Really, I Thought That Maybe We Could Try Again

My husband got really, really sick and spent last night in the hospital here in Islamorada. This morning they tell me he is still too dizzy to stand. Last night there was some talk of sending him to Miami, so I have no idea yet where to plan for the rest of us to stay tonight.

The doctor won't be in for a couple of hours and I have a number of calls to make, which is why I'm still at the condo, waiting for a reasonable telephone hour. I am supposed to be packing up and flying home today and preaching on Sunday, none of which is going to happen. Others things are going to happen, but who knows what they will be.

I know; I did say that only a moron would try to predict five minutes ahead.

Shall we move on down to Have a New Year That You Can Stand?

Florida Musings

Although I am far from home and school, I'm thinking a lot about ministry, because I am preparing for the PC(USA) ordination exams, which are now less than four weeks away, and I'm preaching in my field ed church on Sunday.

I'm not happy with my sermon, but I find that I'm enjoying the studying. As I (try to) pull material together and read through a couple of theological overviews, I'm discovering a new appreciation for my seminary education. And I see that I have changed not a little. (Gulp of relief: for awhile I feared that I might emerge from seminary like a couple of other people I've heard about, who upon their graduations said," I haven't changed one bit from the moment I arrived!")

Of course, much of the change has come via another route. Today I am thinking about that in the context of two other things. For one, Quotidian Grace is highlighting blogs of ministers who are mothers. I imagine that someday that group will include me, albeit not as I had planned or expected. And secondly, last fall, two young men in my class preached sermons in which they referred, one explicitly and one by implication, to seminary as a "mountaintop experience."

Not exactly, I thought at the time.

I suppose that it will be many, many years before I will understand what it has meant to study for ministry while grieving the suicide of a child. To explore all those meaning-of-life-who-is-God questions in an academic environment while stuggling through them at the deepest personal levels. To be engaged in hopes and plans for middle-age changes while saying good-bye to a very young life measured mostly by possibility.

God, it has been so hard.

I have no idea what the future holds for me. (Given the past sixteen months, I have to conclude that only someone completely devoid of gray matter would attempt to predict even the next five minutes.) But I hope that my ministry will be marked by a deep respect for the experience of the absence of God, an enlarged capacity for listening in silence, and a vocabulary from which religious cliches have been banished.

(Of course, none of those abilities, such as they are, will be of much help on the ordination exams. And what does that say . . . ???)

Anyway ~ that's the report from the Florida Keys this morning.

Sunset from Long Key (FL)

Little Retreat - 6: Short Story

One of the columnists in the local paper is doing one of those "write your life story in six words" things.

Mother brother son dead hope fragile.

Liitle Retreat - 2: Listening

If God has made all things by the Word, then each person and thing exists because God is speaking to it and in it. If we are to respond adequately, truthfully, we must listen for the word God speaks to and through each element of creation ~ hence the importance of listening in expectant silence.

~ Rowan Williams
Where God Happens (2005)


(Image: St. Augustine, 2004)

Little Retreat - 1

The next two weeks are full, and that's assuming that no one around here gets the flu:

Two papers to finish and a mammoth final exam to prepare for ~

Some unbloggable medical challenges ~

A dear friend's wedding ~

Trying to figure out what to do about the holidays this year, holidays which it would be my preference to ignore (and the first one is only a couple of weeks away!) ~

Yeah, that's enough for a couple of weeks.

One of the little things I have to do is send in my deposit for an 8-day summer retreat here. After last year's debacle, I am equal parts anticipation and apprehension. I'm going to start small by taking a couple of days of silence for myself at the local retreat house when we have spring break in March to see how I manage.

Anyway, I am thinking about retreats and silence and attentiveness and mindfulness and all those good things, all in the context of the weeks ahead. So I think for the next while I'll try to find something on which to focus each day and post it here. And by then . . . it'll be time to move over to the Advent blog.

I think I'll go ahead and start right now by posting a St. Augustine (the place, not the man) reminder that there are worlds and creatures beyond the ones which consume our ordinary and frenzied lives:

25th Birthday

Matt and Josh in St. Augustine
June 2004
(They were almost 20)

Key West in No Particular Order (6): COLOR!

One of the trying things about winter out here on the tundra is its monchromatic nature. Regardless of how disinclined one is to see life in general as black-and-white, the endless shades of gray in the physical world do get tedious.

Herewith, then, a break:

Ten Things

Due to the Giant Storm, I decided to skip my Tillich class today and drove home from seminary last night ~ apparently a good idea. The last 25 miles on the interstate were treacherous, an hour-long trip with cars every which way, since no one could see the lines, and judging from the looks of things, I would not have been able to come home tonight. I thought that I would spend the day holed up in the house finishing a paper, but I am still procrastinating (actually, I just got up) and have given myself a 10:00 am start time.

Therefore . . . since I see that my friend Stratoz is playing one of those list memes, I thought that I would make one up for myself. I am 55 so: ten things about myself, one for every 5th year starting with age five (and ignoring this one, which has nothing to recommend it):

1. When I was five, I went to the second half of kindergarten in a church in Vero Beach, Florida.

2. I rode a horse for the first time, on the trails of Grand Teton National Park, when I was ten.

3. I went to the Harvard-Dartmouth game in Cambridge when I was fifteen, which was followed by an unfortunate double date involving my boarding school rommate and two Dartmouth freshmen.

4. When I was twenty I used to wake up in my dorm room in Williamstown, Massachusetts listening to classical music on Morning Pro Musica with Robert J. Lertsema of WGBH-Boston.

5. When I was 25, we lived in an apartment two blocks from where we live now and one of our upstairs neighbors, now a city councilman who lives two blocks in the other direction, led our tenants' revolt when the furnace broke down during a storm like this one.

6. When I was 30, we had a large and silly black dog, named Renko for the character in Hill Street Blues.

7. I don't remember many details, but I would venture that 35, with two four-year-old boys and a year old daughter, was one of the most perfect years of my life.

8. When I was 40 my three children were in Montessori school and I opened my family law practice.

9. When I was 45, we took a family trip to Italy. Our favorite parts were ~ everything! The Duomo, the monastery out in the middle of nowhere, Pompeii, the Cinque Terre, the Vatican Museums, the Roman Forum, the gelato, St. Peter's, the full moon over Florence. Lots more.

10. And when I was 50, I had one of those completely unexpected and life-changing encounters, when I resignedly signed up for a graduate class with the Jesuit who would a couple of years later guide me through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and become the mentor, counselor, guide and spiritual father who would nurture me through the seminary process and now through this horrible past year.

I see that I did not make my 10:00 deadline. Guess I'll procrastinate a bit more and look for photos of Florence.

Key West in No Particular Order (4)

Bahia Honda Key. There's a rainbow in the second one.

Key West in No Particular Order (2)

Key West in No Particular Order (1)

"They will kill you!"

When I was a little girl and we lived for part of the year in Vero Beach, we viewed Portuguese men o' war as jelly terrorists. Lying in wait on the beach after the tide receded, they would whip their 50-foot long tentacles into the air and snap them around your legs, causing you to gasp for breath and writhe in pain as you succumbed to a slow and tortuous end.

I don't know how we expected them to consume us, or why we thought that they would have any interest in trying. I suppose that logic is not a component of childhood drama.

These days, I view them with a good deal more equanimity.

Gannet's Christmas Recommendations . . .

for those years in which disorientation is an optimistic descriptor:

Not recommended:

A Christmas Eve sermon offering as its theme, "Jesus came so that you could have a better life." Don't even get me started. (Move over, Joel Osteen.)

Recommended:

An afternoon walk through Gulf waters of blue and green followed by a long nap.

Highly recommended:

A Christmas Dinner of grilled shrimp-scallop-and-pineapple kabobs out on the deck.

Christmas Eve List

Duval Street Shopping

Frigatebirds over Gulf

Key Deer
Midnight Episcopalians

It looks easier than it is.

Balancing Act

Little Lakes in Winter

It's hard to figure out what the balance is.

I've been back in seminary for three weeks, kept up with the reading, written two papers, missed some meetings, gone to chapel, avoided chapel, hung out talking to people in the library. Most people have no idea what to say to me, some feel compelled to offer the most appalling platitudes, and a very few seem to know how to be present to someone who feels as if she is wandering around on a planet in a distant galaxy. My first real venture outside my protective cocoon of family and friends, and it wasn't easy.

I spent some time one evening with the committee that oversees the ordination process for our Presbytery. Everyone was supportive and encouraging and did what they needed to do to mover things along. In my former life, I tended to exude tremendous zest and stamina, and I am self-aware enough to recognize how steeply that level of engagement has declined. I suppose they must still have seen a spark of the old Gannet, and I am grateful for that, and for their willingness to hang in there with me.

I am exhausted. My estimate is that the grieving process, day in and day out, takes about 500% of the energy required for a normal day in life as usual. Every few hours of effort requires many times over that number to recover. Every encounter with a baby, every strain of Christmas music, every symbol, whether liturgical or secular, is another invitation to the practice of endurance. Our mail carrier is out sick and the substitute has not deigned to come by all week (I finally called the post office tonight), which may be a good thing. Fifteen weeks, and condolence cards are still arriving (well, they were) but now now they are mixed in with those for Christmas and Chanukah. A lot to take in.

The Lovely Daughter is home from Oregon and the sound of her laughter from the living room is a very good thing. My father was supposed to come and visit for a couple of days but decided that the weather was too risky, so we have a clean guest room, if anyone wants to stop by. We have a little tree, mostly decorated. And we have reservations for Key West starting on Sunday, where we are going to continue our efforts to come to terms with lives far outside the orbit of the ones we had planned.

I guess we are all right.

More on Attire ~ and Continents

When I told Gregarious Son about the Clothing-as-Identity Discussion, he said,

"Mom, maybe you and Wonderful Friend should stop buying and returning clothes, and accept that you are still yourselves and that your existing wardrobe is just fine."

The problem, I suppose, is that our lives are not fine. And so, neither, are our clothes.

I suppose, though, that we are still ourselves. I have said before that it seems that we grieve as we have lived. Wonderful Friend organized another Wonderful Friend's newly remodeled kitchen the other night. I pour over poetry sent my way by Jesuits. I could not find my way around a kitchen and she would not want to wade through this poetry. We each do what we can.

We are going to Key West for Christmas. "As long as you know that we will not feel any better," said the Lovely Daughter. I do know. What I think I am going for is the outer-edgeness of it -- the edge of the continent cracking and flattening and floating into islands, islands broken off from the mainland and almost submerged in the ocean.

And there I can wear soft t-shirts and my ancient and frayed khaki shorts and be the woman who walks the shore ~ the woman, perhaps, who I most am in a place whose geography will reflect my own.

Issues Issues Issues

None of them bloggable.

For those who have asked: I have 6.5 weeks of school left, including exams, and then a (very) few days off before starting CPE at Giant Famous Hospital. GFH offers the double benefit of a wildly diverse patient population and a wildly diverse array of medical challenges, meaning that opportunities for pastoral care will be boundless (none of which is, of course and ironically, beneficial or good news in any way to the people in said population presenting the conditions which create said challenges). I am not going to be able to carve out time to go away on retreat this summer (which is making me just a little crazy), but the aforesaid GFH is a 2-mile walk from my front door, so I guess I will have a couple of mini-retreats each day, provided that the skies do not turn black and gush forth water on too regular a basis.

The Lovely Daughter will be home and will perhaps return to her camp counseling job in North Carolina, which may garner me a short hiking-and-waterfall sojourn in August. The Son Who Has Been Looking For A Job For Months starts one this coming week. Chicago Son and Charming Girlfriend will perhaps host us for a summer week-end, which will perhaps include tickets to WICKED (!!!!!!).

In the meantime, there are a lot of things that I need to know by tomorrow morning that I don't. Know. And a lot of issues bubbling up on every front.

I leave you with images of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine, which does not look remotely Presbyterian, but is surely one of my most favorite church buildings ever. Who could not love a building with an interior dome painted the color of the sea and an address on Sevilla Street?

Easter: Another Era

With all of us all over the place, I got to thinking about this photo (I'm guessing it's from some kind of Instamatic) and this period of our lives:

Easter 1989 in St. Augustine.

Gannet had abandoned the practice of law to become a fulltime mom-at-home. The Guys were five and in Montessori school; The Lovely Daughter was two and full of glee; life that week, judging by the photo album, was primarily about The Beach: sand castles and super-squirters.

What I remember most: being filled to overflowing with a constant sense of sheer joy.

Not So Long After Sunrise

I just reworked my entire sermon for the Sunday after Easter. It's about light. The light of the Resurrection. I'm thinking this image would do just as well as the words I've been wrestling with. Maybe I should forget about preaching and just pass a copy of the photograph around.

Indecision

As the sun sets each evening in Florida, I am completely torn. Do I stay on the beach, waiting for the light to change above the horizon and melt into a dozen colors in the surf? Or do I hop in the car and dash over to the river, so that I can watch the sun itself sink behind the marshy waters? Every night a critical analysis: Where are the clouds the best? Where is the color likely to be most dramatic? How high is the tide? How strong is the wind? Am I too early? Am I too late?

If only each day involved such a crisis in decision-making!