Good Stewards

Here is today's homily.  The readings are Psalm 19 and  Matthew 21:33-46

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Today we talk about stewardship.

This subject takes a number of forms. You’ve all received new pledge cards in the mail, because today is the beginning of our annual parish pledge drive. Making a financial commitment to St. Paul’s allows the vestry to draw up a budget for the coming year. Having a workable budget allows us to keep the lights on, pay salaries, and continue our outreach ministries, our small but crucial efforts to contribute to the care and healing of our community.

Today is also the day when we observe the Feast of St. Francis, the beloved thirteenth-century saint who embraced poverty and loved nature. Echoing the psalm we heard today, which affirms that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” Francis’ ecstatic Canticle of the Sun celebrates all of the ways God’s creation sustains us:

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which You give Your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom You brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Because Francis especially loved animals, our 5:00 service today will feature our yearly Blessing of the Animals, although most of the people who bring their dogs and cats and ferrets and turtles and guinea pigs and lizards to be blessed would probably agree that the pets we love bless us more than we could ever bless them. Honoring St. Francis, we remind ourselves to be caring, responsible stewards of our beloved planet and of everything that lives on it.

And, finally, our Gospel lesson today is also about stewardship, although these are bad stewards rather than good ones. The tenants in this story refuse to acknowledge their landlord or pay what they owe him. They’ve made the crucial mistake of forgetting the difference between stewards and rulers.

A steward is someone who looks after and manages someone else’s property. Stewards do not rule or own that property; it is not theirs to use as they wish, and certainly not theirs to waste or ruin. They are subject to the rules imposed by the owner of the property, not the other way around.

The tenants in today’s parable aren’t the only people who’ve gotten confused about this distinction. Faith communities, and Western civilization in general, have only recently started to grasp the difference. In our own Book of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer C -- the most environmentally conscious of the Eucharistic prayers, with its beautiful description of “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home” -- still contains the line, “You made us rulers of creation.” I wince whenever I hear this; I cheer whenever the priest says, instead, “You made us stewards of creation.”   Even St. Francis, writing in 1224, recognized that our “sister Mother Earth . . . feeds us and rules us,” not the other way around. Maybe the next edition of the Prayer Book will do better.

We do not rule nature. We don’t understand half of what happens even in our own bodies, those astonishingly complex organisms. Physician Lewis Thomas once wrote, “If you were put in charge of your liver, you’d be dead in a day.”

And there’s a real question now about how many days remain to human civilization, how many more editions of the Prayer Book we’ll survive to see. By all accounts, we’re in the middle of an ecological cataclysm, fueled largely by human intervention, that could lead to widespread social collapse within the lifetimes of people in this room. Pollution and habitat destruction change weather patterns, which create drought and famine, which fuel social instability – economic crises, wars, migrations -- which lead to more destruction of the natural world. Species are dying off; the last four years alone have seen the extinction of the Eastern cougar, the Western black rhinoceros, the Formosan clouded leopard, and the Japanese River Otter. Lonesome George, the last surviving Pinta Island Tortoise, died in 2012.

We are people of resurrection, and we have faith. But while some forms of life will surely survive all this, there’s a real question as to how many humans will be among them.

Many people are trying to be better stewards now. A friend of mine at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City tells me that museum biologists, acutely aware of the rate of species extinction, are creating tissue banks of as many species as possible to try to preserve their DNA. On September 22, more than 300,000 people marched through the streets of New York City, demanding swifter government responses to climate issues. “Reduce, reuse and recycle” has become a familiar catchphrase.

The problem is so huge, though, that it’s easy to swing back and forth between despair and denial. Despair tells us that there’s nothing to be done; denial says that nothing needs to be done. Either stance allows us to continue with business as usual – but that’s what landed us in this mess. I think the important thing is to remember that any action, however small, can help.  Perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to change our perspective, to stop seeing ourselves as rulers and start seeing ourselves as stewards.

Author and activist Joanna Macy tells the story of visiting a friend, a young Buddhist monk, in India. They were drinking tea when she realized that a fly had fallen into her cup. Her friend saw the change in her expression and asked what was wrong. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a fly in my tea.” Embarrassed, she didn’t want the young man to think that she, an experienced traveler, was squeamish about insects.

Crooning softly in concern, Macy’s friend rose from his chair, inserted a finger into Macy’s tea, lifted out the fly, and left the room. When the monk came back, Macy reports, “he was beaming.  ‘He is going to be all right,’ he told me quietly. He explained how he had placed the fly on the leaf of a branch by the door, where his wings could dry. And the fly was still alive, because he began fanning his wings, and we could confidently expect him to take flight soon.”

Macy had told the monk that the fly was “nothing.” Her friend knew otherwise, knew that the fly, however small and humble – or even despised – was a beloved and cherished part of creation, with its own role to play. He acted as a good steward.

What will become of our vineyard, “this fragile earth, our island home”? Installed as tenants, we have grievously mismanaged the property. We killed the landlord’s son the first time he showed up. The question now is whether we can mend our ways quickly enough to regain the trust of the landlord, or whether our irresponsibility will cause us to be replaced by other, more respectful tenants. As much as God loves us, God also loves the rest of the creation, the oceans and forests and jungles and everything that lives in them. Let us love them too, saying with St. Francis, “Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures.”

Amen.

Promises, Promises

Here's today's homily.  The readings are
Exodus 17:1-7  and Matthew 21:23-32.

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Many of you know that my husband and I have three cats. Every morning when I wake up, they’re waiting outside our bedroom door, and when I come out, they begin wailing piteously. I can just imagine what they’re saying. “Where were you all night? Why did you go away? We’re starving! You’ve never fed us!  No one has ever fed us!”

I go downstairs, cats underfoot, and give them a can of wet catfood. They’ve had dry food to eat all night. I give them fresh water. When my husband wakes up, he attends to their litter boxes, one of which is in the giant enclosed catio he’s built for them on our deck, so they can safely go outside.   Over the course of the day, we feed them again, let them lick our own plates, give them various treats, play with them -- they have an entire drawer of balls and catnip mice, and that’s not even counting the laser pointer -- and lavish them with affection.

Then we go to bed. We don’t let them sleep with us, because it wouldn’t be very restful. The next morning, there they are again, outside the bedroom door. “Where were you?  You never feed us!  No one has ever fed us, or played with us, or given us treats!”

Do my cats remind you of anyone?

Just last week, we heard the Israelites lamenting that they’re starving, that no one feeds them, that they’re going to die in the wilderness of hunger. We watched God, in response, shower them with quail and manna, a feast in the desert. And now here we are, a week later, and they’re complaining again. “There’s no water. We’re thirsty. We’re going to die out here, Moses! Why did you bring us here to die?” We hear them complaining, and we watch God give them water. How long do you think it will take for them to start complaining again?

Granted, the Isrealites have it much worse than my cats do. But I still find it helpful to compare the two situations. I wonder if the Israelites believe that they have to complain to get what they need, that if they don’t, God won’t pay any attention to them at all. I wonder if Moses, who’s clearly fed up with them, is worried about whether God will get fed up with them too. I wonder if anyone in the crowd is thinking, “If we want to keep getting food and water, we’d better stop complaining and say thank you really nicely.  We’d better watch our manners.”

I suspect that the answer to all of these questions is no.

My husband and I take care of our cats not because they have good manners -- they don’t -- and not because they routinely complain about our terrible treatment of them, but because we love them. We chose them. When we adopted them from the Humane Society, we promised them that they would be our cats, and that we would be their people. And that’s a promise we intend to keep, no matter how they behave.

My husband and I, heaven knows, are not God. But I suspect that the divine covenant with humanity is a little like this too. God has told us that he will be our God and we will be his people.  No matter how badly we behave, he’ll still love us. Didn’t he send Jesus to feed us, to heal us, and to clean up our messes? God is faithful even when we aren’t. That’s a promise we can count on, even when it seems like God’s shut the bedroom door and will never come out, even when we’re hungry and thirsty and feel like no one has ever loved us.

Of course, we trust this promise because we have been fed and loved. We’ve seen the promise made good.  We can’t blame people desperate for sustenance, for meaning and belonging, not to believe it, not unless we -- as God’s hands and heart in the world -- help show them that it’s true.  It's our job to offer food, and water, and love.  To too many people, the promises of the Gospel seem as empty as the glib assurances of the landowner’s second son, who says, “I go, sir,” but then doesn’t. Who among us hasn’t felt the sting of a broken promise, the betrayal of people who’ve made glib assurances of help or friendship, only to fail us when we needed them?

It’s easy to list those examples. It’s a little more difficult to think of people who say, “No, I won’t help you,” but then do. It took me hours to come up with an example, but before I tell you that story, I want to talk about Jesus in the temple.

The priests and elders are trying to trick him, and he knows it. If he says that the baptism of John came from heaven, he’ll be defying their authority. If he says it was of human origin, they’ll claim that their own religious authority bears more weight. So Jesus neatly turns the tables, throwing their own question back at them, catching them in the same net. If they admit that John came from heaven, they’re granting Jesus the authority they want to deny; if they say that it’s merely human, they fear the reaction of the crowd.  So they refuse to answer one way or the other, and Jesus does the same. Checkmate.

This legal maneuvering reveals the nature of Jesus’ dilemma, the bind that ultimately leads to the cross. He is subject to two authorities: to God, and to the human leaders of his place and time. Both are valid. To keep serving the first authority, Jesus needs to avoid overtly defying the second. It was Jesus, after all, who said “Render under Ceasar what is Ceasar’s.” He can’t pull rank – at least, not until he’s trapped the priests and elders again, until they’ve offered the correct answer to his question about the landowner’s two sons.

And that brings me to my story. When I was in high school, I had a math teacher named Mr. McCarthy. I was scared of math and I was scared of him, although probably no one else could have dragged me kicking and screaming to a passing grade in calculus. Mr. McCarthy smelled like coffee and cigarettes.  He wore tweed jackets stiffened with chalk dust, and passed back exams and homework from the highest grade to the lowest, which made waiting to get your paper back an exercise in sheer agony. You’d watch him return work to other students, and when someone let out a moan you’d know that was it:  the first failing grade. If you hadn’t yet gotten your own paper back, you were doomed.

Mr. McCarthy yelled at students, and he wasn’t above throwing erasers at people. Every day when I got to school, I saw him standing in the hallway. Every day, I said, “Good morning, Mr. McCarthy.” Every day, scowling at me with nicotine-and-caffeine yellowed teeth, glowering through his thick glasses, he snarled, “What’s good about it?”

Mr. McCarthy was a staunch member of the teacher’s union. My junior year, right before most of my class was scheduled to take the SATs, the union announced a job action. Teachers would hold their regular classes from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. , but they refused to help students after school, meet with clubs, or help with extracurricular activities.

I no longer remember the specific contract problems that led to this impasse, but I remember that those of us prepping for the SAT were terrified. For all his surliness, Mr. McCarthy was a good teacher. We’d asked him to give us extra SAT prep after school. He’d said he would. We knew that now he wouldn’t. Someone made the mistake of asking him during class. He curled his lip. “No. Don’t you know what’s going on?”

But then he passed back a set of papers, and those of us taking the SAT found that he’d written on the last page:  “Be here at 7 a.m. tomorrow.”

We dutifully showed up. Mr. McCarthy glared at us and growled, “Don’t you dare tell anyone about this.” And then he gave us an SAT prep class. He’d found a a way to follow two sets of rules:  those of the union to which he was devoted, and those of his calling, his passion to see us do well in math, even if he’d never dream of wishing us good morning.

Mr. McCarthy kept his promise, even though we were afraid of him and even though we frequently grumbled against him. I suspect he’d planned his subterfuge all along, but if he’d changed his mind, like the first son in the parable, his actions would have been no less honorable. I don’t think he liked most of us, but we were his, just as my cats are mine and my husband’s, just as all of us are God’s. I wasn’t yet a churchgoer in high school, but if I had been, I would have said after that SAT prep class, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

Amen.

Getting Out of the House

Here's this morning's homily, which includes a video clip.  I've never shown one before, so I hope it works!

The readings are Job 23:1-9, 16-17 and Mark 10:17-31.

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I didn’t start going to church until I was an adult.  I went for many reasons, but among them was the fact that my husband and I had just bought our first house.  By Reno standards, our house is small, but I was very conscious of living with one other adult and three cats in a structure, and on a piece of land, that could contain an entire third-world village.  I didn’t want to become complacent about that.  I thought church would help stave off complacency.

It worked, especially when I heard this morning’s Gospel for the first time.  Over dinner that night, I fretted to my husband.  “Jesus says we have to sell all we own and give it to the poor,” I told him.  “I mean, I don’t know anybody who’s done that, but that is what he says.”

Gary, who doesn’t go to church, looked alarmed. He put down his fork.  “Susan,” he said, “we’re not selling the house.”

We didn’t sell our house, and we don’t plan to, but this Gospel passage continues to nag at me.   I suspect many of us struggle with it.  Are we doing what God wants us to do?  Do we give enough to others?  Do we really have to sell everything we own, leave everyone we love, to strap on sandals and a robe and follow Jesus?

The discomfort of this morning’s Gospel is only heightened by the lesson from Job.  You remember Job: that pious, blameless guy who became the object of a bet between God and Satan.

“Job loves me,” says God.

“Betcha he’ll curse you if he loses all his stuff,” says Satan.

“Betcha he won’t,” says God, and the game is on.  In short order, Job loses his house, his land, his flocks, his family, and his health.  He winds up on a dungheap, howling in misery, demanding to know why this has happened to him.

I’ve never been satisfied with God’s answer to Job, which is more or less, “I invented whales, and you didn’t.  I’m God, and you’re not.”  I’m not even satisfied with the fact that after all those torments, God restores Job’s fortunes twice over.  I know too many people who’ve suffered tragic losses and have never gotten a winning lottery ticket to make up for it.

What I do take from Job’s story – which I believe we’re meant to read more as parable than as history – is the importance, not of blind faith, but of stubborn faithfulness.  Job isn’t blind.  He knows his suffering isn’t fair, but he doesn’t stop talking to God, and he doesn’t stop listening to God.  He doesn’t abandon God even when he feels God has abandoned him.  He stays in relationship even when that relationship is maddeningly difficult.

This is useful.  It means that it’s okay for me to get mad at God, which I do regularly.  It doesn’t, though, help me figure out what to do about my house.  So I head back to the Gospel, where Jesus is telling his disciples that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the Kingdom of God.  The disciples remind Jesus that, unlike Job, they’ve freely chosen to leave everything they have and everyone they love.  They’ve strapped on robes and sandals to follow him.  “Jesus,” I can hear them saying, “we’re not rich.  Come on: do we look rich to you?  These robes are ragged. These sandals have holes in them.”

And Jesus says something that I, at least, usually forget when I’m trying to imagine camels fitting through needles.  He tells his disciples that anyone who leaves an old life to follow him holds a winning lottery ticket.  His followers will receive a hundredfold “now in this age,” as well as eternal life.  If you’ve walked away from one house to follow Jesus, you’ll get a hundred houses.  Like Job, you’ll be rewarded for your deprivation in spades.

Jesus exaggerated sometimes – it was how people in his culture pressed home a point – so I don’t think we need to take that “hundredfold” literally.  But he’s certainly saying that if his disciples leave stuff behind to follow him, they’ll get a lot more down the road.

They will?  The disciples get new, improved houses? Where does that happen, exactly?

And then I remember.  It happens after Pentecost, in the idyllic first days of the early church, described in the Book of Acts.  “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.”  In this model, selling your stuff doesn’t mean that you have nothing.  It means that everyone has enough.  It’s like the feeding of the five thousand, where a few fish and some bits of bread turned into enough food to fill all those stomachs. Many scholars think there was nothing supernatural happening there:  it was a simple matter of the people in the crowd, including mothers who’d brought snacks for their children, pooling their resources so everyone would have enough to eat.

Jesus is telling us that to enter the kingdom of God, we have to share.   We have to believe that if we give what we have to the poor, even if we become poor as a result, someone will give us what we need in return.

Sharing this way requires radical trust, both in God’s generosity and in the generosity of other people.  “It doesn’t work that way,” we think. “I’ll sell all my stuff and I’ll be poor and no one will give me anything.  And anyway, I don’t want to sell my stuff.  It’s mine.  I’ve spent a long time collecting it, and it’s valuable to me.” The young man who questions Jesus at the beginning of this morning’s Gospel has exactly this reaction: “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”

As Gary will tell you, I too have many possessions -- too many possessions.  I’m not good at giving them away.  I can’t even bring myself to have a garage sale.  I believe I’m still merely at packrat level, but all of us have heard stories about people who are possessed by their possessions.  All of us have heard of hoarders.

Hoarding – the compulsion to keep acquiring things you don’t need and have no room for – is a recognized mental illness.  It’s not about greed: it’s about fear.  Fear of scarcity, fear that there won’t be enough, fear that you aren’t enough.  Hoarders can’t get out from under their stuff.  Often they can’t care for themselves.  Sometimes they literally can’t get out of their houses.  This means that all their gifts remain hidden.  They are hoarding, not just magazines or radios or pets, but themselves.  They are both the hoarders and the hoarded, imprisoned by what they own, locked away from light and love and joy, from caring neighbors and from God’s good creation.

What might it feel like, to get out of a prison like that?  What might it look like?  Well, it might look something like this.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus came “that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”  The ducks in this clip, released from prison, have overcome their fear of the new and their distrust of the unknown.  They’ve discovered abundant life “now in this age,” and so can we.  The first step, Jesus tells us, is to walk away from our stuff, even if we have to take baby steps.  The first step is to get out of the house.

Amen.

Food for the Journey

Here's today's homily.   I went with the alternate reading of 1 Kings 19:4-8 because I didn't have the courage to tackle "Absalom, Absalom!"  The Gospel is John 6:35, 41-51.

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Most of you know that I’m an English professor.  At least once a semester, usually around midterms or finals, a student comes to my office in panic and pours out a tale of woe.  Everything is due right now in every class, and the student also has a job and family crises and had the flu last week and just can’t keep juggling everything and doesn’t know what to do –

By now, the student’s usually sobbing on my tiny couch.  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” he or she will say, sniffling, as I hand over a box of tissues.  “I’m not usually such a mess.”

I give these students academic guidance, and I’ve been known to walk them over to UNR’s free Counseling Center.  But that’s not the first thing I do.  The first thing I do – something I’ve learned over many years of dealing with these situations – is to ask the student, “When’s the last time you ate something?”

And the student, who’s usually sitting on my tiny couch at about three or four in the afternoon, inevitably sniffles and says, “Yesterday, I think. Why?”

At that point, I reach into my desk and hand the student a power bar, a box of which I keep handy for just such occasions.  “You need to eat,” I say.  “You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.  This will all seem much more manageable when you have fuel in your system.”

As far as I know, none of my students have been prophets, and I’m certainly no angel.  Nonetheless, Elijah would recognize this scenario.  “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”   Elijah, fleeing Ahab and Jezebel’s death threats, was having an even worse day than my students usually are.   After hours of wandering in the wilderness, he was so exhausted and discouraged that he asked God to let him die.   Bone-tired, frightened and depleted, he couldn’t imagine how to continue.

Elijah’s despair certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of faith.  Two chapters before this reading, he called on God to restore a widow’s dead son, and lo, the child lived.  Note that in our lesson this morning, he again calls on God, shaping his desire to die as a prayer.  “O Lord, take away my life.”  The Lord doesn’t do that.  The Lord gives him bread and water instead.  This famous prophet has already seen and performed miracles, and will go on to see and perform many more.  He’s going to hear the still small voice of God a mere six verses from now, and he’ll conclude his career by ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire.  Right now, though, he has a serious case of low blood sugar.  He can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

Elijah reminds us that the physical and the spiritual can’t be separated.  Ours is an incarnational and sacramental faith: God has given us marvelous, intricate bodies, and has placed us in a marvelous, intricate creation that nurtures and sustains us.  If having a body is hard – we suffer from hunger and thirst, illness and injury – it is also a source of wonder.   Miracles needn’t take the form of angels or chariots of fire.  Miracles are within us and all around us: stars and stones, trees and grass, birds and beasts.  The seemingly ordinary is also always divine.  This is why Jesus came to us in a human body, and why the eucharistic feast is simple bread and wine.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ neighbors haven’t figured this out yet.  They don’t understand how this kid they watched grow up – the boy whose parents they know, whose games and pranks and skinned knees they witnessed throughout his childhood – can also be the bread of life that came down from heaven.   They labor under the misconception, still common in our own day, that holy things have to be rarified, otherworldly, set apart:  that miracles have to take the form of angels and chariots of fire, 3D special effects straight out of some CGI blockbuster.

And, in truth, Jesus does sound a little otherworldly in this passage from John.  “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  That all sounds more than a bit mystical and off-putting, and I think the neighbors can be forgiven for being confused.

Jesus’ life on earth, though, very much depends on ordinary, prosaic bread.  Throughout the Gospels, he’s obsessed with food.  After he raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he commands her parents to give her something to eat.  He scandalizes the Pharisees by sharing meals with people who haven’t washed their hands.  One of his last acts on earth is to feed his disciples:  even Judas, the one he knows is about to betray him.   In one post-resurrection story, he asks what’s for breakfast; in another, he fries up some fish for the disciples on the beach.   He feeds us, now, whenever we take communion.  Jesus wants us to work to heal the world, but first, he wants us to have food for the journey.  He knows we can’t think straight on empty stomachs.

But he never force feeds us.  The feast depends on our consent and participation.  Elijah has to reach out to take the food the angel brings him, just as my weeping students need to agree to eat their power bars (and not all of them do).   The elements of the Eucharist represent not only God’s good creation, the grain and grapes that nourish us, but human stewardship in tending them and human skill in turning them into bread and wine.   God gives us what we need to live, but like any good parent, he knows that we must ultimately learn to feed both ourselves and others.  We have to learn to cook our own food, to share it, and to clean up the kitchen afterwards.

Even when we have done this, most of us will hit low points, moments when we feel too discouraged to continue.  Sometimes our despair literally takes the form of praying to die.  At such times, it’s crucial to remember that bread and water almost always help; low blood sugar and dehydration only make things worse.   But it’s also important to look elsewhere in the creation for sustenance, to remember that simple physical things can offer spiritual nourishment.

Years ago, during one of my volunteer-chaplain shifts in the ER, an ambulance brought in a suicidal patient.  He lay in a fetal position, unmoving and unspeaking, as the paramedics rolled him into a room.  Later I learned that he’d had no food or water for three days before, finally, summoning the strength and courage to call 911, to ask for help.

The ER staff started a saline drip to rehydrate him, and gave him a meal.  When I went in to talk to him, he was slowly munching a sandwich which, blessedly, had simply appeared without his having to prepare it.  In severe depression, even making a sandwich can seem overwhelmingly difficult, and a hospital food tray can be a miracle.

He poured out a long tale of woe: mental illness, job difficulties, abandonment by family and friends.  This had all been going on for many years.  “So what’s kept you going through all that?” I asked him.  “What makes you happy?”

“Nature,” he said.   He told me about camping at a lake in the mountains.  He told me about a waterbird he liked to watch there, about its antics and feeding patterns.  His descriptions were very precise, and as he told me about the bird, his face brightened.  He sat up on the edge of his bed, put down his sandwich, and whistled the bird’s courting call while he used his hands to imitate its mating dance.  And then the man who had wanted to die laughed for pure joy.

I know the saline drip and sandwich were food for his journey, but I believe his memory of the birds was, too.  I pray that after he left the hospital, he went back to the lake to see those birds again, and I pray that as he listened to their calls, he also heard the still small voice of God.

Amen.

Everything's Better with Lambs

My weaving and spinning guild meets once a month, in various locations.  Today we met at a farm north of Reno, just over the California line, where a woman named Doris raises sheep.  She had a twenty-one-baby lambing season this year, and had promised that we’d be able to bottlefeed lambs if we wanted to. (Note: click on any picture for a larger image.)

My friend Sheila picked me up in her Prius and we set out; the farm’s a little remote, on a dirt road with tricky directions, so she was glad to have a navigator and I was glad to have a ride.  She’d picked up a bag of gluten-free bread mix for me, which was very thoughtful and much appreciated.  As we jounced over one of the dirt roads to Doris’ farm, we stopped to admire a goat.  There were other goats: in fact, there were many baby goats, who hop and skip just like those adorable videos you always see of baby goats.  I’m sorry I got no pictures of them; a dog was herding them and drove them away from the road and our car, which was a sensible, protective kind of thing to do.

After several more – and progressively rougher – dirt roads, we got to Doris’ farm and saw our first lambs, who were indeed adorable.  The babies came in various sizes and colors; some were in fenced fields with their mamas, but the bottle babies were in a barn. The adult sheep wore canvas coats.  We thought maybe they’d been recently sheared and this was to protect them from sunburn, but Doris explained that it’s to keep their wool clean.  They wear the coats all the time, and as their wool grows, Doris has to take off the smaller coats and put on larger ones.  Each sheep has four coats.

I didn’t get a picture of the grown-up sheep in their coats because I was so focused on the lambs.  I loved the lambs.  Of course I saw lambs in petting zoos when I was a kid, and probably even bottlefed a few, but I don’t remember being this enchanted with them.  I wanted to take them home.

The littlest lamb came when we called her and tried to nurse on our fingers.  During the guild meeting – held outside, in a circle, as people knitted or spun – I sat close to the barn door, and whenever the littlest lamb came to the barn fence and baaaaed, I got up and gave her a bottle (Doris had left several in the barn).

Sometimes when I came into the barn she’d just look up at me, with an expression that said “Feed me!” but would refuse both the bottle and stroking.  She was testing me, I guess.

Sheila and I both especially admired the black sheep and lambs, many of whom had white blazes on their foreheads and were even cuter than the white ones.  This lamb was a bit pushy, as you can see, and as befits the reputation of black sheep.

It was really hot outside, so Sheila and I each took a few minutes’ refuge in Doris’ wonderful weaving studio, which I wanted to take home with me (with several lambs inside), and which Sheila called a “womancave.”  Sheila did take home the guild’s seven-foot triloom.  She’s going to use it to weave a shawl and then lend it to me so I can weave a shawl. This will be much easier than weaving smaller triangles and trying to sew them together in any attractive fashion, a task which has proven beyond me.

It was a lovely morning, although all that outside time has kicked my allergies into overdrive, and I’m very sleepy and sneezy.  Completely worth it, though.  If you ever get the chance to bottlefeed a lamb, do.

And my, didn’t the cats think I smelled interesting when I got home!

Occupy the Kingdom of Heaven

Here's tomorrow's homily, a juggling act if ever there were one. You can read the pesky Parable of the Wedding Banquet here.

I'll be preaching at three services, and the last one will include the Blessing of the Animals, right in the middle of the service. We'll see if the barking dogs and wailing cats drown me out! As always, I'll bring photos of our three, but won't subject them to the alarm and indignity of being stuffed into their carriers and driven to a Place With Dogs.

*

Today we observe the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Born in 1181, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Francis spent his early years partying with rich friends. He was a rising merchant himself, but after a religious conversion in his mid-twenties, he put aside his costly clothing to wear beggar’s rags. Determined to imitate Christ’s life by doing Christ’s work, Francis founded an order devoted to poverty. He turned from the riches of the marketplace to the splendors of the natural world, calling all creatures his brothers and sisters. He is the patron saint of the poor, of merchants – those two sound like a contradiction, until you know his story – of ecology, and of animals. At the 5:00 service today, we will bless companion animals in his name.

Today we observe the Feast of St. Francis. Today we are also called to ponder the Parable of the Wedding Feast, which contains its own contradictions. Who wouldn’t want to attend such a fabulous party? And why, after being dragged in off the street at the last minute, is one of the guests thrown out again for not wearing party apparel? That detail’s especially startling against the background of Francis pulling off his stylish threads to wear a hair shirt. Isn’t casual Friday what Christ would want? Since when does God have a dress code?

The parable offers some clues about why the people on the first guest list don’t show. “They made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business.” These guests have no time for a party; they have to work. The farmer grows his own food. He doesn’t need anybody else’s banquet. Another needs to tend to his business to make money. No handouts for these two, nosirree. They’ll put their own food on their own tables all by themselves.

In his homily last week, Father Kirk talked about how difficult it can be for us to recognize grace, the unearned gifts we receive from God. The parable of the wedding banquet is a prime example. When the invited guests reject God’s grace and send regrets, the banquet’s thrown open to everybody. But we still have to wonder what’s up with the dress code.

Nine years ago, I heard a very fine preacher explain that the wedding robe is metaphorical. The guest didn’t bring his best, most joyous self to God’s banquet. Whatever his body wore, his soul wasn’t clothed in its brightest garments. That’s a good answer, but it didn’t completely satisfy me. Nine years later, preparing to preach today, I found the tensions between wealth and poverty in Francis’ life starkly mirrored in the news. Exploring those parallels, I found another possible answer to that nagging question about the banquet.

However you feel about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the grassroots protest that has now spread across the country, no one can deny that issues of poverty and privilege are at its heart. The protest is driven by rage at economic injustice, at the growing chasm between rich and poor. Reading about it reminds me not only of Francis’ call to voluntary poverty, but of Jesus’ challenges to the wealthy and powerful of his own day. But the rhetoric on both sides is filled with anger, ugly us/them divisions. Where is the love Jesus insisted on? Watching this hurts.

And then, a few days ago, I found a blog maintained by a group of Boston-based Christians, many affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who call themselves Protest Chaplains. One of them, Kevin Vetiac, writes about marching down Wall Street: “We were there to be a specifically Christian witness against corporate greed and excess and the exploitation of the poor.” Protest Chaplain Marisa Egerstrom, writing on the CNN blog, describes the community created by the protesters. “Trained medics volunteer their skills to treat injuries and illness. The food station is ‘loaves and fishes’ in action: There is always more than enough to eat, and homeless folks eat side by side with lawyers and students off of donated plates.” Protest Chaplain Dave Woessner, describing Occupy Boston as “real community,” lists free food, free medical care, and “the ‘really really free market’ of clothes and supplies.”

Always more than enough to eat? That sounds like a banquet to me. These descriptions also sound like the early church in the Book of Acts: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” And when I read about the “really really free market” of clothes, the wedding robe in today’s Gospel suddenly came into new focus.

The king in the parable sends his slaves out into the streets to gather anyone they can find. What if those streets are occupied by a real community, with a really really free market of clothing? What if anyone can have a wedding robe, just for the asking, and this unnamed guest has refused to ask: out of pride, out of sloth, out of shame at accepting the generosity of others? What if he won’t take anything he hasn’t earned or paid for? What if he refuses grace? If he can’t accept a free robe, how joyously can he accept the king’s hospitality, all that free food?

This is a partial answer too. Jesus told parables to make us ask questions, to make us think. When this reading comes around in another three years, our answers will look different, because we’ll be living in different circumstances.

There is no doubt, though, that Jesus wants us to occupy the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now. This isn’t the afterlife; it’s the reign of God here on earth. Jesus says it is within us and all around us. The keys to its gates are love of neighbors, forgiveness of enemies, and renunciation of wealth and power. Sometimes we catch glimpses of the Kingdom even in the midst of chaos and violence.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has produced disturbing reports of police brutality. They’re among the grimmest of the us/them stories coming out of the demonstrations. But Protest Chaplain Julia Capurso writes in delight about a police officer who, instead of beating or macing the sidewalk protesters, coached them instead: “You need practice! Stand together so you’ll look stronger! Keep your feet moving!” This officer proves that us/them divisions can be overcome, that those in power can reach over social barriers to offer aid and encouragement.

Here’s another story about power, poverty, and feasting. It happened right here in Reno, and it includes St. Francis’ beloved animals. During one of my volunteer shifts at the hospital, a nurse told me about a homeless patient who’d come to the ER. Waiting for some tests, the patient worried about his pets. “I had to leave them outside, with my shopping cart,” he said.

The nurse went outside, and found a shopping cart loaded with the patient’s possessions, including two clean, spacious pet carriers. In one, a calm, healthy cat was eating a piece of boneless chicken breast. In the other, a calm, healthy guinea pig was nibbling on a piece of biscotti. The nurse went back inside and told the patient, “Your pets are fine. Don’t worry.”

But a passerby saw the animals and called Animal Control. The patient was terrified that his beloved pets would be taken away. But after the Animal Control officer had looked at the cat and the guinea pig, he came back inside to talk to the patient. “Your pets look fine, sir, and I can tell you’re taking good care of them. But, you know, it’s dangerous for them out there, because someone could steal them or hurt them. So here’s my card. The next time you have to come to the ER, please call me, and I’ll come watch your animals to make sure they’re safe.”

Instead of abusing his power, the Animal Control officer used it to love a poor neighbor. I think both Francis and Jesus would approve. I think the Protest Chaplains would, too.

Amen.

Caprica Climbing the Drying Rack

This is on Facebook, but I couldn't resist posting it here, too. Isn't she adorable?

Lotsa Stuff

Hi, everybody! Sorry not to have posted in a few days; I'm spending a lot of time over at FB these days. It really is a fun way to keep in touch with people.

A few items of note:

* For those of you in Reno: On Saturday August 13 at 2:30, I'll be giving a talk and reading at the Nevada Historical Society. This is part of a Worldcon promotion. The curator says that after my talk, "we will show the bad sci-fi movie 'Godmonster of Indian Flats' for Nevada-themed sci-fi." Mark your calendars! Bring popcorn!

* I now have 71,000 words of the rough draft, with completion of same estimated around August 10.

* I love weaving on my new Cricket loom and can't wait to try different techniques. My first scarf was short and ugly; the second, currently in progress, is longer and less ugly.

* It's really wonderful to be going into August without having to worry about prepping fall classes. I needed this sabbatical!

* Caprica is well; she goes to the vet for her FIV/FLV tests tomorrow, and, we hope, will be "released to GenPop," as Gary puts it, soon thereafter.

* Last night we watched a TV special about the Serengeti. As a baby elephant and mom traipsed across the screen, James Earl Jones praised the devotion of elephants and said, "The bond between mother and daughter can last fifty years." My first thought was, "Lucky elephant. I only had my mother for forty-nine." I'm doing better, but still miss her.

* There was a wildfire across the street two nights ago, about half a mile away. We watched it from Gary's study; when someone started pounding on our front door, I thought maybe we were being evacuated, but no, it was two friends who'd come over to watch the fire. Summer sport in Reno! (Cars lined the street, too.) Luckily, they got it under control quickly, and there was never any threat to structures.

I think that's about it. Hope you're all well!

Kneady Paws

Got Things to Say!

The Cat We Said We Wouldn't Get

Remember my noble resolve not to get another cat until after my sabbatical, when I'd be better able to handle vet bills on a restored salary? That lasted all of twenty-six days.

Today the Nevada Humane Society sent out an urgent appeal via Facebook for people to adopt pets: they're swamped with dogs and cats, and were offering reduced adoption fees: $5 for an adult cat and $30 for a kitten. And they were making dire noises about how animals would have to be euthanized if they didn't find homes. So, sucker that I am, I asked Gary if we could adopt a kitten now; sucker that he is, he agreed.

There were a lot of people there, adopting, which was heartening, because I've never seen so many animals in the building. The appeal had said they had "hundreds" of cats, and they weren't kidding: cat-cages three-deep, housing several cats and kittens each, lined the walls of each room and hallway, and that's outside the normal cat rooms. (There were also quite a few rabbits and other small mammals. We didn't even go into the dog kennels, but I'm sure they were similarly crowded.)

We walked around for a while, checking out the kittens. All of them were adorable, but we wanted a female, so that narrowed it down. (When we got Bali, we thought he was a female, until the fateful surgery, and by then we weren't about to return him.) We also wanted a cat we'd be able to tell easily from the other two; there were a lot of gorgeous all-black kitties, but we already have Bali, and we saw several very pretty kitties who were the spitting image of Figaro.

We also had fairly exacting age requirements: young enough to be accepted easily by the two grown cats, but not so young that early weaning would cause behavior problems. A lot of Bali's weirdnesses can be traced, we think, to his not getting enough time with his mom. I fell in love with a very spunky black-and-white kitten, but she was only four weeks old, and Gary said, "Nope. I don't want to go through that again." And there were other black and white females, but I thought it would be better to have a cat who didn't remind me of Harley.

I thought an orange cat would be nice; I've never had one, and there were lots of cute orange kittens. The problem was that they all seemed to be boys. "Why not ask if they have any females?" Gary said.

So I did, and a friendly staffer checked on the computer, and sure enough, back in one of the cat rooms, there was a four-month-old female who'd just been brought in today (after being spayed at Animal Control next door). The staffer took us to visit, and we fell in love with her, and because she's just at the cusp of when they define cats as adults -- although technically, they're kittens for the first year -- we only had to pay five dollars to adopt her. He told us that orange females are unusual, so that was another plus.

We named her Caprica. (BSG fans out there will recognize "Caprica Kitty" as a pun on "Caprica City.") She has incredibly soft fur and lovely spots; we think maybe there's some Bengal in there. Her purr fills the room. She's litter trained. She's curious and friendly, and has already given me head bumps. We think she must have had previous owners and gotten out or been abandoned; she's clearly been well cared for.

We're keeping her in isolation for a week or two, as we do with all new cats. She needs time to heal from her surgery, and we need to get her tested for FIV/FLV -- which NV Humane Society doesn't do, because it's too expensive, although she's had all her other shots -- and keeping her apart from the other cats will give everyone time to calm down and get used to the idea of being roommates. Right now, Bali's an even needier wreck than usual (he had fits the minute Gary got the carrying case out of the garage, even though it wasn't for him), and Figaro and Caprica are facing off on their respective sides of my study door, trying to suss each other out.

See? Facebook's useful after all! Also a lot of fun; I'm really enjoying it.

So now we're up to our full three-cat complement again. I thought that was the limit for cat ownership in the county, but the NHS staffer said no, the limit's seven. "You shouldn't have told her that," Gary said. Hmmmmmmm . . . .

My Very Own Zoo

Because our weather's been so nice, I've been spending hours every day sitting in the shade on our deck, writing and weaving and knitting. This is more deck time than I've done before, and it's made me very attuned to the wildlife in our yard.

We have finches and quail, of course, as always, and this time of year, we have quail chicks, who are very cute. We have doves. At one point we had quite a lot of pretty yellow butterflies, although I haven't seen any for a few days. We have rabbits: evidently there's a warren in one corner of our large and messy backyard, and last week I saw either three bunnies or one bunny three times. My gardener friends would consider this a catastrophe, but I don't garden and I love rabbits, and I'm happy that they love our messy yard.

On Sunday, a friend and former student -- a student from my very first semester at UNR, in fact -- stopped by with her little boy, who's fourteen months old and very cute. They were down for the weekend from Portland, where she and her husband live now, so I hadn't met the baby before. While the rest of us ate Gary's homemade scones and fruit salad, Will conducted experiments with gravity and grapes, and had a fine time.

At one point, his mother glanced up at the ugly power lines running along our yard and said, "Hey, look, a hawk." Sure enough, a red-tailed hawk was perched on the power pole, being harassed by a much smaller bird who did pendulum passes past the hawk.

"The hawk has a bunch of feathers in its mouth," said Pam, who has much better eyes than I do.

"I bet it ate a baby bird and the mother's trying to drive the hawk away from the nest," I said.

"Who knew that our backyard was a nature special?" said Gary.

Our yard is notably unlovely, dirt and weeds, although there are a few clumps of pretty flowering peavine. We're on a third of an acre, and a fair amount of that is a Sierra Pacific easement -- remember the power lines? -- so between the prohibitive cost of landscaping and the fact that the power company has the right to come in and tear up anything we put in, we've left it alone. The patches of weeds spread out every year, and I'm enjoying the process of watching the yard turn into a meadow. I suspect this is also why critters like our yard.

Before too long, though, most of the weeds will be gone. We're getting into fire season -- there have already been wildfires near here -- and every year when the weeds start to dry out, Gary tears them up to reduce the amount of flammable material and create a defensible zone around the house. (To our relief and pleasure, the current weeds don't seem to be cheatgrass, an invasive species that's extremely flammable, and that we battled for quite a few years.)

I'm grateful for Gary's hard work tearing up the weeds, but I'll miss our meadow, and I hope the bunnies will still like it here when the cover's gone.

Wild Horses Framed by Train Window

Wild Horses from Window of V&T Train

Well, Nertz

Tonight I took a cute video of Bali playing with a toy; I was going to post it, but the "add video" button doesn't seem to exist on the post editor anymore. I did a bit of research and discovered that I'd have to switch back to the old editor to post videos, but I'm not sure how to do that, so at the moment, you'll just have to imagine a fluffy black cat romping around chasing a small green pom-pom. It's adorable, honest.

Our Fourth was very quiet, which is how we like it. I'm not a big fan of explosions or Festivals of Drunken Driving (yeah, I know, some people are just no fun), so we stayed home and watched a few episodes of True Blood. I loved the first two seasons of this show, but two-thirds of the way through the third, I'm seriously annoyed with it.

For one thing, it's turned into one of those shows where hardly anyone isn't some sort of supernatural beastie. As I often tell my writing students, just sticking a label of "vampire," "werewolf" or "fairy" on someone doesn't automatically make that character interesting. One of my classroom mantras is, "If you can't write an interesting story about a mailman, you won't be able to write an interesting story about an elf, either." Having Sookie turn out to be a fairy who flits around in a white dress through a sparkling meadow with other fairies waving flowers -- talk about kitsch! -- makes her character less interesting, not more, at least for me. (I haven't read the novels on which the series is based, but I believe this is Charlaine Harris' doing, not Alan Ball's.)

And anyway -- as I'm also constantly reminding my students -- having too many vampires in town just doesn't work. Vampires are major predators. They need food. If their prey don't outnumber them by a fairly substantial order of magnitude, a lot of them are going to have to move on. In fact, I'm slightly suspect of highly organized vampire societies: seems to me much more likely, given the population biology of the situation, that they'd hunt on their own and spread themselves out very widely.

Then we have the infamous vampire-versus-werewolf feud, which has become such an old story that I yawn every time I see it. Then we have the really excessive amounts of gore, which has lost whatever shock value or interest it once had. Then we have the fact that every supernatural beastie on the planet seems to have settled in Bon Temps, and don't local law agencies suspect anything? Buffy at least explained this with the Hellmouth trope, and even had characters fantasizing about moving to non-Hellmouth locations (and, in some cases, actually doing it, as when Buffy moves away from Sunnydale at the end of Season Two).

To be fair, Being Human has a lot of these same problems too, but I think that series acknowledges them more honestly (and I find the characters more interesting). Right now, the True Blood characters I'm most interested in are Tara and Lafayette, who are still human (as far as I know) and dealing with interesting conflicts. The Tara/Franklin subplot this season was worth the price of admission, even if it was just a tiny bit reminiscent of Spike and the Buffybot. The most appealing supernatural at the moment is Jessica, who's trying to figure out how to get along with a human, fang-phobic coworker, instead of getting caught up in succession struggles and internecine bickering and Ye Old Nazi Werewolf Conspiracy Plots.

Nazi werewolves? Please! Has anyone else noticed that writers who don't know what else to do invoke the Third Reich? This really bothers me. For one thing, it's lazy writing. For another, it ultimately trivializes the subject, which I -- for one -- find problematic.

Okay, I'm done venting now. I still think Alan Ball is a genius, but at this point, I'm basing that on American Beauty and Six Feet Under, not on True Blood.

Yarn on the Hoof

Driving to church today -- a route that takes me through a flat, ugly part of town, with lots of dismal strip malls -- I happened to glance to my left and saw, standing at a fence . . . two llamas! I goggled at them for a minute, thinking maybe they were huge, misshapen dogs, but quickly realized my error. I think maybe they'd been sheared recently; one reason they looked so weird is that large swathes of hair were missing.

I wonder if somebody around here is making llama yarn. Although, given the recent heat, they might have needed a shave to cool off, poor things. Anyway, they were grazing in a nice little enclosed meadow which, when I scrutinized the area as closely as I could on my drive-by, included some barn-looking outbuildings. I've never noticed this before. A lot of Reno used to be farm or ranchland, and there are still pockets of grazing land where you least expect them: a herd of cows munching away next to a bottling plant or self-storage place, say.

On my way back from church, I drove by the meadow again to see if I could get a photo of the llamas (llami?), but I didn't see them. I'll keep looking.

I turned the heel on my mother-in-law's first sock today. I'm afraid I may have made it a smidgen too long, and the thing looks huge anyway because it's made from relatively inelastic yarn, but I've learned that socks that look too big often fit fine. I hope to have them finished and mailed off to her by the time I leave for Albuquerque in twelve days.

The socks have created a delay in the scarf-weaving project. However, last night I had an epiphany and realized that instead of using thirty different bobbins for the warp (talk about a headache!), I can use a smaller notched piece of cardboard as a roller for all thirty warp threads at once. If that works, it will greatly simplify things. The moderator of the small-looms group on Ravelry thinks it should work, so that's heartening.

I'm still toiling away on the book, of course. For some reason, my left hip's been killing me for the last two days -- usually my right one's the culprit -- and I think that too much sitting time may be part of the problem, so I'm trying to get up and move around (limping like Quasimodo) at least every half hour. Swimming and using the elliptical has helped somewhat. I've also temporarily traded in my backpack for an extremely tiny pouch purse to lighten my load. I have to lug a fairly heavy backpack around when I go to Albuquerque (which I'm determined to do without checking, and paying for, luggage), so I want all the muscles rested and healed before then. I'll also have a rolling bag, of course, but I can't fit everything in there, and the backpack's the next best thing, as long as I'm walking okay.

Ah, aging. Remember when you bounded out of bed in the morning with no thought as to whether your joints would behave themselves? I'm infinitely happier now than I was in my twenties, but I could still do without the achy-creakies.

Church Knitting Group

After trying, without success, to find a night when more than two or three people were available, I finally just decided to have the first meeting tonight. My only firm RSVP was from our Senior Warden, and I knew she'd have a key to the church, so I didn't worry about whether I needed one too.

In retrospect, that was a mistake. She was late, and the church was locked tight, except for one door in the back -- the entrance to a women's AA meeting, it turned out -- which I never would have found if a kind AA member hadn't led me there. So I managed to get into the building and unlocked the front door, and then the Senior Warden showed up. Classic!

There were only three of us. I'd brought extra yarn and needles and various books, including Knitting for Peace, which I bought today just for this purpose. Two of us had brought food, so we served ourselves and started eating, and then it occurred to me to offer a prayer, which the others seemed to appreciate.

I asked if they were interested in charity knitting, or knitting as spiritual practice, or both, or something else; the Senior Warden said cheerfully, "Oh, it's summer. Let's just knit."

So we knitted. Actually, I knitted, and the Senior Warden went back and forth between knitting and crocheting, trying to find a pattern she liked, and our third member read a crochet book and finally crocheted a little bit, and we chatted about nothing in particular -- although there was a long string of cat stories (the Senior Warden was sad because a beloved elderly cat had to be euthanized last week) -- and all in all, it was mellow and pleasant.

We're going to do it again next week. I hope more people come. And I hope to have a key by then. If we keep meeting regularly, a direction will emerge. Or not. Whatever happens, I'll know some people at church better.

Mr. Eyes

Relaxation

Be Very Afraid

After I got home from the hospital today, I took a nap. I woke up with a weight on my chest to find this looking down at me.

Aieeee!

Translation: "Supid human. Why aren't you upright and feeding moi?"