My own private elevator speech

In March 2014 millions of people around the world followed the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines 370. We asked, “How could a commercial aircraft with 239 people aboard simply disappear?”

Cognitive neuroscience says our fascination with such mysteries is found deep in our brains. From the age of one, starting with peekaboo, humans seek to make sense of what puzzles us. We crave what researchers call the “puzzle of reality” and we thrill to the “zap of pleasure” when a mystery is solved.

Though we never went to church, as a child I constantly wondered about the mystery of life and the existence of God. As a teenager I joined a church and was comforted by the caring people and the safety of a sure dogma. Then, in college, I stumbled into an Episcopal Church where mystery and faith instantly re-emerged. In the beauty of the prayerbook language, in the sense of community, in the welcome of questions and rigorous conversation on all facets of faith, I found a spiritual home.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist urges. The Episcopal Church offers something else our brains demand: not only do we taste the bread and wine, but in worship we test each of our senses in turn and always in the company of others.

Taste and see. Allow your mind, heart, and soul to engage the mystery of life and the questions of faith. And perhaps you’ll find the Episcopal Church to be the perfect flavor.

Proof Enough

Last Sunday evening my family and three others gathered for a picnic supper at the old farmstead that serves as the headquarters of the Damariscotta River Association, a conservation land trust here on Maine’s midcoast.

The main reason for our gathering, besides sharing a meal and one another’s company, was to search for spring peepers (pseudacris crucifer) and wood frogs (rana sylvatica) in the DRA’s fresh water marsh just below the farmhouse. Our friend Tom, a biologist, had led a walk in search of frogs and salamanders just two nights before that drew 40 people. His friends, we losers, had missed it, so he and his children, Andrew and Jenny, agreed to host a private peeper hunt.

Among our party was Mamiko, a woman in her late fifties who came from Japan to spend this school year teaching Japanese and learning English at our local high school. She lives with our friends Ned and Denise and their sons Abe and Lucas.

By the time we finished our potluck meal, the sun was setting over the tidal river beyond the treeline. As we donned hats and zipped jackets, Tom and Andrew stopped to put on waders. I looked down at my Converse All Stars (white) and my sons’ sneakers and experienced a moment of maternal inadequacy. I looked over at my husband Scott and knew, after almost 23 years of practice, that he was just along for the company… if he didn’t get his feet wet and see the diminutive peeper up close, that was just fine with him.

Mamiko was wrapped in her full length winter jacket but hatless. On my way out of the house, I had grabbed several wool beanies and still had one in the car. It had been a beautiful spring day but now the air chilled to remind us that spring is a fickle friend to Mainers.

“I will get a hat for you, Mamiko,” I gestured the universal sign for hat and ran off. A moment later, with peepers in full voice as dusk dropped quickly upon us, I returned to her. Everyone else had started down the hill to the marsh: Andrew, who is 12, swinging his long-handled net marched ahead and Audrey, who is two, tried to keep up with the big kids despite the uneven grass.

“Not many Americans get to do this kind of thing,” I told Mamiko. “This is special. This is rare.” She turned to me as we walked along.

“I know,” she said, smiling in her shy way. “I am very happy.” And forgetting to be reserved with her, I put my hand on her shoulder.

Earlier Tom had explained that the call of the spring peeper is pitched so high that it makes it almost impossible to identify where the sound is coming from. “They’re only an inch long and you can practically look right at one without seeing it.” Now, down at the marsh’s edge, everyone fanned out with flashlights. After five minutes we’d found a lot of big spiders but no frogs whatsoever. In the dark I’d lost my husband, sons, and Mamiko, but found myself beside my five year-old godson, Lucas, whose responsible and loving mother had supplied him with a headlamp and rubber boots.

“Okay, Lukie, I’m depending on you to find a peeper.”

“I can hear them but I can’t see them,” he said, earnest but exasperated.

“We’re going to have to go closer to the water. Tom said they’d be in the water or on the grass at the edge.” As I stepped closer, a surge of frigid marsh water seeped into my All Stars and socks. I trained my flashlight on the tufts of grass that made cozy little inlets for frogs and searched. After another few minutes in the deafening roar of lovesick frogs, I heard Lucas’s brother call out to him and off he stomped in hope of allying himself with someone with better luck and eyesight.

Alone, I realized that the only way I was going to get close enough was if I knelt down in the water. Another plunge and my left leg, knee to ankle, was soaked. Argh. My flashlight probed every little nook of the brown marsh grass for the evidence of just one of the gajillion tiny amphibians making all this racket. It’s obvious that they’re here, so why do I feel compelled to see one? How uncomfortable must I become before I’m rewarded with the proof.

After another few moments, I decided to try something. I switched off my light and in a few seconds, I heard a call that was just inches away. I hit the button with a “haHA!” but nothing. I tried it again and the little voice returned from a tuft near my left hand. On with the flashlight, a quick grab, a plop. My light picked up a tiny frog doing a froggy kick in the water. Splash as my hand went in and came up with nothing. Well, I saw the critter at least. That would have to do.

Standing up, dripping, cold and happy, I heard a commotion 20 feet away. Andrew had succeeded in catching one in the water. He sloshed over to the edge of the marsh in his waders and we gathered around. “Bring it inland so I can see,” I heard my husband call from higher ground.

There it was, a tiny frog, just as we’d been told.

How powerful is this need to see with our own eyes, to feel, to taste, to hear, to smell. Though the aural evidence of the presence of peepers was overwhelming, a sound I’ve welcomed every spring of my life, the urge to actually see one and – better still – to hold one for a few seconds was strong. It was strong enough to compel me to get my shoes and jeans soaking wet in the chill of a spring evening, to turn off my flashlight and kneel alone in the dark. It’s not a far leap to liken this human requirement for evidence to how we demand such proof from God.

Though when it comes to delivering sensory input, it’s hard to beat the Episcopal Church. The feel of an oil-slickened thumb making the sign of the cross on your forehead; the smell of smoke emanating from the thurible; the sweet taste of the wine; the swell of a well-played organ or a practiced choir; and the sight of the backs and shoulders of your loved-ones – or, better yet, strangers – as they kneel at the rail and wait for their turn or intimate gaze of people’s eyes as you offer the chalice to their lips.

These physical points of confirmation give us license to believe the unbelievable. They embolden us to make choices that the world deems foolish. They feed us enough in the way of faith to last until we become faint and doubting again and then provide the space to return to be replenished, week after week, year after year.

ee cummings had it right:

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

Even if Andrew hadn’t caught a peeper to show around, seeing the quick flash of the little frog in the mucky water would have been enough.

I think of my young friend Lucas for whom I couldn’t deliver the goods. Despite my willingness to soak my shoes and pant legs for our efforts, he went over to the big boys who could. But still he’s my friend. In fact, as we climbed back up the hill, he told me and Mamiko all about it. And the warmth of his mittened hand resting securely in mine is proof enough to last awhile.

Hidden Zippers

Yesterday the ironing crisis in our house reached a critical point. The piles of shirts, skirts, and slacks balanced on a maple rocking chair in my bedroom attained such historic proportions that I could no longer ignore them. At least three dozen articles of clothing – most of them mine because long ago my husband Scott learned to send out his shirts – required the attention of a hot, steamy iron. That doesn’t count the 30 or so linen napkins that graced our table at various dinners from Thanksgiving to New Years, which were washed and then relegated to the realm of forgotten textiles.

This is embarrassing and I am loath to reveal it in such a public, Oprah-esque way except that I can’t think of a better way to tell this story.

Scott gave the rocking chair to me 20 years ago on my birthday. I’m fond of it but haven’t sat in it for years because, well, because it’s always covered in wrinkled clothing. But in the late fall of 1993, in a different house six miles inland, I moved the rocker from my bedroom to the room across the hall that, with its new dormer and fresh carpet and built-in cupboards, would serve as a nursery for our imminent twins. I bought some lovely watercolory fabric for the curtains with enough left over for a seat and back cushion for the rocker. I figured I’d be spending a lot of time rocking over the next year and I was right. The seamstress I hired did a beautiful job fashioning both the cushions and the curtains, immeasurably better than I could have dreamed of doing myself.

Over the next few months the cushions stayed perfect. Then the babies arrived and before long the cushions weren’t so pristine anymore: baby spit-up, stray squirts of breast milk, later juice and gummy cheerios, still later crayon marks and smears of play dough. Though the cushions turned dingy, I never thought of more than spot cleaning them because I assumed that the cushions had been permanently sewn into the covers.

Ten years ago, when our sons turned four, we sold that house and moved closer to town. I left the curtains for the new owners, but the cushions and the rocker made their way to our new home. The smart thing to do would have been to chuck the cushions, but I felt the need to keep some remnant of that fabric close at hand. It spoke to me of hundreds of dimly-lighted midnights with a baby or two in my arms, the sweetness of rocking and singing or the desperate whisperings of please please please, darling boy, go back to sleep. In a corner of our new bedroom, the chair began to take on clothes faster than a leaky boat takes on water. Until yesterday, I hadn’t had a visual on those cushions in years.

When I removed the ironing for triage, out of the corner of my eye I noticed something I had never seen before: an overlap of fabric indicating a zipper. Fourteen and a half years since I tied them onto the rocker, I realized the covers were removable.

“No way.” I said, shaking my head, and in a moment both the back and seat covers were in the machine for a long-delayed bath. The mechanism to keep them clean and fresh had been there all along but my lack of curiosity and the fuss and busyness of daily life had not given me eyes to see.

Why is it so easy to get used to the familiar, grimy things in our lives that they become virtually invisible? How many hidden zippers are lurking under our piles of ironing or among our daily comings and goings? What else waits 14 years to be discovered, ripped off and scrubbed clean? Eastertide isn’t a bad time to look for the zippers in our lives – for that quiet moment or that seemingly random encounter that causes you to see something clearly.

For many years now I’ve been writing personal essays that start with simple moments of daily modern life and then eventually wend their way to matters of faith. And what a hypocrite I’ve felt each time I’ve written about reconciliation or doing hard things or choosing to act in a Christ-like way. And here’s why: Since 2000, with the exception of one phone conversation when she had by-pass surgery, I haven’t seen or spoken to my sister nor have I made an effort to do so.

However, the events of recent months have served as a Gordian knot to reverse this estrangement. I’ll call my sister “Peg” because her story is complicated and not mine to tell. Peg has lived in the Midwest for years, but agreed to come to upstate New York to care 24/7 for our mother in December when Mom was essentially kicked out of a nursing home for refusing to do physical and occupation therapy.

In advance of Peg’s arrival, we spoke on the phone several times. The conversations were focused on train fares and arrival times and our mother’s condition. While initially strained because of our long lack of communication, they became remarkably natural and cordial as long as we stayed within the confines of the current situation. Arriving at my mother’s apartment the night before we were to spring her from the nursing home, I felt anxious about seeing Peg after so long. She is 16 years older than I am, and, as the oldest of the four children, she often took care of me, the youngest by many years. Her older son and I grew up more like siblings. Still we never had the close sisterly relationship that I often envy my friends for sharing with their sisters and a sad set of family circumstances led to our years of mutual silence.

But there I was at the front door with my bag and my laptop. The gap of eight years, since she last came to New York to make peace with our father who was dying of lung cancer, had pushed her into her sixties and me into my forties and we both stood at the doorway gulping back the shock.

Because it was snowing hard, I had called her when I turned off the Utica exit on the Thruway. She had put the tea kettle on. After I dropped my things, we sat at our mother’s kitchen table and drank tea and talked. And talked and talked and talked.

Gently and instinctively, we didn’t talk about the past or any hurtful, sorrowful, regretful things. We talked about our families, and our brothers, and what the heck to do about our mother. We talked about today and tomorrow.

Here’s the hard truth: On my best day as a Christian, I could not have picked up the phone to call her in the Midwest to start that conversation. My mother’s health crisis became an opportunity, a suddenly revealed zipper that allowed us to whip off the veil that separated us…not completely perhaps...but enough for healing to start.

Last week my sister returned to the Midwest. My mother is on her own in a new apartment with meals on wheels and Lifeline. We don’t know how long this equilibrium of our extended and far-flung family life will last but for today, this day, all is well.

In the midst of my ironing marathon, my sister called and I happily picked up the phone. We talked about her trip home, her grandchildren, my sons, our mother and how the hard it will be to get through the next four weeks without the TV show Lost.

Despite how well this has turned out, I’m frightened to think what other sorrows and difficulties in my life could be redeemed if I choose. What possibilities are there for forging new relationships and challenging old fears and casting aside old stumbling blocks. As one who knows I am lavishly beloved of God, I should be able to open my eyes to see how easy it is to do such things. But without the miraculous grace of the previously unseen zipper and the knowledge of how to work it, I’m not so sure how to start.

As I walked back into my bedroom and the pile of clothing on the floor, my eye caught the empty rocking chair. Instead of returning to the ironing, I sat in the chair and turned my face to the familiar cushion: stained, faded but so so so sweet.

Big Jon's tattoo

This was posted yesterday on the Facebook group, Episcopal Diocese of Maine.


Perhaps a first!

Displacing the Blame

It all started when Jerry Hames decided to retire as the editor of Episcopal Life at the end of June. My friend Tracy Sukraw, editor of the Diocese of Massachusetts’ paper The Episcopal Times, and I wormed an invitation to his goodbye party in New York as the surprise guests. We figured a surprised and delighted Jerry Hames would be a marvelous sight to behold. And, you know, it was.

On the morning of, Tracy flew from Boston and I flew from Portland, Maine. We found each other and took the AirTrain (seven bucks from JFK to Manhattan!) to midtown. Because this was just a quick trip and we’d be walking around all day, we limited ourselves to one shoulder bag. Mine was stuffed, and I kept needing to take things out of it to get to what I wanted at the bottom. I sensed this was not a good way to live, but without a convenient place to drop our bags (we were spending the night way uptown), I had no choice. Perhaps that I would lose something was inevitable. But, as I discovered when I tried to start my car back at the Portland airport several days later, losing my key ring was truly unfortunate.

If Jerry Hames was less wonderful and if Tracy was less game, I would never have gone to New York last June and lost my all my keys…keys to both of our cars, keys to the Diocesan House, keys to the Genesis Fund and its post office box and the key to my mother-in-law’s house that I’m still afraid to tell her I lost. The only reason I didn’t lose the key to our house is because we never lock our doors. That small mercy compensates for hardly anything at all.

Three weeks ago when I arose at 4 a.m. to drive to Stittville, New York, (same state – different universe) to take my mother to the hospital for surgery, I jiggled my coat pocket to listen for my keys. Clang, clang they sounded and I figured I was good to go. At 5:30 a.m. when I inserted my car key into the ignition after a coffee run at the Kennebunkport rest stop, I thought, “Gee, this feels funny.” I turned on the light and discovered I was holding my husband’s key ring.

Rut-roe.

Because I had lost my key to his car in June, one of the keys splayed out on my palm was the only key to his car in existence. That his keys were in my coat pocket is an uninteresting story that involves impatience, laundry, and designated driving and I won’t bore you with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was on a trip of undetermined length with the only key to my beloved’s car in my possession. Actually, when I woke Scott up at 6:30, he took it well. He knows Jerry Hames and likes him very much, “It’s Jerry Hames’ fault,” I said into my cell phone somewhere on I-495.

“I don’t think so,” my car-less husband said.

Scott borrowed a friend’s car to take our son to school and I fed-exed the keys from the road.

So yesterday afternoon, when I couldn’t find my wallet in my mother’s hospital room in Utica, New York, I thought back to the moment earlier that day as I sat in my car in the parking garage. “Should I take my wallet into the hospital or lock it in the car?” I pondered a moment, consulting my wiser self. “Take it, because you need someplace to put the money you get back from the cafeteria.”

Ah, the wisdom of moi.

The previous evening my brother Brad, his girlfriend Lisa, and I were in the hospital dining room while they were working on our mom in the Intensive Care Unit. It had been quite a bad day with a worrisome close shave with the dreaded and invasive ventilator. Three weeks after surgery and we were back to the ICU. Brad hadn’t eaten and the cafeteria was closed for business, but you could buy sandwiches from a sort of automat machine. “Here, Sweetie,” I said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich. The turkey doesn’t look too bad.”

I put a ten in, retrieved the $2.25 sandwich, and waited for my $7.75…which didn’t come. The maintenance man patrolling the dining room told me to return the next day and the cafeteria people would refund my change. So that’s why I took my wallet into the hospital - because of the turkey sandwich situation. My wallet, it turns out, probably never made it past the parking garage. Later, I retraced my steps, talked with Security, poked through the garbage cans and finally left my name and number at the main desk. My mother had 20 bucks stashed away that I could use for tolls and I had a gas card in my glove compartment. I would make it back to Maine and I did.

Before I left the hospital, I called Scott at home. That morning we’d had a little tiff on the phone about some wet laundry I thought he should have noticed and put in the dryer without being prompted. “How do you walk past a basket of wet laundry a dozen times and not notice it?” I asked, befuddled.

“How was I supposed to know it was wet?” he cried.

From the parking garage I called to ask him to cancel our credit cards, I said, “Hi, it’s me. Please don’t be mad.” And when I told him what had happened, you know, he wasn’t.

Blame is a funny thing. As someone who has worked for the Church for a long time, I’ve seen a lot of blame passed back and forth. Anyone who follows the episcoblogs can’t escape the winding gyres of blame that circle each new development. I’ve always been pleased that I wrote an essay about which both Gene Robinson and Kendall Harmon seemed to agree.

The need to place blame is so human, so natural we’re hardly aware when we’re doing it.

Over the weekend I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.” Though I still work for the diocese as a consultant, my family and I, once so involved in parish life, have kept our distance for the past few years. Scott was senior warden and chair of the last Search Committee. He played guitar at the family Eucharist every Sunday for years. Then suddenly something broke for us, and we’ve never quite been able to figure out what it was. We’ve visited other nearby churches, warm and welcoming all, but ultimately we believe in being involved in the community where we live. This is our church, but we feel removed from it and we’re stuck in a hard, sad place.

Taylor’s book is certainly told from a clergy point-of-view but, having lived the oxymoronic life as a “lay professional,” I understand her journey. The need to blame others for my lapse as a churchgoer is palpable. If only, if only. But ultimately I’m responsible for my own stuff. That’s what we’re trying so hard and so rigorously to impress upon our young teenage sons. You don’t like that grade in math? Oh…maybe you should try harder. You want an I-tunes gift card? Oh…maybe you should mow a neighbor’s yard.

But here’s the thing: I hate being responsible when it’s so comforting to blame others for bad things happening or good things not being done. On Saturday night if Brad hadn’t said, “Let’s go down to the dining room,” I never would have lost my wallet. In June, if Jerry Hames hadn’t retired, I never would have lost my keys in New York.

But here’s one more thing: Once you start owning up, it gets a lot easier. On Saturday morning, I stepped into my mother’s hospital room with a chocolate frosted donut as a peace offering. The word on the sibling street was that she blamed me for all the complications that had caused her to be back in the hospital instead of living independently in her own home. I had pushed her into a dangerous surgery and look what had happened.

But when I stepped to the threshold of her door, she held up her index finger to me, as though she were on an important phone call…but she wasn’t. She was in the midst of a very, very serious bout of congestive heart failure and had called for help. Nurses and respiratory therapists streamed into the room on either side of me.

Her struggle for breath was frightening. It reminded me of the brief days seven years before when my father was poised between this life and the next: the feeling that together we – he on one side and I on the other – were on the verge of something else, something unknown and slightly reckless. On Saturday my mother struggled for breath under the oxygen mask while we waited for a room in the ICU and for the three diuretics they had given her to kick in to relieve the fluid buildup in her lungs. I sat on her bed and sang all the old hymns I still knew by heart. She pulled off her mask and whispered, “Sing ‘How Great Thou Art’”, and I obliged the best I could.

If, as my siblings had warned me, she blamed me for pushing her into this awful, vulnerable place, she didn’t say it then. My mother held my hand and whispered, “I knew you’d come.”

Maybe I am to blame for the complications of my mother’s medical condition. Maybe we’re to blame for our restlessness with our congregation. Maybe we are all to blame for the current fracture of our church. But maybe blame doesn’t matter. Maybe blame is irrelevant to God. Maybe what’s important is simply showing up to church every Sunday and to every goodbye party we can manage whether we’re invited or not.

Maybe Jerry Hames isn’t to blame for my lost keys after all and maybe ten dollars isn’t too much to pay for my brother’s turkey sandwich.

Lost and Found by Faith - February 2005

Here is a list of things lost somewhere in our house right now:

• One Birkenstock sandal (right - mine)

• One U.S. Passport (mine)

• One L.L. Bean stainless steel soup thermos (Marty’s)

• One piece of driftwood (Colin’s)

• One Branford Marsalis CD (“I heard you twice the first time”)

• One black glove (left - mine)

• One video camera operator’s manual (last seen in Scott’s hand on Christmas morning)

Here is a list of things recently found

• One black Ann Taylor skirt (found wrinkled under a pillow on a chair in Marty’s room where he said he had stashed it one day a year or so ago when he was mad at me)

• One pair of black Merrills (Colin’s)

• One return address stamp (Scott’s)

• One camera battery charger (Scott’s)

Things come and go in our house all the time. If you were to spend two or three days here, you would eventually hear someone yell, to no one in particular, “Faith!”

You might think that some good soul was admonishing a fellow member of the family to have faith…to take heart… over some difficult or sorrowful task. But that wouldn’t be true. In our house the cry of “Faith!” means you can’t find something where it ought to be.

For about a year, between mid-2002 and mid-2003, our home was cleaned each week by a young woman named Faith. And before long, faith became a verb.

Linda, her predecessor, was a hard working single mom who had decided to get her real estate license and quit the cleaning business for good. I hated to lose her no-nonsense approach to our clutter but I was happy write a recommendation and see her move onto other things. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a slot on the cleaning schedule of the much-admired Patsy, someone referred me to Faith.

It was obvious from the first few weeks that Faith liked to organize a lot more than she liked to clean. Each Thursday I’d come home to find the stuffed animals on one of the boy’s beds arranged by color or size. Entertaining but a little weird. The dusty seashells on Colin’s windowsill might be set up in a mysterious tableau. Groupings of family photos might turn up on end tables in rooms where they hadn’t started out that morning. At first it was funny but then I realized that there were whole rooms that hadn’t been touched. I’d find a note that would say, “Sorry I couldn’t get to the upstairs.” Huh?

But then things began to take a more frustrating turn. On Halloween we were just about to leave the house to go trick or treating around the neighborhood.

“Go get the flashlights, Martin,” I called to Legolas, Elf Prince of the Woodland Realm, while I put the finishing touches on the Grim Reaper’s black eye make up. (That year, Colin knocked on people’s doors with his plastic scythe and, when they answered feigning fear, he said, “Don’t worry, I’m the Grim Reaper on vacation.”)

“I can’t find them,” Legolas replied from the cloak room.

“Use your excellent elvish eyesight.”

“I CAN’T FIND THEM,” he maintained. And no one else could either. Every single flashlight we owned, about six or eight of them, had disappeared from all their usual places.

“Faith!” I said, throwing up my arms. “They’ve been Faithed.” And we were forced to venture forth by the light of the moon.

A couple of weeks later I opened the cupboard in my office where we keep extra light bulbs and silver polish and ant traps and there were all the flashlights, lined up prettily by height.

“Faith.” I said.

Since then, whenever something disappears, it’s been “Faithed.” We know it will turn up eventually in a more logical place than where it was last seen, but that doesn’t really help a bunch of people who aren’t predisposed to order and organization.

After a year or so of rearranging our belongings each week, Faith said she had to quit because of difficulties finding child care for her daughter. From the few times I had been working at home while she was cleaning, I had come to know her story was much more complicated than that. “Godspeed, Faith,” we said, half-sad, half-relieved.

Soon after a berth on Patsy’s schedule came open and she’s been good-naturedly keeping us from spiraling into chaos ever since. She practices a kind of tough love. If the boys’ rooms or our offices aren’t picked-up enough for her, too bad. Better luck next week.

Occasionally it’s Patsy who puts things away where we aren’t expecting them to go, but we still yell “Faith!”

It’s an peculiar thing to have someone you don’t know well deal with all of the intimate details of your life. I cleaned houses at various times in high school and college and later as a hospice volunteer when that was what a family needed someone to do. For several months in 1989 cleaned the apartment of an elderly couple. Ethelma was dying of a brain tumor. At some point during my assignment to them and to everyone’s unhappiness, she lost her dentures. The loss of those dentures was a small thing that loomed hugely between Ethelma and her husband Ossie. He blamed her. She blamed herself. The missing dentures marked a shift in her ability to care for herself. They marked an expenditure of money that they could not afford in the midst of her illness. Their loss conjured up a other hundred issues that had accumulated over the 50 years of marriage.

The tiny kitchen in their apartment in the elder housing complex was often in need of cleaning. I mopped and scrubbed and washed the cupboards. It was something I could do for them, and they were appreciative. One day on the floor in front of the stove a stubborn bit of food needed to be pried away. As I got down on my hands and knees to tackle the gummy patch, I caught a glimpse of something under the stove. The dentures! I whooped it up and rounded the corner into their cramped living room. We all whooped it up. Ethelma’s eyes glowed with relief and happiness. Ossie said, “I don’t know how we can thank you!” as though I had just found buried treasure in with the pots and pans.

A few months later at Ethelma’s funeral, the minister, who obviously didn’t know her very well, went on about how the two of them shared a love for Milky Way bars. “Who cares?” I thought, looking at the back of Ossie’s head several rows in front of me and wondering what he was thinking. “Tell us something real about her, tell us something intimate.”

For a year or two after Ethelma’s death, Ossie would call me now and then to take me out to lunch. Then I got a more demanding job in Augusta and a few years after that we had our children. Slowly the Ossies in our life (there were several around that time…older friends for whom Scott would wire a cordless phone or we would share a meal or I would take the time to visit on a Saturday afternoon) drifted out of our orbit. Or we drifted out of theirs.

A month ago I read Ossie’s obituary in the paper. He was 98. He had moved away to live with his daughter further down the coast a number of years ago. He told me once he remembered clearly the day his father arrived home from work with news that the Titanic had sunk with great loss of life. He told me he was due to be discharged from the Army on Monday, December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He didn’t return to civilian life until after the end of the war.

I don’t know what they said at his funeral. By the time I read the paper, it was all over. I hope someone told something true about him. I wish I had been there to tell the denture story…the age-old story of something being lost and then suddenly being found and of great rejoicing that follows. It is the exact opposite of being “Faithed.”

Certainly I know I’ll rejoice when Patsy finds my passport.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

A Reading from the Big Book

Tuesday afternoon I take a taxi from a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, to the airport and suddenly, after being surrounded by thousands of Episcopalians for eight days, I am back in the world. Standing behind me in the security line is an otherwise conventional-looking young woman with tattooed arms, shoulder to wrist. Behind her a loud talker is going over the details of a loan closing. A disproportionate number of people with Ohio State stamped somewhere on their person mill around our slow-moving line.

While waiting at the gate, I talk with a group of teenagers, boys and girls, who tell me that they are on their way to Ft. Franklin in North Carolina for basic training. They’re so polite and earnest, so baby-faced and excited that my throat closes up when their flight is called. I can’t help picturing them dead.

Amazingly no one stops to inquire if I have heard how Resolution A161 is faring on the floor of the House of Deputies or who has blogged what about whom.

I am glad to be out of the bubble of the Episcopal Church’s 75th General Convention, where my role had been to do a soft segment for the nightly news program and to cover the convention for the Diocese of Maine. It hadn’t been a great week for reasons that mostly rest with me. One evening I had meant to send a hyperbolic email to a buddy with whom I have exchanged a good deal of gossip and woe over the years. It’s our way. But then, in those wee hours, mistakenly and sloppily, I sent it to about 100 colleagues most of whom I would inevitably bump into by nine the following morning. Most were sympathetic and offered a hug or arm pat of the “but for the grace of God go we all” variety, some were gracious enough to pretend it didn’t happen, but I know others were hurt by an act that strained the bonds of our affection. And that I deeply regret.

Here’s another downer: A number of people, most of whom I don’t know well or at all, said to me variously but essentially: “I don’t care what other people say, I think you’re great.”

Gee, um, thanks.

So I decide to suck up the airline change fees and return home a day early. My work is either finished or can be done from Maine. At some point on the way home, somewhere between Columbus and Philadelphia, I decide to quit being an Episcopalian. In the Philadelphia airport, while waiting for my flight to Portland, I call my friend David in Miami to break the news. He’s seminary-trained and cares about these things, and he doesn’t believe a word of it.

On the plane I open my book, John le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, to discover a photo that I stashed in as a bookmark in my hurry to pack the previous week. It’s a photo of the Rev. Janet McAuley, whom, to me and many others, stood tall as someone who knew what was important and had no problem telling you. Her ministry objective was “love affair with God, each other, and all creation.” I’ve kept her photo tucked into my bureau mirror since her death in January 2005 where, each morning, I look at it and its neighbor, a faded, knock-off icon I bought from a silent monk at the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev.

Within a few pages I read this sentence: “’Better to be inside the system and fighting it,’ her father – an iconoclast in other ways – would say, ‘than outside the system, howling at it.’”

Good God, God, I think, can’t you leave me alone for one goddamn minute.

I arrive in Portland to discover that the retribution for my defection is to prevent my suitcase from making the trip. As a significantly myopic person, that is especially inconvenient news because I had packed my only pair of glasses. I will rise in the morning blind until I bumble into a new pair of contacts.

At midnight I enter the house to discover that the dishes are mostly done and there are no real household disasters. I mosey around, read the court reports in last week’s local newspaper for names I recognize, peruse my sons’ newly arrived report cards and flip through the rest of the mail. I try to refrain from turning on the computer to check the evening’s news from Columbus but fail.

Later, as I gently pull back the covers, Scott rolls on his side, his head on his arm. He says, sleepily but sweetly and rather surprisedly, “Hoozlow, it’s you.”

I wake to an empty bed and a familiar muted version of NPR’s Morning Edition seeping under the bathroom door. My sons are still asleep. It is bright and warm and I reach for my glasses to check the digital thermometer by the window, the one that Marty gave Scott for Christmas. No glasses. Ah, yes. No suitcase. No toothbrush.

After awhile Marty crawls into bed with me. We talk and joke and catch up on our week apart. He offers the scoop on everything. Colin brushed his teeth twice. I nod at this. Colin comes in and deigns to be kissed and fussed over for a few minutes before getting ready for a day at Pemaquid Beach with a friend.

“How about hiking Maiden’s Cliff?” I ask Marty when we are alone after breakfast. He’s flopped on the sunporch couch, playing handheld solitaire and listening to a Harry Potter book on tape for the 23rd time. He’s hiked this two mile climb with his summer camp a number of times and has been pestering me to do it with him.

“Sure,” he says, all 12 year-old nonchalance but I know he’s thrilled. He wants to show me something he cares about, just the two of us. It’s a luxury rarely afforded a twin.

We drive to Camden and park at the trailhead. I carry the backpack as I’ve always done because I’ve always been the strongest. He whips up the trail ahead of me, talking a mile a minute over his shoulder about past forays to the top. This is my first hike of the year and immediately I feel weak and old. I haven’t been eating or sleeping well for the past week and it shows. Marty waits for me next to a big rock, tapping his Teva on the dry leaves of the path. “I’m coming, man,” I say, trying not to betray my hard breathing.

Another quarter mile up the trail he turns around and calls, “Hey, Katz. Don’t chuck the supplies.” He’s referring to Bill Bryson’s out of shape hiking partner, Stephen Katz, from A Walk in the Woods. Katz was known to throw heavy water bottles and tins of Spam into the woods to lighten his load as they walked the Appalachian Trail. We like Katz. Marty smirks and bounds on ahead of me. I call to him to wait up then tell him to carry the backpack if he’s so energetic.

The woods are quiet and there’s a lovely stream trickling down a ravine beside the trail. This is nothing like the Columbus Convention Center. Without the pack I’m happier or perhaps I’m catching my stride. We climb in quiet with Marty leading the way. “We’re almost at the top. Don’t look over the edge and spoil the view until we reach the summit,” he commands.

“Is that what your camp counselors tell you?”

“No, but that’s what I’ll tell campers when I’m a counselor,” he says, turning back to me. “Otherwise you ruin the effect.”

The summit is grand. We’re high above Lake Megunticook and beyond is Camden Harbor with open ocean peeking between the hills. It’s a glorious day but suddenly it occurs to me how red-faced and hot and sweaty I am. I open my bottle and squirt it along my brow and rub my face with the cool water. Salt drips into my mouth. I lift my hand behind my head and squeeze hard to send a stream of water along the back of my neck. It pours down between my shirt and sticky skin. I feel well and happy and refreshed. Martin is closer to the edge than I would ordinarily care to see him, but I see that this is the summer I can trust my fine, long-haired boy.

He shows me the cross and the monument dedicated to young Elenora French, who, while on a Maying trek with other maidens in 1864, tumbled to her death while trying to catch her wind-blown hat.

“Bummer,” Marty says, after allowing me time to read the stone marker.

“Yeah, really,” I say. Then something draws my gaze upward to a hawk gracefully circling the higher reaches of a neighboring peak.

On the way down, Marty leads by 50 feet and we walk along without talking. I think of how much better I feel now that I’m here in these airy woods, the blue sky above my head.

I think of how Philip Newell, in his small treasure about Celtic Christianity Listening for the Heartbeat of God, cites the ninth-century theologian, John Scotus Eriugena. He writes, “he taught us that we can look to creation just as we look to the Scriptures to receive the living Word of God.” Eriugena called Scripture the “little book” and creation the “big book,” which by reading we can divine the grace of God that surrounds us.

I think of how good the water felt splashing on my hot face and pouring down my back and the sweet taste of sweat on my lips. I think of how hungry I am. I think of this winsome, changing boy walking before me, still bearing my burdensome pack. I think of how near-sighted I am and how grateful I should be for this enormous, world-sized book laid out before us all, its type as tall as trees.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved.

Treasure Sought and Found - September 2005

A few months ago while wasting time on-line, I stumbled onto a link for www.geocaching.com . I had heard a little about the game but until I visited the web site I never realized how far-flung and popular it has become. Geocaching is simply this: you take a handheld GPS, plug in latitude and longitude coordinates you find on the geocaching website, hike until the GPS tells you you’ve reached the coordinates and then look for a Tupperware container (or, for a microcache, a 35 mm film case or an Altoid tin) with a log book and all kinds of goofy trinkets. The geocaching credo is that you must sign the log book, take something from the cache only if you leave something, and log your visit on the website when you return home. Within 30 miles of my home there are 131 caches hidden on hiking trails, in parks or in downtown flower boxes. I never knew! There are caches all over the world and, as with just about anything these days - e.g. pinball machines - there is a whole Internet culture of true believers out there.

The first step was to get a GPS. We used to have one but we sold it with our sailboat a couple of years ago. I hinted around for a month or so, but finally had to take matters into my own hands. A nice man at LL Bean gave me a lengthy tutorial on handhelds to the annoyance of other customers lurking around the counter and trying to catch his eye. I decided on a Garmin GPSmap 76. It’s a little slicker than I had intended but it has a mapping display, you can import detailed topographical maps from your computer and, at one-third off before the end of August, it was a real deal. Small handhelds suitable for geocaching can be had for about 99 bucks.

With GPS in hand and the manual glanced through, I returned to the website and found the coordinates for a cache at Salt Bay Farm, a nearby preserve on the Damariscotta River. On our way to the cache we stopped downtown at Waltz’s Drugstore to pick up our weekend guest, our friend Tracy. She was coming in on the afternoon bus from Boston and didn’t yet know she was going geocaching. It came as a bit of a surprise, but she was her ever-game self. We got smoothies and ice coffees at the book store café and were off.

The Salt Bay Farm cache is a multi-cache. You punch in the coordinates for the first cache, a film case in a ziplock baggie. Inside are lots of tiny slips of paper with the lat/long for the real cache. I made a little mistake putting in the second set of coordinates and was relieved of the GPS by the males in our party but we found our way and returned home with a heart-shaped nightlight on which is printed “Maine Injury Prevention Program 1-800-698-3624.” We left two plastic woodland animals and signed the log book.

By the morning of Labor Day the luster of the first geocaching find had worn off for three of my four partners and only Tracy and I set off for a local preserve called Dodge Point. Good conversation, stunning scenery along the river, three turtles sunning themselves on logs, cookies and apples, and a successful GPS experience made it a lovely few hours. We signed the log, left a dinosaur pencil and an algae fossil and took a brass belt buckle that reads:

“Most Improved Average
League (ABC) Award
American Bowling Congress.”

Wow. Where else could you find something that special to put on top of your computer monitor. No where, I tell you.

In a spirit of hospitality and generosity, I offered it to Tracy but she didn’t seem to want it.

Hiking and treasure-hunting. What a great combo!

So yesterday when I suggested to my boys that they go geocaching with me at some local sites, it was hard to understand why they turned me down. Scott was working on a project he needed to finish by Monday and the boys, fresh from their first soccer practice, wanted to hang out at home.

With coordinates for two local caches printed out, one on either side of the Damariscotta River, I headed a mile or so down the road to the Lincoln County News parking lot. I am ashamed to admit that I have lived in this part of Maine for 17 years and have never seen the ancient oyster shell middens that lie along the banks of the Damariscotta River.

For more than 1000 years Native Americans gathered each winter and early spring on these banks to harvest oysters, hunt, fish and feast.. Before tons of the shells were mined to provide calcium for chicken feed in the late 1880s, the middens measured 30 feet thick and stretched as far as a half-mile along both shores of the Damariscotta River. Enough still remain to give you an idea of the wonder of 1000 years of oyster feasting. Both sides of the river are now protected historic sites.

So with treasure in mind and GPS ready, I started my hike. The display read that I was exactly one mile from my destination. At one point along the trail I came upon an enormous rock at the edge of the bay. I climbed up and took in the view. What a great place to eat lunch or to smooch someone you love. A bit hard and bumpy for anything else. I drank some water and moved on with my quest.

Finally I came to the shore near the middens. The tidal Damariscotta River continuously laps at a beach of crushed oyster shells and the banks are tall with compressed shells that dating tells us are at least 2,200 years old. The Native Americans ate oysters here until the river changed and allowed the water to become more saline and therefore host to snails and other oyster predators. The age of the oyster passed at the turn of the first millennium AD, but here was the proof of their abundance.

My GPS told me that I was within 450 feet of the cache but the problem was it was also telling me to cross the river to get there. I walked up and down the shore and it became obvious that four satellites 30 miles above me were not wrong. I was wrong.

And then it dawned on me. I had been following the lat and long for the second cache, the one stashed on the other set of oyster heaps across the river, instead of the one I should have been looking for. I had punched in the wrong coordinates. Dumb dumb dumb. Suddenly I was glad to be alone.

Quickly I sat on a rock and keyed in the right coordinates. My destination was only .27 miles away. I was almost there. I bid farewell to the oyster shells and headed along the trail. As I walked back inland, I saw a wide field along to my left just off the trail. I stood at the edge of the meadow that gently sloped to the water just down river from where I’d been at the middens. It was a beautiful September day, blue sky, sparkling water, green grass with fading wildflowers, dragonflies and the hum of insects. I felt sorry to be alone then. What a transcendent place. What a place of places. I wanted to stand among other people in quiet.

But I’m not alone, I thought.

In the His Dark Materials trilogy, the writer Philip Pullman creates a wonderful conceit about humans and their souls. The world he introduces in the first volume, The Golden Compass, is very much like our world except that humans have their souls outside their bodies and call them dæmons. They take the shape of an animal and can talk and comfort and consult and commiserate.

Children who have not reached puberty have the best deal, their dæmons can change shape at will. If his human needs warmth, she can turn into an ermine and wrap around his neck. If her human needs her to be tiny in order to spy on someone, she can become a moth, or perhaps a wildcat to protect him. After puberty the dæmons settle on a form that is often like the personality of their humans, but they remain life-long companions who share thoughts and heartaches and joys.

When Lyra, the main character from that world meets Will, a boy from our world, she says,

“You, your dæmon en’t separate from you. It’s you. A part of you. You’re apart of each other. En’t there anyone in your world like us? Are they all like you, with their dæmons all hidden away?”

That is what I thought about as I stood in that perfect place, alone but not alone. My dæmon, my soul was with me…somehow separate, somehow inside, somehow knowing. Somehow the mysterious Spirit of God was involved, some Spirit of Truth that fades in and out of focus on these dark and confusing days that comprise our world.

So I wasn’t alone, I was among those I love who can be where I am but don’t have to be, among the thousands of people who feasted nearby over ten centuries, among the dragonflies and insects and squirrels scurrying through the trees. We are not alone and, as I stood there, that sinking in was the treasure to find, beyond any belt buckle or nightlight I could imagine. But it turns out that if I’d been smarter, I wouldn’t have found such a treasure at all.

As I walked back to the trail I soon discovered that I should have backtracked from the middens, not gone on ahead. I had really overshot the geocache in my quest for the coordinates across the river. I found it a little while later hidden under the big rock I had stopped by early in the hike. I took a Czech beer mat, left a Jurassic Park flip book and turned off the GPS. I may not be a brilliant geocacher, but I don’t need it to find my way home.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

A Verger of the Heart - July 2005

From the middle of September, I’d been bypassing pumpkins all around Lincoln County. “There’s plenty of time until Halloween. I can’t stop right now,” I told myself repeatedly. My sons didn’t hound me because they took it as gospel that I, as their mother, would provide the requisite pumpkin in due time.

But, by the afternoon of October 31, the Halloween noose had really started to tighten. In September our son Martin began spending hours designing, building and decorating props to transform himself into an authentic elf from The Lord of the Rings. I had sewn a green tunic for him a week or so before but never got around to hemming it.

On that fateful day, while working away at my computer, I looked up and was alarmed to see that it was 1:30 p.m. No pumpkin, no finished tunic, no Halloween candy. I zoomed into Damariscotta to get four bags of candy at Hannafords with the remote hope that they would still have a respectable-looking pumpkin outside with the mums. No luck! The natural food store had a couple of white Brazilian pumpkins. Nope! Louis Doe’s was my last chance.

Louis Doe’s Home Center has everything. There on a shelf outside sat one pumpkin with a concave back and a slightly mushy stem. It tilted. I was desperate, but was I this desperate? Shaking my head in despair, my eye caught the front window display. There stood a tallish, well-shaped pumpkin. I walked in the store and was dismayed to see the windowsill completely blocked off by a new display of birdfeeders.

I found the ever-sympathetic Louis and explained my plight: “It’s Halloween; the school bus is coming; you have the last good pumpkin for sale in Lincoln County and, by God Louis, I need it.”

“No problem, ” he said and went to the counter and hovered while his wife Judy helped another customer.

“What is it, Louis?” She said without raising her eyes.

“Heidi here needs the pumpkin in the window,” he said, giving me a conspiratorial eyebrow before disappearing down the plumbing aisle.

When Judy finished up, I started my little grovel routine but she was already moving boxes to find a way to climb over the top of the birdfeeders. Before I knew it, she was handing the pumpkin over a mountain of merchandise. She climbed back though to safety and my profuse thanks that she waved away with her hand. “Anytime!” she said and was off.

At home I whipped out my sewing machine and began hacking excess material from the sleeves and hem of the elf tunic. As I egged the sewing machine on, feeling bad for my second-rate sewing, for my busyness, for my deficiencies as a mother, I realized something rather profound: That Martin, later in life, will regard this Halloween as the best ever—the high-water mark of childhood Halloweens.

Isn’t memory is a strange thing? Already, just a few weeks later, it doesn’t matter that I was rushed and forgetful of pumpkin-buying and costume-making. It got done and there was happiness all around.

Sometimes the journey is important in forming and informing us, but sometimes closure and completeness, the end result, matters most. I’ve always marveled at the words Jesus utters in John just before he is betrayed: “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (John 16:31 NRSV). “I have conquered the world? Already? Maybe if the disciples had listened a bit closer to they would have saved themselves a lot of hand wringing later in the week.

“I have conquered the world!” What faith, what confidence, what assurance. It’s so not me. At least once a week I wake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night to toss and turn and worry about everything: children, husband, work, the next day’s schedule, all the things I should have done but didn’t, women who are, right that minute somewhere in the world, suffering abuse and whose children are frightened, animals who aren’t properly sheltered on a freezing night. It’s ridiculous, but it’s my 2 a.m. bad habit and I can’t seem to shake it.

What I need, what each of us needs I think, is vision like Jesus to see beyond our current worries and fears. Jesus declared himself a conqueror on the eve of what the world would call his utter defeat. Why do we need such a daily miracle of conversion? Why do we need to work through our muddles anew every single day?

Advent is a time to prepare the way for the Lord into our rocky and preoccupied hearts. These hearts of ours are cluttered with pumpkin worries and with children and grandmas who don’t do what we tell them to do and with a million different things many of which could be fixed if only we thought first to ask the Judy Doe’s in our lives. Perhaps we need a “verger of the heart,” after that ancient tradition of the guy with the stick clearing goats and children out the way for the priest to come along. But we don’t need this verger only at Advent and Lent. This is a full-time, year-round proposition. Our need for this verger is in our DNA because, I think, God created in us a great forgetfulness. Into our newly-verged hearts, God offers us just the grace we need lest we get too happy and forget to return for more.

May the Great Verger whack your pumpkins with gusto.

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Me and the Black Fly* - June 2005

One magnificent Saturday last May, the temperature hit 85 degrees. Our friend Michael came from New Gloucester in the morning to help my husband finish insulating our new addition, a truly happy thing because it meant that I didn’t have to do it. I spent some time fiddling in the garden, admiring the green pea shoots popping up through the dirt. My son Marty and I walked to the neighborhood fish ladder and watched thousands of struggling alewives ascending, in little fits and starts, the tortuous 42 vertical feet from the tidal Damariscotta River to the concrete dam at the mill pond that marks the southernmost shore of Damariscotta Lake, their birthplace. Once in the pond these mackerel-like fish spawn and then late in the summer they slip and slide back down the ladder and out to the open sea. Next spring they’re compelled to do it all over again.

At one point I pulled out the hammock, set it up for the season, and just lay there enjoying the welcome warmth and the view of the mill pond and the repeated whoosh of my son Colin whacking the heads off the dandelions with a stick. The ecstasy lasted about ten seconds before the black flies found me.

The black fly. The bane of what passes for spring in Maine hovered around my hairline and behind my ears with the intention of extracting little droplets of A Positive. I hauled myself out of the hammock with a sigh and walked down to the dock where there was a wisp of breeze. Every few seconds the skin of the mill pond flickered as a newly-arrived alewife struck a black fly on the surface. Down below the dam, where the fish are the thickest, the gulls and cormorants feed from the sidelines on the fish that get waylaid on the rocks. If you’re lucky, once or twice during the alewife season, which runs the month of May, you might look skyward at just the right moment to see one of the neighborhood eagles flying by with a fish clutched in its talon en route to its nest over the far line of pine trees.

Black flies, alewives, and eagles. I stood on my dock looking at the chill, black water thinking how superfluous we humans are to this particular chain of connections. But then a black fly started to suck a bit of blood from the tender flesh at the corner of my right eye. Instinctively I squished it with my index finger and flicked it away to the pond. At that moment it occurred to me that my blood and my family’s blood and the blood of my-until-recently-cooped-up neighbors is what feeds this remarkable system. In May we come out of our homes en masse, feed the black flies who, heavy with our donation, skim the water to be eaten by alewives who are in turn eaten by eagles eager to feed their young. One sad spring several years ago, the eaglets died of hunger in their nearby nest because the alewives were delayed in making their journey up the river. It’s true. I have neighbors who monitor these things with high-powered binoculars.

Back on the dock, I felt a twinge of guilt for squishing my tiny fly friend. What’s a bit of pain and an unsightly red welt when I could help to feed the eaglets? It’s a small price to pay to live amid this natural wonder and beauty in a setting that would resemble a photo in the L.L. Bean catalogue if only we had nice lawn furniture and professional landscaping. By letting myself be chomped, I can be a living sacrifice – a little of my life given freely will support a little of theirs. Of course sacrifice, particularly blood sacrifice, as a way of life, has fallen a bit out of fashion over the past couple of thousand years. But in this natural setting, it represents a yielding, deferential way of life that does not much diminish me as a giver but rather offers my small oblation up to the world. The small amount of time time I volunteer in the community, for instance, is resented by my young sons whom I don’t put to bed some weeknights because I’m at meetings, but it gives them a little guy time with their dad. They get to break the rules, stay up late, play pinball after 9 p.m. But, all in all, mine is a very small sacrifice. I can think of dozens of people who give much, much more out of the substance of their lives, not to mention a lot of black flies and the alewives who, wittingly or not, give up the whole thing.

I worry that my modern children won’t learn about sacrifice. In the summer Colin likes to walk around the house with a flyswatter and recite Ogden Nash’s couplet, “God in his wisdom made the fly but then forgot to tell us why.” Maybe in time he’ll learn, but until then, all I can say is I’m glad Colin isn’t in charge of the universe.


Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

*Winner of the 2005 Polly Bond Award of Merit for Humor (publications under 12,000) from the Summer 2004 issue of The Northeast, the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

Here I Sit - January 2005

Not long ago I was highly entertained by someone’s description of their vacation as a lot of “eating and sleeping and screwing.” Scott and I have had the good fortune to take a lot of vacations over the years…to pull ourselves temporarily out of the daily grind to go somewhere warm where no one expects anything of us and to commit ourselves to not doing much at all. To one another we’ve always described those trips in similar terms, though, nerds that we are, we have always added reading to the list.

As I recounted the conversation to him at dinner last night, I suddenly recalled a poem I wrote in my journal 22 years ago while sitting on a slab of stone on the east side of the Romanesque abbey church in the village of Vezelay in central France.

I was about a quarter of the way through my first trip to Europe with my college roommate Alison Arthur and a dozen other students. When I wrote the poem, Al and I had already lived through a long night of some drunken Germans trying to unzip our small tent at a campground in Worms (Gehen Sie aus, bitte!!!) but we had yet to find ourselves walking around Geneva late in the evening before realizing that no one in our party remembered the name of our guesthouse or the street that it was on. That was a long and funny night, though it was less so at the time.

During the first four weeks of our trip, we studied Reformation History. In Worms, along the Rhine, we visited the church where Martin Luther stood taking heat before the Diet after nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Door. It was there he uttered his famous line, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” A week later at the back of Vezelay’s magnificent abbey church, I was still thinking about Martin Luther’s moxie and verve and feeling blue that I didn’t appear to be made of the same stuff. I was going on 21 and wanted to believe I had something going on in my life but suspected that I was too lazy and happy to ever make anything happen for myself. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but my poem of that hour now seems awfully prescient about what was to become my way of life.

Here I Sit
I could choose a quiet life
filled with easy dinners, screws, and songs
I could take my rightful share
of what I fully know I don’t deserve
and perform a subtle duty
I could be a dying sacrifice
not so clean but not yet dead

I could own a dog and we could run though fields
and have a perfect time
my dog and I
we could

but
here I sit
uninspired
without a hope for lack of wanting one
here I sit
until I will no longer bear
the Quiet’s gentle roar

I’ve always been very fond of the knowingness of that poem. The I-see-through-you-ness of it. I still like it but now, more than two decades hence, find I have little patience for whining angst of it. Here I sit, wanting to kick my own little 20 year-old butt.

Here I sit. I’m still sitting at my computer desk with dishes to do and children to yell at for jumping off my bed upstairs. I can hear them.

Upstairs in his office Scott is doing the saintly thing by crafting a video from a lot of raw digital footage we shot two years ago at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Palmyra, Maine. He’s doing it so that I can show it tomorrow after the funeral of St. Martin’s wonderful, inimitable priest, Janet McAuley, who died last Sunday. The previous Sunday she preached and celebrated the Eucharist. The day before that she sent me a note about my essay “The End of Something.” It read, short and sweet, “All Americans should be required to read The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, love, Janet+”

She always signed her notes with “love” even if it was to write a quick line to chastise me for forgetting to put a notice in a newsletter about an event she was hosting.

Or “I think you’re completely wrong on that point,” she might write. “Love, Janet.”

Here I sit. Uninspired.

But it’s becoming harder to write that as I spend my life around people like Janet and some other recently departed saints who come to mind: holy people who stood tall among us for kindness and justice, love and faith, humor and a minimum tolerance for bullshit.

When I wrote the poem, I don’t think I could have imagined exactly what the “quiet’s gentle roar” was or what form it might take in my life. I knew only that there would always be a force somewhere near at hand ready to shake me from complacency whenever I chose to open my ears. In 1983 I couldn’t imagine a name for it, but now I know and dang if it isn’t Janet.

Janet+

Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.

Homework - 2004

So I’m sitting on my living room couch and in walks Jesus. He’s snapping his gum. He looks a lot like Johnny Damon, center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. You can tell he’s got things to do but he’s willing to make time for me. I’m the only person in the room for him right now. That’s obvious. He flops down on the other couch and kicks off his sandals.

"So. What can I do for you?" he asks.

"Geez. I mean, Jeez. You’ve kinda caught me by surprise here. I was just daydreaming."

"What were you daydreaming about?"

"Don’t you know? Being Word made flesh and all."

"Well, yeah. But I want to hear you tell me. It’s how I operate in this mode."

"I was just wondering if it is all true. This Gospel biz. This Church biz. Having thrown my whole lot into it for the last 30 years, I’d feel pretty silly if it weren’t true. Still, sometimes at quiet moments like just before you walked in, it all seems so absurd and unbelievable – especially considering how the Body of Christ conducts its business in such a trying manner much of the time."

"Do you think it’s true?"

"Hey," I say, "I thought I got to ask the questions."

"You do, but I do too. That’s part of the deal."

"What I need is for you to stay with me for awhile. A couple of weeks, maybe. Let’s you and me go on vacation somewhere...away from diocesan work, family, school board, laundry, dinner making, lunch box packing, website construction, email, phone calls. How about it? That’s what I need of you, I need you to talk to me and explain things to me. Let’s go hiking in Acadia. You can have the good tent and the air mattress."

"You think a time-out with me would help you decide if it’s all true?"

"Yeah. I really do."

"You’re sure?" He asks.

"I’m really sure."

"Get up, Sweetheart."

"I’ll go get the tents and the sleeping bags." I say as I leap to my feet. This is great. Camping with Jesus: mysteries of the universe solved and boiling water in two seconds flat.

"No, come out of this dark living room to the other side of the house."

So Jesus slips on his Birks and we walk through the hall, dining room, and kitchen to our new porch. It used to be a three-season caving in affair, but we tore it down last year and built a sunny, year-round room.

"Nice," he says.

"Yup," I say. "I never get immune to the beauty of the view."

"What do you see?"

I look out to placid surface of the mill pond, our huge late-coloring maple, the hammock and the stacked faux-Adirondeck chairs that need to come in for the winter, at the water’s edge our dock and swim ladder, and, on the deck just outside, the shards of a broken terra cotta pot that smashed in a recent wind storm.

"What’s the most important thing you see out there?"

"The shards of the pot."

"Why?"

"Because there’s some lesson for me in the broken pot, right? You’re going to tell a story that begins ‘The Kingdom of God is like a broken pot...’ Right?"

Jesus laughs. It’s the kind of laugh that makes me laugh too even though I don’t have a clue about what’s so funny. "No," he says, calming down. "I would say that broken pot is exactly what it seems to be, a pot the wind swept away and ruined. Usually when things seem to be something, that’s what they are. We made the world pretty simple that way."

"Okay," I begin again. "The most important thing is..."

And suddenly I get it. Sitting down near the water on the picnic table are some shards of pottery and old broken bottles that my sons and I dug up from the bottom of the pond this summer. Colin and I had done an archeological survey of the bottom of the pond over the course of several days, i.e. we lay on a big tube side by side while he peered into the shallows along the perimeter looking for artifacts and I gently paddled with my fins and made course corrections at his command. When we found something, Martin, his twin brother, would paddle out in the other tube and serve as the salvage team leader.

What is important about those shards and broken old medicine bottles isn’t some profound truth about beauty or nature or God, but about wonder and curiosity and adventure and partnership with these boys who, at ten, still crave my company and attention. I am responsible for them, and it is holy work. It is the Kingdom of God. And it tells me, though I never saw it at the time, that every hunch I have about the life of faith and the Gospel of Christ is true true true.

"Do you still want to go to Acadia and hike?" Jesus asks me, scratching his beard. "I’m game."

"No, that’s okay. I have a lot to do here. Maybe another time." I say, "But maybe you can take a minute and walk down to the pond and help me date those bottles. It would mean a lot to the boys."

Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved.

- This is an assignment for a Celtic Spirituality class at Bangor Theological Seminary. We were asked to write about how we would respond if Jesus stepped into the room and asked, "What do you need of me?" It was published in the December 2004 edition of The Northeast and TOTALLY slammed by a meany Polly Bond judge. I apologize for the Johnny Damon reference to any offended Red Sox fans. I wrote this in the post-World Series glow.

Confessions of a Reluctant Apologist * - 2001

My friend and sister-in-law Cary lives in a swank little town in California’s Napa Valley. One summer afternoon she is sitting with me on the back deck in our not-so-swank Maine village. We are watching my kids jump into the pond. They are loud and goofy children, and always fun to watch. Suddenly she says, “One of the older ladies I play tennis with invited me to church.”

“Cool,” I say, groping under my chair for my iced tea.

“An Episcopal church.”

“Cooler still.”

“Well, I can’t go,” she says, mildly exasperated, as though any fool could see why.

“Why not?” I ask, comfortably assuming the role.

“I don’t believe. I’m agnostic.”

“So?”

“That’s what the lady said.” Cary pauses and shifts her chair toward me before delivering the zinger. “How can a church survive if it allows people like me to attend who don’t believe? Won’t it just eventually dissolve into a social club?”

Here’s my truest confession: I don’t think about the answers to these questions every day. I believe this stuff, try to live it, and generally let God take care of everything except those things that lay conspicuously before my path and, thereby, require my attention.

So here’s my sister-in-law, whom I have known for 20 years, who thinks of our faith as quaint and admirable. She’s not exactly lying in my path, but since she’s sitting on my deck and invited to stay for supper, I suspect I have to answer her. I quickly recite one of the writer Anne Lamott’s two best prayers, “Help me! Help me! Help me!” (The other is “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”)

“Well, think of it as though you’re at a wedding,” I begin. “There’s the head table with all the critical players. There are the immediate families. There are the extended families. There are the groom’s friends, the bride’s friends, their mutual friends. Then there are the parents’ friends. Then there are the neighbors. It’s like concentric circles of intimacy.” Help me here, Lord. I mean it.

“It’s the same with church. Just like it’s OK for a friend of a friend to be at a wedding, it’s OK for a person who is simply interested in faith to come to church. In every congregation, people are at every level of commitment and involvement. The bottom line is this: Who am I to say what the spirit of God is doing in anybody’s heart? Simply showing up for church, simply having an opening heart means that maybe you are in a position to be touched by grace and the spirit of God.”

“But what happens when everyone just shows up and doesn’t believe anymore,” Cary asks.
“Well, then it does fall apart. Just like if there weren’t a bride and groom at the wedding there would be no reason to have the party. When the very last soul in a congregation has ceased to be in deep communion with Jesus, then the party’s over. But that doesn’t happen very often.” I sigh. I’m not theologically trained, and this is as good as it gets.

But there’s no convincing Cary. So I give her Anne Lamott’s funny and genuine spiritual autobiography, “Traveling Mercies,” and ask her to read it.

I suspect that the church Cary was invited to is a wealthy, wine country parish. They are God’s people. The spirit of God is present among them. I pray her tennis partner keeps inviting her whether or not even she, the tennis lady, truly believes.

* Winner of the 2002 Polly Bond Award of Excellence for Humor by Episcopal Communicators

Heidi Shott
Copyright © 2004 All rights reserved.

links to e-cafe columns

I'm still in the midst of migrating over from my old site. Since its silly to bring over pieces that were published elsewhere, here are links to columns at episcopalcafe.com.

The Truth about You

The Church of Baseball

Intervening in the Lives of Goats

Uncle Walt Keeps the Gate

Does God Ever Stop Nagging

The Gospel of James