew our noses, and continued. We learned to speak through tears and to be glad for rather than embarrassed by them. Some days we set a timer to call us out of prayer. The ding jolted us back into our clock driven days, and reluctantly we left our reverie in the manner we always used to end our prayers, The Lord’s Prayer. We prayed it together listening to and relishing every word.

I'll Pray For You

2011-01-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

Another excerpt from that longer essay on prayer:

“I’ll pray for you.”

I can’t count how many times I said those words during the seven years I served as pastor of a church. Usually my offer came after a conversation where parishioners confided in me their suffering––cancer, a strained marriage, job loss, depression. I knew I didn’t have the power to fix their situations, and even if I could provide something practical––a referral to a doctor or counselor––my help was never enough for their need. I offered the one response I felt equipped for. Prayer.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone has had the privilege of travelling deep into prayer with a soul friend, as I've had for the past fifteen years. I was startled when in my pastoral role I asked, “Would you like to pray about that?” and the answer was a frightened, “Now?” or an uncomfortable, “That’s okay. It’s not urgent.” I would prefer to pray with them, right there on the spot, to invoke God’s presence and place the burden in the Holy One’s lap of love and compassion. But then I remembered the days when I felt awkward and too vulnerable to ask for prayer, let alone join my pastor in it.

My path has led me to realize that prayer is not a magical power invested in ordained and qualified parties. And there are no particular or right words to invoke. I shed my early expectations that prayer (and my own prayer specifically) should impact outcomes. God does not respond to my requests as if he works in a worldwide order fulfillment center. Instead, prayer realigns my priorities.

When I say, “I’ll pray for you,” I imagine holding the person in need––and aren’t we all in need?––up to the light of an amorphous and loving God. For me, prayer is about coming consciously into the presence of the great power for good that is everywhere and ever-present. It is a place I never want to leave. I have my prayer partner to thank for that.

Prayers of the People

2010-11-20T17:16:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from essay on prayer I'm currently writing for my degree program :

Three Sundays a month for seven years I closed my eyes, bowed my head, lifted my arms in supplication, and prayed without self-consciousness or script. No creeds. No prayers from a worship book. My parishioners prayed together only one prayer––and not as a rote ramble, but as living words, often sung––the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, The Lord’s Prayer. The rest we created in worship.

In my religious tradition, we invite prayers of the people. I listened to rambling stories, teary requests, mumbled worry, celebration of milestones, and less frequently, thanks. Summarizing and repeating for the congregation, so all could hear, I felt myself lift their joys and concerns out of our midst into a realm of spirit I felt intimately connected to. After worship, people often said to me, “Cathy, you do such a good job with the prayer time.” But I never saw it that way. It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about job performance. I planted my feet and claimed the posture and attitude of prayer. I held holy space. I observed silence and focused on breath. (The Hebrew word for spirit is ruach, breath.) Others followed. We did not share our lives out of prurient curiosity or even for the sake of community building. We prayed because it was the least and the most we could do for one another. We prayed because we were God’s people, communicating with God in one of the few ways we knew how.

Thanksgiving in a Box

2010-11-08T16:02:00.000-08:00

The November we began remodeling our kitchen, I wasn’t sure how I was going to prepare Thanksgiving dinner. The honor and responsibility had recently come my way, once my grandparents decided it was easier for the two of them to drive eight hours to be with us, than for my mother and stepfather, and my husband, me and our two children, ages five and two, to make our separate treks to Los Angeles.

The week before the feast day, I leafed through the adverts in the mail and found in the Safeway circular, a ready-made Thanksgiving dinner. I signed up at the deli counter, and picked up my order the day before Thanksgiving. At home, in the company of my parents and grandparents, I opened the large cardboard box to reveal our dinner in a box.

1 shrink-wrapped defrosted, uncooked turkey
1 foil roasting pan
1 box Safeway brand frozen Bread Dressing
1 box Safeway brand frozen mashed potatoes
1 tub refrigerated Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
1 tub refrigerated turkey gravy
1 dozen fresh dinner rolls from the Safeway Bakery
1 boxed Entenmann’s pumpkin pie with a red ribbon printed on the packaging

There was nothing technically “wrong” with this dinner, and if the advertisement had shown the components fully prepared and steaming in china serving dishes, well that wasn’t uncommon.

It was simply that until that moment, I hadn’t fully appreciated the heroic efforts my grandmother had undertaken each Thanksgiving and Christmas. She constructed elaborate centerpieces and made decorations for each plate setting (one for each dinner guest and dozens more of that year’s craft to sell at her church’s holiday bazaar). Her home resembled Santa’s workshops for weeks before the feasts, as she and my grandfather ran their jigsaws, painted, and glued. She put every leaf in her dining room table until it nearly filled the room to accommodate ten of us and a myriad of china serving dishes. She pressed her best tablecloth and set out the fancy china and crystal goblets for our sparkling apple cider.

Her food was fabulous too. The hors d'oeuvres tray was plentiful and healthy: carrot and celery sticks, crackers and dip, and black olives that my sister and I would stick on our fingers as children. Her menu consisted of turkey, of course, and a stuffing that contained onion, celery and giblets as well as breadcrumbs and broth. The potatoes were russets, mashed with milk and butter. The gravy was whisked thick from basting broth with giblets and cornstarch with no trace of lumps. There were green beans topped with Durkee onions. The cranberries were whole and mixed with chopped orange peel and nuts to make chutney. She baked pies, pumpkin and apple with a flaky crust we raved about, and served them with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream.

My grandmother, whose energy was a constant source of amazement, would stay up nearly all night before the feast days, perfecting everything. On the big days, running on two, maybe three hours of sleep, she would dress up, tie an apron around her waist, and zip around her kitchen, attending to every detail, when launch into the role of gracious hostess as her company began arriving.

One year her turkey wore a vest, collar, cuffs and spats perfectly crafted dough, shaped into clothing and made more realistic with the application of food coloring and an egg wash. She took a photo of that turkey in the kitchen, and also on the table. She always took a photo of the fully decorated table, although I’m not sure if she snapped pictures of her guests.

There was no chance my Thanksgiving in a box could compare to the care and craftsmanship evidenced in my grandmother’s kitchen. My kitchen had temporary plywood countertops and all the overhead cabinets had been ripped out so we could knock out the upper half of the wall, making a large pass through into a bedroom that would become a dining room. We ate in a nook just off the kitchen. Our table sat eight and was much too large for the space. One long side was shoved against a wall so we could squeeze past it into the kitchen proper. Our Thanksgiving meal of 1993 would be served directly from foil, boxes and plastic containers onto paper plates, and eight of us would crowd around three sides of a table covered with a red and white checked plastic coated cloth.

Instead of despairing, we laughed. My grandmother––given a reprieve from her usual time consuming preparations––laughed first and longest of all. We were all together, great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and children, and we would celebrate. It was Thanksgiving, and just as tradition dictated, my grandmother artfully arranged the components of our dinner in their colorful wrappings atop my dining room table. Then she fished her Kodak Instamatic camera from her purse and photographed our feast.

Dogged

2010-10-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of a very long essay written for my daughter. Too long to post in its entirety, but wanted to share this snippet:

The world doesn't need another dog story, and I hate to say it, our dog is neither genius nor terror, neither Lassie nor Marley, and I doubt my pen can magnify our ordinary lives into books and movies that will entertain the masses. Sterling, our fifteen-year-old American Eskimo, is hardly a hero. So, these words are for us. We have lived this tale, and now that Sterling is truly geriatric, you and I both know there will be an end. Each day, we see the last page coming closer. With each meal he leaves uneaten, with each time his atrophied leg slips out from under him, whenever we shout his name and clap our hands at the front door, and watch him bark or wait resignedly at the sliding door a few feet away, deaf to our racket, oblivious to our movements, we circle mortality, worried that death will step into view.

Sterling's demise will arrive too soon, whenever it comes, because we want him to outlive us. We try to be rational. I say, “After all, he's fifteen years old. That's somewhere between ninety and one hundred and five in human years, and he's in great shape when you think of it that way.” You agree, out loud at least. But how can you think of it that way? You yourself are only nineteen and Sterling has been part of our family since you were six.

We know very well that you are the reason he exists in our household, and that he, in the form of mythic dog, existed in our lives the moment you could assert your desire. You, born to cat loving parents, were enamored with dogs from infancy, so much so that you became a dog, shedding clothes and abandoning speech as a preschooler. When you reverted to your human self you explained your imaginative integrity, “Dog's don't wear clothes. Dogs don't talk.” Your father and I entered your fantasy. When you were canine, we allowed you to run naked at home, and in the homes of friends and relatives, saying to them, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “She's a dog right now. When she's a dog, she doesn't wear clothes,” and because we weren't shocked or angry, neither were they. When you stripped at Round Table Pizza and barked your way through the Cub Scouts awards dinner in the banquet area, instead of scolding you, Dad scooped you up and said that if you could turn back into a girl, he'd take you to the playground next door.

Writing Workshop

2010-09-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

Holy Ink

Writing Workshop

in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Sat. November 6, 9 am to 4 pm

Led by Cathy Warner

Telling Our Stories. Unearth your memories. Name what you know. Join in a day of writing.

We will focus on personal and family stories, life journeys, and spiritual experiences.
Sharing is optional and conducted in a supportive environment.

$40 registration includes morning continental breakfast, coffee & tea, snacks and materials.
To register email holyink@me.com
Registration Deadline: Nov. 2.

Bring: lunch (or visit local market/restaurants), journal or notebook & pen, or laptop computer.

Gather at Cathy’s home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lunchtime recreation includes use of hot tub, relaxing in gardens and scenic walks, weather permitting. (Allergy sufferers note: I have indoor cats &; a dog)
Address &; directions will be sent upon registration.

United Methodist Advanced Lay speaking credit available on request. Text required for layspeaking credit:
Remembering Your Story, Richard L. Morgan, cost $11.20. Order directly from cokesbury.com

Silly Poetry Contest

2010-08-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

As you know, I'm studying creative writing through Seattle Pacific University. A highlight of our residencies is a poetry contest, where we parody the poets and writer's we've been studying (and sometimes our program director). Last week, we studied the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with an emphasis on "The Windhover."

Hopkins was always on the lookout for God, as was Annie Dillard (we studied "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"), who perfected the art of stalking nature. Like those notable writers, I too have been on a quest (for the last 35 years) for the perfect pair of jeans. If I find them, I'll know God exists!

Here is my version of The Windhover--

The Skinned Cover
To Christian Dior

I sought this morning Macy’s markdowns king-
dom of day’s designer-discount denim, Jeans for this—hiding
Of the rolling bevel underneath slim, sturdy wear and striding
Sigh there. Eeh, ow, my rump upon the grain-glove a dimpling thing
Is this Ecstacy? Then off, off forth I swing
As Kate’s* heel sweeps smoothe on a show-end; I twirl and gliding
Rebuff the rear bend. My hind in hiding.
Word! It’s absurd,––the aggrieve of, the misery of the sling!

Brute booty and Valium and ack! No air, pride, doom, fear
BUCKLE! And the tire that quakes from me then a million
Times rolled, uglier, more strange than thus: dough, bagel, schmere.

No wonder of it: beer, fod, makes chow down spillion.
Mine the grand blue-jean tremblors. Ah, my rear,
Sprawl! Maul the shelves and dash, bold civilian.

*Super model Kate Moss

The Brady Bunch, Christ Followers

2010-06-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, we need a little humor. Today I preached my last sermon after seven years of serving as lay pastor to my congregation. What was I going to say? My daughter suggested I think of my retiring (to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing full-time) like the end of sitcom, maybe Cheers, since our church is small and everybody does know your name. I thought about it, and The Brady Bunch came to mind, specifically, "Here's the story, of a man named Brady." I thought about the Bible and what it's the story of. So, here, to lighten the mood of a tearful farewell, and with apologies to any Brady, living or dead, and understanding that I've taken great liberties by abridging almost all of scripture, is my new hit song, "God's Story!"

God’s Story
Sung to the theme of the Brady Bunch

Here’s the story of the baby Moses
Found in the Nile and raised in Pharaoh’s house
He led his people from slavery through the Red Sea
And wrote God’s ten big rules

It’s the story of God’s son Jesus
who spoke and healed throughout Galilee
He was crucified yet rose from the Grave
To save us all from sin

And later Paul who had once persecuted Christians
found his life turned upside down by a vision
He wrote the letters we now read in the Bible
That’s the way we all became Christ followers

Christ Followers, Christ Followers,
That’s the way we became Christ followers

Forging Ahead

2010-06-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

"Forging Ahead" appears in the Upper Room book, Rhythm and Fire.

I wrote this poem seven years ago, the last time our church was in transition, as a thank you to Rev. Tarah Trueblood and in recognition of the difficult work she undertook in her first pastorate. It seems appropriate, as my congregation faces another transition with my retirement from pastoral ministry to focus on my MFA. A new configuration for ministry in Boulder Creek is still being dreamed up and formed, and it's stretching folks.

Forging Ahead

We’re all being hammered down
smashed flat, quivering red and molten
like silver in refiner’s fire

We’re all being punched and pushed
squashed, spun, dizzy and thrown
like clay on potter’s wheel

Maybe we should’ve kept our mouths shut
kept our noses in our books
kept our hands in the dishwater
kept our feet on the gas pedal
kept our lives settled, stable
and possibly, doubtfully, content

But we had to do it, look up from
our circumscribed lives
remove our rose colored glasses
pry our fingers from their death grip
around familiar’s throat
and belt out those words

Melt me, Mold me

Who would’ve known asking for God
would be this messy, this ugly
leaving us purple and bruised
dumped into the unknown
Who would’ve known we’re not in control

Whether we like it or not
whether we admit it or not
God always had hands all over us
fingers poking and prodding
hot breath in our faces
whispering, shouting
when we lost attention

You’re Mine

So there we were and here we are
forging ahead sharpening our trust
kneading our faith

How else are we going to become silver forks
spearing meaty portions of justice for the poor
How else are we going to become cooking pots
steaming with hope to feed the hungry

How else are we going to rise up and follow
telling our stories of transformation
from mound of slimy clay to communion cup
from chunk of ore to steeple bell

How else are we going to stare straight
into the world’s face
shift our weight in the Creator’s palm
and cry

Fill me, Use me

The Business of Memory

2010-06-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Business of Memory for my MFA program. Amazed by the sacred gift and curse, burden and blessing of memory and what the writers in that anthology brought to the page.

My annotation is filled to overflowing with quotes. My own thoughts in this last paragraph:

As writers, we access and use memory for a purpose. We delve, finding scraps and snippets to assemble and reassemble, leading us into narrative. We engage, explore, and extrapolate from image, nuance, and feeling into language, word, sentence, paragraph. We create with material that we may have indeed created ourselves without consciously knowing it. We commit to the page, trusting as much as we are able, our memories to have retained the essence, the truth of our experience, if not the actual facts.

Our Cornerstone

2010-05-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

A reflection based on 1 Peter 2:4-10

One town founder, fond of rock walls, built a mile of them through Boulder Creek, rendering it reminiscent of the English countryside. The walls came down as lots were split and town grew, but one still runs the length of Boulder Street right in front of my church. Rounding the corner from Main Street, it’s just a few yards before the wall comes into view. Those stones, mottled with dirt, moss and age, held in place by gravity and occasional cement cry out, “This is God’s house,” as much or more so than our hundred-year-old building. The church built on land donated by lumberman J.W. Peery, is painted white and fashioned of wood and sweat. The pews have held logging men, resort-goers, retirees, baby boom families and commuters. The building has burnt to the ground and rebuilt twice. The wall is made of stones hauled from Boulder Creek and stacked by Chinese laborers who built railroads in the 1880’s and has withstood the great San Francisco earthquake, and more recent Loma Prieta temblor.

Our congregation dates back to Wesleyan class meetings 140 years ago, our name changing with each Methodist reconfiguration. This is our history, but not our foundation. God is our true founder and architect. Scripture is our blue print, faith the nails that join us together. We stand on the corner of Boulder and Mountain Streets. More importantly, we stand on the Cornerstone--the Living Stone.

O Cornerstone, help us to stand on the living stone, and in so doing become steppingstones for others into your home.

Thoughts About Pentecost

2010-05-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

I wonder about the fisherman Jesus called out of the Sea of Galilee, and if they were baptized. Scripture doesn’t tell us if those that Jesus called to leave their nets and fish for people were dunked in the Jordan River by John before Jesus came on the scene. John the Baptizer warned his converts that there was more to it than immersion. That was just the beginning. The Bible gives us only one account of Jesus continuing the practice of baptism. He and John were both in the Judean countryside, at “Aenon near Salim because water was abundant there; and people kept coming and were being baptized.” (John 3:23)

How could you baptize fishermen who waded in water day in and day out, who’d caught their feet in nets of floundering fish and been pinned under water, nearly drowned on several occasions? A lengthy immersion, a holding underwater until the last of their breath escaped their lungs in futile bubbles as they surrendered to death? Or dry baptism, the mud and muck of riverbank ground into their skin? What would feel most like giving up an old life and becoming a new creature?

Maybe if they were baptized along with the three thousand on Pentecost in Jerusalem, a desert city without river or sea, a solitary drop was all they could expect. I think about Peter, exercising his voice outside the upper room where he’d been hiding with the disciples after Jesus left for good, wondering, worrying what would happen next. Then, filled with the Holy Spirit, and not new wine, he spontaneously combusted, along with his friends, speaking a language that was universal for the first time since the tower of Babel fell and speech scattered with it.

I imagine women rushing back and forth to wells, filling their jugs, presenting them to the disciples who cupped their hands, poured water over the converts’ heads, perhaps extravagantly at first until the heat rose, the women slowed, the heavy jugs arrived more infrequently, those waiting in line growing restless, the baptism going from a pour to a trickle, to a drop, and when the water ran out, the disciples, perhaps remembering their master’s use of spit to heal, smearing saliva across the foreheads of those remaining, until the last of the new believers was marked in baptism.

No one writes about the three thousand the day after Pentecost. Were they nicer to their employees, more tolerant of their spouses’ annoying habits? Did they pray more fervently? Did they build shrines in the backyard? Did they sign on with disciples, or go door-to-door sharing their experience in attempts to start a new church?

John said someone else was coming who was going to baptize with fire. We received that ignition at Pentecost. That branding was intended to sear us into family, scar us for life, leaving marks no one could ignore or forget. Now, having been lit by the spirit, how do we follow Jesus into the flames?

Leave Nothing Undared

2010-04-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

Leave nothing undared.

There are the words in bas-relief spurring on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Life sized statues of sturdy men cast in bronze sit astride horses, crucifixes strung around their necks as they prepare to ride out from their memorial wall into the vast expanse of Southern Texas preaching nothing but Christ crucified. It is written of these Fathers who galloped the Word west––“Specialists in the most difficult missions.”

I sit on the flagstone before them, pen in hand, copying down my indictment. I am a specialist only in myself, in the whiny self-help-why-am-I-not-happy-most-difficult mission-of-don’t-worry-be-happy. Thinking, as I often and inevitably do, that it is all about me. Then some men wearing clerical collars to proclaim their vocation, and wide brimmed hats to prevent sunstroke, gallop out of the year 1849 alongside the words, “Strive to be saints.”

On horses sweating and briny in the humid Texas summers, they brought Holy Manna to the poor and the Son crucified to the hungry. And, slowly, no faster than the beast and spirit could carry them, they rode the Word throughout this continent and onto others.

Leave nothing undared. The words flare at me like a mare’s hot nostrils. I have spent the past year pawing at my life, fuming like a wild colt confined. I have been stomping in my pen, unable to get my own way, and unable to live with myself not getting what I want. I buck against the circumstances saddled on my back. I refuse to respond to the spurs against my ribs, urging me forward and into the open journey. Instead, I kick up dirt, tossing my head, neighing blame at everyone in sight, and refuse to live my dingy stall.

This weight on my back, this load I stagger under is the yoke that should be light, the burden that should be lifted because of the One who chose to leave nothing undared. The One Pleasing and Beloved chose to trust, to set aside his own will, to set aside the cup of his own choosing for another set before him, to allow a greater will to reign on earth as it will.

I cling to my will as though it were saddle and bridle, rider and horse, sun and North Star. I confine my life to a map, bristling up against reality. The representation of a place is not the thing itself. A map is not terrain. The contour of a life cannot remain a blot of ink.

Leave nothing undared the Oblates demand. I stare at the determined faces of these immortalized men and wonder if I have dared anything at all. If they stepped out of bronze into flesh, would I have the courage to follow them? Would I be bold enough to develop equine sense, to allow a rider on my back to guide my journey? Could I let go of expectations that keep me trapped and static? Could I plod along, sometimes trotting, sometimes galloping, sometimes roped to a tree, not knowing where I might end up?

O spirit of the men who strove and rode to be saints, and spirit of the animal who partnered with them, let me dare, like you. Help me to cultivate such inner strength and outer conviction that I will not be undone by life’s circumstances. Let me accept, no not accept, but embrace the paths that change that sway and divert the best-laid plans. Let me live into and out of your story, and into and out of my story, and into and out of God’s ongoing story of redemption that leaves nothing undared.

Dont Just Stand There, Repent

2010-03-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

My meditation from last Sunday, speaking from the voice of Jesus.
Based on Luke 13:1-9

Do you think that misfortune befalls only the wicked? Do you think that by playing it safe, that by staying out of trouble, that by pointing a finger at suffering and assuming they sin, that comforting yourself by believing they’re only getting what they deserve, that disaster will never strike you? Well guess again. The Galileans Herod murdered while they worshipped in the temple were no worse sinners than you. And taking up the cause of hatred and retaliation will do you no good. Towers collapse. Walls tumble and the innocent are crushed. I have told you that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, and likewise we are all going to die. Death is part of life, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed.

No one knows the day or the hour, so choose a life without regrets, live a life that lines you up with God. Straighten up and fly right. Turn around. In other words, repent.

Don’t be like that fig tree, stuck in the ground, unwilling to spread out roots, to delve deeply and take sustenance from the soil. God didn’t plant us in this garden to be dormant forever. There is a time for rest, for suspended activity, and there is a time for nourishment that takes place within, for filling ourselves with holy nutrients, and there is a time, just look around you and you’ll see it right now—to leaf out and blossom, and by becoming who you were created to be, you offer beauty, comfort and signs of God growth to the world. As you ripen and mature, there is a time to bear fruit and to feed others from your abundance.

So don’t stand there like the near dead tree, afraid to thrive. Call out to gardener God—let that green thumb fertilize you with word and prayer, let all your experiences, the failures and defeats, the accomplishments and joys compost together to feed you and bring new life. Soak up rain and spirit. Don’t be content to simply exist. God who rooted you in the soil of everlasting love will provide everything you need to produce a bumper crop. And I have come to call you into that life abundant.

What are you waiting for?

Lament Over Jerusalem

2010-02-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

This was my sermon today, a blend of Jesus words from Luke 13:31-35, poetry from the book of Lamentations, some history, and my imagination–––

Woe to you Pharisees, who think that a threat of death will deter me from my purpose. Do you think me like Jonah, running from God’s voice as if I wasn’t destined to descend into the belly of darkness? I will not be swayed by the name of Herod Antipas. nothing more than a puppet of the Emperor Caesar, weak son of a despicable father who murdered innocent children in an attempt to do away with any rival to his power at my birth. Have you not ears, have you not eyes, you who call yourselves men of God? Do you not realize that no power on earth can silence God’s message? Return to that fox Herod and say unto him that though I would not set foot Sepphoris and Tiberias, cities built for worship of him, that Jerusalem will always belong to God. Jerusalem is God’s to build up and to destroy.

Jerusalem, home to those who silence and kill prophets, it is there that I will complete the work given to me, there that I will complete the Exodus of deliverance begun by my father through Abraham and Moses. Do not think that I will run from you, Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Romans who sent you. You say you are about the work of the Lord, but you are so diluted and polluted, you don’t know what it is to observe the laws of love and righteousness.

Nothing will keep me from my appointed task. The angry mob from my hometown of Nazareth could not push me off a cliff, neither will you. I will not be silent, even though the vile fox beheaded my cousin John. You tell Herod that this message is unstoppable. It is he who should fear for his life the day I set foot in Jerusalem.

Today and tomorrow I am doing my father’s work in the countryside, casting out demons and curing diseases, setting the captive mind and body free. And then the day after that, I will enter Jerusalem to face my death and become the Lord’s instrument for the ultimate act of healing. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that day is coming soon, pay attention, read the signs.

O Abraham, O Jacob, O Israel, O Zion, Judah and Jerusalem, how often have your ears and hearts been closed? O City of David that destroys the prophets, Jerusalem where Jehoiakim struck down Uriah with his sword and threw him in a common grave, where Jeremiah was struck and left to die in a muddy cistern. O Terrible city that cut Isaiah in two. We have been singing lament over you for centuries, issuing warnings, proclaiming God’s judgment, offering plans for reconciliation, paths for redemption.

O desolate city whose foes have become masters, whose enemies prosper because of the multitude of your transgressions. How I brood over you my people, remembering the days of your slavery, and of your wandering, and all the precious gifts that were yours in the days before your downfall.

How I long to gather you together, like little chicks, to stretch out my wings and offer you the shelter and comfort of the Most High, and yet despite your groaning you will not come to me. You search for bread, but not for the Lord. For these things I weep, my eyes flow with tears, my heart is wrung within me at your rebellion.

O people of Zion, sit on the ground in silence, throw dust upon your faces, put on sackcloth, bow your heads and rend your hearts, for vast is the sea of your ruin. Your house is left to you. You have been your own undoing. Cry aloud to the Lord! Pour out your heart like water and lift your hands to him, for you will not come under my shadow.

O Jerusalem, trapped in arrogance, fear and unbelief, soon everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. Your very foundations will shake and the curtain will tear in two. The time is coming, and sooner than you think, when I will pass through your gates and God will have the final word. You will line the roadside, waving branches and shouting, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” You will greet me like a king about to assume his throne, unaware of the events this triumphant entry will set in motion.
O Jerusalem, the day is fast approaching when I shall be nailed to a cross and the sky will turn black. I say to you once more, before it is too late, “Come under the shelter of my wing.”

Do you yet again refuse?

O my people, and my God, why have thou forsaken me?

The Transfiguration

2010-02-12T00:38:00.000-08:00

I have seen the minor transfigurations
a young woman all lit up with new love
the radiant smile of a groom on his wedding day
the inner glow of a pregnant woman
parents beaming as they hold their newborn child
the long married luminous and dancing under the moon
the dazzling light that gentles us from this life into the next.

Each brush with love transforms us
if only temporarily and like the sun
it burns so bright we must look indirectly or go blind.
We can only come so close to the Great Source
before we catch fire from the inside out.
God’s creative power emanates from us
profuse and dazzling momentary perfection.
Like Moses our beards shimmer
Like Jesus our garments blaze white
This is transformation
shining on the mountaintop emitting God rays
dumbfounding those in our presence

As the blush fades we walk down from the peaks
onto the plains of our existence
uttering our small prophecies
We are not dazzling, worshipped, or set apart
but, Oh, we have been changed.

Reclaiming Our Creativity

2010-01-22T17:03:00.000-08:00

When your creativity has been stolen by Hades and taken underground like Persephone how do you get it back? What if there is no Demeter searching everywhere for her precious daughter? Or what if you are Demeter and your grief and railing led to the straightjacket?

“We would all be better off without you making such a fuss. Get on with your life, stop making trouble, stop complaining to me,” is what everyone says. “You are a bother, and so is your child. Keep quiet, stand still, don’t blow everything out of proportion and don’t make life so difficult for us. We’re perfectly happy when your hands are tied behind your back.”

And so you sit, in your madness, fully aware of how dire your circumstances are seeing death and doom and the unraveling of life in everything, so you undertake nothing, exist in the daily without joy, check off the chores, do what is required. All this, while your imagination is sequestered, held hostage, and you wonder––if she were returned to you, you would have any use for her?

Do you remember what it is like to play, to dream, to find joy in a word, a movement or a moment? So afraid are you of her returning to your doorstep and seeing you in this state that you work out long involved custody arrangements via courier. You come up with a list of everything that must be done, all the unfinished tasks accomplished, the to do’s completed, so that when she returns she will have one hundred percent of your attention.

You will dote on her, marvel at her, sit and stare at her. She will shrink under all this attention. She does what she does for the joy of it, the life it brings, not because you need to prove to yourself that you are talented or worthy or capable of making a living with your art. Even when she was with you, you did not hold a spotlight over her head and illuminate her every movement. She has learned to create in the dark, to weave what she can’t see, to trust beyond her sight, and asks you to do the same. Do not force her into deadlines and grades, and do not confuse her with the editor or working writer. The creative genius cannot be controlled. She does not live by clocks or calendars by college courses and critiqued papers.
And so do not wring your hands, the restraints chafing at your wrists. Do not build walls around yourself, or boxes to contain her, or platforms to thrust her into the lime light. Do not make yourself director and audience waiting for her to take the stage, and worrying if she will withstand the spotlight and the pressure.

Trust instead, that when she returns to you, it will not be the tearful reunion of separated lovers. She will come quietly, gently, you will not see her so much as feel her hand slip into yours, sensing that she has returned. Go slow and be gentle with yourself when this happens. Do not dance an all night marathon. It has been many months since you two have been together. Treat her tenderly, asking little, expecting less. No one can demand spirit. The captors can make us sing by the waters of Babylon, but they cannot make us compose a new song that fills our hearts with joy.

Give Persephone a pen, some paper, a paintbrush, a piano. Give her food and water, sleeping and waking, sunlight and shadow, privacy and people, solitude and community, give her sanctuary and open spaces. Trust her and she will blossom. Make room in your psyche for her without asking for product. Embrace the process that brings life, claim it for her, for you, for the spirit of life that has awakened within and among us. Learn from her to escape your constraints and choose abundant animated life.

Bearing the Promise

2009-12-15T21:54:00.001-08:00

Bearing the Promise
Mary, I praise you.
I marvel at your faithfulness
your wholehearted embrace
of God’s claim on your life.
You sing a magnificent song
of certainty.

If it had been me
I would not have been so accepting,
so confident
so quick to assume
my place in the plan.

You worshipped.
I worried.

You said, behold
I am the handmaid
the servant of the Lord.

I said, whatever this is
I have to research this first.
I need to be logical, look at the facts.

An angel spoke and you listened.
I would like to say I’m learning
to do it your way.

How do I listen?
What will I hear?

We All Sit Beside A Pool Of Tears

2009-11-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

We all sit beside a pool of tears
Mine was home to algae and mosquitos
not much more than a puddle, really
I sat there everyday unable
to see the sun, the moon or myself
reflected in the murk, hoping
for a tadpole to take up residence
or dew to float on a leaf
Hungry for food, thirsty for drink
longing for sustenance

The dark immensity of tears beside you
was too deep to fathom
too wide to sail across
the rain of accumulated pain
tsunamis of sorrow, centuries of grief
Unlike me, you didn’t sit at water’s edge
helpless, hoping

You braved the stagnant sea
waded until you submerged
our despair alive against your skin
Your nostrils flared, your mouth opened
you did what those of us desperate
to survive avoid
You gulped in our grief
drowned in the lake of our shatteredness
then you emerged, coughing, sputtering
the weight of us dripped
from your robe and beard

You stroked toward shore
then stopped, knelt
The pool now clear glittering
lapped at your chest

You beckoned to us
we who stood on the sand
thinking we had witnessed your folly
Tentatively we inched closer
shivering in the shimmering wet
You touched our shoulders
cupped the small of our backs
dunked us into Presence
We surfaced, soaked and stunned
You wipe our eyes
Scooped up our tears
held your palms to our lips

“Drink,” you said
“This is the Water of Life”

©Cathy Warner, 2009
With thanks to Trevor Hudson for the title.
Dedicated to the Companions in Ministry Community.

Permission to use this poem for personal or worship use is granted, provided the author is credited.

From Darkness to Light

2009-11-13T06:12:00.001-08:00

I woke too early this morning from a terrible dream that one of my daughters had died. Even though I knew it was just a dream, I couldn’t shake the sadness and despair. I got up, took some aspirin for the pounding headache I’d developed, and returned to bed. I told myself to think of happy things, but my mind kept returning to my sadness. What a terrible dream to have, I told myself, hoping to scold the parts of my brain responsible for nocturnal images and stories. Shake it. The daylight will come and I can call my daughter, just to say hello, hear her voice. Know that she’s safe. She’s okay now, I thought, but what if something does happen to her in the future? Should I ask her to carry a card in her wallet that says, “If anything bad happens to me, call my mother at this number right away?” She might do it, to humor me, but it seems a little controlling and paranoid to ask. Think of something else. Thanksgiving’s coming soon. She will be home.

I thought of my Thanksgiving table, of the people who will be there, and the people who won’t. My mother-in-law won’t be there. She’ll be visiting a son who is dying of cancer. Another son of hers has been absent from our table for years; dead at forty-five. The nightmare I had is the reality for so many mothers and fathers, not just in untimely tragedies, but also in epidemics of disease and famine. We humans are fragile; we leave this world at all ages.

These are the sort of thoughts that swirled in my head in that liminal world where the tug of the dark dream and my sleeping life forget what I know when I’m wide-awake. I have to think of something good, I told myself, and then a song, a jumble of two Taize chants, came into my head, “The Lord is my light. The Lord is my song. All my hope comes from God.” I played it over and over in my head, until the refrain pushed out my fear, with the conviction, that should the unthinkable happen, I will not be undone. I will survive it by my faith.

The sort of faith I have doesn’t keep me from pain. It doesn’t keep bad things at bay, or stop me from being angry, worried, scared. The faith I have accompanies me in all my human emotion, all my mistakes, all my panic and nightmares. It is that pinprick of light ever so slightly piercing the darkness that helps me to know there is so much more than I can see, and that whatever happens, I am not alone. I am not alone, and I am loved. I am loved by the light, by the creative force of the universe, by God.

It is that love that makes suffering bearable. How I long for those who find themselves in darkness to know the power of this light, to feel it at the very center of their souls, that they may reach for it and cling to it, trusting, as I have learned to do, that it is always there for them.

A Letter From Jesus

2009-10-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

One of the writing exercises I find most powerful is writing a letter from God, Jesus, or a spiritual guide to me. It’s a way of finding out the words and message that the holy has for each one of us. In every workshop where I have led this exercise, I have always been awed by the love, tenderness and power of these words that come to us and through us. I truly believe that we become vessels for a greater knowing, for a love and power that is often beyond our ordinary consciousness, but always available to us.

Next time you need some encouragement try this simple exercise. Take a pen and a paper, and write a letter from God, Jesus, or a Biblical figures, or spiritual guide to you. If you want, you can make it a dialogue, with questions and answers, a conversation.

I guarantee that you will be blessed. The following is an excerpt from a letter from Jesus to me. In it is a promise for all of us:

“It is my job to bring healing into situations that seem hopeless and impossible. Trust that I have power to heal events not only in the present, but in the past, too.

Perfect love casts out all fear, but even imperfect ordinary love can cast out some fear. I want you to remember that I know that you love me. You can call on me, count on me, and trust me to be present with you and for you. All you need to do is ask. Invoke my presence; utter my name and I will walk with you. I will hold your hand. I will stand with you in every situation. I will give you words when you can’t speak. I will give you strength when you are weak. I will be all that you cannot and I will never desert you. For you are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased.”

After Words

2009-09-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem a few weeks after the Twin Towers went down. Remembering today, that it's still my fervent desire to find a way toward peace.

After Words
A response to September 11, 2001

It was a time of uncertainty, doubt and fear
a time of mourning, weeping and crying out
a cacophony demanding
Revenge, Justice, an End to the Madness
Peace.
A time when we perched at the brink
looked into blackness
and rock crumbled underneath our feet.
A time when we held our collective breath
and braced ourselves for the hand
that would push
us into the abyss.
We clamped our eyes shut
images of destruction replaying
in the darkness behind our eyelids.

Then we felt it.
We were not standing alone.
Shoulders pressed against ours.
Fingers found their way
into our clenched fists.
We offered our hands, opened our eyes
stepped back from the precipice
into a sea of tear-streaked faces.
Voices swelled like waves
our grief, our lament, washing us clean.
Stripping us bare.

And we knew that to heal
We needed a new vocabulary
with the power to break divisions we’d invented
to keep us “us” and others “them”.
Words to topple fences
that kept neighbors apart.
Words to weave humanity together
across the span of continents.
Words to reveal what it means to be human
in all our brokenness and beauty.

At the edge of the pit
we held the hands of strangers
we called them brother and sister.
We sang of hope, of love, of a presence bigger
than our constructions and our understanding.
We spoke of the power that embraces us all.
We became the river of life
carving a new path to a place
we’d been longing to discover all of our lives.

Blog On Break

2009-02-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

Thank you for visiting my blog. I am currently concentrating my writing on my MFA program, writing essays and memoir that are in progress and too long to post here. Don't let the lack of recent activity discourage you. I hope you will visit my archives and that the essays, prayers, and poems I've written will encourage you on your spiritual journey.

At the Manger

2009-01-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

Jesus, like the magi, and the little drummer child, I bring you a gift. I pray it will be of use in this world. The wrapping isn’t fancy, the package not designed to sell. All that I can offer you is myself and the words I possess, words that I unfold before you. Words about a life, mine, that has been transformed by a life, yours. The words of epiphanies, of God moments that have changed me from a Herod––fearful and wanting control because I never really had it––into a mother Mary, willing to say yes to God even when I don’t understand how the plan is to come about.

I stand before the manger with words you will need when you are older, words that will thread you to humanity and your divine essence, words to balance you between worlds. I bring you words that are the story of struggle and triumph of each person who has made their way to you.

I drop to my knees under the weight of these words, wrapped in a tattered cloth I have tied around my arm. Then one by one I tuck words like Thank You into the corners of the straw around your sleeping frame. Your little fist opens for a moment, reaching for a word to hold tight to your chest. You choose Love.

Election Night Blues

2008-11-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

I was listening to the election results, alone, my nest empty of both children, and my husband, presenting at a conference in San Francisco, an hour and a half from home. Obama was declared the President elect, and I was happy. I was a take the easy road supporter, made a few contributions on my Visa card and sported a bumper sticker on his behalf. Then McCain gave his gracious concession speech and I began to realize that this was a watershed––an or a (I heard both)––historic moment with regard to race in this country. I hadn’t given it too much thought. Race was never an issue for my family, native Californians in our Bay area melting pot.

I realized we elected a president, not a savior, but when Obama gave his speech, I was moved. I won’t say it was a victory speech. It was a hope speech, a Yes We Can speech. I believed, and felt deeply that we were, as Tom Brokaw said, entering a new era, one of possibilities. I thought about my nephew, an eighteen-year-old multi-racial child. He never knew his black father, has been ashamed of his white mother, dropped out of school. We don’t know where he’s living. I wondered if he had a T.V., and if so what difference it might make in his life to see this future president on stage, embracing the responsibility of leading America into the future.

Then the phone rang, and my seventeen-year-old daughter, a freshman at a university in Florida, called crying. At first her tears were those of joy and relief, “I can’t believe it, Obama won. For the first time in my life, I’m proud to be an American.” She talked about her trip to Europe last summer after graduation, how she felt all eyes glaring at her, the American. How she’d wished she had an accent from New Zealand that would’ve thrown them off. “But now,” she said, “I’m so proud of my country.” She sniffed. “Do you think it’s strange that I care so much and I can’t even vote? Nobody else around here seems happy.” “It’s not strange, it’s important,” I told her, “It’s your future that you care about.”

Too soon, her tears turned to those of outrage and grief. She told me about a young man watching election results in the dorm lounge. “He kept calling Obama the N word,” she said, “and then he said he hopes he’s assassinated.” During the incident she was shaking with such rage she was left mute. Her roommate confronted the young man, and my daughter spent the next two hours in her room shaking. I spent several hours on the phone with her that night. She’d never witnessed such outright racism. We live in liberal Santa Cruz County where there’s a high degree of tolerance. Her high school values and promotes diversity and has a zero tolerance policy for threats, violence and the like. We talked about prejudice and why it might exist, particularly since she was living in the South and how she might learn to stand up for her beliefs in a constructive manner. We talked about prayer, not that she does it much, but that she could pray for our president and for this young man and those like him, to be open to a new vision and way of thinking.

My daughter has landed in a harsh and alien world, and it’s a daily struggle for her to stay true to her ideals. Her passion is for a “green world” and she brought her environmental consciousness to Florida, teaching her roommates how to recycle, on a campus where recycling bins come and go, conserving water in a city with fountains and water parks galore. She’s been a voice crying for the wilderness.

I wished so much for a safe place for her. I wanted for her the companionship of peers regardless of who they voted for, who would support her in her recognition of injustice. I wanted a place where she could gather inner strength to navigate in a broken world where hatred and meanness exist, even though we wish it didn’t.

After we hung up, I realized that what I longed for her to have was a campus ministry like the Wesley Center at U.C. Berkeley. A place where young people can grow into the people they are called to be. A place where they are encouraged to be prophets, the way their minister, Rev. Tarah Trueblood, defines prophet—a person who speaks the truth about the present situation. I long for her to have a tribe to empower and sustain her in this hard work. I thank God for the gift of campus ministries, available to so many students through the United Methodist Church. We just never know how and when they’ll have an impact. After all, I never set out to raise a prophet. Do any of us?

Prayer for our Elected Leaders

2008-11-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

Eternal and Expansive God,

Throughout history you have set apart your servants
calling them forth for such a time as this.

We lift to you today those who have been called by us
elected to represent the rich and poor, young and old,
citizens and residents, the rainbow of ethnicities
populating our cities and towns and all in between

We have chosen these men and women
to speak for us in our communities
in our states, in this nation
and in this one world we all call home

We pray that as these leaders pledge
to promote the greater good
that they will be guided in their public
and private lives by the teachings
of Jesus and his church that call
for right relationships between people
for stewardship of the Earth
and for justice that places in the forefront
the needs of the hungry, poor, sick and oppressed.

May our leaders be worthy
of the trust we have placed in their hands.
May you uphold them as they carry heavy
responsibilities and expectations
on their shoulders.
We pray for their families
that they will not be sacrificed
to the demands of public office
and that the spirit of love will reign
in their homes and hearts.

We give thanks for our government
for the peaceful transition of power
our founders sought, and yet we need
healing from the polarizing division
of political campaigns. We pray for those
who find both hope and fear at the
results of our votes.

We pray particularly for our President-Elect
Barack Obama and for the symbol he has become
for many, of possibility, for others a threat.
We pray for his physical safety in a nation
where racial hatred still festers in our
shameful wounds.

Gracious one, we recognize our dependence
on you and on one another. Keep us always
in prayer and in good will for those who
give their lives to service.

Amen.

Writing Prompt 54

2008-10-20T16:40:00.001-07:00

What role does or has music played in your life?
What could your theme song be?
Write about it.

What We Create Together

2008-10-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

My church choir amazed the congregation yesterday. Five of us and our director pumped out the volume of thirty singers, blended into the voice of one, and saturated the sanctuary with the spirit of a thousand worshippers ecstatic for God. If we weren’t holding music, we would’ve lifted our hands as we sang, “and I lift my hands and pray, to be only yours I pray,” from Only Hope (Mandy Moore’s solo in the film A Walk to Remember). After our accompanist sounded her last melancholy note, there were Wows and a smattering of applause. We’re still waiting for a ruling on whether or not it’s kosher to clap after the choir sings––after all, we are definitely not performing.

I don’t intend to brag, but our choir routinely knocks the socks and support hose off the congregation. And to be truthful, we’re not that great. We’ll never cut an album. We do have some local talent–– you’ll find our choir director singing with The Dulcimer Girls; our tenor writes the occasional song and sings karaoke, as does our bass, son of a Methodist minister who grew up in a church band. One alto confesses, “I’m not very good” saying she has more enthusiasm than talent; the other sings mainly with her preschool class; I sang in school choir from fourth to eighth grade, but I never could read music. And, every now and then someone who likes to sing in the shower will join us for a few months. Put us together, and you’d expect to have an okay choir, a small group of middle-aged folks you’d smile at indulgently during worship, while you opened your Bible to prepare for the scripture readings, thinking They’re no Amy Grant and Vince Gil, but it’s sweet of them to try.

What we have instead is something radically unexpected. We amaze ourselves. Our choir director will get goose bumps, my scalp will tingle, I’ll feel lightheaded. Sure signs that The Spirit is present and has not only carried us away but has flowed through, magnified and united our breath and intention, creating an offering, an outpouring that not only blesses us in rehearsal and keeps us carving time in our busy schedules to scarf down a quick snack before Thursday night practice week after week, but blesses and refreshes the congregation during Sunday worship. Spirit drenched music pours into us, through us, fills the sanctuary and the people in the pews. God magnifies us, and in turn we magnify the Lord, as instructed by our ancient psalmists, who were, of course, song leaders.

The thing that transports and transforms our choir is more of that whenever-two-or-more-are-gathered miracle-working. It’s the leaven added to the loaf. It’s the sum being greater than the parts, which might be mathematical, rather than Biblical, but still true. It’s that Jesus, sneaking in unexpectedly, with answers to questions no one thought to ask, squeezing abundance from scratch when bread and fish were in short supply. My church choir is just one more invitation to the banquet. Take this bread and eat. I have a recording of yesterday’s Only Hope, of the soul sizzling beauty we created together with God. I can’t stop playing it. When we swell to double forte and my chest constricts as if Jesus is sitting on a ventricle, I ask myself––if our little choir can do that, is anything impossible with God?

I'm a Sticker

2008-10-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a lot of reading for my graduate program, and I’m reading with various sets of eyes, as a reader, a writer, and a pastoral leader, thinking about what the words mean not only for me, and my craft, but also for my church community.

In an interview with The Writer’s Chronicle (Sep’t. 2008), author Scott Russell Sanders says, “No community can thrive without a substantial core of citizens who are committed to the long-term wellbeing of that place, nor can any business, church, school, or volunteer organization. Wallace Stegner observed that Americans tend to be divided between ‘boomers’ and ‘stickers’––the first kind ready to move on as soon as things get tough in one place…the second kind committed to making the situation they’re in…as good as it can be, or at least better than it was. Obviously a vibrant society needs both sorts of souls.”

Reading this, I thought about the history of my church, dating back to 1874 and those pioneers of Boulder Creek who were committed to this community, who saw many people come and go, loggers, summerers, clergy, etc. They didn’t just go when things got tough, they went on to the next place God lead them. I thought about the people who have come and gone in the 20 years I’ve been here, and how sometimes, I want everyone I’ve ever loved, known and cared for to remain here with me. After growing up in an ever-changing familial landscape (four divorces and five marriages between my assorted parents by the time I was 16) I have become a “sticker.” You just can’t get rid of me! That’s a good thing for me, and after reading Sanders’ interview, I understand it’s a good thing for my church as well, providing stability and a foundation, a “home” in a constantly changing world. But, as Sanders says, our society and our church need “boomers” too. I’ve always been intimidated by these explorers, people willing to take risks, to not only move to new states and cities, but to venture into new jobs, ministries, life journeys. Sounds too scary to me.

Yet, all of us, in some ways are both—we’re stickaboomers! We commit to what is foundational in our particular lives: God, family, profession, or place, and move in and out of—communities, relationships, jobs, churches, as we attempt to live the fullness of life God promises us.

What a launching pad Boulder Creek United Methodist Church has been in its long life. It’s not about amassing members and keeping them forever. It’s about filling folks with God’s love, wherever they might go. We continue to be a small spiritually vibrant church, and it is a privilege to play a part in providing the stability that encourages people to dream of possibilities, listen to God’s leading, and go forth into their passions. May this always be a place to return, welcomed with open arms, to be refreshed, renewed and recharged to “boom” God’s love into the world.

The Gallbladder of Christ

2008-09-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

According to my docent at Bandelier National Monument, the kiva was “an important part of the ceremonial cycle and culture. It was a center of the community, not only for religious activities, but also for education and decision-making. Unlike our secular world, there was no separation of church and state in Ancestral Pueblo culture.”

I stood in the July sun, fanning my face with my hat, circling the rim of the kiva; a giant sunken bowl with rock lined walls, now roofless, and imagined what it would be like to live a life so closely connected to my neighbors. Everyone gathered in a seasonal rhythm, praying and giving thanks for plantings, rains, harvests. Everyone knew when and what to do and was constantly grounded in prayer, in communication with the Great Creator. The tribe operated as a living organism, a single body with a purpose that sublimated individual desire to a communal will.

Then I wondered about the tribal leader, did he (undoubtedly a he) ever wish he could sneak down to the Rio Grande, climb down a ladder into a neighboring kiva and take part in a ceremony that he was neither responsible for or called to lead? Meaning, I wondered if he ever felt like me.

The Apostle Paul in his lovely metaphor of the body tell us that each part has a necessary function, and there’s no more inherent worth in being the obvious coiffed big hair of Christ, than being the wrinkly kneecap. Those of us who serve as pastoral church leaders are the eyes and ears, the mouths, the hands, the feet, very noticeable, active responsible parts of the body. We are the tribal leaders, organizing and leading the worship, prayers and operational systems of our kivas. Where can we go to simply take part as part of the body, to perform a necessary function, but not be in charge? Where can we go to be the gallbladder or small intestine of Christ?

My answer is The Academy for Spiritual Formation. The Upper Room, which sponsors the Academy, describes it as, “a two-year journey into the heart, mind, soul and will of Christ. Participants meet in residence for five days each calendar quarter– a total of 40 days in retreat. Recognizing the power of the Holy Spirit to shape our lives, the daily schedule provides a balanced approach to spiritual formation with worship including Morning Prayer and Night Prayer, and Eucharistic celebrations, thoughtful faculty presentations, silence, spiritual community, small covenant groups, and a balanced approach for head and heart.”

For me, the Academy provided a structure and a tribe. Surrounded by people itching to venture into the unknown of God (unlike some of our parishioners who are stuck in place), all I had to do was show up, be fully present, and go with the flow. The two years were a time of learning about the larger Christian heritage we all can claim, developing new practices in my life, introspection and further development of my gifts and call, and forging relationships at a soul level which continue today.
For more information about the Academy in general, visit The Upper Room. For information about the Upcoming West Coast Academy see the previous entry on my blog.

West Coast Academy for Spiritual Formation

2008-08-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

THE UPPER ROOM® ANNOUNCES
THE ACADEMY FOR
SPIRITUAL FORMATION®
TWO-YEAR / FORTY-DAY MODEL

CELEBRATING 25 YEARS
ACADEMY # 29
AT MERCY CENTER
BURLINGAME, CA (NEAR SAN FRANCISCO)

“I found the two-year Academy at Mercy Center to be one of the most profound experiences of my life. It was a means of growth, healing, transformation and grace.
The relationships formed and the lessons learned will last a lifetime.”
––Sue Magrath, Academy #24 participant

The Academy for Spiritual Formation® is a two-year journey into the heart, mind, soul and will of Christ. Participants meet in residence for five days each calendar quarter– a total of 40 days in retreat. Recognizing the power of the Holy Spirit to shape our lives, the daily schedule provides a balanced approach to spiritual formation with worship including Morning Prayer and Night Prayer, and Eucharistic celebrations, thoughtful faculty presentations, silence, spiritual community, small covenant groups, and a balanced approach for head and heart.

Participation is open to laypersons and clergy from all denominations;
racial-ethnic persons are encouraged to apply.

RETREAT SCHEDULE

Session 1 February 16-21, 2009
(Monday-Saturday)

Session 2 April 28-May 3, 2009
(Tuesday-Sunday)

Session 3 August 10-15, 2009
(Monday-Saturday)

Session 4 October 13-18, 2009
(Tuesday-Sunday)

Session 5 January 11-16, 2010
(Monday-Saturday)

Session 6 April 13-18, 2010
(Tuesday-Sunday)

Session 7 August 9-14, 2010
(Monday-Saturday)

Session 8 November 1-7, 2010
(Monday-Saturday)

Faculty for Academy #29 includes some of the best voices in the spiritual journey today: Elizabeth Canham, Loyd Allen, David Horowitz, Jane Vennard, Bruce Rigdon, Kathryn Damiano, Bishop Hee-soo Jung and others.

An outstanding leadership team of Suzanne Seaton, Bob Mitchell, Jan Sechrist, Jim Seaton and Ginger Howl are ready to welcome you.

All sessions are held at the Mercy Center (www.mercy-center.org) in Burlingame, California, just minutes from the San Francisco airport. Room, board, and tuition are $5,500, payable over the two years. Partial scholarships are available. For more information and a twenty-page prospectus, visit www.upperroom.org/academy, email academy@upperroom.org, or call the Academy office toll-free at 1-877-899-2781, ext. 7233.

“Without Christian formation in spirituality, there can be no Christianity at all… The Academy offers a structured, supportive community in which Christians can learn Christian history and resource their own growth in the love of God and neighbor, take risks spiritually, and find courage to submit to God for healing the very parts of themselves they most would reject. I am committed to support it.”
––Roberta Bondi, author and Academy teacher

“The Academy fulfills a unique place in the lives of Christians reaching for deeper spiritual growth…I have never known a spiritual frontier which combines such a wide spectrum of Christian experience…Yes, it changes lives, including mine.”
––Flora Slosson Wuellner, author and retired Academy teacher

Writing Prompt 53

2008-06-22T15:12:00.001-07:00

What does "the body of Christ" look like to you? Draw it, write it, dance it, live it.

The Body of Christ

2008-06-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

I was honored to read this poem at the opening of the California/Nevada Annual Conference Session of the United Methodist Church on Wednesday, June 18.

A special thank you to my fellow readers: Burt Yin, incoming Conference Co-Lay Leader; Judy Newton, retired missionary to Japan; Rosa Washington Olson, lay woman involved in all aspects of Conference life; Debbie Dillon, local pastor who is moving to a new appointment after serving at Cone Community UMC; and our percussionist, Tarah Trueblood, Executive Director and Campus Minister, Wesley Foundation, University of California, Berkeley. Thank you everyone.

The Body of Christ

You are the face of God
You are the wrinkle of age
You are the gap-toothed smile of youth
You are the cleft of chin
You are the hook of nose
You are the dimple of smile
You are rose of blush

You are the eye looking for justice
You are the ear listening for love
You are the head bowed in prayer
You are the mouth singing praise
You are the voice proclaiming new life

You are the arms raised in thanksgiving
You are the hands wiping a fevered brow
You are the grasp of a newborn
You are the fingers frail with dying
You are the palms cupped with living water

You are the legs skipping in play
You are the knees bent in worship
You are the feet marching for peace
You are the toes balanced on rock
You stand barefoot before the creator

You are the lungs, breath of the holy
You are the heart beating eternal rhythm
You are the belly brimming with laughter
You are the womb cradling hope

You are the hips carrying our future
You are the back refusing to be broken
You are the shoulders carrying your cross

You are the glorious body in motion
You are the passionate body overflowing with emotion
You are the ever-curious body nourishing the intellect
You are the everlasting body sustaining the soul
You are the sacred body, a temple for the Most High

And I am you
And you are me
And together we are one body
Bearing one another’s fragility
Promoting one another’s healing
Sharing one another’s purpose

You and you and you and you and me
Together we are called to be
One mind, one spirit, one body
Offering our lives to the one who redeemed us

How we love this broken body
transformed by the Lord of Love
How we love this wondrous body
Baptized in the River of Life
How we love this precious body
A testimony to the living God
How we love this immortal body
A witness to the Alpha and Omega

The hands
The feet
The face

I am
You are
We shall be
unto this world
The Body of Christ

Permission is granted to reprint this poem by crediting the author, Cathy Warner.

Writing Prompt 52

2008-06-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

What direction are you headed this summer? Write about it.

Directions

2008-06-16T20:18:00.001-07:00

I'm off in many directions this summer...physically it's all East of me...Sacramento, Orlando Fl, Visalia, Georgetown (CA), Santa Fe NM, Orlando again. I don't anticipate posting to my blog for the next month or more.

Enjoy this poem as we head toward the solstice and the long hot days (I wish mine were lazy) of summer.

Directions

God you are North dancing in shadows
as Earth turns her face from sun to silence.
My arms reach toward you like oak’s prayers
naked branches stretching skyward.
I find you in wind’s snap across my soul
as I crunch through snow tracing footsteps
touching guideposts, marked by the cloud of witnesses
gone North across steppes and barrens before me.
Like them I discover your deepest treasures
preserved in winter’s solitude.

God you are East, your voice spring’s chorus,
tiny cheeps and pips of wrens and robins
nesting in their creation story.
Like ice-melt’s gurgle that births still waters
I find you reflected in the faces of those
traveling with me. We wash our hearts clean
and covenant alongside doves in your river.
God of East, you bathe us in the spring
of compassion and embrace us into your story.

God you are South, shining at the zenith
both sun and star that fix me in your history.
God of August heat and summer extremes
you are compass and map
your hand cool across my temple in mid-day.
Your words tap roots within me
pumping living water from history’s depths.
God of summer, God of South you shelter the weary.

God you are West, you are horizon’s shimmer
calling pioneers from their homes toward
the promised land. I surrender my heart
journey West to find you swirling
through fields, celebrating fall’s harvest.
What can I add to your bonfire O God
but my ancient ideas their brilliant reds, oranges
and golds now faded brown and crumpled?
They crackle in wisdom’s fire
and are transformed.
Fuel for the promise bursts into sunset.

God of all desires and directions
there is a season for every purpose under heaven.

--
Directions was originally written for Anne Dilenschneider who presented the concepts of Pastoral Leadership and Soul Care that inspired this poem, and for Patricia McCallister, Linda Kelly and the Conference Lay Ministry Training participants who journeyed with me in January 2001, Sacramento, California.

Writing Prompt 51

2008-06-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

In his book, Thanks, Robert Emmon's recommends keeping a gratitude journal as one of the most important ways of living in gratitude.
Try adopting or adding to your journaling practice, writing what you are thankful for.
Mix it up a little. If you write "cat, job, apartment," every day for three weeks, you'll end up bored with those blessings.

Hodu Ladonai, Give Thanks to God

2008-06-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

Did you know that living in a state of gratitude improves your health, happiness, job satisfaction, income level and lifespan? It's been scientifically proven in Robert Emmons' book: Thanks: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

I just finished the book and preached about it Sunday; the scientific findings were confirmed by members of the congregation as they shared stories of how much better we feel when grateful, not pollyanna-ish, gliding over illness, death and serious issues, but finding blessing and personal growth even in our trials.

Nearly everything in my life is about to change, or has already begun. My oldest daughter has changed cities and colleges, my youngest is graduating high school in two days, and heading cross country for college, my sister moved in with us two days ago, I've begun reading for my MFA program, and already know why I've never read the classics (without a dictionary in hand and unlimited hours at my disposal, I'm sunk).

And in this swirl, it is a right and good thing always and everywhere to give thanks to God. God may not need all the affirmations, but God was certainly on to something, commanding thanksgiving--it's good for us humans, body and soul.

Hodu Ladonai

Hodu Ladonai
Give thanks to God
Give thanks to God
for calling us to this
time and this place
to carry out
God’s purposes
as we discover
what they are for our
particular lives
and circumstances

Hodu Ladonai
for the gift
of each other
this community
to bear witness
to our journeys

Hodu Ladonai
Give thanks to God
for the covenant
that binds us
one to another
and to our creator
Elohim

Hodu Ladonai

Rhythm & Fire

2008-06-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

I am privileged to have two poems in Rhythm & Fire, newly published by the Upper Room. This anthology is written by Academy for Spiritual Formation faculty and participants. You'll recognize some big names, and I'm honored to be included alongside them.

Writing Prompt 50

2008-06-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

Take a scary religious word or phrase, like born again, saved, end times and write about it in a way that makes sense to you.

Born Again

2008-06-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

This writing was prompted by Kathleen Norris' book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, where she defines tricky theological words in accessible ways. Here's my take on the troublesome "Born Again."

Born Again

At your age, you are already counting lifetimes, like a cat. There have been changes and challenges that sent you tumbling out a second story window, twisting, arching, frantically clawing at air, as you made your way to a foot first landing, blinking at the impact, then trotting home.

How many times can one be born, again? How many times until you get it right, until you become the kitten that isn’t tossed into the river, or sent to live in the alley picking through trashcans? How many times until you become the kitten who is pulled out of the stream by the scruff, dried with a towel and placed against the chest of a person who is your Jesus, someone who will stroke you, pick off your fleas, and take you to the vet for shots and de-worming? How long until you find someone who will make room for a litter-box in their life, who will keep you even when you sharpen your claws on the carpet, will let you curl in their lap while they read the daily paper, will allow you to nestle at their feet on the quilt their grandmother pieced?

Do you count the lives in between your first birth and your new place, secure in the home of the someone who has taken you to heart? It’s up to you now. Stay out of the road, stay clear of traffic, keep your collar on, don’t wander up the hill where the coyote will devour you.

Do you know how much your Jesus loves you? If you disappear, they will put up signs, go door to door asking the neighbors if they’ve seen you, will search the roadside, comb the hillside, not wanting to give up hope that you are alive, believing you want to come home, but just aren’t able. They can’t search forever, but they will never forget you. They won’t know when or how to say goodbye, but they’ll try. Some days, the memory of your furry weight in their lap, the press of your cool and whiskery nose against their hand will flood through them, as you are born again, born anew into their hearts, love coexisting with pain, like a velvet curtain against a broken window pane.

All of it was worth it, then, being taken from your mother, tossed into a cardboard box, sold in front of the market for a dollar to a kid with gooey fingers. The hard work of finding your way since then, brushing against ankles for a bite of tuna, squirming out from hands so desperate for love, they squeezed the life out of you.
All of it was worth it, if in the end, or even somewhere in the middle, you are born again, into the heart and lap of someone who will love and remember you into eternity.

Writing Prompt 49

2008-05-26T18:50:00.001-07:00

Write about your vision of heaven.

The Last Letter

2008-05-26T18:35:00.000-07:00

It seems fitting to post this last letter from the dead in the midst of listening to Dante's Divine Comedy (Longfellow's translation)--I have completed the journey through hell--and on the heels of preparing a memorial service for my friend's 83 year old father. We prayed over his body a few hours after his death on Friday afternoon, and she has begun speaking of him in the past tense. Already, he lives on in the photos piled on the dining room table sparking memories.

Mija,

They came in a dream, the angels, and invited me to go with them. Do you know what it is like to soar, rising from your old bones and labored breath? It is freedom. It is glorious and it set this tired old man to laughing. But then I see all the long faces, praying for me on the rosary. I want to reach down and wipe away all your tears. Eighty-seven years is enough on the earth. And I think you should be glad that I have gone. I think you should be dancing. Then I remember how scared to die we all are. Afraid that our mortal soul hangs in danger, and that words must save us.

It is with noble hearts that you pray, believing your prayers will twine themselves into a net to scoop me from the jaws of Satan and drop me at the feet of the Virgin. Rest assured I am not in hell and I am not in purgatory. It is possible that I am in heaven, although I have not seen the Virgin or her beloved son, Jesus, or your mother, Anna Maria, the love of my life. Wherever I am, I am free.

How I long for you to celebrate. Light the prayer candles and sing Alleluia. Pull apart the white carnation cross by my coffin and pin a flower in each lapel. Mija, I would like to tell you what it is like, this new life, this life after death. But I am at a loss, for there are no tastes and no sounds and no sights. Just this feeling.

I felt something like it once before, only much smaller, just inside my own heart, when you were born. The first time I held you and gazed into your dark eyes and touched the mat of black hair on top of your tiny head, I thought I would swell and explode with my love for you. Where I have gone it is like that, like love has exploded into a soup of stars and spirits.

Oh, my beautiful daughter, I wish you this peace.

Writing Prompt 48

2008-05-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

In one of his Psalms, David wants to bash the enemies' babies against rocks.
Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek. How do choose the path of restoration and forgiveness when the wrongs in society and our own lives our so grievous?
Write a letter, and/or a psalm. Struggle with your anger, your desire for retribution, your ability or inability to forgive. Don't censor your words, yet temper your actions.

The Letter that Forgives Evil and the Psalm that Cries for Vengeance

2008-05-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

The Letter

To the little girl with the braids tied in pink ribbons,

I never knew your name. You’re grown up now. Maybe you got kids. Bet you never leave them with someone you don’t know. Then you were seven or eight, the daughter of a friend of the girlfriend I had that week and you came over while she went to court or something. You sat on the couch watching cartoons. You had a scab on your knee and flowered underpants. And your skin was so white and so quiet and I needed quiet.

Now I think I shouldn’t have touched you like that. Then I was stoned and everything makes sense when you’re stoned. There were other girls, but you were the first and the one I saw at night when I pulled the sleeping bag over my head and the traffic on the bridge took over my veins.

I couldn’t get quiet, couldn’t get it right, so I quit living. It’s not hard. And now, I know things. Like I screwed up your life bad. And that bites. You still got time, right? Maybe you’re one of the good ones who can forgive. I don’t deserve it.

I don’t deserve shit. But that’s the weird thing, if you can forgive me, you get better, but it don’t change me a bit. You might even get a life that works okay. That’d be cool. Man, I never wanted no power like I had, messing with your mind, fuckin’ up your life. Maybe you already worked it out. Maybe all I am to you now is a shiver that pulls on your gut.

Death don’t change the past. It just makes you a little smart. Now I get that there were choices. I hope you pick the right thing, the good thing.

From the man you always hoped was dead and finally is

The Ranting Psalm

O God they say we are all your children
They say we are all created in your image
They say we are born again into your eternal love

And I say to you what about those who abuse your children
What about those fathers who come into their daughters’
Bedrooms at night, who pull back their covers
And force their sour breath upon their innocent skin
Would it not be better if you smote them
Destroyed with your own hand those who would destroy a childhood

Why are you silent why do you allow the shattered
To suffer in silence and shame
Surely God you should exercise justice they say vengeance is yours

And I want to know if you’re ever going to use it
Reach down your hand and press it against the throats of the transgressors
Until they can whisper no more until the sounds of don’t tell anyone
Are drowned in the gurgle of their spit
Silenced in their dying breaths

Stop granting second chances stop looking the other way
Stop pretending time heals all wounds
Stop killing hope and innocence and childhood
Too many of your children have suffered
At the hands of those who say they love them

I want what is right God I want what is just
I want you to restore what has been stolen
From your daughters and from your sons

Like King David I plead with you
Get off your throne get your head out of the clouds
You’ve done it before you can do it again

They say that you are love they say that you love us
So what about bringing wholeness what about saving souls

You will of course in time eventually
But why must the suffering last so long

Writing Prompt 47

2008-05-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

What's your cancer story? How has your life been impacted by your experience?
Write a letter to someone who needs to know--spouse, children, God...

The Cancer Letter

2008-05-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

Is there anyone who doesn't have cancer? Right now, a husband and wife in my church both diagnosed (early thankfully) at the same time. A choir member whose husband died a few weeks ago of renal cell cancer. My brother-in-law fighting multiple myeloma. An older man at church getting skin cancer removed, all sorts of relatives of church members undergoing treatment for one variety or another. How do we survive it--those who recover, and those who mourn those who succumbed? Without God, where do we find hope?

Another Letter from the Dead

Darling Kathleen,

You amaze me, the way you held up through it all. Still are. Driving the children to school, making beds and lunches, folding laundry. Where do you find it, that inner strength? Or is it simply numbness. Changing the phone number was a bit much, but if that’s what it took to stop your mother from calling every day, why not?

I heard her, the old biddy, and your aunts, reciting their platitudes. “He’s out of his misery.” “He’s gone to a better place.” “He’s with the Lord, now.” Fuck you. That’s what I’d want to say, if I were alive. Sometimes I forget it’s not about me any more. It’s about you. It’s about you because you sat by my bed for months and washed my scalp with a washcloth and clipped my goddamn toenails. You saw the worst happen and now you have to pick up the pieces and reassemble the mess I made of our lives.

Burning the sympathy cards, I liked that. Enough with the Hallmark crap.

There are so many things I am sorry for. I am sorry that the cancer ate away not only at my body, but at your hope, at our dignity, at the security of our children. I wish now that I had been brave enough to leave before everything was depleted. Somewhere, beneath the morphine and oxygen and the fading in and out of consciousness, I couldn’t bear to leave you alone with the children and no job and no money. I was afraid; afraid you’d fall apart after I was gone. I thought the lingering would make it easier.

You must feel so cheated. It was all for worse, with no better. It was all in sickness, with no health. And now all you have is death do us part. I’m sorry for the fear, how it held me back. I wish I could appear like a fairy godmother with a magic wand and wave it over you and Brittany and Josh. Cast a magic spell and you’ll live happily ever after. But there’s nothing I can do.

What can I say? Let it out. Scream and yell; cry all you want. Cry until your pillowcase is soaked. Swear at me; I won’t be offended. Swear at God; God can take it.

When people ask, tell them I was a selfish bastard and you’re glad I’m gone, wish I’d died ten years sooner. Or tell them I left a pit in the center of your life and the only thing that keeps you from jumping in after me, is the rope the kids have tied to your waist. Remember that oncologist at Stanford, the one who went to med school after her baby died of leukemia? We raised our eyebrows when she told us. And when she left the room you said, “If it were me, I’d get as far away from cancer as possible.”

Now it is you. I won’t tell you everything is going to be okay, because I don’t know. Maybe life is terrible. The only thing I can tell you, the only thing I know to be true is this: You are not alone. Even when you wake up terrified in the middle of the night, aching for me, aching for someone to hold you and smooth your hair and kiss your forehead, and find no one there, no one at all. Even then, you are not alone. Maybe that’s eternity. We are threads in a web, invisible, but real nonetheless.

I remain yours,

Darryl

Writing Prompt 46

2008-05-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

Think of an ex--yours, your parent's, your child's. What needs to be said from this side of the grave, or the other. Write the letter. Then what? Rip it up? Burn it? Post it to your blog?

The Letter From the Dead Ex-Wife

2008-05-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

What is the protocol for attending the funeral of your ex? I don't have an ex, but I have multiple parents. I just don't imagine them showing up for the occasion. The divorce was over 35 years ago. They're strangers. Any bitterness long gone. Not so in this letter.

Roger,

So nice of you to leave the office for an hour. Yes, shake hands with my parents, nice touch. But then they always liked you, even when I got the lecture about living up to obligations. I suppose my clients will be delighted you’re representing them now. That ought to make you happy. Never thought I’d die from the impact of slamming my head on the glass ceiling, but that’s what it boiled down to. Hah.

Sorry to disappoint if you were expecting something more exotic like Lotus flowers, incense and the Buddha. There’s nothing special about Korean Methodists. If we’d had a church wedding, you’d know that. I don’t know most of these people to tell the truth. The two rows of ladies at the back of the church are in the women’s circle. They made the refreshments, be sure to try a pecan crescent. I’d say they’re to die for, but no cookie is that great.

You’re uncomfortable. I can tell by the way you’re picking lint from your cuff. Look around the room, lots and lots of gray. You should be safe for another twenty years, at least. But it does make you wonder about your mortality. What if you are next? Tomorrow morning you could be reading the paper at the breakfast table while your new wife grades papers before class. They next thing you know, you’re road pizza. The last thing on your mind is Linda; how you didn’t say I love you when you left the house. When she gets a phone call from the Highway Patrol, you want to think that her wails will be as loud as the sirens.

Should I say fat chance? Do I sound bitter? I don’t mean to be. Divorce happens. We were doomed from the start and I won’t pretend otherwise. But let me give you some advice. Don’t let Linda end up loving the dead you more than the live one. After all, the dead you will always be around. Go home after my memorial. Take the afternoon off work, unheard of, I know. And when Linda arrives, tell her something she can’t forget.

Susanna Yoon

I’m In!

2008-05-04T21:37:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that I’ve been accepted into Seattle Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. I have been accepted in the “Creative Nonfiction” genre, which means I will be writing memoir and essays.

This writing program is four years old (I heard about it in its planning stages and have been waiting to apply) and is the only one in the country that includes a foundation in Christian spirituality and literature.

SPU’s website says, “What distinguishes our program from other MFA programs, then, is its focus on the relationship between literature and faith, its integration of the spiritual disciplines, and the reading of literary classics of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the curriculum.” You can read more about their philosophy.

The program is low-residency; most of my work will be through correspondence with a professor who is an accomplished writer in the field. Twice a year, I will travel to a ten-day residency where I will take intensive classes with everyone else in the program. It is small and highly selective, so I’ve been told being chosen is a testament to my writing ability. I begin with a 10- day residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico this summer at St. John’s College. Seattle Pacific is the home of Image Journal, which sponsors the annual Glen Workshop at St. John’s. Those of us in the MFA program will have the opportunity to take advantage of the wide array of Christian writers, musicians and visual artists who will be at The Glen.

Our winter residencies will be on Whidbey Island, so I’ll enjoy some lovely scenery but never actually set foot on campus! If I stay on track, I will graduate in the summer of 2010 and will have written a book length work, as well as having commented on sixty books by others––I think “annotated” is the term, and I have no idea what that means, so I better learn fast! My exposure to literature in college was narrow and specialized (i.e. books about the Viet Nam War and Feminist movement), and I’m ready to explore The Canon. My first reading assignment includes Confessions by St. Augustine, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I know that God continues to call me to use my gift of writing in the world. I spent last fall discerning whether this was the time in my life to say “Yes” to God once again and begin such a big undertaking––20 to 30 hours of work each week. With my “baby” heading out-of-state to college, my husband traveling internationally frequently, stable clergy leadership to assist me in ministry, and a growing number of leaders in my congregation, I felt that it was. I figured if I didn’t get accepted, then God would let me know I should wait. The opposite happened. I received amazing letters of recommendation, wonderful critique of my writing sample from my writer’s group, encouragement from my family, spiritual direction group and prayer partner.

Now all I have to do is the work!

Writing Prompt 45

2008-05-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Try writing from a voice completely out of your realm of experience.
Be as outrageous and authentically foulmouthed (think Billy Elliott) as your dare.

The Letter that Got Me Blacklisted

2008-05-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Warning this post is rated R for language. Yes, you've heard it at the mall, on campus, in countless movies, but the sensitive among you, be forewarned.

A few years ago I decided to enroll at a well known Christian Writer's Conference, conveniently located near my home. I signed up for a fiction workshop where we emailed our work out in advance. I sent my Letters From the Dead (which I've been posting here individually), thinking that I'd get some good feedback from people of faith. I was writing, after all, about theology--life, death, regrets.

Shortly after sending my letters, I received an email from the instructor. She'd received complaints about my use of language. One of my characters, an inner city teen was killed in a drive by shooting, and she said tasteless things like, "Fuck" and "shit." The instructor said she understood why my character might swear, but this was a Christian writers' conference and perhaps I'd like to send a different story. I was willing to give it a chance, until I received the other writers work.

One man wrote a "thriller?" about a self-proclaimed vigilante who picked people off with great glee and the latest weaponry in order to save the United States from the new godless regime. It was okay to litter the pages with dead bodies because at times of extreme emotion, he said, "Darn."

A woman wrote about an abused wife who killed her husband by driving him off the edge of a cliff. She jumped from the vehicle just in time, and it was all good. She did what God wanted without once swearing.

In writing, we often talk about the inner critic, or the inner censor, to try to ignore her, and write what's deeply felt. I didn't want to censor the other writers imaginations or writing (as they did mine) but I was as offended by their "Christian" writing as the other writers were about my "inappropriate language." I wanted to ask where in their writing were the What Would Jesus Do messages? Non-violent protests, community organizing, caring law enforcement officials arresting batterers, safe houses, women's shelters? I couldn't in good conscience offer any positive comments on the writing, but then, I've never read any "Christian genre fiction," so what do I know? I withdrew from the workshop and got my money back.

Here's the letter that made me the bad girl of the Christian writer's workshop:

Yo Peanut,

‘Sup girlfriend? Did I pick the wrong time to go to LaSondra’s to borrow her rhinestone jeans or what? I’m like just opening the gate and that Taco Bell dog of hers is yapping and jumping on the chain link and I’m all, down you little shit and I hear it all before I see it. Tires squealing and the gag me stink of burning rubber and the Camaro engine roaring like a fucking 747 landing on the house and shouting something something motherfucker. Then DeWayne comes bombing down the street and then bullets like rocks on fire go slamming in his back and he crashes onto me like a two hundred pound balloon. Pop! Next thing I know everything’s like totally hot and white and my brain feels like fried egg on the sidewalk in that stupid commercial and everything is noise, volume all the way up, ear bleeding noise. And I’m all wet and slippery like a fish on land. Then bam. End of that shit.

So like I don’t know and I shouldn’t be telling you this shit. You’ll have nightmares and pee the bed and Mom will spank you and it’ll be my fault, but sorry I just have to tell someone, and no way can I tell Mom. At first I was like where the hell am I and where’s DeWayne and he better get his ass here quick and tell me what the fuck’s going on, since he’s like the reason I’m in this mess. Thanks to him, I missed Halloween 4 with Tyrone Friday and that was the night we were gonna do it finally. Yeah, well, like they say, Denial ain’t no river in fucking Africa. DeWayne wouldn’t believe we was dead or some crap. It’s like, man, I was so not ready for this. But here it is.

Now no way mom’s ever gonna let you out of the house. But this time it totally wasn’t my fault, I think. Okay, so don’t be like me. Have some goals and shit. It’ll make mom happy and maybe that way you could like keep part of me alive or some weird-ass thing like that.

Don’t forget about me, okay? ‘Cuz even though you are––I guess I’m supposed to say were––a royal pain most of the time, you’re bad for a six year old plus you got the great hair and I have to admit, I was jealous but not anymore. You are my one and only baby sis. So chill in the crib and step light in the hood. Wish I could come home.

XOXO,

Chantrelle

Writing Prompt 44

2008-04-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Think of a long term marriage or partnership--yours, your parents, grandparents, that couple at church. What would one partner write to the other after death? What could be written in advance? Would it make any difference?

The Second Letter from the Dead

2008-04-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

Introducing my first letter from the dead, I said it came out of a frustrating funeral experience. It was the "letter" from a dead husband to his wife, possibly something published in a Dear Abby or Ann Landers column that did me in. The message was Don't worry, be happy. I'm in heaven, everything's cool. That fact alone was supposed to cancel any agony the widow would experience. Her circumstances were irrelevant. Arghh.

I've always felt that memorial services were for the living; to provide us with sacred time and space to remember and honor the life of the one we lost, and to give us courage to shoulder on without him/her. I never thought that anything we did or said would make a difference to the dead, or insure them a slot in a specific beyond this realm venue. In that, I agree with Thomas Lynch who says about funerals, "the dead don't care."

My letter to a widower:

Dear Ira,

After today, take the suit to the Salvation Army. It’s seen too many buried. First your mother, then my brother, then our Samuel. Not Samuel. We needed Samuel. God forbid our child, we’d said. But God didn’t forbid. And how we tried to change God’s mind. Bring him back, God. Bring him back or give us another child. We’ll do anything. Go back to synagogue; invite Rabbi Kamenstein to dinner. Bargaining is for the living, Ira, and we both know it doesn’t work.

In this heat, your jacket will be off at graveside, so starch your shirt, there’s a can of Niagara in the back closet, top shelf. Turn the iron to cotton. Let it heat for five minutes, then spray like you’re doing my hair. Grief is for the living, Ira. I wish I’d known that. I wish I had allowed myself to wail, instead of drowning in the sherry. I know I wasn’t easy with the drinking, the nagging, cheating at Bridge. I had to win, had to have everything my way. You just let it roll like water off a duck. So Ira, do what you need to do. If you don’t want to be alone, I’ll understand. Everyone will understand. I tried to take care of you. I loved you. Maybe I never said it right.

Wear the red tie, you know it was my favorite, and take it to the cleaners, see if they can’t get the gravy stain out. Oh, and put a rose, just one on my coffin. I always liked that. What else? Make sure Ben at John’s Food King de-bones the chicken.

Things will be different, Ira. If it feels like too much, just breathe. Breathe and go through the motions and one day you might find something that makes you want to trim your beard, put on your blue cashmere vest and leave the house.

And Ira, if that something happens to be Doris Katz, you have my blessing.

Your Miriam

Weeds

2008-04-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

I thought the price on Dr. D’s Weed Death sounded too good to be true, but at Customer Warehouse, once you throw in a couple cases of Coors and Marlboros along with those mountain climber bars and diet iced teas, the bargains get fuzzy.

To read the rest of this short story, visit Verdad Magazine.

Writing Prompt 43

2008-04-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

Try writing a letter from a soldier (dead or alive) to someone back home.

The First Letter from the Dead

2008-04-17T21:41:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago I went to a funeral and left furious with the platitudes the pastor preached. My frustration gave way to a written rant which, after much revising, found form in a series of seven fictional letters written by my imagined dead to those they've left behind. The letters were accepted into an anthology that never materialized. I think about them every now and then, and last week I was at another funeral, one where I felt inclined to slap the perky pastor across the face. That, and the fact I'm reading The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch, has planted death in the center of my awareness. I return to my letters, whatever they might lack, as a point to begin again a dialogue about grief and living in the shadow of death.

This week, the first letter.

Hey Mom and Dad,

I know. We all knew I took a risk. But friendly fire, who would’ve thought? Gee whiz. Is that what they call irony? Dad, please don’t keep the flag all folded up in a case on the mantle. Give it to the Eagle Scouts or Union High, someone that’ll fly it.

I finally get the thousand points of light. Kaboom! I’m a thousand points of light. In a weird way, I was ready. Not that I had a death wish or anything, but you’re packing up your gear the night before and you can’t sleep and think, what if this is it? You didn’t think I understood, thought I was too young and immature, but I did. So don’t guilt yourself. And, you’ve got to stop thinking you could’ve stopped me from enlisting, that you shouldn’t have been so do the right thing all my life. I didn’t join just for the college or because of some God Bless America recruiting booth at the fairgrounds on Fourth of July. It was something else, something I don’t have words for, I was just supposed to.

Mom, now the freezer’s full of Tupperware casseroles. You’ll be eating leftovers for a year, sorry. Maybe you could defrost them all at once, have a big old potluck in the basement at Presbyterian First. Kenny and Richie could tell stories on me, like the time we took the Civic while you were at the bowling tournament, and set out for Mustang Ranch. That would loosen everyone up; maybe they’d stop acting like I was so perfect. I don’t want a halo.

Things will quiet down eventually. My newspaper obit will come off the bulletin boards to make way for the track team’s championship photo, the memorial scholarship fund will run out of money, some of the kids won’t even know who I was. You can even decide it’s okay not to be sad anymore, at least not all the time. It’s okay with me. We had our fights and stuff, but you were the best parents.

And when people shake their heads and say, “What a waste,” tell them they’re wrong.

Love,

Martin

Writing Prompt 42

2008-04-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles repenting.”
-Mary Oliver

Let Oliver's words inspire yours.

You Do Not Have to Be Good

2008-04-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles repenting.”
-Mary Oliver

I was given this writing prompt during my AWA training last summer. Oliver's quote is merciful, much as I imagine God. I also thought of the Psalmists, raging against their enemies, and that primal urge I have had to face and quell, to make someone who has hurt me suffer before I will offer forgiveness. So here is the shadow side given voice:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles repenting.”

But that’s what I want you to do.
I want you to be sorry, so so sorry.
I want you to crawl to my door, fall at my feet
your knees bloody, your lips cracked.
I want you to beg for mercy, beg for forgiveness.
Prove to me, every day in every action for the rest of your life
that you are agonizingly sorry––
that you are miserable, screwed down by my gaze,
aware of exactly what you did, every detail, to betray me.

You have committed the unpardonable sin, the one thing I will not forgive.
You can try though, to eek it from me,
the forgiveness that will wet your parched mouth.
I will stand and wait, a cool glass of water in my grasp.
I will stand at my door, shading my eyes with my hand.
I will watch you crawl toward me, waiting for your arrival.
You, hungering for benediction, thirsting for a blessing––
you will walk on your knees toward me, repentant for a lifetime.

Writing Prompt 41

2008-04-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

"Bodies carry our immediate history and our heritage; they too are made of stories."
-Elizabeth J. Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey

Write about your bodily inheritance.

Our Inheritance

2008-04-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

“You inherited the Preimsberger butt,” my mother said to my sister and me, two girls thin as two-by-fours, flat from head to foot, except for the butt, protruding from our backsides like cantaloupe halves. She was not a Preimsberger and therefore not a contributor to our malady. The butt came from our father, and to him and his three thin sisters from his mother, who by the time she was our grandma, had enough padding to camouflage the butt. Technically she was a Tholen; a Preimsberger only by marriage, but we were never a technical family.

When I was born my father nicknamed me P.B. It was supposed to stand for Preimsberger’s Baby, but my friends determined it meant Preimsberger Butt, loudly reminding me of my ancestry every time I walked away. My sister was spared such a nickname.

Then there was the nose. The butt was nothing compared to the cursed nose, a huge eagle-y beak long as a ski slope, that made many a Preimsberger look mean: Grandpa Dick, Uncle Reiny, our father, and even Aunt Jayne who made up bedtime stories just for me about kids who could dispense buttermilk from their noses via straws. Thinking back, Aunt Jayne's stories were most likely a product of hours spent in front of the mirror theorizing that a facial feature that large should have a spectacular function.

Our father’s Preimsberger proboscis had also been broken, twice, as a teenager and reset itself with an extra lump on the ridge. For a long time I worried that I had the nose since mine was always a bit too big for my face, and because people seemed to be able to recognize from great distances that I was my father’s daughter. Somewhere during high school though, I began to worry about my oversized butt and undersized breasts more frequently than my nose, which seemed to have mutated just a bit.

The full brunt of the beak fell to my little sister, who on her thirteenth birthday set aside the ten-dollar bills in the cards from both sets of grandparents for a nose job.

Our father is six foot two inches tall; his sisters hover near five feet ten. These great heights weren’t shared with us. Instead, our mother, five foot two, and her mother, five foot three, set the tone for my sister’s and my height. A few weeks after her thirteenth birthday, my sister, determined to break five foot four used her nose job fund to buy a pair of four-inch platform sandals with cork soles.

Interestingly, she said her nose felt smaller, almost invisible when she could look down at her friends from her new height, rather than up at them across the long slope of her schnozz.

Writing Prompt 41

2008-03-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

"Tell me everything you know about Jell-O."

-Natalie Goldberg Old Friend From Far Away

What I Know About Jell-O

2008-03-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

When I was young and had the stomach flu, my mother made red Jell-O, strawberry or cherry in her metal mixing bowl and shoved it in the refrigerator to cool. When I was too restless to stay in bed, she helped me to the couch in the sewing room, tucked my favorite patchwork blanket around me and popped a thermometer in my mouth. While I clamped it between my teeth, she dashed to the kitchen and spooned a blob of slippery Jell-O into my plastic All-Gone bowl, the words printed inside the dish along with a clown. She set it on a TV tray next to me, along with a glass of warm flat Bubble-up, and an empty mixing bowl, in case I needed to throw up before I could make it to the bathroom. My mother turned on our black and white set to Captain Kangaroo and Sheriff John and Hobo Kelly and sat at her sewing machine a few short feet away, whipping up matching dresses for my sister and me. Every now and then she’d turn around and look at me, ask how I was and bring me more of whatever I needed, even her hand on my forehead.

In fifth grade, Kendis Lescher and I bought strawberry Lady Lee gelatin dessert, a Jell-O knock-off, as an alternative to Pixie Sticks, colored paper straws that you sucked flavored sugar from. We ripped open the paper packets of our generic Jell-O, and when Miss Coppack wasn’t looking, we licked our index fingers, cracked the lids of our desks open an inch, and navigated our fingers into the powder, popped our fingers in our mouths and sucked the flavored sugar off. I spent most of that year with a red dye #5 fingertip.

I didn’t think much about Jell-O for the next twenty years, until I was seven months pregnant with my second child. Peter Rivero died and the United Methodist Women called on me to bring a Jell-O salad to the reception after his funeral. I didn’t know Peter, who was Catholic, but I knew his wife, Jean. We served on the worship committee together, and she’d held my baby, watched her grow into an inquisitive toddler, and had given her car keys to play with. So I said yes.

Of course I’d eaten Jell-O salad, at Thanksgiving dinners and church potlucks, but I only knew how to make plain Jell-O; Jell-O for the sick. I didn’t know what sort of Jell-O salad was appropriate for the dead, or rather, those who mourn them. I hadn’t been to a funeral since junior high school. Our neighbor, Bob, had been killed in a car accident on his way home from work, leaving behind his wife, and two children, about my age. Everyone was grief-stricken. There was no food afterward. But this was different. Peter was an old man, seventy or so, an acceptable age to die, so people would talk about him while spooning Jell-O salad into their mouths.

I needed help. My mother was at work and as inexperienced with death as I was, so I called my mother-in-law, a widow who’d lost her parents long ago. She served Jell-O salads at Thanksgiving and Christmas in cut crystal serving bowls. I copied down her instructions. The night before the funeral I boiled water, poured it over emerald green powder, stirred with a wooden spoon, watching the powder dissolve. I added cold water, stirred more, then dropped in chopped canned pears and dollops of cottage cheese. I didn’t own crystal, or a serving bowl, so into a Pyrex baking dish it went to cool in the refrigerator.

I didn’t attend the funeral the next morning. I wasn’t ready to face death. I watched Sesame Street with my almost three year-old, felt the daughter I was going to have kick me under the ribs. I spread Saran Wrap over my Jell-O dish, buckled my daughter into her car seat and drove to my church.

I climbed the stone steps from the street to the sidewalk, unable to see my feet over my baby-belly, one hand in my daughter’s, the other balancing my lime, pear and cottage cheese Jell-O concoction, as it jiggled under plastic warp. So this is how it was going to be with me and death––a little wobbly, a little vulnerable. I walked into the social hall, bustling with women, many of them widows, setting out trays of coffee cups, cookies, and pies. “There you are,” one woman said, and swept my Jell-O into her capable arms. “You are going to stay.” She set me to work wrapping napkins around forks. My daughter helped stack them in a basket.

Soon Jean, the new widow, arrived with those who’d attended the funeral. Some of them wore black, some had puffy red eyes, but most were talking, some even laughing. I hadn’t known that was allowed. Gratefully, they received everything set before them like an offering––cups of coffee, oatmeal cookies and small plates of my Jell-O salad.

Writing Prompt 40

2008-03-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Imagine yourself in the scene on "Good Friday." What would you have named that day?

Good Friday

2008-03-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

I never understood why they called it Good. Nothing that happened that day was good. A gruesome death and I was there, weeping on the hillside, powerless to help my son. And it appeared, at the time, that my son was powerless too, despite his confidence, despite his faithfulness to his call, his clear mission, his understanding of what his spiritual parent desired for him, and for the society around him.

Good. No. I can never call that Friday good. Necessary, maybe, but I wonder. Perhaps I’ll always see my son’s life differently from everyone else. He wasn’t born to die. That much I’m sure of. I cradled my newborn infant in my arms, gazed into his intense brown eyes, those eyes that saw only me. His tiny fingers clutched mine, holding on for dear life.

And what a life. He took such joy in the simple things. The moon appearing in broad daylight, like a slice of melon in a blue sea. The intricate grain of olivewood sanded smooth. He was curious, so eager, into everything, so full of questions. I told him everything I knew, and he pulled from my mind and imaginings, teachings and tales I thought I’d long forgotten. He came with me to the well and the river. We trudged with our water jars and pile of soiled garments. We talked of justice, the law, the words of the prophets. He knew my every thought, and I knew his. He didn’t know at ten, chasing chickens in the courtyard that he was going to change the course of history. He didn’t know at thirty-three, hands strapped to a wooden cross, what would occur after his death.

He did know he was going to die. I knew it too. He made enemies each time he spoke, challenging the law, accusing the powerful of failing to live by the spirit of the law. As his name and influence spread, the religious authorities grew afraid and began plotting. You should have seen the energy around him. That’s what kept us going, kept us believing. We saw the healing that took place wherever he went. Illness evaporated, demons fled. He brought peace to the troubled, health to the sick. Crowds gathered everywhere he went, hungry for the taste of his words. We’d hear them later, walking back to their villages, beginning to question the old assumptions, ready to embrace this new law of radical love.

Word of him spread like wildfire. I didn’t ask my son or his friends to keep quiet, to keep silent to save his life. He said it himself, “Even if we said nothing, the stones would cry out.” Did he have to die? Did God require it? I can’t believe that. I know it came to that, but I always hoped there could have been another possibility, the path not taken.

In my deepest prayers, I envisioned that road. I closed my eyes, emptied my heart and saw a vision of the world Jesus said was possible. Pharisees and Sadducees and Scribes who put away their pride, who let go of their power over others long enough to listen, listen with all their hearts and souls and minds, to the words of my son and the testimony of his life. I saw them kneeling side by side with tax collectors and carpenters and Samaritans in the synagogues and temples, praying for signs of understanding. I prayed for them too, for openness, forgiveness, and mercy. I believed there could have been conversion and reform and hearts turned anew toward God who made us. The promise of a changed world that wouldn’t need death as its catalyst. I glimpsed a world that could embrace the possibilities for life that my son offered.

If it were up to me, what would I call it? Evil Friday? Lost Friday? Brokenhearted Friday? I don’t know. But I do know that the Great One took the events of that terrible day, took the death of my son, the death of hope, and fashioned something new and beautiful from the remnants.

Mary and I found the tomb empty. The smell of embalming spices clung to our hands as we wept into them, finding no body to prepare. My son had vanished. I didn’t know where or why or how. I can’t say that I understood the meaning and impact of that morning we now call Easter. Even after all this time, so much remains unclear in my mind, a mystery.

This is what I do know. The power of love always proves stronger than the power of death. The journey into the abyss can lead us into the light. Grief can lead to rejoicing. Somehow, my son lives on. The message he had for the world is still being spoken. Ordinary people like you and like me have been changed; we have been given hope, not only for ourselves, but for this world, through the life of Jesus. God has carved an eternal place for him in the heart.

Writing Prompt 39

2008-03-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

What does "Take up your cross" mean to you?

Take Up Your Cross

2008-03-12T21:10:00.001-07:00

We carry our crosses
hung from our necks
lashed round our shoulders
nailed to our feet

No wonder we smack into doorframes
knock over our neighbors
slam face down in the street

All that dead wood
weighing us down

If only we dared look up
we might see him this Christ
head wreathed in thorns
nail studded palms
inclined toward us

What if we each rose
took up our splintery cross
and bore it in our arms
like a broken gift

What if we each rose
took up our cross
and followed the one
who forms hope from dust

©Cathy Warner

Writing Prompt 38

2008-03-02T23:46:00.000-08:00

Write about the last meal you had with someone you loved. Did you know it would be the last? Do you remember the menu, the table settings? Were you able to eat much? What do you say or not say?

That Last Supper

2008-03-02T23:42:00.000-08:00

March is here and so are my thoughts already about Holy Week and those pivotal events during the last week of Jesus' life brought to us in so much detail in the gospels. It does seem that we remember the events before everything changed much more than we remember the content of living out each day, even when we're using our gifts and heeding our call.

Here are some thoughts about the Passover meal Jesus shared with his friends:

Jesus knew that things were heating up; that the Passover meal was the last one he would spend with his disciples, his beloved community. Never again would they gather in this same manner, a teacher and guide not simply with his followers, but with the people who were closest to his heart, who had shared intimately in his ministry, who had journeyed with him, who had tried to make his vision their own.

By the time they gathered for dinner, Jesus knew that a crisis in his ministry, in his life, was unavoidable. He knew that he would have to endure death to remain faithful to his call. He tried to explain this to his disciples, but they couldn’t fathom it. They weren’t ready to understand or comprehend the way Jesus’ death would tear apart their lives. There was no way for them to predict the Resurrection.

Imagine how it must have felt for Jesus. His closest friends incapable of understanding what he’d said to them, what his ministry was truly about. It must have been heartbreaking, yet he trusted God’s power to transform lives, even beyond death. Jesus took common items from an everyday meal, bread and wine, and offered them to his dear ones as a way to remember his life and God’s promises.

How powerfully this symbol lives on. Proclaiming the mystery God worked through Jesus, bringing healing and new life out of brokenness and death. Throughout time and throughout the world, the mystery continues, and we gather around a table, like the disciples, to eat the bread and drink from the cup. Through this act, we are brought into community. We are held in relationship with each other and with God.

We share the grain of the fields, the fruit of the vine, and we are offered the chance to be recreated and transformed. When we, like the disciples, say yes to the gift without having to understand it, we demonstrate our faith. We proclaim our willingness to follow Jesus into the broken places in this world and in our hearts, and we offer ourselves to the holy, to be God’s instruments of healing. Through the ordinary, we encounter the profound.

Writing Prompt 37

2008-02-21T23:12:00.000-08:00

What does living water mean to you? Where do you find it? How do you immerse in it? Use your senses to describe it.

Surfing in Living Water

2008-02-21T23:05:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about living water this week. Jesus offers it to the Samaritan woman at the well in this Sunday's lectionary reading from John's gospel. Water was my first experience of God and body surfing a formative experience as I grew up in Seal Beach. This is one of my earliest poems, not my best writing, but even coming back to it after almost ten years, I still find Jesus in the water.

Church of Living Water

"You're abandoning God," your mother
proclaimed on Sunday mornings
and drove her station wagon to a stagnant building
where the fear-broken tried to cast out damnation

With your back to sunrise
you walked barefoot across town
shifting the board in your grasp
and slipped under the surf

You paddled through years of blue-green mornings
salt-wind washing your bruised feet
and recovered from countless sand drills
when the sea spat you ashore

You outlasted the cool crowd
and the bronzed beach babes,
who drifted to another fad

The currents haven't changed
you remain faithful
in the quiet when even gulls are silent
waiting for the mother of waves

When she arrives, you embrace the swollen water
The force of moon-pull suspends you
alongside ocean's eternal walls

You slice through gravity
Jesus walks the infinite wave with you
aligned in uncontrollable rightness
before you plunge into living water

Writing Prompt 36

2008-02-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

Write about temptation in your life...minor all things chocolate or major really, all things chocolate depending on how deep you feel like digging. If you dig deep, what nuggets of gold will you find in the pile?

The Upside of Temptation

2008-02-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Today is the first Sunday of Lent and the themes of temptation present themselves. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus heads into the wilderness after his baptism to wrestle with his call. Satan appears offering Jesus’ several opportunities almost too good to pass up––

1. Turn these stones into bread. Wouldn’t he crave fresh bread steaming from the oven, some comfort food after 40 days of locusts and honey, or the wilderness roughage diet? I see this as the temptation of More. Satisfying my every desire will bring happiness. I know it won’t, and I just put myself on the waiting list for a Kindle, so perhaps it’s hypocritical for me to blog about resisting temptation.

2. Throw yourself off the temple spire. Cause a scene, grab some attention, force God to swoop to the rescue. I call this the temptation of Rescue. I throw myself into a precarious situation either, or I’m not paying attention and I fall, or am pushed, and instead of taking care of my mess, doing my healing work, I yell, “Hey God!” (Feel free to substitute your chosen savior or enabler for God, e.g. spouse, parent), “Save me!” usually from my actions and myself.

3. Choose the easy path and you’ll get fame, glory and political power. Head rush galore. I name this the temptation of Influence, or It’s all about me! Secretly, or not so secretly, I want to be worshipped and adored. I want everyone to agree with me, and the world to cooperate and operate according to my agenda.

Jesus doesn’t cave to temptation the way I do frequently. He remains firm in his discernment of God’s desires for his life work. He’s famished but he’s not starving to death, he doesn’t need to use his power to satisfy a whim, he values relationship with God more. And, he won’t hesitate later, though to feed the crowds when they’re hungry. Think a few loaves, a handful of fish, thousands of people, a real need for food. Jesus won’t jump into folly, off the temple or any place else, he’s going to look before he leaps, and leap into something meaningful and deep (let’s hope a body of water, hah!). He’s not going to pursue worship and adoration through power, political or economic. He’s going to do his job, which requires every once of his life force, but he’s doing it for the greater good, not personal gain.

It all happens so fast on paper, but the way I think, temptation isn’t temptation, unless the opportunities and things dangled before you are something you really want––food after a fast, someone to rescue you from your reckless behavior––or provide an out to avoid your biggest fears or terrifyingly hard work. In my experience temptation isn’t a “no thanks” you give to a telemarketer, hang up and go about your day. Temptation rears it’s wooly head when I’m most vulnerable—emotionally, physically, spiritually. Sometimes I can keep my perspective and ask myself, will I be able to live with the consequences if I give into this temptation? No. Will my actions harm other people? Yes. When that happens, I can muster up the strength to say, “Away with you Satan.” But other times I act on impulse and have to muck through the consequences.

In temptation we run smack into the full extent of our humanity. Jesus was successful in his desert dance with the devil. Many of us are not. Although Jesus’ life doesn’t show us an example of temptation as a catalyst to turn our lives around, we can see it in the stories of some of the people he healed, “Go and sin no more,” and transformation is all around us. In my valley a former drug addict and self-described gang banger, met Jesus in jail and now ministers to troubled youth, helping them get off meth and out of gangs. My story is less dramatic, a mid-life crisis, “Who am I apart from my roles and wife and mother,” led to following God’s call to write.

The upside of temptation? Opportunities to examine our motives, our resolve, our deepest selves and our relationship with God and those close to us. Tests, that we can take again and again, unlimited chances to improve our grades. I always liked school, even tests; especially blue book essays…Get out the pen and write.

Writing Prompt 36

2008-02-04T17:52:00.000-08:00

Have you experienced an Ash Wednesday service? Do you remember what it felt like to have ashes imposed on your head for the first time? Write about it. Include all your senses.

Or--Think about ashes--from a fireplace, a campfire, a house fire, a person you loved. Write that story.

Ash Wednesday

2008-02-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

Soon I will be marked
smudge of ashes
across my forehead
gritty remains of fire
smeared on my skin
a small grating
anticipated

I don’t absorb them
the soot the meaning
of the moment
as deeply as I desire
What more do I expect
long for as Lent
lengthens before me

Seraphim and the bite
of coal against my lips
the taste of fire
lighting my tongue
searing me into
proclamation

I am God’s
God is mine
revealed in Jesus
I will never comprehend it
completely

Writing Workshop March 8

2008-02-03T22:59:00.000-08:00

Holy Ink: Telling Our Stories
Writing Workshop
in the Santa Cruz Mountains
Sat. March 8; 9:30 am to 4 pm
Led by Cathy Warner

Explore your life, unearth your memories, name what you know, find the words, tell your story!

Join in a day of writing. We will focus on personal and family stories, life journeys, and spiritual experiences. Sharing is optional and conducted in a supportive environment.

$25 registration includes morning continental breakfast, beverages, snacks and materials.
Bring: lunch (or visit local market/restaurants), journal or notebook & pen, or laptop computer. Held at Cathy’s home in Boulder Creek, Santa Cruz mountains. Lunchtime recreation includes use of hot tub, relaxing in gardens and scenic walks, weather permitting.

United Methodist Advanced Lay speaking credit available on request. “Lay Speakers Tell Stories” text (purchased separately) includes section on writing as ministry.

To pre-register or for more info, email: cathy_warner@bcumc.com
Registration Deadline: March 3, 2008. Address & directions will be sent upon registration.

Writing Prompt 35

2008-01-24T16:38:00.000-08:00

What do the words from Spirit of the Living God "Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me" conjure up for you?

Forging Ahead

2008-01-24T16:37:00.000-08:00

We’re all being hammered down
smashed flat, quivering red and molten
like silver in refiner’s fire

We’re all being punched and pushed
squashed, spun, dizzy and thrown
like clay on potter’s wheel

Maybe we should’ve kept our mouths shut
kept our noses in our books
kept our hands in the dishwater
kept our feet on the gas pedal
kept our lives settled, stable
and possibly, doubtfully, content

But we had to do it, look up from
our circumscribed lives
remove our rose colored glasses
pry our fingers from their death grip
around familiar’s throat
and belt out those words

Melt me, Mold me

Who would’ve known asking for God
would be this messy, this ugly
leaving us purple and bruised
dumped into the unknown
Who would’ve known we’re not in control

Whether we like it or not
whether we admit it or not
God always had hands all over us
fingers poking and prodding
hot breath in our faces
whispering, shouting
when we lost attention

You’re Mine

So there we were and here we are
forging ahead sharpening our trust
kneading our faith

How else are we going to become silver forks
spearing meaty portions of justice for the poor
How else are we going to become clay cooking pots
steaming with hope to feed the hungry

How else are we going to rise up and follow
telling our stories of transformation
from mound of slimy clay to communion cup
from chunk of ore to steeple bell

How else are we going to stare straight
into the world’s face
shift our weight in the Creator’s palms
and cry out

Fill me, Use me

and really mean it

Writing Prompt 34

2008-01-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

Write about rain. Allow the images to soak through you and onto the page.

Praying for Rain, Spiritual and Otherwise

2008-01-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

Despite a storm that dumped eleven inches of rain in the San Lorenzo Valley recently, we're still in the midst of a drought. I'm longing for rain, not one big deluge, but days of steady drops that will soak into the ground, fill our streams and reservoirs and nurture our land and spirits back to life.

Oasis

Once you were a nomad
parched dry, sunburned and chap-lipped
limping through the Mojave
with a broken compass
and a bag of gorp.

Then something, you don’t want to call it God
rained on you and in you
drenching the bone dry well of you
with something that hydrated
from the inside out.
You’ve heard it called living water.
Whether or not that’s true
you were never thirsty
in the same way, after that.

When your mother died
you worried that you’d dehydrate
were afraid to watch yourself shrivel.
But there was enough water.
Enough for the tears you needed to cry
and enough to keep you afloat.

You always knew you were grateful
but it seemed a private matter
one that lacked image or words
until the hundred-degree day your children
begged to run through the hose.

You turned the faucet and stood barefoot on the front lawn
thumb arcing the water into a bracing rainbow
and they raced back and forth through the spray
arms held to the sky, a squealing trinity
blades of wet grass plastered to their ankles.

It was then that you stepped away from yourself
one step closer to the flood.
You turned up your face and felt drops baptize your forehead.
Thank you you said to the force in the universe
and knew it was well pleased.

Writing Prompt 33

2008-01-10T12:06:00.000-08:00

How does it feel to know you are God's beloved? Write about a time you experienced that love, or of your search for it.

Come to the Jordan

2008-01-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

Come with me to the Jordan River, full of the repentant, wet to their chests in the cold muddy water. Today Jesus is here, wading into it all, eager to immerse himself. Over the riverside commotion, I heard him say that it is love, not law, that rules. That got everyone’s attention. There will be questions, debates, accusations. Soon Jesus will be struggling time and again, talking in parables, riddles, words that won’t always make sense; using all his creativity to explain God’s desire. His friends, his followers, his critics, his enemies, the curious, me; we just won’t get it. This Jesus, he’s going to walk where no one has walked before. He’s going to walk on water and people will follow. We’ll follow because he’s not afraid. His confidence will never fade, even at his death. His faith clings to him like skin; there is no division between them. This fearless faith calls us to follow.

We will leave the familiar and open our lives, our minds, our bodies and souls to experience God anew. Now God sends a dove, a sign, and speaks in Jesus’ ear. If you listen closely, you can hear it too. “This is my child,” God says. “This is my child, my beloved.” We are silent, breath held, and the air crackles with affirmation. “This is my child, my beloved with whom I am well pleased.” Now Jesus knows, once and for eternity, his ministry, his mission. I see the emotions play across his face. He is relieved and energized and filled with joy and swept away with feeling so deep and wordless that he weeps. The crowd, we kneel in the water with Jesus, waiting for God to pour over us, cleansing that same deep place. We make no effort to wipe away the tears streaming into the Jordan, his, mine, ours.

Writing Prompt 32

2008-01-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

Meditate on Psalm 46:1

Be still and know that I am God.

Meditate, with a pen or keyboard, focusing on each word in the sentence separately and writing a brief response.

Or meditate by removing the last word from the line, until you have reached Be.

Be Still and Know

2008-01-01T22:36:00.001-08:00

I'm tempted in the new year to make resolution upon resolution--exercise more, write more, read more, especially the Bible and devotionals, pray more and better, follow through on all the half finished projects from last year, cook from scratch more often, keep the house cleaner. The list can be endless, and my ability to fail to maintain the busy-ness guaranteed.

Instead of more, perhaps what I need is less. To be still. My meditation on this line from the Psalms:

Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:1

Be still and know that I am…
The one who claimed you, taking you to my heart so that you might have hope.

Be still and know that I…
Have plans that will fuel your dreams and bring you always ever closer to me.

Be still and know that…
You will discover your place in and ministry to this beautiful and brittle world.

Be still and know…
That I’m a commando of love. Be amazed at where and how I will reveal myself.

Be still and…
Sit down and shut up, sometimes. I want your attention. I want your intention.

Be still…
You are a thing of beauty and I have given you seasons. A time to bloom, a time to fade, a time to wither and be pruned, a time to be small and turned in upon yourself, and a time for rebirth.

Be…
Just be.

Writing Prompt 31

2007-12-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

Write about a signficant birth in your life--whether it be a baby, a career, an insight. How was or wasn't this birth what you expected?

A Christmas Blessing

2007-12-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

Our Child is Born

For unto us this love is born
Unto us this grace is given
This infant head will rest
upon our shoulders
And we will call this child
Wonderful, Darling One
Light of God
Everlasting Joy
This precious life

Based on Isaiah 9:6-7

In the midst of darkness, in the midst of winter, in the midst of failing health and personal struggles, love is waiting to be born into our lives. God issues the invitation moment by moment. May we all have the courage to let go of the savior we expected and embrace the unexpected unlikely gift God offers us instead.

Unto us love is born!

Writing Prompt 30

2007-12-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

Write your own version of The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56).
Or write why your soul sings.

My Soul Sings

2007-12-16T22:22:00.001-08:00

A Contemporary Magnificat
based on Luke 1:46-56

From deep inside my soul I sing
praise to my maker.
God is amazing beyond belief
the Heart of Being has held
my heart in hand.
I’m just a girl trying to live
a God worthy life
and from the crowd
I was noticed, chosen, claimed.

When people look back on my life
they won’t be able to help seeing
blessing and the great things
the Mighty One has done.
I hold up God’s name, wave
it like a flag and walk
under the banner of the Holy
in a parade of wondrous works.

God rains compassion
quenching the thirst of those who follow
as far back as our earliest kin.
I-Am-Who-I-Am was there
flexing divine muscle
humbling the proud who thought
they had it all.

God knocks the powerful off their thrones
drives them to their knees
and lifts the trampled to their feet.
The Almighty fills the baskets
of the hungry with delights
and says to those already satiated
“You have enough.”

God is faithful never veering from the promise
made to our father Abraham
and all who sprung from him.
God is with us forever.

My Soul Sings

Perhaps this is what it means to say my soul sings. Saying yes to God, saying yes to the creative spirit that longs to dwell within us and birth something new into our lives. Like Mary, we can sing out a love song to God recognizing God’s wondrous work and our hope for a world open and attuned to divine power that topples traditional power structures and set all of us free to experience new life in unconditional love.

My soul sings with the privilege of being called by name by the Holy One. My soul sings because I, who was an atheist, a Christian hater, a scoffer and skeptic, have been claimed and loved by God.

If God can do that, if God can turn my life around, fill me with hope from the inside out and let me work out the details of my faith, beliefs and salvation later, then what else is God capable of?

My souls sings. I believe in the power of God’s love to work miracles. My soul sings and I want to turn my life and this world into a never-ending refrain of praise. My soul sings. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I believe in all encompassing unfathomable love.

That love is God and Love will save us. Love will bring about the fervent desires of our hearts for justice and for peace. Some day, some way, it will happen. This is the hope we have inherited. This is the hope that set Mary’s soul to singing. This is the hope we proclaim now and forevermore.

Writing Prompt 29

2007-12-05T20:51:00.000-08:00

Do you know someone who is preparing the way of the Lord? It could even be you.
Write your own version of Isaiah's words (Isaiah 40:40:3-5), or those of John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1-12) about this servant.

Prepare the Way of the Lord

2007-12-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

This poem was originally written for Rev. Victoria Schlintz. She began her ministry at Atwater United Methodist Church just as she was diagnosed with ALS. Under her leadership, the church is thriving. Equipped this year with a special van, nothing is stopping Victoria in preparing the way of the Lord.

May each of us be as brave and faithful in saying, "Here I am, Lord, send me."

Prepare the Way of the Lord

There’s a voice in the valley
calling through the wilderness
“Prepare the Way of the Lord”
and the people are listening.

She says, “I am not the one
you are seeking but I know him.”
And they see in her life and suffering
that God’s grace is always present
is always enough that they too
can be blessed no matter what.

“Prepare the Way of the Lord.”
It is the voice of our sister
calling in the wilderness
and we heed her words.

Prepare the Way of the Lord’s servant
Make her paths straight
and her rough ways smooth
Fill the valleys and level her mountains
And together we will see
the salvation of our God.