making the weekend fun

I had fun being crafty this past weekend.  Folks brought some beautiful garden flowers to church on Sunday.  It was Karen's birthday, too, which gave me a lovely excuse to put them into a bouquet for her.

And, her birthday provided the push I needed to follow through with a long-planned craft adventure: reclaiming an old book by tearing its pages out and making it into a journal.
I'm still amused at the idea of a journal called "Think before you write."  ;)

I finally planted the front yard with summer crops, too, but I didn't take any pictures of that yet.  I'm growing baby corns, which has me pretty excited...

in print

Yesterday and today, I've been having a bit of fun with some little printmaking projects.

One was impromptu, cooked up to salvage a sheet that was oddly stained with navy blue residue in a bunch of places.  It's going to become a wrap-around skirt.

I'm feeling good about the double fortune of using a near-rotten yam to make some stained fabric useful.  I hope Marian doesn't mind about the state of the yam used on her skirt.

I also finally made the seat covers I planned last fall, for our backyard chairs.  (My procrastination was augmented by my need to wait for some nice, big, fresh fig leaves to use as stamps.)

Sometimes I wonder why I wait until Holy Week, when I have plenty of extra and special church projects to be working on, to finally get around to craft projects.  (It's nothing new, but I still wonder.)

open trails and hidden treasure

This past week, Matt has been on spring break, so we decided to take a bit of  adventure.  Having begun plans for an epic summer backpacking adventure on the John Muir Trail, we thought it would be good to get a little practice 'packing in.  Mostly for my benefit.

So, within the space of a week, I hiked a bit on both the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.  Pretty wild.  (Some bits wilder than others.)  And, I got different blisters on each.

I also got to try something new that had been intriguing me: geocaching.  Using the GPS coordinates, we found 3 hidden caches on our  hike.  (We tried a fourth, but failed; geocaching near turkey hunters makes me nervous.)  Here are two pics of our happy finds.

Then, yesterday, when one of Matt's friends came to town, we decided to try a bit of geocaching adventure in La Jolla.  I'm thinking this is a really splendid way to spend time outdoors, explore new areas, and learn some stuff about them, too.  Plus, we learned that there's a cave in La Jolla accessible by a long tunnel dug through the rock, with an entrance in a little antique store.  Who knew?!?

I'm looking forward to trying some of the caches that come with riddles.  

How did I not realize there were magical treasure hunts all over the place?!?

spring in three frames

Washington, DC was beginning to break into spring.  This saucer magnolia blew me away.  It was just a block or so from our hotel.  

I admit, though, great joy in returning to San Diego, where the early evening still was warm enough to be coatless as I waited for Matt to pick me up at the airport.
And, I love being back in my crazy little neighborhood, where I can catch a Chinese dragon rehearsal on a Saturday afternoon if I'm lucky.  They didn't have the costume on, but it's still a good time.

wonderings and wanderings

I hiked a piece of the AT with my brother. It wasn’t at all like I’d imagined: flat and in the company of humans. The piece closest to his home runs across a valley between the edge ridges of the Appalachian Mountains and the end of the Blue Ridge. There, in central Pennsylvania, the trail makes its way across farms, above marshy lowlands on a wooden walkway, across an interstate highway on the shoulder of 4-lane overpass, and above the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a concrete walkway.
My brother maintains this is the most “honest” section of the AT: it keeps us from romantic ideas of wildness, separated from human life and development. It also reminds him of the footpaths he enjoyed while living in England—public ways maintained by foot, opening up pathways through farmlands and private property. There, as in the other bits of Europe I’ve experienced, nature’s beauty doesn’t depend on our strange American notions of wilderness landscapes requiring the editing out of human interventions. But our wild lands, at least in my imagination, are only truly wild when I can cut development out of the frame.
The hike seemed even more honest, coming the day after he showed me a film he’d planned to use in the classroom, teaching about sustainability in a global context: Manufactured Landscapes. An exploration of Edward Burtinsky’s strikingly beautiful and unsettling photographs of landscapes created by modern human industry. Red rivers of copper mining trailings, monstrous and oddly squared-off canyons carved in granite mines, the endless stretch of a Chinese factory and its masses of their employees, the geometric patterns of masses of e-waste piled in a dump—the images capture an unmistakable beauty in a landscape that embarrasses.

I finished Michael Pollan’s Second Nature on this trip, too, and have been considering my own framework for care for the earth. I like the clarity with which he suggests a way past the dominant message of nature conservation, which seems to believe that a pristine environment, free of the taint of human interaction, could be preserved. (And, hiking through a state park made of second-growth pines replanted after 19th-century cast-iron factories burned the earlier trees to fuel their furnaces, I see a certain short-sightedness and forgetfulness in the idea, too.) A garden, he suggests, might be a better metaphor for nature: a realm to be tended for its beauty as well as its usefulness, and from which to gratefully draw things that will sustain our lives.

In the creation-care class at my church, someone raised the idea of the goodness and beauty of creation, at its beginning—suggesting a call to work at restoring Eden. While I like most things circular (restoration, recreation and renewal, for example), I also want to give resistance to the idea that we need to get back to the good old days, to repair things the way they used to be. I feel God drawing us forward—not to replacing what was, but to reimagining what could be. A spiral, perhaps, demanding our full engagement in cultivating ways to care for each other and the earth.

In Washington, with church folks charged to help implement the social principles we say we stand for as a United Methodist Church, we talked some about the impact of our present environmental crises on the world’s poor—on people already made vulnerable by economic systems that keep them out of power. In the present climate of economic crisis, it’s far too tempting to forget the poor, and just focus on protecting ourselves, or the people we know who are like us. If there are going to be bail-outs, we know we don’t want them to go to AIG executives, but we are skeptical that there will really be enough for everyone, so we’d just as soon protect our pension plans and investments.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve lost sleep over the mess I’m in, having taken out a mortgage I worry about being able to keep up with, on a house now worth half of what I owe. For now, though, I’m trying to remain grateful that I can pay that mortgage, that I have a decent place to live, and some space to grow some of my own food.

I’m glad for this church meeting, for helping lift my gaze beyond my own yard, to reconnect to my belonging in a global body of Christ, unbounded by national borders or economic systems. We advocate for serious climate control legislation, eager to find a way of living on this planet that won’t put us all—and, particularly, the poorest among us—in eminent danger.

Conversation among our politicians seems to have settled on carbon trading as the “feasible” solution for our time. And, yet, it leaves me unsettled: as our international economy proves itself insecure, do we really want to rely on the market to shape our solution to carbon emissions? And, what kind of strange values are embodied in the creation of a market for the trade of the right to destroy our environment in measurable increments?

As the global poor suffer disproportionately the effects of our industry’s carbon emissions, what recourse or remediation to they have in such a market?

broken things

I’m flying home from a meeting of our General Board of Church and Society (more about this later), in Washington, DC. The flight has been long enough to read a book I’d been wanting to read, and it moved me.

Sara Miles’ Take This Bread honors the mysterious, transformative power of sharing in the body of Christ—communion, wherever it can be found, meeting the hungers of our world. Our faith us bodily—at the center of our worship is Christ’s broken body, giving us life. Church is real when we become the bread.

I’m looking forward to our congregation’s planned community family meals at the Normal Heights church just after Easter. I’m eager and hopeful that they will be communion, too. I’ve been frustrated and disappointed with myself that it’s taken us long to get to this place where we will host them.

But, I remind myself again, that mystery is really, quite completely, beyond our control. This past week, I was playfully and seriously advocating attempts at relinquishing control. (Really, that’s already a given; I just need help remembering not to waste my time seeking after the illusion of control…)

I struggle, though, at knowing what it looks like to press on and to organize, without ever believing I’m in control. I still remember deep frustration with a then-boyfriend who refused to work on things: “It’ll work out if it’s meant to be,” he said, shrugging off my attempts to negotiate real obstacles in our relationship. I don’t ever mean to abdicate responsibility, but I do mean to tap into a confidence, power and hope that doesn’t depend on abilities alone.

At the heart of the difference is my recognition that I’m a part of God’s mystery, and a part of an unfolding story of the Church that is better than I could think up on my own.

Which, it will not surprise some of you to hear, brings me to my frustration with strategic plans, measurable outcomes and annual assessments.

My UM church is anxious about its decline, and aware of the growing burden of maintaining the structures and commitments we have in place. “Ineffective” clergy are often blamed for our problems, as we continue to lose numbers of members, and struggle to employ those we have ordained. We all know folks who we judge to be ineffective, who seem to be doing just enough to get by and wish they could afford to retire. But, really, they’re not the folks around me. The clergy I know well are dedicated, hard-working, imaginative, often-frustrated innovators, doing the best of what they can to be in faithful ministry in a compliated world.

I have this sense that we’ve created a good part of the problem. And, I think our efforts to help clarify the problem have made it worse: I blame our systems of assessment.

Periodic evaluation of our effectiveness is a good thing—self-reflection and conversation with others to talk through the ways we’ve failed and succeeded helps us grow in ministry, and remain faithful to God’s call.

Mostly, though, I think we reduce our serious evaluation to things that are easier to count and further from the heart of what gives us life. We chart changes in attendance and membership, count hours spent in continuing education opportunities, and ask what measurable objectives we have pursued.

Ministry has never seemed to me to be something I could measure in a quantitative sense: the most wondrous, transformative bits defy objective analysis. Like the oft-celebrated heart-warming experience of John Wesley, the best stuff exists just beyond our reach. Sometimes, it takes years to take root. Other times, I get to step into someone’s life just in time to see a dramatic conversion that was years and many earlier communities in the making.

To be asked to reflect on those interactions and then to fill in rather trivial, fact-like details makes me feel like the church doesn’t trust me, and also like the body of Christ has missed the point.

In the end, we have to trust each other—that what we’re doing is a part of something impossible to measure, made real in relationships and lives that cannot be quantified in objective terms. The pressure to “factify”—to reduce the unquantifiable into something that can be carefully and seemingly objectively measured—is constraining us by keeping us focused on things that don’t really matter.

Besides, I’m still on my soapbox about our distraction with anxiety over death of the United Methodist Church, all while we’re preaching freedom from our slavery to sin and death in our communion liturgy and in Christ’s resurrection.  

It's almost Holy Week.  As good a time as I know to think about brokenness, to reflect on what is at the core of our faith and practice and to make a change.  Thoughts?

3.14

How did you celebrate Pi Day?

I attempted what I believe to be my first totally-whole-wheat pie crust.  With apricots inside.  Clearly, my crust-making skills could use some perfection...

flowers in the yard

Spring has come to San Diego, and I'm enjoying the chance to play with flowers from the yard.  I've been enjoying the delightful distraction of learning more about flower arranging, occasioned by my plans to be the florist for a family wedding this summer.  It's nice to have excuses for spending time with beautiful things.  This past week, the poppies and irises started blooming, and they're lovely.

And, this week, we finally finished the giant head of cauliflower we picked out of the front yard.  That's a whole lotta cauliflower.  
And now it's time to dream of summer gardens.  The tomato seeds are germinating away in their starter trays...

deep thoughts after a friday afternoon trip to the beach

There are so many incredible particularities about our world.  

Like the beautiful way the waves tenderly drape bright green seaweed on water-smoothed rocks.
In stopping to enjoy this beauty, though, one risks getting wet, as the waves don't pause in the same way.

There are worse things that squishy socks on a beautiful beach.

it can't last

I'm in Atlanta (well, Norcross) at a church meeting.  In a facility that blocks use of Facebook on their internet server.  I suppose this is just right, after I tried blaming my lack of blogging on Facebook.  I can take a message.

So while thinking about this week's lectionary and Transfiguration, my mind turned to the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  Which led me on a delightful internet journey through their work, much of which is about concealing and revealing.  But also much more.  

Pondering the nature of our work in the church, I'm more and more drawn to the idea that our call is less to create things that will last and more to create things that are beautiful.

This temporary wall, built by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on a narrow street of Paris out of used oil barrels in 1962, lasted as a wall for a few hours.  Its statement against the Berlin Wall lasted longer.  I think it speaks pretty loudly today, as we continue to construct walls that interrupt our human living--think Hafrada wall built by Israel, or the border fence in our own community. 

But before I get distracted (ah, the possibilities of following links around the world!), what I meant to say is: perhaps we in the church need to get more enthusiastic about things that don't last.

I know that I've been guilty of the paralysis of over-analysis, wanting to create something perfect and lasting.  And God knows we're guilty of working too hard to save structures in the church.

"I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain," Christo said in response to critics of his work.  I'm thinking we all need a little more courage, and a little less of the self-centeredness that says, "The things I make should last forever."

I've been reading The World Without Us, a Christmas gift from my brother.  It details what would be likely to happen to the world if humans suddenly disappeared.  I was shocked by his descriptions of how quickly destruction would come to so many of the structures that deceive me as being strong and permanent.

Really, life is shockingly impermanent.  Colleen was telling me about how Heidegger wrote of the critical work of recognizing our mortality--that our being is toward death, and only when we recognize and accept this can we find real meaning and beauty.  (Did I get that right, Colleen?)

It seems to me that resurrection is a pretty beautiful way of getting ourselves out of any despair that might rise up (pun intended) from recognition of our frailty.  After all, we're connected to a God who is way bigger than we can understand.

So, encouraged as well by the collapse of financial markets that deceptively used terms like "securities," I suppose it's a good time to practice some investment in temporary things.  Or, in things we cannot own or control.   Invest in the millenium and plant sequoias, to steal a line from my favorite poet, Wendell Berry.

still growing

Sorry for the long hiatus from the blog.  I guess I just got distracted.  I blame Facebook.  Also that I haven't figured out our rhythm for sharing digital photos now that there are two laptops in the house and the camera's mostly in Matt's possession.  

It's not that I haven't thought of things to share...  Things keep going and growing.

For example, the garden:

With my dear neighbor all moved in, I started a little potato-growing experiment.  For a bit of a hybrid between container growing and in-ground gardening, we planted 5 varieties of potatoes in burlap bags (courtesy a favorite local coffee roaster).  In my yard, I cut out the bottoms of the bags, and dug them into the ground a bit.  I'll add more soil as they grow, and unroll the bags to cover the stems.  Or, so the plan goes.
Some turnips and carrots were ready for harvest this past week.  Well, at least one of the turnips was well past "ready."  It's size skews the sense of proportions in this pic.  Those carrots were not really as small as they seem next to that purple giant.

I'm also dreaming with seed catalogues these days.  

Matt tried a little garden experiment of his own, too.  (And, oddly, it sounds more like something I'd come up with.  He's usually the one who wants to do things the "right" way, and I'm all about the quicky crazy way.  I think he hit some kind of breaking point with my ability to accumulate seed packets and his desire for a less-cluttered house.)  He took a whole bunch of flower seed packets and threw them all in an area of the garden, mixed up together.  In another section, he threw an assortment of herbs.  Happily, it's been awfully rainy for San Diego, and little seedlings are popping up.  It remains to be seen how many are weeds...

I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I hope your Friday doesn't feel like the 13th!

jamming

Wow--it's sure been a long time since I posted here. 

I think I wanted to save my blog from the fullness of my impatience during that time between when Matt began his exit of Camp K-V, Iraq and when he actually, finally landed in San Diego.

Then, I suppose, I've been distracted with getting used to living with my dear husband again.  Which is a delightful challenge.  It's good to be together again, and to settle into our house together.

One of the messes he came home to was our backyard.  It was a disaster.  I'd attempted to begin cutting back our uncontrollable (if abundantly fruitful) passionfruit vine and made a bigger mess of it.  The banana tree that bloomed in August fell over a few weeks ago from the gradual pull of the weight of its fruit, and was poorly propped up by a teetering pair of stacked chairs and a wooden prop.  And so on.

Last Friday, we made a go at cleaning it up.  And things are looking much better.  We're just eager for the trash truck to come down our street this week.

One little piece of our work was picking the last three hands of bananas on the other plant--the one that bloomed in June.  They were still green, but I've decided that I don't think they're gonna turn yellow on the plant.

So, with those bananas now turning yellow, tonight, I made my second batch of banana jam from one hand.  It's too early to say for sure, but it early results seem very promising.  And with peanut butter on a sandwich: yum.

Banana jam recipes were a bit tricky to find, so I thought I'd share mine.

Homegrown Banana Jam

7 cups of bananas, chopped

juice of 2 limes (about 1/2 c.)

2 cups of white grape juice

4 1/2 c. sugar

Combine it all, mashing the bananas up a bit.  Bring it to a boil, stirring regularly.  Let it boil for about 15 minutes, 'til it seems good and jammy.  Pour it into jars, and process for 10 minutes in hot water bath.

Makes 9 1/2 pint jars, with about a half-cup left over.  I'm a big fan of left-over jam samples.

(Why do you suppose half-pint sound so much more quaint that "cup" when speaking of jars of jam?)

yes we can

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me that my newfound appreciation for canning coincides so beautifully with the election of a president who has lifted our hopes with a slogan so beautifully affirming of both the generous possibility of human communities and jam preservation.  Yes, we can.

Who knew that my own little efforts at food security would resonate so elegantly with this exciting moment in history?

The passionfruit vine in our backyard grew crazy this year, so I've been enjoying the challenge of figuring out ways to preserve it.  

In that spirit, here's how I have been making passionfruit jam:

Ingredients:

about 30 ripe passionfruits (really, though, some are awfully little, so make it more like 34)

2 1/2 limes

water

about 4 lbs of sugar

Get the pulp out of the passionfruits.  My preferred method, to get most of the pulp but few of the seeds, is to cut the stem-end of the fruits off, scoop the pulp and seeds and everything into my little food processor, and run it for a few seconds.  The food processor frees the good, tasty pulp from the seeds.  Then, you can pour it through a strainer, into a bowl.   Add the lime juice, and set it aside.   (I think a few seeds make a nice addition to the jam, so I let a few of them through, too.)

Put the rest of the passionfruits--the wrinkly outside--into a big pot, and add water until at least half of them are submerged.  Boil them for at least 30 minutes, until the white pithy parts are all moist and swollen and kind-of purplish.

Cool the fruits you've just boiled, and peel the outer, crunchy skin away from the now-moist pithy pulp part.  Compost the skin, and put the inside pulp layer into the food processor.  I only have a little food processor, so I do about 6 fruits at a time, adding about 1/4 cup of the water from the boiling pot into each batch.  Blend the pulp until it's milkshake-thick.  (You'll end up adding about 1 1/2 cups of the water from the pot you'd boiled the fruits in.)

Now, as you put all the pulp and the juice into a big pot for turning into jam, measure the volume, and add an equivalent amount of sugar.  Bring it to a boil, and watch until it begins to turn jammy.  It doesn't take long--apparently, there's a good amount of pectin in that pulp.

Put the jam into jars, and process in boiling water bath. 

a big night

Just moments after the television people officially "called" the election for Obama, my dear husband called from Iraq, as he was about to leave the base where he's been stationed to begin his long journey home.

It'll still be a couple of weeks before he's back here, but it was a sweet, sweet moment.

in defense of the wink

I am a winker.

I feel my way is threatened, and I wish to speak out.

With Sarah Palin winking to the television camera during Vice-Presidential debates, she seems to suggest that the gesture builds her credibility with millions of living-room viewers. Her promiscuous winking makes me feel cheap, used.

Certainly, the wink, like any other intimate gesture, can be misused and abused; most precious things can. I do not mean to excuse predatory, manipulative winks, meant to insinuate a relationship that doesn’t really exist.

I resent that, when I speak of winking these days, people tell me it makes them think first of Sarah. Or Tina Fey as Sarah. Of shallow, deceptive attempts to shape democracy around leaders who are just like the kind of folks next door with whom you might enjoy sharing such connection. This wink, though, has become a veneer, lacking substance. It attempts to gain broad power through deceit.

I believe a wink is best shared in mutual relationship, between consenting parties. The wink is intimate, embodied communication.

Simple and loaded with layered meanings, I cherish its multivalent possibilities. Across a busy room, the wink flies under the radar of the dominant discourse, carrying a silent greeting, a daring acknowledgement, or recognition of the absurdity of a situation. With grace, subtlety and speed, it builds connections between winker and recipient, and invites creative response: another wink, a smile, rolled eyes.

Free of the baggage of words, and easily layered on top of other, more public conversation, the wink connects two people in an instant, with more than words can say and without missing a beat.

Lately I have noticed my own hesitation to use this beloved gesture. Instead, I’ve found myself turning to bold smiles—which convey a similar meaning but lack the covert grace of a wink.

So, I hereby commit myself to reclaiming its usefulness. If you happen to catch one across the room, I hope you’ll wink back.

8 reasons I oppose Proposition 8

On our November ballot here in California, we will be asked whether we support a proposition that would remove the right of same-sex couples to enter into legal marriage.  As a heterosexual, married, Christian woman, I oppose this proposition for many reasons.  Whether you agree with me or not, I would be honored if you'd consider these 8 reasons why I'm voting against it.  In my mind, any one of them is enough reason to vote against this proposal.

1.  This is a matter of legal rights, not a referendum on how religious people should interpret marriage.  As a part of a nation built on ideals like justice and equality, I see no reason to restrict the legal rights of people to enter into the marriage contract with one another.   I would like to live in a California that affords rights, not one that adds clauses into its Constitution to deny them.

2.  This proposition has nothing to do with the rights of homosexual people to have children. Regardless of marital status, gay and lesbian people are already raising children.  I would contend that it does our society good to have children being raised by people who are married--that the commitments made in marriage tend to help create home environments that are more stable, especially because of the way the community beyond the couple understands what it means to be married.  Allowing same-sex couples to continue to marry in California will give greater stability to families, not less.

3.  Heterosexual marriage does not need protection from same-sex marriage.  I do believe that heterosexual marriage needs work in our culture--too many marriages end in divorce.   It is a challenge to succeed in marriage--I struggle with the difficulty of separation during deployment, with my own independence, and much more.  My marriage is not, however, threatened by the marriages of same-gender couples.  I wonder what we believe we're protecting marriage from?

4.  Our understanding of marriage, in the church and under the law, has been continuously evolving.  I celebrate that, as a woman, I enjoy rights to choose my own spouse (as well as the right to choose not to have a spouse and still own property) that have not always been available to women--certainly not always in our biblical tradition.  I also celebrate that marriage does not exist only for the purpose of having children.  I give thanks for the love shared between couples that have chosen not to have children, and between couples that have been unable to have children.  I delight in couples far beyond their child-bearing years who are able to marry.  There is not an unchanged understanding of marriage stretching back through the Bible, nor through our nation's history.  The Supreme Court's decision to extend the rights of marriage to same-sex couples is another change in this evolving history.  There is no one "original" understanding of marriage that we can preserve. 

5.  I have been blessed and enriched by same-gendered couples.  Both as domestic partners and as married couples, they have shown me what mutually-life-giving, committed relationships can look like.  Often persevering through immense challenges, they have demonstrated how married couples can care for each other and strengthen one another.  These couples have been a blessing to our communities, too.  I welcome ways that we can do more to honor committed relationships and let them be an asset to our communities.

6.  Opposing this proposition does not mean that clergy are required to perform same-sex marriages.  As a pastor, I always have the right to refuse to marry a couple.  Opposing the proposition does not compel churches to change their definitions of marriage.   Already, many churches have requirements for marriage in that church--such as requiring both spouses to be members of the church.  Churches can continue to define their own rules for marriage, even without this proposition.

7.  This restriction of rights does not belong in our Constitution.  In my mind, a Constitution exists to provide rights, not take them away.  

8.  I am bothered by the fear-inducing tactics used by supporters of Proposition 8.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ demands that we move past our fears to dare to include more of the world in God's love.  I refuse to be convinced to restrict legal rights to members of our community because I am afraid.    I do believe that there is real evil in the world, and that this campaign is distracting us from work is necessary for God's kingdom.  Over and over, Jesus commanded us to care for the poor.  Never once did Jesus speak about same-sex marriage.   Proponents of this initiative are asking us to be afraid of the wrong thing.  We have a lot of work to do if we want to follow Christ's example of love for our neighbors.  This Proposition will not help us in that work. 

fruitful life

I didn't make a conscious decision to plant holy-sounding fruits in my garden, but this week's yield certainly does have that appeal.

Here's a bunch off my Praying Hands Banana, named because the bunches (called hands in banana-speak) look like hands held in prayer.

And passionfruits, named because the flowers reminded Spanish missionaries of Christ's passion.
Pretty good choices for the backyard of a preacher who images it to be here little promised land, in the spirit of Micah 4, complete with vines and fig trees, eh?

 

So far, I've mostly been freezing passionfruit juice, or dumping it into iced tea--but I'd be very keen on hearing of any favorite uses you have of either bananas or passionfruit.  Maybe there's a jar of passionfruit-banana jam in store for whoever can come up with the best idea...

in remembrance

Sharing communion last Sunday, with a congregation divided by our US border fence, reminded me just how much work remains to be done in remembrance of Christ.  Our border much more easily dismembers the human community.

The broken bread, handed through the fence in violation of the US Customs rules our Border Patrol says they're to enforce, became a vivid symbol of our own division.  In sharing it, we mark our belonging together.

It seems to me that whatever border policies we might choose for our national interests are irrelevant to our call to see one another as brothers and sisters in Christ across this fence.   In our Christian practice, if we are going to take Christ's salvation seriously,  we must be willing to share this sacrament across anything that might seek to divide us.

Of course, once you've shared in holy moments together, it's hard to imagine advocating for a policy that would treat others as anything less than people of infinite worth.

I suppose that's part of why I love communion so much: it makes Jesus real.  Sharing the broken bread helps me know and taste that Jesus really meant those wild and crazy things he said.

a taste of fall

I was up in Julian today, and last weekend, too; even though San Diego's weather is mostly sunny and 80, it's possible to get a hint of real seasons by going uphill for an hour or so.

We've been working on a house up there for a long while now.  Today, I had some time to walk around a bit, and find some lovely signs of fall.
Last week, after a little work, I explored the joys of apple season, with my moms.  It was a beautiful (though a bit hot) clear day.  Tasty, too.
During some canning adventures earlier this year, a friend found a recipe for Swedish Apple Pie that I love.  It's fabulous with just-picked apples.  Really, it's as much like a giant, apple cookie as it is like a pie.  A pookie, perhaps?   I'd post a picture, but it didn't last long enough to catch in pixels.  Dad suggested that it might have been even better with some oats that he brought out from the family farm.  I'm confident that it would be fun to try.
The least-expected part of my fall days in Julian was the appearance of local belly dancers at the festival.  But hey: why not?!

transformation (worth more than a hill of beans?)

I have a whole bunch of blog posts swimming around in my head.  Mostly, I haven't committed them to actual words yet.  So, in that spirit, I start this post with a picture.  I don't have any deep thoughts to accompany it; I just thought these beans had wonderful colors.  They came out of the garden as I was tearing out the last of the summer garden.

After the help of many friends and a load of compost, the winter garden is now doing its underground magic.  There's something daring about starting with seeds.  It feels much more dangerous and beautiful than seedlings from the nursery.  And it reminds me that garden life starts with dried up, dead things: seeds from old plants and a pile of decaying compost.
Speaking of dying things, or at least, things dying to their previous selves, I've been taking note of the gulf fritillary that love my passionflowers, and enjoying their transformation.  I caught this one in the act of making its cocoon.

Thanks to recent conversations with Colleen, my dad and others, I've been pondering the transformations that may be life-giving for the church.  As I read the communion liturgy, proclaiming that Jesus Christ saves us from "slavery to sin and death," I mourn the way our own, institutional fear of dying seems to occupy much of our attention.  As people of resurrection, I pray that we might trust more (and more fearlessly) in new birth.  

And, as Colleen helped me consider just this morning over coffee, birth is not simple, clean or solitary.  I wonder what it would look like for the church to put more energy into the life-giving, painful, uncontrolled process of helping prepare for new life and new birth?  (Perhaps we should put energy into dying well?)  I suspect our priorities would need to shift a bit, and that we'd need to be open to a considerable bit more uncertainty.

I wonder what our caterpillar is thinking as it forms this cocoon.  Does it have any idea what life might be like on the other side?