Happy Birthday to Son! :)

We interrupt our thoughts on Jeremiah to say….Son is nine years old today!  What a fantastically interesting world this is with him in it!

Jeremiah Part Three: “And I Was Deceived”

 

O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived;
you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.

In the Book of Jeremiah, this verse – 20:17 – follows a narrated incident in 20:1-6.  The religious powers of Jeremiah’s time and place, fed up with his doom-and-gloom message and his refusal to toe the party line, had had Jeremiah beaten and put in the stocks for a day and a night.  A little worse for wear when released, Jeremiah unleashed a blistering prophecy against his tormenter Passhur in verses 3-6; then, beginning with verse 7, Jeremiah turns and lets God have it with both barrels.  Verses 7 through 18 are some of the rawest, rantingest, most heartrending, “bipolar”, naked, and nakedly real reading in the whole Bible.  Jeremiah, as I explained in the previous posting, ’saw naked people’.  Beginning in 20:7, we see a naked Jeremiah.  And…it isn’t pretty.

The true extent to which Jeremiah lets God have it in verse 7 is not readily apparent in the translated English.  In the Hebrew, at least according to my seminary professor of many years ago, the word that is  translated as ‘deceived’ (or occasionally, ‘persuaded’) carries overtones that border on sexual, or even – dare I say it? – sexually predatory.  Deceived; persuaded; seduced; led-on… in short, if someone were to translate the line as follows:  ‘O Lord, you led me on and then screwed me over’ – it would be terribly offensive and even blasphemous by our standards, but it would not be entirely wrong.  In fact, it could quite possibly be right on the mark.

Think about it.  God calls a young Jeremiah, way back in the beginning:    ‘I want you to be my special prophet, Jeremiah! I picked you out for this from before the beginning of time! It may be tough, but don’t worry – I’ll be with you! Really!’  Years later, his own kin turned against him, his own hometown folks trying to kill him, his own priestly colleagues beating him within an inch of his life, Jeremiah finds himself locked in stocks:  hurting, hungry, thirsty, cold, alone, ridiculed…and terribly, horribly, utterly, alone.

Alone:  three a.m., locked in stocks, with nothing but cold wind, colder stars, and a cold and terribly clear prophet-vision telling him it would only get worse from here on out.

Jeremiah would have had plenty of time, in that very dark night of the soul, to think back on his early days – when the calling burned bright, when he was full of the knowledge of his demanding, yet powerful and oddly comforting God, when he trusted that God to protect him and “make him a fortified wall” against the troubles to come.  How far away that blazing certainty must have seemed.

Jeremiah would have had plenty of time, through that long painful night alone, to think about having been dealt a singularly bad hand:  fated to live a terrible life – like all those around him were fated – but, unlike all those around him, to know that it was coming…and be unable to do anything about it.

Jeremiah would have had plenty of time to think about his ’stubborn and stiff-necked people’ – who, free from the burden of knowing, were soundly sleeping, not hungry, not thirsty, not hurting, warm and safe in their circles of family and friends and community, loving and loved, perfectly at peace with the feel-good messages their leaders were feeding them, and perfectly content to dismiss Jeremiah as a raving lunatic.

Jeremiah would have had plenty of time, shivering in the stocks at 3am, to wonder where his God was now.  And nothing, it seemed, answered him that night, save for the cold wind and the dust that swirled and stung his open wounds.

‘Deceived’? Yeah…one prophet, at least, has been there.

Until next time…

 

“I See Naked People” – Further Thoughts On Jeremiah

So I felt compelled to do a post or two or however-many, based on my latest readthrough of Jeremiah. But then I wasn’t sure how to get into it. Because Jeremiah’s plotline is rather Kafka-esque:

1. Everything sucks.

2. Everything sucks worse.

3. Everybody dies.  Or goes into slavery/exile.  Or goes into slavery/exile and then dies.

Maybe Shakespeare could do something with that, but I’m no Shakespeare and I was having a fair amount of trouble getting a handle on just what it was that drew me to Jeremiah and drew me to want to write *something* about him.

Then, a few nights back, I had a dream.  And in this dream, I was in church;  and in this church, I was down front giving a children’s sermon.  Or rather, I was trying to.  I wasn’t having a whole lot of success, giving this children’s sermon in this dream, because as I was trying to give this children’s sermon, I kept getting distracted by…of all things…Naked People.  One, at first, then two, then three, then seemingly dozens of Naked People – wandering ghostlike and aimless around a sanctuary full of worshippers who seemed not to notice them, and they seemed not to notice the worshippers or the worship.  These were not comely, come-hither naked people, either…these were the sloppy, floppy, birthday-suit’s-definitely-seen-better-days, for-the-love-of-God-put-on-some-clothes Naked People that, let’s face it, most of us are beneath our armor.  They weren’t pretty.  They didn’t seem to belong there.  And even though everyone else seemed not to see them, I saw them…and because I saw them, I was distracted.  I kept stopping and stumbling throughout the children’s sermon.  I couldn’t get any kind of a flow going.  I couldn’t get with “The Ministry Program”.  And just like the little kid in ‘The Sixth Sense’ was looked at askance for saying, “I see dead people”, I, in this dream, was looked at askance by the good people in the pews, because I alone among them stood up and stopped and said, “I see naked people”.

Whatever else my dream may or may not ‘mean’, I found within it the thread that finally connected me to the heart of old Jeremiah.  Because, as I read through his prophetic utterances and demonstrations, his ‘rantings and ravings’ as they were surely termed by his contemporaries, I realized that what it all boiled down to was this:  Jeremiah saw naked people.  It was his accursed gift to look upon all the beautiful people doing all their beautiful lush worship rites in and around that big beautiful Temple shining on the hill…and see, X-Ray style, the nakedness beneath it all.  And, he saw, that nakedness wasn’t pretty.

He saw people carving up God like a choice cut of meat, stuffing God into whatever forms and functions suited them, consuming God like a commodity, discarding whatever didn’t quite suit them.

He saw people observe to the letter all the outward pieties during worship, only to go back out and be the same greedy, sadistic sh*ts they’d been all along.

He saw people building and worshipping a life of “me me me me me”, even sacrificing their own children in their pursuit of health and wealth in the here and now.

Filter down the poetic and prophetic turns of phrase and figures of speech, and Jeremiah’s primary complaints come down to this:  a recognition and denunciation of the most ugly of human nakednesses:  naked avarice, naked ambition, naked powerlust, naked disregard for God and others.  It was a terrible, and terribly lonely, vision that Jeremiah had – seeing Naked People beneath everything all the time – and all the more terrible because it is so terribly, perfectly clear.

We still build God in our own image and worship what we ourselves have fashioned.

We still follow the gospel of ‘Me-First’ to the detriment of others.

And we still sacrifice our children upon the altar of ‘me, mine, here, now’.

Maybe that’s why I would’ve preferred to skip from Isaiah straight to Ezekiel…because Isaiah saw Future People (Messiah, anyone?) and Ezekiel merely saw Dead People (Ch. 37), and so both of them make for more hopeful, or at least more entertaining, reading than Jeremiah – who when he sees his Naked People, somehow someway managed to stare through the page and the centuries and see me.  That makes me uncomfortable.

And I am not sure if that discomfort is made better, or worse, by reading between the lines and realizing that Jeremiah, for all that he saw and railed against and suffered because of the ugly naked truths beneath his culture’s surface, still didn’t take off to live the rest of his life in a cave.  He lived, he suffered, he died, and it seems he died still trying to help, those very people, Naked and all.  He cared for them even when he despised them (and they him).  He served God even when he doubted God’s goodness.  He saw Naked People…but he didn’t close his eyes and turn away.

What’s up with that?

The Knock At The Door

Reserving as always the right to interrupt my own series – Jeremiah in this case – I’m thinking today about Halloween, and seasons, and yesterday’s knock at the door.

Today, it is the Eve of the Eve of All Saints. Or, as we used to call it as kids, “Devils’ Night.” The Halloween preparations have been in full swing around the neighborhood, with inflatable goofy ghosts and orange lights abounding, and kids running amok yelling, “Whatcha gonna be for Halloween?”. The other day in a store I watched a lady about my age check out with twenty-seven cans of neon silly string and two carts stuffed to the gills with cheap toilet paper. Wish I’d had time to follow her home, because that’s gonna be a party.

Silly, funny, goofy Halloween. American-style. Merriment abounds, chocolate flows like water, the ‘Munsters’ theme song plays everywhere you go, and Mammon, our national god, reigns jolly and fat as always over the whole affair. For this unofficial national holiday, you can either thank or blame the Irish, who brought it here with them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Of course, as with other things Irish, the merriment and silliness has a darker underbelly. In this case, the underbelly’s name is ‘Samhain’ (“SOW-in” or “Saw-WHEEN” are close enough pronunciations) – the Celtic festival of the dead…when the gods of light gave way, for the winter season, to the gods of darkness; when the veil between this world and the Otherworld was thinnest; and when the spirits residing in that Otherworld – dead humans and otherwise – came through and and walked unseen among the living…some for good, others for ill. The jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treating of our modern day are all descended from older attempts to either frighten, trick, or appease mischievous spirits. To this day, there are many people who still, on Samhain Night, host dinners for departed loved ones who might be ‘visiting’ – complete with food and drink and remembrances…always fond ones, for one must never speak ill of the dead. (They might be listening.)

I love Halloween, and so does my family. We decorate, we carve pumpkins, we do costumes and trick-or-treating, we have a lot of fun with the silliness and the merriment of it all. We are not in the ranks of Christians who refuse to participate out of concern for the ‘dark underbelly’ and any power it might gain over us. But with those Christians, we share a thing in common – the same thing we share with our Irish ancestors – a belief in the reality of the ‘thinning of the veil’. Call it superstitious, but we think there really is something to the whole notion that there is such a thing as a spiritual realm and that sometimes, they do touch fingers with us; and that the time of year we know as Halloween/Samhain/AllSaints lends itself to that sort of thing more strongly than, say, an average Thursday in July. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, or the way we have of believing things into reality (our own subjective reality, at least). Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons – that mournful howling wind, that cold rain, those shivering, skittering leaves, that raking of newly bare branches across an ever-darkening sky. With nature entering her appointed time of dying, it is perhaps only natural that our own thoughts turn that way. Candle flames dancing in jack-o-lanterns, children in cheap store costumes dancing from door to door, adults in masks and makeup dancing at parties…it’s death we are dancing with, and against, and toward, and away from, and in spite of.

But even here, even now, at the time of year it’s farthest from, Easter inbreaks. The other day, while going about household business, Mom and Husband and Nephew and I all heard a knock at the door. A quick, light tapping: one-two-three, one-two. Being very near the door, we opened it right away and looked out, to see…no one, and nothing. No branches or anything that could have made the sound, no people, no stray animals. Maybe it was no one. Maybe it was ‘Someone’. But at this time of year, it was a reminder that “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”…that God is God of all worlds and all circumstances…that death and life are neither as separate nor antagonistic as they often seem.

Silly and unscientific as such things may be, my worlds would be far more colorless, cold, and sterile without my ’superstitious’ quirks, the folksy things I choose to believe in passing, the vivid imagination that lets me ’see’ the death in every life…and the life in every death. Thanks be to God for giving me ears to hear the knock at the door.

Jeremiah: Part One: Being A Prophet Stinks

So a few weeks ago in church, the Jedi Master Pastor throws down a challenge:  Do something this fall to deepen your spiritual life.  OK, I think, I haven’t spent much time with the Hebrew prophets lately, maybe I’ll blow through ‘em again and see what I pick up.  So I kinda bodysurfed my way through Isaiah – whose rising and falling swells of vision and poetry make him rather easy to bodysurf through – and came to Jeremiah.  Slam.  Wham.  Into the fortified wall.  Then I remembered:  one does not bodysurf through Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is the prophet I have flippantly termed “the prophet most dire in need of prozac”.  He moans.  He groans.  He rants.  He raves.  He rails at God, his people, their adversaries, himself, and life in general, often all at once.  He’s one of those books in the Bible that, given my druthers, I would really rather just skip over.  I’d rather go from the “no harm nor hurt on all my holy mountain” and “arise, shine, for your light has come” beauty of Isaiah, jump straight into the funky-unky visions of Ezekiel and Daniel, and leave Jeremiah and his companion Lamentations in the sackcloth and ashes where they belong.

But stuff gets into the Bible for a reason, and that reason doesn’t ENTIRELY rest with ancient councils of persnickety-politicking religious police, despite what either they or their subsequent fans/critics may think.  Spirit is resilient and resourceful; Spirit can find ways to work in and through and around and even despite us.  Like dandelions in concrete cracks, Spirit pokes through and thrives.  So it is with the stuff that got into the Bible.  It’s in there because it has something to teach us.  And just because the shining God-lesson isn’t always just sitting there right in a beautiful, easily-appreciated gem of wisdom, singing beautifully “pick me, oh pick meeee!” …doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  Sometimes, you gotta pull on the work clothes, pick up the shovel, and go digging.

So it is with Jeremiah.  As told in roughly ten zillion gajillion interpretations and commentaries – such as the ones by R.E. Clements, Walter Brueggeman, and the briefer embedded commentary in vol. 6 of  The New Interpreter’s Bible , plus a whole lot of other ones – Jeremiah is a complicated figure from a complicated time in Biblical history.  From what we can pick out of the text, we see that he came from a class of “professional” or “semi-professional” prophets, a group very roughly akin to the various mystical clerics in the various world religions today.  We get the idea that he was called young and set apart – he would later complain to God of being set up – to preach a difficult message to his people:

-All was not well and their God was really PO’d with them;

-It was gonna get worse before it got any better; and

-Sometimes, surrender really is the only option.

A message like that doesn’t play well in any society, at any time, and it didn’t play well in Jeremiah’s society and time either.  Some people got back in his face, openly rejecting and insulting him.  A few tried to shut him up, even kill him.  Most just smiled and nodded and kept right on ignoring him and going about their business.  Oddly, the latter group seemed to get to him the most.

And that’s the interesting thing about Jeremiah, the thing that sets him apart from most of the other prophets.  We see things get to him.  He doesn’t just deliver the message from God to the people, he also internalizes the emotions and reactions of his people and delivers them back to God.  And – something many people can relate to – he hates his job.  He didn’t grow up wanting to be a prophet the way little kids today grow up wanting to be police and firefighters.  He just wanted a nice normal easy life, like everybody everywhere.  He tripped and fell over backwards – no, he was God-slam-dunked and pushed – into his role, and in his role, he was truly caught in the middle:  seeing how it really was, yet not wanting it to be that way; compelled (“like fire in my bones,”  he called it) to deliver a difficult message from God, yet not always feeling God’s strength or helping hand when the pushback came; accepting his role and playing his part, yet complaining bitterly about it the whole time.  Jeremiah is one of the more human – perhaps the most human – of the prophets – and in Jeremiah we really see that, in a lot of cases, Being A Prophet Stinks.

So I’m starting to slog – not surf, you don’t surf – through Jeremiah.  And in days and perhaps weeks to come, I’m gonna drag you all with me.

First question to chew on:  have you ever had to choose between doing what is easy, and doing what is right? Which choice did you make and how did it work out for you? Comment if you want, think on it at the least.

Tune in next time for Jeremiah:  Part Two:  Why Does God Pick On People?

The Worst Mother In The World

Like the Stanley Cup, the Worst Mother In The World Award is a coveted and hard-to-earn trophy, gained under grueling conditions and passed from mother to mother and back again.  Unlike the Stanley Cup, there are no photo-ops or throngs of adoring fans to see you hoist it.   I was reminded of this when I got my turn at this double-edged award this evening.  Because I made daughter turn off “Hunka-Do-Me-Burnin’-Love” [a slight edit of the actual show title...but not much of an edit], I got the Award…complete with the full nine-syllable “MOOOooOOOoooOOOOOooooOOOOoooOOOMMMM!!!!”, the eye roll, the exasperated sigh, the stomping stair ascent, the slammed door, and even the withheld-out-of-spite goodnight kiss.  She’s watched it before.  All the cool kids watch it.  It’s not like she’s gonna DO any of that stuff, WEAR (or not-wear, in some cases) any of that stuff, SAY any of that stuff, BE like that.  I’m so backwards! I’m so old-fashioned! I’m so totally ruining her life!

Alone downstairs with my award (and without my goodnight kiss), I remembered the times some 25-30 years ago when I was the one stomping upstairs, leaving my mother kissless and holding the Award.  How DARE she not let me go over to my boyfriend’s house just because his parents weren’t home? How COULD she insist I wear more clothes and less makeup? What did SHE know about unchaperoned parties, reasonable bedtimes, or homework coming first?

My mother knew that there’s a time to be a child’s “BFF”, but there’s also a time to step up and be a child’s parent.  What she knew then, is what I know now, partly because she knew it then and partly because I learned it the hard way.  What daughter will know in two or three decades, when she’s left holding the Award by a child whose life she’s just ruined, she will know partly (no doubt) from learning it the hard way, but partly – I hope mostly – because I was willing to step up and occasionally be what every loving mother occasionally has to be:  The Worst Mother In The World.

Everyone Knows It’s Windy…

It’s rather windy out today, as summer finally gives way to fall. Leaves and the odd bit of debris – paper, a plastic bag, a small terrier (OK, not really a small terrier) – all are blowing past the window, and the huffs and puffs and “awhooOOOOOooohhh!” ’s of the wind against the house sound, in a way, alive.

The wind is alive, if only in our imagination. Look at our popular songs: “The wind cries ‘Mary’” -Jimi Hendrix. “I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul” -Cat Stevens. And my all-time favorite, “Windy”, by the Association:

Who’s peekin’ out from under a stairway

Calling a name that’s lighter than air

Who’s bending down to give me a rainbow

Everyone knows it’s Windy

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin’ at everybody she sees
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a moment
Everyone knows it’s Windy

And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies
And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds)
Above the clouds (above the clouds)

And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies
And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds)
Above the clouds (above the clouds)

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city
Smilin’ at everybody she sees
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a moment
Everyone knows it’s Windy

As a very young, very imaginative child, listening to this song (my parents were big fans of the Association and played their albums roughly ten million gazillion times a day ), I would “see” in my mind’s eye a sort of magic person – an entity that was Now a lovely dark-haired lady, dressed in bright firegolds and warm russets, and Now-Again a puff of wind with fall leaves whirling and dancing around it/her, and Poof! Now a lovely lady again, and Whoops! Now a puff of leaf-dancing wind… this magic lady “Windy” of my child’s imagination was a playful, unpredictable force of energy, kinda-scary-but-not-really, a law unto herself, just blowing through her world and doing what she did because that was…well…what she did.

Much, much later in life, I learned that there were other names for the “Magic Windy Lady” of my young childhood. Names like “Sophia”, or, as translated from the Greek, “Wisdom”, often spoken of in the Bible and very famously quoted in first-person in Proverbs 8:22-31:

“The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works, ^[b] , ^[c]
before his deeds of old;

²³ I was appointed ^[d] from eternity,
from the beginning, before the world began.

²⁴ When there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding with water;

²⁵ before the mountains were settled in place,
before the hills, I was given birth,

²⁶ before he made the earth or its fields
or any of the dust of the world.

²⁷ I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

²⁸ when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

²⁹ when he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

³⁰ Then I was the craftsman at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,

³¹ rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in mankind.

Christians also know and call upon this Wisdom, this creative “windy” force, by the name “Holy Spirit” (or just “Spirit” or “The Spirit”). We see this Spirit at work in all kinds of ways and flowing through all kinds of earthly manifestations (dove, fire, various human charisms…and…in Acts 2….wind!). In both the Greek and the Hebrew which the Bible was originally written in, the word translated as “Spirit” also translates as “Breath” or “Wind”.

It was the thing that brooded over the face of the primordial deep, before anything was created.

It was the thing that Adam needed in order to transition from mud-sculpture to living being.

It was the thing that the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel’s vision needed in order to make it back to the land of the living.

It was the thing that Jesus famously told Nicodemus in John 3, ” [it] blows where it wills”.

It was the thing that Jesus breathed out onto his disciples when he said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

The wild, lovely, unpredictable and uncontrollable breath/wind/Spirit/wisdom/Sophia of God is – as they say today – “kinda a big deal.” And it’s just as much at work now as it was in Bible times.

What new ideas are peeking out from under your stairway?

What lighter-than-air dream is it time for you to name?

Who – if you but stop to look up for it – is bending down to give you that rainbow?

God is still speaking.  Christ is still very much alive and engaged with the world.  And the Spirit-wind is still blowing.  Although many, perhaps most of us, forget for long periods of time….deep down, Everyone Knows when it’s time to reach out and capture those moments.  Everyone Knows It’s Windy.

Growing Into Her Voice

It was a rainy night, some four and a half years ago.  I was driving daughter, then just nine years old, home from karate practice.  The car radio was on, and a popular song was playing.  It featured a very strong, somewhat edgy, female vocalist.  Daughter began to sing along.  Half interested parent, half lifelong amateur musician, I turned a quiet and critically inquisitive ear to her voice.  It was a pretty voice, a little voice, a pretty-little-girl voice, a voice that matched the notes most-but-not-all of the time.  It was kind of like the equivalent of purple rock candy trying to be seven-layer dark-chocolate cake.  Sweet thought, but…not quite.  Not yet.  But little kids have big dreams, and as she bipped and bopped and sang along, I could almost see the little thought balloon above her head, in which she had superimposed her own face onto the artist jammin’ and slammin’ before adoring millions under the bright lights.  “Someday, Mommy,” she said when the song stopped, “I’m gonna sing like that.”

Fast-forward to a few nights ago, when daughter and I were again driving on a rainy night.  Daughter is a young teen now, with all the highs and lows, joys and sorrows, imagined problems and all-too-real problems that a young teen faces.  But she still has those big-stage dreams.

On the car radio, as chance would have it, that same old song from four and a half years ago, with that same strong, edgy female artist, came on.  And again, as she did when she was nine, daughter began to sing along.  Four and a half years makes a difference.  She’s not all the way to seven-layer-chocolate-cake yet, but she’s considerably closer.  She had tone, coloration, inflection, she hit all the notes, she sang along less like a little girl playing dress-up and more like a young female in the wings, waiting and watching and almost ready to take the stage herself.  And in the little thought balloon above daughter’s head I saw, not just her face superimposed on the female artist, but her whole self fronting that band and singing that song her way.

“She is growing into her voice,” I thought.  And so she is.  Age and experience, joys and sorrows, adversity and overcoming, all are the soil and fodder out of which voices grow.  Like flowers, all voices are lovely and unique in their own way.  And like flowers, every once in awhile, a real prizewinner begins to emerge from the patch and gain attention.

Permit this proud Mom to think, after listening to daughter’s maturing voice, that we’ve got a budding prizewinner on our hands.  And whatever stage spreads out before her in life, she’s gonna make an impact.

Ghost Cats, And Other Small Graces

In America, believing in ghosts is akin to liking Barry Manilow:   people won’t admit to it, but secretly, they do.

Take all those ‘Haunted This’ and ‘GhostHunter That’ TV shows.   You’re flipping channels, you tune in, you stay with the show “just to laugh at how fake it all is”…but before you know it, you’ve watched the whole show.  Again!

Then there are the Legends that every camp has.  A jaded camp counselor might overhear a group of young and impressionable campers scaring themselves silly with one of the legends, and even as she laughs out loud – “oh, is THAT old story still going around? it was baloney thirty years ago!” – she still, later that night, looks over her shoulder.

But closer to home, and closer to ‘Barry Manilow’ territory – in terms of being something we’re a little embarrassed to admit but still secretly hold on to – are the Family Ghosts.  Many of us – regardless of our religion, or lack thereof – believe that our departed ones, human and animal alike, can and perhaps do come back to us, from time to time.

That Big Dream that felt like a visitation?

That pot of dead flowers which mysteriously sprung up and bloomed like crazy on her birthday?

That small grey shadow just outside our field of vision?

The way that picture always tilts itself on the wall, or the familiar-sounding footstep in the upstairs hall?

Skeptics will say that there’s no proof, that there’s no such thing, that all those stories and ‘evidences’ can be explained by combinations of natural phenomena and wishful thinking.  Maybe…but given that science is revealing the universe to be more rather than less weird as it goes on, I’m not quite so quick to dismiss.  Maybe our electromagnetic energies can and do hang about for awhile after our bodies quit.  Or maybe – to speak more theologically – our souls can and sometimes do hang about the places and people we have known and loved in life, if God so wills/permits.  Who knows.

I’m thinking of this, not because I have designs on being the next Shirley Maclaine, but simply because the other night I was thinking privately of my familiar, Mischief, who died untimely in July 2008, and I was missing him very much, and later that evening, Son glanced over his shoulder and suddenly exclaimed:  “Whoa! I just saw Mischief over there for a minute!”

I looked over and saw only the sofa, none of our current living cats anywhere in sight, nothing that could have been mistaken, on quick glance, for a cat.  In the old house, I had occasionally seen little shadows, felt pawprints on me in the morning, and heard what sounded like Mischief’s colorful meow, but had never been certain if it was really him, or just my own combination of memory and longing.  But for someone besides me to “see” my friend in the new space was, I’ll admit it (like I’ll admit to liking Barry Manilow)…very comforting.

I’m not one who obsesses about ghosts and all the rest; there’s quite enough to interest and challenge me in this world, and whenya think about it, we’re really not in this world for very long, so why rush to know everything about the next one? …but I am a believer in God:  God of grace, and life, and love, and above all, surprise.  There is always more than meets the eye, God is always bigger than any living human can fathom, and there is always something new to be discovered.

Our “ghost cat” was, and is, an angel – as in its root-word meaning of ‘messenger’ – a quick reassurance that in God’s surprising and very-big-yet-very-small, very-complicated-yet-very-simple universe, nothing and no one, living or dead, present, past, or yet to come, is ever lost or gone forever.  Not even a little black cat.  Not even you.  Not even me.

Maybe it’s not ‘real’ as we currently define ‘real’, but it’s grace, and grace is real enough.

School Of The Middle

Daughter has just begun her third year in that no-woman’s-land called Middle School…in the U.S.A., that two-to-three-year stretch of school years that roughly span the average age of puberty, where students transition from ‘old kid’ to ‘young teen’. Academically, it’s challenging; socially, it’s brutal. And as I watch Daughter navigate all the ups and downs, ins and outs, all the intricacies and extremities, the Socially-Darwinian climate and the little wargames and the unwritten rules, I think two things:

1. She sure handles it all better than I ever did.

2. Middle School really does embody the ‘School of the Middle’.

‘School of the Middle’ is a phrase that came to me at some point – whether out of my own head or picked up somewhere else, I do not know – as a catchall description for…that Comfort Zone…that Happy Medium… that Big Blip On The Bell Curve… the “Most” of “Most People”… in a word, “Normal”. It’s that place, that look, that level of acceptability, that state of existence that – well – “most” people in a given society have agreed is good, is desirable, is worthy of either being, or pretending/trying/wishing to be.

In the middle-school world that many of us remember all too well, the School of the Middle is the place where you are pretty, but not too pretty; smart, but not too smart; well-outfitted and well-adjusted, but not too much so; the place where you stand out ‘just enough’ but not so much so that you can’t also blend in with the happy-middlin’ crowd. And although middle school ends (thank goodness!), the School of the Middle never does. In the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the PTOs and the churches and everywhere else people congregate, there is a School of the Middle. And, in small ways or in large, if you deviate in some way from that Middle, the pressure comes down.

“You’d be so pretty, if you’d just cut your hair/get contacts/lose weight/wear makeup/smile more.”

“That house/yard is too weird, it’s devaluing the neighbors’ properties.” (Actual letter-to-the-editor complaint in the local paper a few weeks back, about a house/yard decked to the nines in local sports team regalia. Experience has taught me that letters like these tend to come from people who outdo the proverbial Griswalds in house/yard decorations at Christmas…)

“You need to spend more time socializing with the Movers and Shakers if you hope to get ahead/keep your job. Never mind if you don’t like them – they don’t even like each other! – you have to fake it; they do.”

I’m no anarchist: I understand and respect that there is both a ‘School of the Middle’ in our society, and a need for it. But I am continually surprised and dismayed to find out, not only how tyrannical and arbitrary it can be, but also how small that ‘Middle’ really is.

I’ve yet to meet someone, of any age, who actually looks back fondly on Middle School; everyone, no matter what clique their old yearbooks say they belonged to, no matter how pretty or popular or successful, felt weird and wrong and out of the loop somehow.

And I’ve yet to meet anyone, myself included, who’s really truly permanently secure about their own relationship to the School of the Middle in their own lives. There’s always SOMETHING we wish were bigger/smaller/more/different/better, always SOMETHING we fear “They” – whoever “They” are – whisper about behind their hands and condemn us for behind our backs. There’s always SOMETHING which makes us feel we’re somehow weird, somehow out of the norm, somehow wrong.

Maybe feeling weird is the only universal/normal thing we each-and-all share in common?