Separation Anxiety

My mother cuddling me and kittens when I was six or seven.

The gospel for this homily is John 14:1-14. I chickened out and ignored the other readings; I'm sure someone's pulled off the task of squaring Mother's Day with the stoning of St. Stephen, but I wasn't up to it. *

Good morning, and happy Mother’s Day. If you’re someone who likes Mother’s Day, I wish you every joy of the occasion. But I want to begin by acknowledging that for many people, today is difficult. If you miss your mother, miss your kids, are estranged from your mother or your kids, never had the mother or kids you wanted, or are under pressure to be somebody else’s idea of a perfect mother or kid, the holiday can feel more like torture than celebration. Today’s Gospel offers good news to anyone in that position -- and to anyone else feeling alienated or grief-stricken -- but before we get there, I need to talk a little bit about my own mother.

I was one of the lucky kids; my mother and I were very close. But as many of you know, because I’ve told the story here before, she was alcoholic, and her illness shaped my early life. When I was a baby, she spent a lot of time in hospitals. By the time she got sober in AA, when I was three and a half, my father had decided to divorce her. Dad, in consultation with Mom’s doctors, very wisely decided that in order to be awarded custody of me and my older sister, she had to meet three conditions. She had to stay sober for eighteen months; she had to have her own place to live, and she had to have a job. She had to prepare a place for us. In the meantime, we would live with him.

It was a kind and responsible decision, the best thing for all of us. Dad loved us and took good care of us, but I was too young to understand why the separation was necessary. The only thing I wanted in the world was my mother. We visited her on weekends in her new apartment, and I always demanded, “Can I stay with you now?” Every Sunday evening when she drove us back to Dad’s house, I cried the whole way there. Many years later she told me that she cried the whole way back. When the eighteen months were up and my sister and I finally went to live with her again, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. If I couldn’t see her, I panicked. I was terrified that she’d die, or go away, and leave me.

In this morning’s Gospel, the disciples remind me a little of myself back then. Jesus, whom the disciples love, has to leave them. The Ascension is coming.  He tells them that he is preparing a place for them, but they panic. They don’t want to let him out of their sight. “What do you mean we know the way?” they demand. “How can we, when we’ve never been there? How can we follow you if we don’t know where we’re going?”

Jesus responds with some of the most famous words in Scripture. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”  

The disciples don’t understand this, either.  “What?  What are you talking about, Jesus?  When have we seen the Father?  Show us!”

I sympathize with them. The Gospel of John is my least favorite of the four, because it so often features Jesus making cryptic, long-winded pronouncements instead of telling stories or healing people. If I’d been with the disciples, I probably wouldn’t have known what Jesus was talking about, either.

With the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight, more repetitions of the baptismal covenant than I can count, and a number of church classes, I think maybe I do. I think Jesus is telling us that when we’re in his presence, we are in the presence of God the father. Meanwhile, our baptismal covenant charges us to “seek and serve Christ in all people,” which means that when we’re with anyone else, we’re also with Jesus, which means -- according to Jesus -- that we’re also with God. QED. If we’re with Jesus, we’re on the right path. The philosopher Jean-Paul Satre famously said that hell is other people, but the Gospels remind us that heaven is other people, too. The Kingdom of God is other people. Whether we’re in the here-and-now or the hereafter, we find the divine in our neighbors’ eyes.

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places,” Jesus says. Most of us are more familiar with the older translation, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” I think each of us is a mansion for God, just as our mothers -- good or bad, loving or neglectful, near or distant -- were mansions for us during the nine months before we were born. Each of us has a place in God’s kingdom, both here and in the hereafter, because each of our hearts is one of the dwelling places of God.  

The problem is that while this makes logical sense, it’s too much like a geometry proof, and the beauty of the math sometimes breaks down in practice. The people around us can be irritating, difficult, smelly, needy, and sometimes even dangerous. So can each of us, for that matter. Searching for Christ in our neighbors, or in our own hearts, can feel like looking for a mustard seed in a wheatfield. And the task is often most daunting when we’re gripped by separation anxeity, terrified of abandonment. As a five year old tenaciously glued to my mother’s side, it wasn’t enough for me to hear her patiently telling me, again and again, that she wasn’t going anywhere, that I really did live with her now. Words weren’t enough. I needed to feel her physical presence.  

Gradually, though, I relaxed. I learned to trust the signs that she was with me even when I couldn’t see her: the clothes she laid out every day for me to wear to school; the lunches she packed, often with homebaked cookies; the letters and care packages she sent me when I was in college, and in graduate school, and when I moved across the country to Reno to take a job at UNR.  

I always believed that I would be devastated by her death, and when she died in 2010, I was indeed terribly, deeply sad. That pain, though, was gradually replaced by the recognition that she’s always with me:  in the tangible gifts she gave me, jewelry and furniture and dishes; in my memories of her; in the things I see every day -- cats, birds, cloud formations -- that she would have loved. I can still hear her voice in my head. When I have a problem, I can usually imagine how she’d respond. And as I get older, I have growing faith that I’ll see her again.

This process isn’t that different from what the disciples experienced. Jesus indeed ascended, and they must have grieved, but at Pentecost they received the Holy Spirit. God was still with them. They learned to trust in the signs that announced God’s presence even when they couldn’t see him. Bread. Wine.  Rushing wind. Each other. We still have those signs now. We celebrate them every Sunday at church, in the sacraments, and less formally every other day of the week. God dwells in all of creation, loving and cherishing each of us.

And so, I think, does motherhood, which is one of the faces of God. I was one of the lucky kids. I had my mother for a long time, and I knew she loved me. While I never had children myself, I also never wanted them; I have been content to let others do the difficult work of parenting. I’ve met countless people, though, who are deeply wounded by the death or desertion or cruelty of their mothers or their children, or by inability to conceive children they desperately wanted. None of these issues is simple.  Those pains run deep. But many of my friends who carry such scars have found alternative forms of mothering. They have been nurtured by loving friends, teachers, and chosen family. They have nurtured children they did not bear. They have discovered their own, deeply satisfying ways to embody, and to receive, the love of God, to whom each of us is a cherished child.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus promises us many mansions, if only we can recognize them. I think all of us, if we look, can also find many mothers, both those we’ve had and those we’ve been. On Mother’s Day, I wish all of you the joy of loving and being loved; of cherishing, and being cherished.

Amen.

Ten Years After

The Biloxi Bridge after Katrina

In 2005, my father (83 at the time) was living in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in the Villa Maria Retirement Apartments:  a low-income senior building, a concrete high rise, that was four blocks from the water and one of the tallest things in town. He lived on the top floor, with a panoramic view of the Gulf Coast and its casinos, which often shot off fireworks on Friday nights. Villa Maria was a mile, maybe less, from the U.S. 90 bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs. He adored living there. He’d been even happier living on his sailboat in Biloxi, but health concerns had forced him off the boat and into an apartment. He’d had quadruple bypass in 2001, and in 2005 he often used a wheelchair and was also on a feeding tube -- which he hated; the man loved his food and especially his drink -- because of swallowing problems after a stroke.

I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events leading up to Katrina. We were all concerned about the storm, but Dad’s building wasn’t under mandatory evacuation orders, and he had no plans to leave. I remember at some point hearing that storm damage hadn’t been that bad and being relieved. We weren’t yet worried about not being able to reach Dad; we weren’t surprised phones were down. Then, on Monday morning, my sister called me and said, “Susan, New Orleans is flooding. The levees broke.”

My father was ninety miles from New Orleans, but reports from the Mississippi Gulf Coast were grim, too. That bridge I mentioned?  It’s the one everyone saw on the news, the one reduced to rubble by the storm. What were the odds that Villa Maria, so nearby and with such a high profile, hadn’t also been demolished?  “He has to be dead,” my sister said. “I just hope it was quick.”

We started a frenzied search for information. There was no getting through to anyone in Ocean Springs, but I found an online bulletin board where relatives and friends of people who lived in the Villa Maria were posting queries and sharing whatever they’d heard. No one had heard much.

Then, on Wednesday, a friend of Dad’s drove by the Villa Maria, saw people there, and realized that the building hadn’t been evacuated, as he’d assumed. He raced up to my father’s apartment, handed Dad his cellphone, and said, “Call your daughters. They’re going to be frantic.”

Dad called my sister. She heard his voice and started crying.

To hear him tell it, the storm had been a jolly romp. “They told us to go down to the lobby, so I went down there in my wheelchair with my mattress and my pillow and my Ensure and a bottle of vodka, and I poured Ensure and vodka through my feeding tube, and I was fine!” Whatever gets you through the night, Dad. Remarkably, the Villa Maria had suffered only minor roof damage, perhaps because the strongest winds had flowed around it rather than hitting it head-on. Dad was back in his apartment within a day.

We were very lucky. Millions of other people weren’t.

I flew down to Ocean Springs for Thanksgiving that year. Ocean Springs itself had been largely spared, although all of the beautiful old trees had trash in their topmost branches: clothing, children’s toys, kitchen utensils. Dad and I went for a drive along U.S. 90, the road to New Orleans, taking a long detour around the ruined bridge. Before the storm, the road had been lined with floating casinos on one side and antebellum mansions, surrounded by venerable trees, on the others. All gone. We drove through a moonscape littered with unidentifiable sticks and scraps.  A few staircases rose alone into the air for a few feet. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to tell that the area had ever been populated.

Our drive back to the Villa Maria was very quiet.

Everyone I talked to in Ocean Springs had a Katrina story. Almost everyone knew somebody who had died; many people had harrowing evacuation stories. No one had anything good to say about FEMA. No one had anything bad to say about the National Guard, hailed as heroes and saviors. One woman told me she’d complained to a Guardsman about the Meals Ready to Eat that everyone had been given. “It’s too much food! I can’t eat all that!”

“Ma’am,” the Guardsman said, “MREs are designed for the nutritional needs of soldiers in combat. You’re sitting in your living room reading a book.”

My favorite National Guard story came from Dad’s friend Darlene, who taught art at a local at-risk school where most of the students were black and very poor. The Friday before the storm hit, she’d gotten her classroom ready for the beginning of school the following week. She’d cleaned, put up student artwork from the previous year to inspire her new pupils, and left a to-do list on the corner of her desk. 

School didn’t start the following week. Darlene learned that her school was being used to billet National Guard troops, and assumed that the place would be a shambles. As soon as she could drive safely again, she went to the school and asked if she could visit her classroom. Yes, of course she could.

The room was pristine. The to-do list was still where it had been on her desk, and the Guardsmen had used the blackboard to leave notes for the children, telling them how beautiful their artwork was. I’m not sure if Darlene cried when she told me this story, but I cried when I heard it, and I’m crying now, typing it.  

The Villa Maria instituted a new policy that in the event of a hurricane, all residents would have to evacuate and wouldn’t be able to return to the building until any repairs were completed. Because evacuation wouldn’t have been feasible for him, Dad decided to leave his beloved Gulf Coast. In 2006, he moved to live near my sister in Philadelphia. On his birthday that year, he sent me $300 and asked me to research Katrina charities and send the money to the ones I considered worthiest. In 2008, he moved to Reno to be near me and Gary. He died in 2009. He wasn’t technically one of the displaced because he left shelter that was still habitable, and he didn’t apply for or receive FEMA money, but there’s no doubt that he was part of the larger Katrina diaspora. He was never as happy as he’d been on the Gulf Coast. (After he died, our plans to scatter his ashes in the Gulf were defeated by another disaster, the BP oil spill. I was glad he wasn’t alive to see that; it would have left him sickened and despairing.)

Meanwhile, in 2006, my novel The Necessary Beggar won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and I flew down to New Orleans to accept the award -- one of ten given to adult books with YA crossover appeal -- at the ALA convention. We were the first convention to meet there after Katrina, in the infamous convention center which had gotten so much press, and which was now as bland and antiseptic as most facilities of that sort. On the shuttle ride from the airport, my driver pointed out storm damage, implored us to spend as much money as we could in the city, and thanked us fervently for coming.

Everyone thanked us for coming. Shop windows displayed signs: “We love you ALA.” The city was desperate for business. Many people at the convention took storm tours of the hardest hit parts of the city; I didn’t, because I didn’t think I could bear it, but I wandered through shops, searching for anything I wanted to buy, fighting my guilt when I found only a bracelet, a Katrina memorial t-shirt, and a souvenir voodoo doll for Gary.  

For several years after the storm, I occasionally met Katrina survivors in the ER. One patient told me he was from Biloxi, and we had a long, lively conversation. “Sure I know the Villa Maria! You can see that building for miles. I’m so glad your dad was okay.” Although we’d never met before, and although I’d never actually lived in those communities, it felt like a family reunion. The patient had gone through, was going through, agonies I'd been spared; even so, both of us understood things that other people around us didn't.  

My family was very lucky. My father was in the right place in the right circumstances; even with limited income and mobility, he was less poor and had more options than many of the people (black and terrifyingly poor, left without any money because the storm hit at the end of the month) who died when the New Orleans levees broke. We were grateful for our privileges and enraged on behalf of those who didn’t share them. We mourned those who had died and gave thanks for those who hadn’t.  

I live in the desert, thousands of miles from the Gulf Coast. I know some people might challenge my belief that Katrina is part of my history, too. I’m white and affluent; I wasn’t there; the person I loved who was there made it through largely unscathed. Other people lost and suffered so much more. But I’ll always feel a connection to that terrible time, and I’ll never hear a hurricane forecast without thinking about Katrina.

Unseemly Angels

Here's today's Blue Christmas homily.  The readings are
2 Samuel 7:1-11 and Luke 1:26-38.

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Tonight, the Winter Solstice, is the longest night of the year. Tomorrow, the days will start getting longer again. But many of us have come to church this evening because we’re struggling with our own darkness, with sorrow and loss.
 
If we’re sad, Christmas can feel like nothing but duty. Store displays, advertising and inescapable holiday music insist that we must be happy, surrounded by festive family and friends.  If we’re grieving broken relationships or departed loved ones, the holidays can be a constant reminder of what, and who, we miss. All too often, the people around us don’t want to hear any of this, even if we feel like sharing it. Weeping into the eggnog is unseemly.

When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. It was a magical season, one my parents worked very hard to make both fun and beautiful. But my parents are dead now, and our family Christmas traditions died with them. The season became even darker when my husband’s father died right before Christmas six years ago. These days, I dread the weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Whenever I hear the song, “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” I feel homesick. I can’t go home for the holidays. The home I long for no longer exists.

And so today’s lectionary readings comfort me.  They remind me that God meets us where we are, not where we -- or others – think we should be.  In the passage from 2 Samuel, David frets over the fact that he lives in a nice house while “the ark of God stays in a tent.”  He feels a duty to build a nice house for God, too, until the prophet Nathan passes along God’s message.  “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? . . . the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house.”  God says, in effect,  “It’s not your job to provide for me, David.  I provide for you, as I always have and always will; what’s more, I will provide for your descendants for generations to come.”

The most famous of David’s descendants is Jesus, whose birth we hear announced in today’s Gospel. The angel comes to Mary where she is -- comes to an unmarried young woman in an obscure town in an occupied territory -- and delivers decidedly unseemly news. Although the Christian tradition has always made much of Mary’s obedience, I wonder how much of her meekness is really shock. Her life has been turned upside down. She has just learned that the darkness of her womb houses a completely unexpected, and socially scandalous, miracle.

This story reminds us of the value of darkness. Children grow first in darkness; so do seeds. Life begins in places we cannot see, and bursts into the light only when it is ready. Darkness offers rest and healing and growth, if only we can allow ourselves the time we need for rebirth, and if only we can recognize and welcome the angels who bring us good news.

The angels on greeting cards have never done much for me. The same culture that demands joy during the holidays has turned angels into lovely, fluffy beings, all sequins and glitter.  Even before Christmas became so hard for me, I couldn’t imagine such a creature holding me while I cried.  I’d dribble tears on its pretty white robes.  I couldn’t imagine it visiting my house; its wings would become befouled by dust bunnies and cat hair.

And then ten years ago, visiting my father for Thanksgiving, I found this statue in the gift shop of the George Ohr Museum, a pottery museum in Biloxi, Mississippi.  This angel, wearing a quizzical expression and covered with wounds and bruises, fascinated me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.  He made me think immediately of the angel who wrestled with Jacob in Genesis, and who must have sustained his own scars in the process. I carried him around the store with me for at least half an hour, while a woman who was buying everything else in the shop told me that if I didn’t buy him, she would. I finally handed over my credit card, fretting about how I’d get the angel -- with his fragile, brittle wings -- home safely on the plane.

The shopkeeper had told me that the artist, a woman named Dina O’Sullivan, was Director of Education at the museum.  Back in Dad’s apartment, I found her e-mail address on the museum’s webpage and sent a note asking if there was a story behind the angel’s creation. She wrote back very quickly. She’s Jewish, and to her, this angel symbolizes all the stories of struggle in the Hebrew Bible. My instinct about the Jacob story had been right.

I swaddled the angel in bubble-wrap and cradled it on my lap during the long, bumpy plane ride back to Reno. Then I started doing research. According to one tradition, the angel who wrestled with Jacob was Gabriel, the same angel who appears to Mary in today’s Gospel.  And Gabriel, in many of the sources I read, is called “the angel of incarnation and consolation.”

Incarnation and consolation, mortality and comfort: they’re two sides of the same coin. Incarnation is the miracle of God become naked, vulnerable human flesh, of God growing a body. But bodies are fragile, and need to be healed and comforted. Two thousand years after the first Christmas, we know how the story ends. We know that the God who was born a mortal baby to an outcast mother, the God who heals and comforts us, will be executed as a criminal.  We know that he will be bruised and wounded. We know that this is a story in which God’s love cannot be separated from hard work and pain. The ultimate comfort, Christ’s resurrection, comes only after the embodied agony of Good Friday.  

As I grow older, there are days when I think that resurrection is the only thing that makes incarnation bearable. Our embodiment inevitably subjects us to loss. As Christians, we trust in resurrection, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t grieve and need comfort.  We rejoice whenever a baby is born, but we also know that all babies, as they grow, will meet trouble, will be bruised and wounded. We long to spare those we love from suffering: we try to swaddle them in bubble-wrap and hold them in our laps to protect them from turbulence, and sometimes it works, for a little while. We do everything we can to keep what we love from breaking. But Lent and Good Friday await all of us, as surely as Easter does. Ultimately, we cannot assure safety for those we love. Our only sure promise lies in God, for whom nothing is impossible.

And so we need Gabriel, the angel of incarnation and consolation. He meets us where we are:  he appears in the darkness of our most difficult labors, as we bring forth new life and as we face death.   He’s not afraid to get dirty. He tells us, “Look, I’m scarred too; I’m wounded, too. I’ve struggled all night with fierce adversaries who refused to release me. I’ve sat with women as they labored in childbirth. I am the angel of everything that is bruised and broken but stubbornly survives, and I am here to tell you that for every pain there is also joy, joy at the end of everything, joy and the peace that passes all understanding.  From now on, you will not suffer anything that your Lord has not also suffered.  You are no longer alone, no longer poor and outcast: you are the Lord’s beloved, cherished and whole.”

On this day of darkness, let us trust in the return of light. Let us have faith in the new life that is even now growing where we cannot see it. But even as we trust the future, let us take comfort in the present. Emmanuel has come. God is with us, now and always, meeting us where we are:  in the humble dirt and straw, the dust and tears, of our unseemly lives.  

Amen.

Doors

Here's my homily for tomorrow. The Gospel is the story of Doubting Thomas, John 20:19-31. I used the driving story in another homily, quite a few years ago.  It remains one of the strangest things that's ever happened to me, and no one has ever been able to come up with a strictly rational, Euclidean explanation for it. "Oh, honey, you just didn't know where you were going," my mother said, but I've hardly ever been more acutely aware of where I was going. Gary chalks it up to ESP, but that's not especially rational or Euclidean either.  Of course the story raises more questions than it answers -- if God can reach down to redirect a Honda, why can't God keep a forty-three-year old mother from dying? -- but in my experience, anything resembling a miracle always does.  There's a reason why the definition of theology is "asking questions about God."

*

As I’m sure most of you know, the Episcopal Church uses the Revised Common Lectionary, a set of readings designed, in a three-year cycle, to lead us through the high points of Scripture. On most Sundays, the lessons vary depending on whether we’re in Year A, Year B, or Year C. But some readings remain constant, as unchanging as the sequence of the seasons.  Most of these readings coincide with major events. On Maundy Thursday, we always hear about Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. On Pentecost, we always hear about the rushing winds and tongues of flame. And on the Sunday after Easter, we always hear about Doubting Thomas.

But wait. The Sunday after Easter isn’t a major event. It’s low Sunday. The drama of Holy Week is over; the Lord is risen.  A lot of people, exhausted from the marathon leading up to Easter, don’t even come to church on low Sunday. Why does the Sunday after the resurrection merit its own, unchanging reading? Why do we hear about Doubting Thomas every single year?

I suspect there’s a message here. As surely as Christmas follows Advent, as surely as Easter follows Good Friday, doubt follows resurrection. Even two thousand years ago, no one could quite believe what had happened. At a distance of several millenia, this miracle can all too easily seem like a tall tale. Like Thomas himself, none of us were there the first time the Lord reappeared. Like Thomas, we’re already followers of Jesus, but we still yearn for proof.

Two thousand years after the first Easter, we live in a society obsessed with proof: with scientific evidence, with facts and statistics. A lot of the non-believers I know -- people I love, my friends and family -- approach faith as if it’s a geometry problem. They demand logical proof of God’s existence. They insist that the Christian story is impossible in a  world so full of fear, so wracked with war and wounds. Surely, they say, no loving God would permit such things.

Today’s Gospel story is about fear. Jesus’ followers are so afraid of persecution that they’ve locked themselves indoors. The risen Lord strolls through that locked door, but not as a triumphal figure. He proves himself to Thomas not with a glowing halo, but with his wounds.

People who don’t believe in God often use fear and wounds to prove that God cannot exist. People who do believe in God often find themselves, when they or those they love are wounded and afraid, seeking proof that God really does exist. In this story, God uses fear and wounds as proof that God exists. “Here I am,” Christ says. “I will find you when you are most afraid, in the person of someone who has been deeply hurt.”

Some of you may have seen the recent news story about St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina. The church recently installed a public sculpture of a vagrant sleeping on a bench under a blanket. In this affluent neighborhood, the lifelike statue was alarming enough to prompt a woman driving by to call the police. The vagrant’s hands and face are hidden by the blanket. Only the wounds on his uncovered feet reveal his identity.

The woman who called the cops probably went home and locked her doors. And some local residents find the statue, called “Jesus the Homeless,” demeaning to God. But David Buck, the rector of St. Alban’s, calls the sculpture a wake-up call for his wealthy congregation. Jesus was homeless; Christian faith expresses itself as care for the marginalized. The statue, says Buck, is a good lesson for people used to religious art where Jesus is “enthroned in finery.”

The woman driving past might not have recognized this Jesus, but Thomas did. Do we?

Here is my own story about doubt and fear and wounds. Sixteen years ago -- very early in my conversion, when I still doubted the existence of God -- I dropped my husband off at the dentist for a root canal. Ordinarily, I’d have gone to my office at UNR to work until I had to pick him up, but I’d had an awful week and was in an awful mood. Work was the last place I wanted to be. So instead of driving north on McCarran to get to UNR, I drove south, to Barnes & Noble.

At least, I tried. After a mile or so, I hit a detour that led me into a maze of side streets. I followed the detour until I realized that I wasn’t going south anymore. Mount Rose was no longer on my right. It was on my left, and Peavine was ahead of me. I was going north. So I turned, got the car pointed south again – Mount Rose on my right – and kept driving. A few minutes later, I realized that the mountain had moved. It was again to my left. I was going north.

I did a u-turn. A u-turn meant that I was going in the opposite direction: south. But by the time I got to a set of on-ramps for 395, I’d realized that I was, once again, driving north.

Fine. I’d get on the highway. I’d get on 395 South, and I’d go to Barnes & Noble. Except that somehow, I took the wrong ramp.  I was on 395 North.
 
At that point I took a deep breath and said, to the God I wasn’t at all sure I believed in, “All right!  I’ll go to the office, but I’m not talking to anyone, and I’m not doing any work!”  I want to stress that I was not enjoying this process. I was terrified by my inability to steer my own car. I was terrified by my impression that a giant hand was reaching out of the sky and rerouting my Honda Accord like a child’s matchbox toy. What was going on? Was I losing my mind?

I got to UNR. I stalked into my office. I slammed the door, sat down at my computer, and started playing solitaire. No more than two minutes after I’d gotten there, someone knocked on my door. I ripped it open, ready to scream, “Who are you, and what do you want?”

It was one of my students. He was crying.  His forty-three year old mother had died very unexpectedly the night before, and he needed someone to talk to.

My doubt dissolved that day.

When we’re afraid, we lock ourselves in. But Jesus calls us to open our doors to people who are hurting, who are wounded. That’s how we let God in. And if God, being God, gets in anyway, through all our locks and deadbolts, it’s still important for us to open the door freely. That kind of welcome makes us more like the God we follow: the God who welcomes all, who embraces all, who has promised that anyone who knocks will find the door opened.

I’ve mentioned that many of the people I love are non-believers. Two of those people are my parents. My father, deeply wounded by church when he was a child, spent the rest of his life railing furiously against God. My mother simply dismissed faith as irrelevant and ridiculous. Both of them were utterly baffled -- and, I think, embarrassed -- when I started attending church.

Both lived well into their eighties. The day my father died, in March of 2009, he kept raising his hand and twisting a doorknob, trying to open an invisible door. I thought that was interesting, and I told the story to my mother, who had been divorced from him for many years. She died thirteen months after he did, on April 11, 2010. Easter was the last time she came downstairs to eat dinner with the rest of the family. She died the next Sunday: Doubting Thomas Sunday.

The day before my mother died, she slid in and out of consciousness. But at one point, she lifted her head and stared at a spot in the air in front of her. Then she raised her hand and knocked on a door my sister and I couldn’t see.

What was behind the doors my non-believing parents were so eager to open? I don’t know, and I won’t know until I go through my own. But I believe that they found themselves welcomed into the presence of Christ. I believe that they are now healed and whole, dwelling in the mansions of the loving God who embraces all of us: the fearful and the wounded, those who doubt, and those who do not -- cannot -- believe until at last they meet the risen Lord face to face.

Amen.

Journeys to Resurrection

I delivered this homily as a guest preacher at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Reno.  Lutheran homilies are somewhat longer than Episcopal ones, as you'll see; I recycled two previous sermons I'd given in my home parish.  The family story I tell is one nearly all of my friends already know (and one my mother gave me permission to tell).

Here are the readings for Lent 5; both Episcopal and Lutheran churches use the Revised Common Lectionary.

*

“How could God let this happen?”

We hear this question all the time: after shootings, after tragic car accidents and plane crashes, after typhoons and mudslides and earthquakes. During the seven years I volunteered as a lay hospital chaplain, I heard it often. It is the agonized cry of faith in the face of tragedy, and it’s at the heart of this morning’s Gospel.

The raising of Lazarus is a dress rehearsal for Holy Week.  Eleven verses before the beginning of this passage, the religious establishment of Judea threatens to stone Jesus for blasphemy, for claiming to be God.  After Jesus escapes that threat, he learns that his beloved friend Lazarus is dying. So Jesus — knowing that a return to Judea will seal his death sentence — decides to go back, but only after he’s dawdled a few days, to make sure that Lazarus will be dead before he gets there. An ordinary healing won’t be enough this time. The stakes have been raised; the chips are down. Jesus is about to perform nothing less than a resurrection.

As a dress rehearsal for Holy Week, this story contains many familiar elements: an all-powerful God refusing, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, to prevent the death of a beloved; weeping women; a tomb sealed by a stone; and, finally, the death-shattering miracle of resurrection. The biggest difference is that Lazarus dies of natural causes, not by execution.

Or does he? If Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death and refuses to do so, isn’t it somehow his fault? Mary and Martha think so: both of them say, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Some of the mourners agree: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” How could God let this happen?

Jesus has earlier told his disciples, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” But belief isn’t the main issue here. Mary and Martha, the other mourners, and the disciples already believe in Jesus. The issue is anger. If we believe in God, if we know that God can act to prevent suffering and forestall untimely death, we may become more angry at these things than non-believers would. People who don’t believe in God don’t wonder where God is in the middle of earthquakes and famines and tidal waves. They don’t rage at God when their loved ones die too soon or after too much pain. They don’t demand, “How could God let this happen?” For non-believers, such events constitute compelling -- indeed, crushing -- proof that there is no God.

But those of us who do believe, who have seen God working in our lives and those of our families, are left struggling for reasons, railing at God. “We knowyou can fix this. We’ve seen you do it before. So where were you this time? If you really love us as much as you say you do, how can you just sit there, cooling your heels, while our brother’s body is growing cold in his tomb? How could you let this happen?”

Jesus wept. This is, famously, the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus weeps when he sees Mary and the mourners weeping. “He was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” the Gospel says.   I always want to ask, “What did you expect, Jesus? Did you think the people who loved Lazarus wouldn't weep at his death? Did you think they’d tell each other, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Jesus will show up one of these days, when he gets around to it, so let’s have a party?’”

Any way you look at it, the situation stinks, just like Lazarus’ body stinks after four days in a hot Middle-Eastern tomb. And yet, having finally shown up, Jesus does indeed make everything right.  He calls Lazarus out of the tomb, and he instructs Lazarus’ family and friends to unbind the burial cloths, to help Lazarus readjust to his new life. Any mourners who didn’t believe in Jesus before that little demonstration certainly believe in him afterwards.

Their belief is about to be tested yet again. The dress rehearsal is over. Holy Week is almost here.  This time, even Jesus will cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Once again, there will be weeping women and a tomb sealed by a stone, a tomb from which God impossibly, miraculously, will call forth new life.

The story of Lazarus offers us at least three lessons. The first is that there are no shortcuts to resurrection, even for those who believe. The most steadfast faith will not protect us against grief and doubt and bitter trials. The most serene acceptance of God’s will cannot shield us from feeling, at times, as if God has abandoned us. All of that is human and holy. It is human and holy to get angry when we feel forsaken; it is human and holy to question God, to rail at God, to weep at God’s apparent absence. It is human and holy to mourn our dead. God weeps with us, and when the time comes, God will tell us how to unbind what has been resurrected. God will show us what we need to do to make that new life possible.

The second lesson is that resurrection is a process, even for those who believe.  Look at this morning’s reading from Ezekiel, the famous Valley of Dry Bones. This is a resurrection story, too, but it happens in stages. Going from bones to rebirth isn’t like going zero to sixty. First you need breath; then you need muscle, sinews, skin. It’s like peeling an onion, but in reverse. Resurrection happens from the inside out, and it takes time.

That is why, every year, we make the long slow journey through Lent, walking through those forty days just as Jesus walked through the desert, just as he walked back into Judea to Lazarus’ tomb. We make such journeys at other times, too: whenever we have suffered grief or betrayal, whenever we feel abandoned by God or other people, whenever we gag at the stench of death in a place where we had prayed for rebirth. Rebirth can still happen. God’s time is not ours. Even as we weep and pray – our souls waiting for God more than watchmen for the morning – God journeys towards us, step by step, bringing resurrection.

But God needs our help. The third lesson of the Lazarus story is that resurrection is a community project. “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus tells the onlookers. Those who have been resurrected need to be helped by their neighbors and welcomed back into community. They need to be loved. They need to know that they matter.

My family’s resurrection story began on a winter day in 1964, when I was three years old. My sister, who was twelve, remembers watching our mother being wheeled out of the house on a gurney. She had been a chronic drinker for twenty years. My father had put her in fancy private psychiatric hospitals. They hadn’t helped. Several times she’d tried AA. It hadn’t helped. In 1964, residential treatment centers didn’t exist yet. Employee Assistance Programs were still in the future. AA and the psych wards were the only games in town.

And so my father, in despair, decided to send my mother to the state mental hospital, which wasn’t fancy at all.  He didn’t think she’d ever get better, and neither did anyone else. Everyone thought she was dying. My sister, watching the gurney roll out of the house to the waiting ambulance, told herself that Mom was already dead. I’m sure she wept.

At the state hospital, the doctors said my mother’s case was hopeless. One recommended a lobotomy, a procedure that wasn’t banned until 1967.  My father said no to the lobotomy, but he still planned to have my mother locked inside that building for the rest of her life.

Inside the hospital, my mother got hungry one night. Recovering alcoholics from the community had brought an AA meeting to the hospital, and Mom knew from her past AA experiences that there would be cookies there. She decided to go.

This time, it took. No one believed it; I don’t know if she believed it herself. But she kept going to meetings, and one evening a few weeks later, a visiting AA member sat down and talked to her. He learned that she was terrified of being committed for life, of never seeing her daughters again. He learned that no one in her family thought she would ever get better. They believed she was already dead.

The visitor went home and wrote a letter to my father. In an act that was even braver in 1964 than it would be now, he identified himself both as a prominent local businessman and as a recovering alcoholic. He told my father that he had been in a hospital like the one where my mother was. He told my father that sometimes it takes many attempts to get sober. And he asked my father to give Mom another chance, if only so that she could see her children.

“Unbind her, and let her go.”

My father agreed.  This time, it worked. Five months later, the visitor wrote a second letter.   This one, addressed to my mother, compliments her on her continued sobriety, on her new job, and on her joy at spending time with her daughters. The woman everyone expected to die when she was thirty-eight lived to be eighty-four. This past January 25 would have been her fiftieth anniversary of sobriety.

My mother’s drinking tested the strength and patience of everyone in the family. None of them were believers, but if they had been, I’m sure they would have said, “How could God let this happen?” Mom was brilliant and beautiful. It must have been agonizing to watch her killing herself.

And yet even at her lowest, when everyone who loved her had lost hope, good news was coming. The visitor was going about his own life: eating breakfast, going to work, getting ready to go to the state mental hospital. Even when my mother was locked up, trapped in a place where no movement seemed possible, she was already on a journey towards resurrection.

Her resurrection was a process. Her sobriety involved a lot of meetings and a lot of time on the phone with her sponsor. Because my father had divorced her, she had to find housing and get a job. To earn custody of her daughters, she had to stay well and keep functioning. Her vow of sobriety wasn’t enough: she had to put sinew and skin on those bones.

And her resurrection was a community project. My father and her doctors had to agree to release her. Her father and brother lent a great deal of practical and emotional support. Her AA friends were a constant blessing and source of strength, and my sister and I were her inspiration.  When she died, I inherited the bracelet she always wore to AA meetings.  It’s a gold chain with two charms:  her AA 90-day pin, and a locket with pictures of me and my sister.

As people who believe in God, we are called to be patient with God, but we are also called to help release the resurrected from their winding sheets. We are Christ’s hands in the world. Because resurrection does not happen in an instant, we need to be faithful to the victims of violence and the survivors of disaster, to recovering addicts and alcoholics, to the lost and lonely, and to all who grieve. When we hear people demanding, “How could God let this happen?” our job is to go to them, to weep with them, and then to help them recognize and nurture the new life that God will call forth from their despair.

And if there are times on these journeys when our own belief is tested, that is part of the process, too. Resurrection is coming. It will arrive in God’s good time. Our doubt will become delight, and our pain will become praise, and belief will be reborn from the tomb of tears.

Amen.

Family Stories

Here's today's homily.  The readings are Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35.

*

I’ve always loved the story of Peter’s vision.  There’s something about that image of the sheet being lowered, full of all kinds of animals, that immediately captures the imagination.  All those creatures, all that potential food, and obedient Peter determined not to eat anything he shouldn’t, until the voice in his dream tells him it’s okay.  “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  And soon enough, he learns that all people are clean, too.  “God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

This is only one of my favorite Bible stories.  I love the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, of Nathan challenging David to recognize his wrongdoing, of Jesus blessing the Canaanite woman, the only person in the Gospels who wins an argument with him.  I could offer a much longer list, and I’m sure all of you have lists of your own.  I’ve noticed that many of my friends who aren’t religious seem to think of the Bible as a tedious collection of rules, of shalts and shalt-nots.  To me, it’s a collection of stories.  I come to church every Sunday to share a meal with friends and to hear old tales, stories I know rendered new by occasion and circumstance, made fresh whenever I hear them.

That’s what Jesus did with, and for, his friends.  They traveled together and ate together, and he told them stories:  about the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, about bridesmaids and laborers, about lost sheep and pearls of great price.  And his friends, in turn, told stories about Jesus’ amazing deeds.  Hey, remember that time when Jesus walked on water?  Remember when Jesus called us away from our fishing boats to follow him?  Remember all those people he fed, and healed, and loved?

This is what made the disciples a family; it’s what makes the church a family.  A family is a group of people who love each other, and take care of each other, and stick together.  Families share meals, and over their food they often share stories, not just about what happened that day, but about who they are and where they’ve come from.

Sometimes those stories seem boring, especially to the children at the table.  In my own family, my sister and I must have heard fifty thousand times how our father left home when he was sixteen to hitchhike across the country and join the Navy.  As the son of a truck driver, someone who never expected to get past high school, he loved to tell us how the GI Bill allowed him to go to college, and then to law school.   He routinely bragged about some of his legal victories.

My mother had her own set of stories:  about growing up during the Depression and watching her mother put plates of sandwiches on the back porch for hobos, about meeting my father in college and sneaking out of her dorm to see him after hours, about her nearly miraculous recovery from alcoholism after Dad divorced her because of her drinking.

Not all of their stories were happy, of course.  They both told sad tales about the deaths of their own parents.  But now that both of them are dead, my sister and I treasure all of our family tales, even the ones that made us roll our eyes when we were children.  These are the tales that tell us who we are and what our parents considered important:  compassion, education, perseverence.  Both of my parents, in different ways, overcame long odds to lead happy lives.

So I was very intrigued by a recent New York Times article about research into childhood resilience.  It turns out that the single most important thing you can do for your family is to develop a strong family story.  Children who know a lot about their families, about where they came from, do better when they face challenges.   Psychologists gave children a twenty-question quiz with questions like, “Do you know where your parents met?  Do you know a story of something really terrible that happened in your family?  Do you know the story of your birth?”  The results of that quiz turned out to be the single biggest predictor of children’s health and happiness.  The kids who knew the most about where they came from had the most sense of control over their lives, the highest self-esteem, and the strongest trust in their families’ success.

The researchers also studied the kinds of stories families tell.  They identified three types.

The first is the  ascending narrative, the rags to riches story where things start out bad but get better.  “We came here with nothing, but we worked hard and made our fortune.”

The second is the descending narrative, the riches to rags story where things start out great but go downhill.   “We were wealthy and powerful once, but then we lost all our money in the stock market crash, and now we have nothing.”

The third is the oscillating narrative.  This kind of story goes up and down and up and down. It shows families dealing with both success and failure, weathering both losses and triumphs, bouncing back from hard times.  This third type, the oscillating narrative, was the healthiest one, the one that best prepared children to deal with hard times of their own.

Here are three oscillating narratives.

One.  “Susan, I was so happy with your father, but then I lost almost everything from drinking, and I was in the hospital and everyone thought I was going to die, but then I went to an AA meeting, and I got better.”

Two.  “I used to persecute Christians, but then God literally knocked me to the ground on the road to Damascus, and I discovered the love of Christ.  I helped plant a lot of churches, and God and my new friends are keeping me going even though I’m in prison now.”

Three.  “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you should love one another.”   These words challenge us to think about how Jesus has loved us.  He has fed us and healed us.  He has comforted us, included us, and taught us to include others, even those we consider unclean.  But he has also told us stories, and he has left us with the greatest oscillating narrative of all.  A child born in poverty is revealed as the Son of God, gains a following, is betrayed and crucified, but rises from the tomb.  Darkness gives way to light.  Despair becomes hope.  Life conquers death.

This is our family story.  Christians have been telling it for two thousand years now over their bread and wine, even if some of the kids at the table roll their eyes and say,”That old story again?  I’ve heard that one a million times!”  It’s the best kind of story, the one that will leave us healthiest and happiest and most prepared to face the challenges of life.  We love God, and ourselves and one another, by remembering this story when we need strength, by retelling it at church every Sunday, and by sharing it with the strangers and outcasts we welcome to the feast.

Amen.

Trigger Warnings: Two Stories

Story one:

When I was in junior high school, sixth through eighth grades, I got beaten up or teased or mocked every day, or almost every day, or enough days so that every day when I woke up to get ready for school, my stomach was a lump of fear.  I was a skinny, homely kid with ill-fitting clothing, spotty social skills, a tendency to cry far too easily under pressure, and facial hair.

This last earned me special torment from other kids.  Some just asked questions, probably genuinely curious, like "Why do you have a mustache?  Is it because you have more boy juices than girl juices?"  Some yelled "Mustachio!" after me down the hallway.  This was in addition to garden-variety stealing of my books, my lunch, my purse.

The adults who witnessed all this did nothing.  I don't recall my tormenters ever being punished, although I was trapped in such a solipsistic hell that if they had been, I might not have noticed.  In any case, no one in any kind of authority ever asked me my side of any story, and when I complained to my parents about what was happening -- which I didn't do very often, because for complicated dysfunctional-family reasons I needed to protect them from worrying about me -- they told me that I just had to learn to defend myself.

Eventually, the bullying got so bad that other kids stuck up for me, which means you know it was bad.  But it took a few years for that to happen.  In the meantime, school was the terrifying misery I descended into every day to mine the good grades everyone expected of me, and that I expected of myself.

The kid I feared the most was a girl named Tasha.  We had French class together.  She was as skinny as I was and as bold as I was awkward.  She was sly, fast, scornful.  Every day she came up to me, pulled on my upper lip, and launched into a jeering commentary on my mustache.  The French teacher, to her credit, yelled at Tasha to stop it.  It never worked.  

I hated Tasha more than I've ever hated anyone.  I fell asleep every night, and woke up every morning, nursing furious fantasies about how I'd get back at her if . . . if what?  I didn't have the physical skills or coordination to fight, and I couldn't think of any way to make fun of her that would hurt her the way she kept hurting me.  My powerlessness filled me with rage.  

Later on, after the other kids had stuck up for me, I gained compassion for a lot of the other bullies, and they for me; while I was never friends with any of them, exactly, we established tentative mutual respect.  And now, as an adult, I shudder at what must have happened to Tasha to make her so mean.  But even now, it's difficult for me to see her as another child, as another little girl, and not as the mocking personification of any bit of contempt anyone had ever felt for me, or that I'd ever felt for myself.

Do I need to tell you that if I'd had access to guns, someone might very well be dead now?  

*

Story Two:

When I was nineteen, my father's second wife physically assaulted me.  She and my father were both alcoholic.  They were both smart, kind, funny people when they weren't drunk, but drinking brought out their dark sides, as it so often does, and even when they were sober, they brought out the worst in each other.

I won't bore you with the endless layers of craziness that led up to this particular evening.  The short version is that some months before, my father had confessed to having affairs, although he and my stepmother were trying to work things out.  This particular evening, he was sleeping off too much liquor in bed.  She had stayed up to drink some more and to ramble endlessly to me about her marital problems, none of which was unusual; at some point, she slid into blackout territory and no longer knew who I was.  

That had happened before too, but I'd always been able to remind her:  "I'm Susan.  It's okay; I'm Susan."  On this particular evening, it didn't work.  She became convinced that I was one of my father's mistresses, and started throwing stuff:  a brass lamp (I can still see its square base floating through the air towards my head, until time sped up again and I told myself to move and managed to get out of the way), a chair she knocked over.  She was very drunk and very clumsy.  I was very awake and much more coordinated than she was; I danced out of the way of her sallies and screamed for help.

Why didn't I just leave?  She was between me and the door.  Also between us and the door was the tiny kitchen.  We'd had porkchops for dinner that night.  We'd used steak knives.  I couldn't remember if all of them had been put away.  I was pretty sure that she wasn't rational enough to open a drawer to grab a knife, but I didn't know what she might do if she saw one sitting on the counter.  Also, the door had the requisite three locks -- this was New York City -- and I was shaking really hard, and I knew that if we were together in a small space and I was fumbling with locks while she came at me with a knife, I'd lose the advantage I had in the open.

So I screamed.  The neighbors did nothing.  My father slept on.  Finally she went into the bedroom and woke him up ("Get this woman out of our house!"), and he, disbelieving and bewildered ("That's Susan.  What are you doing?"), restrained her long enough for me to get safely out of the apartment.

Do I need to tell you that if she'd had access to guns, someone might very well be dead now?

*

As stories of violence go, these are chump change.  Millions of people endure worse every day.  I'm not telling these stories to make anyone feel sorry for me; on some very real level, these stories aren't about me at all.  They're about unpleasant situations that would have been incalculably worse if firearms had been involved.

I'm endlessly grateful that I didn't have a gun in seventh grade.  If I had, I hope I'd have had the sense just to try to scare Tasha, rather than to hurt her, but I don't know.  In any case, any such incident would have radically altered the course of my life -- and hers -- and I doubt that saying, "But the grown-ups told me I had to defend myself!" would have done either of us any good.

I'm endlessly grateful that my stepmother didn't have a gun when I was nineteen.  When she came out of her blackout the next morning -- by which time I was safe in my mother's house in New Jersey -- she was horrified at what she'd done.  How much more horrified would she have been if she'd shot me?   How much worse would everything have been for everyone in my family?

The lack of guns in these scenarios didn't prevent bad things from happening.  The violence -- and the violence was real in both cases, even without bullets -- still happened.  But guns would have made that violence, and its aftermath, infinitely worse.

Guns will not solve the problem of violence.  We need fewer guns, not more.

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!

My Worldcon Schedule

Worldcon begins on August 17 and will be held at the Convention Center. I don't see the knitting panel here, but will make inquiries. Note that I'm moderating both the Nevada-as-setting panel and the religion panel, which should be interesting. I've moderated faith discussions at WisCon, so I hope this will go as well. In any case, I'll be busy that weekend!

Wed 12:00 - 13:00, Welcome to Reno (Panel), A02 (RSCC)

An introduction of what to see and do in Reno by locals!

Arthur Chenin (M), Karyn de Dufour, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Richard Hescox, Mignon Fogarty, Susan Palwick

Wed 18:00 - 19:00, Nevada as a Setting for SF & Fantasy(Panel), A03 (RSCC)

Nevada's mountains and deserts have provided a fertile landscape for writers and movie makers for over 150 years. Join regional writers to learn more about the books and movies that helped to define this area.

Susan Palwick (M), Colin Fisk, Connie Willis, Mignon Fogarty, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Thu 11:00 - 12:00, When Faith and Science Meet (Panel), A09 (RSCC

Many SF tales, from Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" to Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz to Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, deal with the intersection of unexpected discoveries on the faith of the characters. Cultural discourse often presents religious faith and science as polar opposites, and certainly there's a long history of conflict between them. But many people of many faiths have happily and successfully reconciled their beliefs with a scientific worldview, and SF/F is no stranger to spirituality, either. Both Joanna Russ and David Hartwell have described SF/F as essentially religious. This panel will present a civil conversation -- between people who respect both faith and science -- about how the two inform each other, both in SF/F and in the rest of the world.

Susan Palwick (M), Eric James Stone, Laurel Anne Hill, Moshe Feder, Norman Cates

Thu 14:30 - 15:00, Reading: Susan Palwick (Reading), A14 (RSCC)

I'll probably read some short chapters from Mending the Moon about my invented comic book, Comrade Cosmos.

Thu 22:00 - 23:00, Short Talks about Art (Talk), A03 (RSCC)

Susan Palwick, Light and Shadow: Family, Pulp Fiction, and the West.

Kelley Caspari, Susan Palwick

I'll be reading a short essay, originally published in NYRSF three hundred years ago, about my grandfather Jerome Rozen, a well-known pulp artist who painted some of the original covers for The Shadow.

Fri 11:00 - 12:00, KaffeeKlatsch: Fri 11:00 (KaffeeKlatsch), KK1(RSCC)

Howard Tayler, Susan Palwick, Ken Scholes

Sat 12:00 - 13:00, River and Echo: The Evolution from Victim to Hero (Panel), A05 (RSCC)

Irene Radford (M), Lee Martindale, Susan Palwick, Charles Oberndorf

The description got cut off, but I think the title works fine. As a longtime Whedonphile, I'm delighted to be on this panel.

Sat 14:00 - 15:00, Autographing: Sat 14:00 (Autographing), Hall 2 Autographs (RSCC)

Warp Thirty, Mr. Sulu

Here's the warped loom, finally (although, as you can see, I haven't gotten much actual weaving done yet). Today would have been Mom's 86th birthday, and in her honor, I decided to spend extra time on handicrafts today. As far as I know, weaving's one of the few she never tried, but I think she would have been fascinated.

Today's Effort

A little crooked, but it was fun to make. As Gary said, "Hey, you're only using a cardboard loom."

Today I started planning an insanely ambitious scarf, which is probably beyond the reach both of a cardboard loom and of my beginning weaving skills. Everything I've read says that to make a scarf on a cardboard loom, either the cardboard needs to be as long as the scarf, or you need to make the scarf in loom-sized sections and sew them together. Seems to me that if you have your warp on bobbins, and have a way to clamp the finished cloth to the bottom of the loom as the project advances, you should be able to weave a scarf in one piece on a workably-sized loom.

So today I ordered clothespins to use as bobbins and some kitchen clips -- the kind designed for bags of potato chips -- to use as clamps. Since we're talking about thirty bobbins, rewarping the thing whenever I need to weave a new section is going to be a hefty piece o' work. But looms with fancy rollers and whatnot cost approximately my annual salary (okay, that's a slight exaggeration), and I think cardboard and tapestry looms are better for freeform weaving, anyway.

So, the scarf: Longtime readers will recall that last July, my sister and Gary and I drove through Arizona's red rock country on our way from my cousin's funeral in Flagstaff back to our hotel in Phoenix, where he and his wife lived. We stopped in Sedona, where I bought some gorgeous orange laceweight yarn that reminded me of the color of the sandstone formations. I've since tried to knit with the stuff, but it's just too fine, and keeps defeating me.

But if I weave with it, especially in conjunction with other, thicker reddish-orange yarns, I think the results could be really pretty, and might even look something like the layers in the rock formations.

Or, I could just make a giant mess of expensive yarn. It's a toss up. But what's life without risk?

Tomorrow's the formal beginning of my sabbatical, and also the first day of my state-mandated paycut, and also the first day of our new, drastically unimproved health-insurance package, with its huge deductible.

I gotta say, I've been in better moods (although I'd feel infinitely worse without the sabbatical).

And on that note, back to work on the book.

Decadence

Because there's so much alcoholism in my family (and it's so genetic), I drink very, very little. For years, my only alcohol consumption was a sip of communion wine every Sunday. I never drink when we're out and about here in Reno, since Gary can't see quite well enough to get a driver's license, which means that I'm always the designated driver.

I like the taste of some drinks, especially cordials, but hate feeling drunk. Since I have absolutely no tolerance for alcohol -- a very good thing, if one has a genetic predisposition to alcoholism on top of a depression history -- my limit is something like two teaspoonfuls.

Over two hours.

On a full stomach.

On our Spring Break cruise, though, I didn't have to drive, so a couple of evenings I got an after-dinner drink while we listened to the string quartet. I had an Amaretto, which was yummy, and a few nights later I had a Kahlua, which was even yummier. Since they give you a bit more than two teaspoonfuls, I learned that I had to space these treats out over the entire evening, which was fine. I also learned, after a second Kahlua the evening after the first, that if I drank two nights in a row -- even slowly and on a full stomach -- my sleep would be disrupted. This is a well-known effect of alcohol, of course, but twice I awoke to hypnopompic hallucinations. In one case, I thought I saw Gary, lying face down, floating above me: I screamed, but when I turned I saw him sleeping soundly beside me in bed, and then the hallucination dissolved. The second time it happened, I saw a disembodied head floating above me.

Charming.

When I got home, I did enough research to learn that hallucinations upon falling asleep (hypnogogic) and waking up (hypnopompic) are fairly common and considered normal, although alcohol can exacerbate them. They often involve floating figures. I'll bet this is where stories about succubi come from; maybe vampires, too.

Anyway, these episodes were definitely enough to make me space out my after-dinner cordials! When we got home, I occasionally (as in once a week, max, but usually more like once every two weeks) had a tiny amount of a chocolate dessert wine a friend gave us for Christmas. No more creepy floating figures, so I must have gotten the interval right. I just finished the bottle last week, and Gary said, "You should get some Kahlua."

"Eh," I said, shrugging.

But today we were at the supermarket, and Gary got some wine for himself, and I went to browse the cordials section. "Are you going to get some Kahlua?" he asked.

"I think not," I said, goggling at the price.

"It's a premium liqueur," he said, picking up the smallest bottle, "and this will last you for a year."

The smallest bottle was under fifteen bucks, so I shrugged again, and we got it. I may even have a little tonight.

But if I start dancing on tabletops while wearing lampshades (a maneuver I'd consider highly dangerous even without distilled spirits, given how clumsy I am), anyone who cares about me is authorized to haul me into the Betty Ford Center.

History

The Audible book I'm listening to right now is Eric Metaxas' biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's fascinating stuff. Among other things, two of the plots to assassinate Hitler failed only because of unforeseen flukes: in one case, a bomb planted in Hitler's private airplane didn't go off because of low temperatures in the cargo hold, and in another, a bomb planted in a conference room did go off, but didn't kill Hitler because of the unusual construction of the conference table. One has to wonder how history would have unfolded differently if the little man in the mustache had died earlier than he did.

For me, the most moving part of the book so far has been Metaxas' account of Bonhoeffer's brief trip to the United States in 1939. Friends on both sides of the Atlantic had gone to a great deal of effort to arrange a position for him at Union Theological Seminary in New York, so he'd be safely away from the Gestapo. But although he'd lived in New York before, he was desperately homesick and torn about being away from the struggle in Germany. To the astonishment of the people who'd worked so hard to assure his safety, he sailed back to Germany on July 7, 1939, after less than a month on American soil.

July 7, 1939 was the day after my mother's fourteenth birthday. In April of 1938, her mother died in a car crash that also put her father in the hospital for six months, and my mother and uncle went to live with relatives on Long Island. I don't know if, by July of the following year, they were still there, or had returned to live with their father and grandmother in northern New Jersey. Either way, they were living within fifty miles of Bonhoeffer as he struggled with his decision.

My mother knew nothing about Bonhoeffer, of course, and was caught up in her own struggles: adjusting to life without her mother, navigating adolescence, getting ready to start high school. But Metaxes, at about this point in the book, mentions that anti-Semitism was becoming more severe in places outside Germany, including the United States, and that made me remember a conversation I had with my aunt -- Mom's brother's wife -- after my grandfather died in 1987.

My grandfather's last name (and thus my mother's maiden name), was Rozen. To the best of my knowledge, no one in the family was Jewish, but when my grandfather died, the hospital sent his body to a Jewish funeral home, perhaps because the name sounds Jewish and there were a lot of Jewish people in the area. Since no one in our family at that point was religious one way or the other, I wouldn't have thought it would have mattered.

My mother, though, had a meltdown. She couldn't stand the idea of her father's remains going to a Jewish funeral home. She was very, very upset, almost hysterical, and I was completely mystified. Mom thought all religion was hogwash and didn't understand why anyone would be involved in it at all, but I'd never heard her say anything intolerant about any particular faith. What was this about?

My aunt took me aside. "Susan, you have to understand that when we were all in high school together, people thought your mother was Jewish because of her last name. There was a lot of anti-Jewish feeling then. It was very hard on her. Later, she couldn't wait to marry your father so she could get rid of her maiden name."

I'd never known about this. My mother had never talked about it, and I still don't know what happened. Name-calling? Exclusion from clubs and social circles? I'll never know, now, but whatever it was, it was traumatic enough to send Mom into a tailspin more than forty years later. And I'm guessing that whatever it was, not being able to talk to her own mother about it probably made it worse.

I'm fascinated by the intersections between private and public history: in this case, how the daily life of a little girl growing up in New Jersey indirectly reflected the issues that led to the very political death of a world-famous theologian in Germany. I also love to think about how individual histories merge into shared history. That's not well-put, so let me give you an example. Gary was born in 1951; I was born in 1960. The day I was born, he was nine years old. Where was he that day? What was he doing? He certainly had no idea that his future wife had just been born. Our two lives ran on very different tracks until November 11, 1989, the day we met and began our shared, joint history. On that same day the year before, what was each of us doing? If you could draw a map or a diagram of our lives over time, what would the map look like before those two points converged?

My old parish had a retreat once where people talked about their histories before they joined the church. Everyone had lived all over the place, doing all kinds of things, before they wound up at St. Stephen's. We drew the journeys on a map. The diagram of how everyone arrived at this one community in Reno was much more complicated than the one for me and Gary, a veritable galaxy of converging lines.

Thinking about all this fills me with a kind of wonder. How many people are alive now who'll be central to my life at some point in the future, but whom I don't even know yet? What are the unseen forces that draw lives together, or deflect people from one another in ways they'll never even know? How do these seemingly random and individual interactions shape larger, public history?

Another Renoversary

Gary has been here in Reno fourteen years today. Happy anniversary, Gar! And happy summer, everyone else!

Go, Little Book

As of this morning, the ED Sonnets are on submission at the Bellevue Literary Press. This is a stratospherically prestigious market -- the Knopf of medical humanities -- and the sonnet sequence is an odd, and oddly shaped, little project, so I expect this submission to be the first of many. But, as I always tell my writing students when we talk about sending out manuscripts, start at the top.

Gary thinks very highly of the sequence, and he's invariably a better judge of how my work will strike readers than I am, so that bodes well. (And no, he doesn't automatically praise my stuff just because he's my husband. I've learned over the years that if he says a given piece of writing doesn't work, none of the editors I send it to will think it works, either. This is both slightly galling and really useful.)

BLP says their response time is four to six weeks, which is both unusually fast and a small enough window that it will be difficult for me not to obsess the entire time. But it's not like I don't have other things to keep me busy, so I'm going to try not to think about it.

And on that note, back to work on the novel.