https://youtu.be/jLTxUBCbLiQ?si=5M16dnxQrbK0TwiP

Bears and Jesus

What is it about bears, especially the stuffed ones?  We have two stuffed bears that have matching hand knitted outfits for every month.  They were lovingly made by a former parishioner who was ensuring that our children felt welcome at St. John's.  The bears are now living on a cabinet in our living room and each month I try to remember to change their outfits.

The original stuffed bear was created in honor of Teddy Roosevelt and was first put on display in 1903.
When our children were little, they received more stuffed bears than any other stuffed animal.  I never purchased a stuffed bear.  They were all gifts. Then there is Pooh Bear and other celebrity bears that have entertained children (and adults) for years.  Nor can we forget the reprimanding bear with which I grew up, Smokey the bear.

The problem is that humans transferred their affections from stuffed bears to live bears, which created numerous dangerous and sometimes deadly incidents in places such as Yellowstone National Park.  By the time I started backpacking in 1974, the public was a bit wiser than in previous years. While waiting for a pass to go on the Fifty Mile loop in Glacier National Park, my backpacking partner and I camped for two days and during that time I read "The Night of the Grizzlies", a terrifying story of two staff members of one of the wilderness lodges where they used to throw leftover food in back of the lodge providing "entertainment" for the guests rather than packing it out.  The bears got their revenge when the two staff camped out about a mile away.  Much to the consternation of my backpacking partner, I then insisted on wearing a "bear bell" so we didn't see much of anything that was alive.  I have since in my hikes in the mountains encountered numerous bears and hugging them was the furthest thought in my mind.  I was always happy that we simply agreed not to have a relationship and go our separate ways.

In many Christian circles, Jesus has become a spiritual teddy bear, warm and fuzzy, giving us great comfort when we are distressed.  He has become our best friend; our footprints disappear when he picks us up on the beach. All of this is well and good, of course.  I would be the first to say that Jesus has carried me many a hardship.  However, Jesus does eventually put us back on our feet and it is at that point that our understanding of Jesus has to expand.  It expands in ways which Jesus starts to ask things of of us: feed your neighbor, sell what you have and give it to the poor, offer the woman at the well a cup of water, question unjust authorities, look for connection rather than opportunity in people.

In the end, when we are ready to let go of the Teddy Bear, we had better be able to look Jesus in the eye and listen to how he can enable us to live more meaningful lives as we ponder his words "Those who are not against us are for us" (Mark 9:40) or in the words of Eldridge Cleaver: "You are either part of the solution or you are going to be part of the problem." Give that bear a hug and walk out into the world.

Memory and Jamaican Drums

I frequently lose my car in parking lots, large and small.  My husband tells me that the way to deal with this is to take note of where you have parked.  The problem is that I don't always remember to "take note".  When I do remember to take note - no problema.

One rainy day at Costco, I was wandering the parking lot for well over 20 minutes, going up and down the lot searching for my car, pushing a full cart. Not fun!  A man finally noticed that I had passed him at least twice and asked if he could help.  I gave him the make of the car and then told him that the car had Michigan tags which ought to make it easier.  He drove around a bit and then got out of his car and waved to me shouting: "It's over here."

Another incident occurred at a local mall in which I wandered a parking garage having remembered to remember only to realize after a half hour that there was an identical parking garage on the other side of the mall.

After these two troubling incidents, I finally had one of those sudden epiphanies.  I thought about the car flags that Michigan football fans put on their cars when they went to games.  Thinking it would not be a good idea to have a Michigan football flag on my car in the land of the Huskies, I settled on an Irish car flag that has several designs on it, including a Celtic cross.  Perfect!  Felling as though I had discovered the secret solution to all the problems of the world, I happily took off in my car.  Shortly after this confident departure, I realized that the flag slapped my car as I drove.  I started to wonder how I was going to avoid getting really irritated and then realized that the "slapping" had a regular rhythm not unlike the sound of Jamaican drums. I thought of a line from one of my favorite movies "Strictly Ballroom" in which the Hispanic mother of a female dancer puts her hand on the girl's talented but uptight Anglo partner and tells him "Listen to the rhythm!" And so I listened to the rhythm as I continued to drive.   Sometimes it is simply a matter of perspective, little gifts from God that allow you to see the big picture even in the midst of a very small picture.  Go Irish!

Returning to Writing

Greetings in this New Year of 2014!  I cannot believe I have not posted to this blog for a year and a half but such is life.  When we are, or at least I am at the pinnacle of stress, I find  it difficult to write except in my journal which no one would want to read.   It is easier to scream and cry out to God.  As challenging as 2013 was which included an untimely retirement, selling our house while living in it, dealing with health issues, driving two cars, one with a u-haul across country, buying a house, securing a loan, moving in, getting settled which included a developing relationship with the driver of the Big Blue Truck from Value Village - well it was all a bit much.  Now that I can look back, I am aware that God has given me a lifetime of material about which to write. 

I have been thinking and praying about returning to my blog and this morning I received a sign as well as encouragement from Ann Lamott’s book “Plan B”.  I suddenly thought - if she can write about surely teenagers and how possums have forked penises then I might have a chance of putting together a few thoughts.  So here I am back on the pages of life. If you are returning reader, I want to thank you for joining the throngs of two or three to see what I might have to say.  If somehow you have discovered me through other means, I look forward to having you join the conversation. 

church

During my sabbatical, I have been visiting different churches.  It has been a lot of fun to see how others do things and I've picked up a number of good ideas.  I rarely get to do this on vacation generally because we are almost always in some remote location far away from any church.  My family does not respond well to: "Hey, let's go to a church that's about an hour from here that looks like it could hold about 50 people."  So we've enjoyed the sanctuary of nature on those occasions.

When all is said and done, the biggest draw of a church is the community.  After all, you can always listen to good music at home (although, in my mind, there is no substitute for live music), say prayers at home and do a great deal of spiritual reading.  You can also do community service without ever crossing into the doorway of a church.   But the kind of community you find in a strong church cannot be replicated anywhere.  A community that actually cares about how you are, a community that will help you when you are in need.

I heard a fine sermon today that, among other things, addressed the difference between being nice and being compassionate.  Lots of people know how to be nice or polite without much disclosure of who they really are or any serious attempt to connect with the other person.  Compassion is another story, an ability to read a person and know that all is not well or that they are, in fact, having a great day. There is a profound difference.

Fitness

Anyone who knows anything about exercise, knows that it is good for you.  I know that I am feeling better now that I am being more attentive to exercise but I now have ways to encourage myself, ways that allow me to have direct feedback that this is making a difference.  This may seem silly and unnecessary to those who have had good exercise routines for years but for me these devices are adding incentives and encouragement.  One is the Nike app which tells you how far you have walked and the rate at which you are walking.  Instead of doing my old routine which I knew was a mile, I can now walk all of over the neighborhood or any where else for that matter and I knew when I have completed my two miles and how best I did them.  I find this little gadget to be very helpful.  The other is a device called emWave made by an organization called Heart Math. This is a device that you install on your computer; there is an attachment that gets placed on your ear.  It reads not only your heart rate but your level of what they call coherence.  The idea is to try to be in high coherence.  A lot of executives use it and my doctor recommended it so that I could monitor my stress level.  It is way too complicated to explain here but it is a fun way to monitor whether or not the things you are doing to reduce stress, such as exercise, are actually working. For example, I have discovered that meditation at home is not as effective as yoga.  I am trying to adapt my practices so that I can gain the most benefit both spiritually and physically.

Little Miracles

While I was on the trip which my older daughter's 8th grade class took to DC, there was an incident that led to one of those little miracles of life.  There was a girl on the trip who had recently had surgery and had to be confined to a wheelchair for the duration of this adventure.  On Sunday, a wheel on the wheelchair had some sort of malfunction and that particular wheelchair could no longer be used.  The trip leader and several others were tearing their hair out trying to find a replacement but to no avail.  Rental shops were not open on the holiday weekend and so forth.   I was in the front of the bus so I was privy to the whole drama.  Suddenly I thought of our wheelchair at church and then managed to locate and call the nearest Episcopal Church to where we were. Not expecting to get an answer to a phone call on the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, I was hoping to at least get an emergency phone number for the rector.  I was not especially looking forward to this call as Sunday afternoons are not good times to call clergy for things that on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of emergency rating falls at a -5, but I was willing to do it.  The first time I called, there was no answer but the recording did have an emergency number for the priest.  Good sign, I thought.  However, I had to call back after obtaining pen and paper.  The second time I called, much to my surprise, a woman answered, Sister Lydia.  Sister Lydia "just happened" to be in the office picking something up.  She could not have been more helpful.  The long and short of it is that they did have a wheelchair at the church and she was not only willing to wait for our school trip leader to pick it up, she negotiated a drop off time on Monday, which was Memorial Day.  Blessings to Sister Lydia of St. Paul's K Street in our nation's capital!