The Good are Always the Merry

Take a second  and watch the Dalai Lama in this Ten Questions Forum put on by TIME Magazine. At the age of two he was told he was the next Dalai Lama; I mean it’s not like he ran for the office. As a result, he is humble. As he puts it, “Important is, we are same: human being.” Like all of us, he too is just trying to play the hand Fate dealt him.The video has some clarifying text under every other utterance which you turn out to really need. I had trouble understanding  the sentences that don’t  get ‘translated’ in this way,  though some words you can puzzle out, like ‘ hypocrisy’ which he pronounces like Hippo-Chrissie (you know her, kind of wide in the beam? With red hair?)Eight years ago I saw that other much-revered Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh, widely credited with convincing Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to come out against the Vietnam War, which gave the peace movement its start.  He appeared at a giant convention center, a tiny doll-size figure sitting cross-legged on a stage 1,000 yards away. I couldn’t decipher his speech at all; plus, he spoke so slowly! I fell asleep two minutes in and was out cold for a good 30 minutes. But here’s the funny thing: when I woke up, I woke all the way up and understood every single thing he said and remember it still. Example: he was asked what his response would be to a September 11th-like incident like we had just suffered. He said, “If a person seeks to harm me I will go to him and ask in what way I have harmed him.”Back to his spiritual brother here. I note his warm smile and wonder if Jesus had that too, and Elijah, and Mohammed.  I’m thinkin’ yes. Because William Butler Yeats said it in his poem The Fiddler of Dooney: "For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance,  And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance."

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efblggixy1A]

Speed the Supplies

Thursday night I found myself watching Good Fellas with the detestable Joe Pesci playing the character he always plays in these movies, all the times hooting people in the face and all.  Good Fellas, which may not be as bad Casino where he puts someone‘s head in a vise but still! I only turned to it because suddenly I couldn’t look at one more image out of Haiti where CNN's Ivan Watson was covering the half-buried 11-year old in her little reading glasses when what he called ‘part’ of a body was pulled from the rubble beside him. He looked for a second like he might throw up.As of that night the supplies still weren't reaching the people. Forty-eight hours and more after the quake they still weren't reaching them! It makes you realize: we think we live in a world of bright commerce, should I have the Boston Creme or the Honey Glazed  but the truth is we will all die, and some rather soon.The above is a penciled ‘study’ from an oil done by the 17^th century Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.  As a study, it is simpler than the original but all the more powerful for that simplicity: all you see is St. Francis and the Christ figure and at first you think St. Francis is reaching up to embrace and comfort Him, but wait! It's the other way around isn't it? Isn’t the Christ figure beckoning for Francisco to join him on the cross, thus illustrating the famous prayer attributed to this sweetest of all saints? "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,” it goes, "not so much to be understood, as to understand; not so much to be loved, as to love.” The rest of it is the reward:  “For it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.” Ah, may it prove to be so! But in the meantime, God, if you can hear us God: speed those supplies to your children, suffering so now on that lovely and devastated island.

Human Rem(a)inders

And now it’s MIDNIGHT on Halloween! Click here for real human bones. This little man in the picture lives - well where else? - under my bed. I bought him when I was working as a massage therapist. He’s actually what they call a 'disarticulated skeleton' which means his parts come all separate and you get the fun of studying them and holding them in your hand.  When I get to doubting that there’s a plan in this here universe I take this guy out and study him. Look at the perfect ball that is the rounded part of his thighbone up top here! Yesterday in exercise class, a woman protested the 100th leg lift. “I have a great big titanium ROD in my leg! Have mercy!” she said.Well God didn’t use no titanium. God used calcium carbonate for the bones of the babies S/HE made. They're lightweight, affordable, and come in nice designer shades of cream and ivory, and THEN S/he went and installed these amazing little blood-production factories in ‘em. So don’t talk to me about the power of Evil. Anyone can kick a thing down but only love and attention to detail can make it!

Living Proof

Bryan just added a comment to what I wrote about him a few days ago but since it's sort of too 'buried' under all the other comments I'm going to put it up here too, as a posting.Again this is my former student and valued friend who in my book came back from the dead, thanks to the 12 Steps and the daily discipline of self reflection and self scrutiny:

Hi Terry: I'm writing in response to the story you printed about the way God led me to 'randomly' meet someone I had needed to make amends to for a long time. As heady and intoxicating to my ego having the story printed was, there were other more important lessons learned here, for me.The story didn't end there, at Bentley's, in that line, behind that guy, that day: Paul and I met two days later in my office. I was able to apologize for my behavior, after all those years. We agreed on a dollar figure for the car, $3,500, and I wrote him a check for $1,000, agreeing to pay the rest in monthly installments.I encountered fear again before writing the check. I had had a couple of customers, earlier that month, not pay me what they owed me. My initial thoughts were to use that as an excuse to either not pay Paul or to give him a much smaller check. But, that fear was quickly removed too and I made a "good demonstration" giving him nearly 1/3 of the amount we had agreed on. I was amazed that as I handed him the check, that all the financial fear was gone.Then I asked Paul for his mailing address, so I could send monthly installments, and he said " No. Why would you want to mail me the checks, when we could just see each other once in a while and you could give me the installments in person".Again, I was dumbfounded. I asked him " Why would you want to see me once in a while, instead of getting the checks in the mail?"He said, " Because you're a good guy. Why wouldn't I want to see you?"I still didn't fully understand. Why would anyone I had treated so poorly ever want to see me again?We've been out riding twice since that weekend. And I got a call from him today to come and look at some houses he's building, to give him  quotes for installing the heat and air conditioning, which, as you know, is what I do.Paul's reaction to me throughout this whole thing has amazed me. I expected nothing but bitterness and anger, but he's been just the opposite. I have a couple of resentments towards a few people I feel owe me amends from the past. I wonder if I would greet these people with the same compassion, dignity, and willingness to forgive that Paul has demonstrated towards me?AA's Big Book teaches us how to make an amend, but Paul has shown me how to receive one and forgive the person making it. If someone came to me to make an ammend, I hope I can behave as Paul has towards me.There were just so many lessons  to learn, all around this thing.I read some of the comments people wrote after reading your article and I was truly touched. It seems a lot of people were affected by this story.I'm just a schmuck who made an amend and told you about it. Then, you told hundreds if not thousands of people by printing it in your article.Judging by the reactions of those who responded, so many more people were affected by this than just Paul, you, or myself.There's a line in a Bruce Springsteen song titled " Living Proof". Bruce sings " I was looking for a little bit of God's mercy and I found living proof."Now, so have I, so has Paul, so have you, and so have your readers.And we've all been changed, by this, just a little bit.Living Proof.Love, Bryan (as he looks today)

Not in My Book

On her blog yesterday my friend Bobbie wrote about the Bored Drawer she kept as a kid. “I’d write things to do on little pieces of paper and fill the drawer with them. Then, whenever I felt that frightening bored feeling coming on, I’d pull one out, make myself do that thing, and get un-bored. “She also mentions Russian-born writer Joseph Brodsky in this connection who got kicked out of the Soviet Union for parasitism, which I know, sounds like he was eating people’s good wool sweaters, then came to the States and mastered English so well he won a MacArthur award and was named our Poet Laureate. But in one speech Bobbie quotes him as having told hsi audience never to run from boredom "because boredom teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance.”Well with all respect for a guy now dead I say: To Hell with That. Was Mozart insignificant? A show-off at times and maybe a bit childish but look at his work! And what about Beethoven, whose music was considered so erotic by his contemporaries some said it must be kept from the ladies whose passions would be stirred and then what?  Was my sister’s cat insignificant who figured out how to use her paws as hands to grasp the pulls on Nan’s bureau drawers so she could hop in whenever she liked and scrabble among her dainty washables?Ah and here I am at cats again.Eighteen months ago when our cat Abraham almost died of a raging infection her now-missing-and-presumed-dead sister Charlotte did an unusual thing. Generally Charlotte thought Abe was a big dummy and ignored him completely but on that rainy night when we found him after three days’ hiding, holed up, waiting to die, hot with fever, and papery with dehydration, she came over to him and began licking his head and face, whether for comfort or in farewell we never knew.Was she insignificant, and also her whole little life, now ended as it seems? What about her brother's life of single-minded devotion to us? What about your life? What about mine?I think of the line from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town where the character known as the Stage Manager, posing as the minister at a wedding, freezes the action for a moment and, addressing the audience as he does throughout the play, recalls all the young ones he has married, naming the cottage, the Sunday drives, the children, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will -  then pauses and says, “Once in a thousand times it's interesting,” but in such a tender and affectionate way you think  he must mean the opposite.So are we significant at all then? To ourselves and to the ones who love us surely but how about to the One who created us if such a One there be?  Which brings me to what is said of the life Jesus, namely that even if he was no son of God and never rose from the grave at all, still what he said about Giving What You Need to Get and Placing Love First seems so bright and true and real you feel you could just hang your Jiminy Cricket umbrella on it and fly clear up to Death, and past and above it until Death is revealed at last as what it well may be: a tiny dark point on an endless shining line.

"It's Full of... LESBIANS": On Judging Not Lest We Be Judged

I have felt so ecstatically happy since Election Day that I look back at the column I wrote the week before and can’t believe how sorrowful it seems. In fact so very different in tone it is from the way I have been feeling for these last two weeks I couldn’t bring myself to post it here at the top where it says 'This Week’s Column' so let me copy it below where it will live forever as a post and not disappear and be replaced as the column is each week. It’s not that much fun but it had God in it and also my wonderful old friend and fellow blogger Milton. Here it is:I once bumped into an acquaintance who asked me what college my daughter was hoping to attend the following year and so I told her. “Oh, I would never my daughter go there!” she exclaimed with delicate horror. “It’s full of lesbians!”It’s funny but I felt a wave of kindness toward her and so went and put my hand on her arm: “You must know that isn’t true, Sarah.” (I will call her Sarah.) And even if there are lesbians here and there in colleges, they’re our daughters first aren’t they? Our own young people?”I was calm in those days.I was less calm last week after my conversation with the Postal clerk I will call John. I was sending something to one of our honorary sons, a young man we have long loved and a brand-new homeowner. I asked him if the letter would get there fast; I was worried because it held important documents.He read aloud the name of the city and shook his head. “Tough area,” he said unsmilingly.“What do you mean?”“Full of minorities” he answered with lowered voice.“HE’S A MINORITY HIMSELF JOHN,” I said with a voice not at all lowered. I embarrassed him – made an awkward moment - but for the first time in my life as a careful and courteous female I didn’t care.And so a silence hung between us until our transaction was complete and I had thanked him and turned away.But ever since I’ve been wondering: What is wrong with us all? An hour earlier, in another place of business, a man passing the time of day there said to the shop owner and me, “Barack Obama was handed through college, same as that WIFE!” For some reason tears sprang to my eyes and maybe the shop-owner saw them because self-proclaimed McCain man though he is, he led me aside, and put a hand on my shoulder.“Don’t listen to him; he’s not himself today” he murmured, thus showing kindness to us both.And later he told me that he too is troubled by the high feeling we have seen in this political season now just ended.I think of something I just read by Milton Brasher Cunningham, songwriter, ordained minister, student of history and professional chef. He writes a blog called Don’t Eat Alone where he cites the Biblical verse “Be Ye Kind One to Another” as the idea he most needs to keep in mind.“I would love to say I have mastered the art of kindness and moved on, but it is not so,” he writes.His favorite station was having its fundraiser one day and so he turned the dial to hear something other than the appeals for money and landed on the local talk radio station. “I felt as though I had crossed into a parallel universe. That they presented a view farther to the right of NPR for me was not a surprise; the level of volume and vitriol was, however. These are guys who command huge audiences across the country, or at least that’s my perception. How can anger that severe be so popular?”That is his question. Mine is, What can we do about this?Milton says we can remember this: that “regardless of our political preferences, our fundamental allegiances are to God and to one another. “Not to country. Not to party. Not to ideology…. Not to class or race or even religion. “To God,” he repeats “and to one another.” And that’s a truth I mean to remember from this day forward.

All Souls Day

I had a dream last night in which I had just died. I was dashing around - flying actually, over scenes like the one above, recently visited - and so didn’t realize I was dead until I swooped back over my body sitting in my same clothes from that morning, seat belt still on, so to speak.

I didn't look dead - just kind of deflated is all, like our little cat looked in the gutter after that car killed her, and all I could think was "So wait that anxious get-it-done, get-it-done girl wasn't even ME?"?

It wasn’t a sad dream though really, not like the one I had about my mother a couple of months after she died. In that one we were at the cemetery, the whole noisy family. I was scooping dirt from the grave to take home with me and my cousin Carolyn was saying "What are you going to do with THAT?” My husband was shivering in his best suit and Cousin George was just wading over to him: “Ever hear of an OVERCOAT?" he wryly remarked, only all that really happened. The dream was that my mother was there with us.

“Gosh isn't it cold!” she said. “I can’t wait to get back to the house! Do you have somebody there making the coffee and setting out the food?”

“Oh Mom I’m sorry but you... you can’t come. You have to go lie down there,” I said in the dream, pointing to the box, pointing to the open hole, and woke feeling about as desolate as ever I have felt in this life.

The other day I saw my former neighbor in a book store. Her husband was the heart of our town before he died in his sleep in a few summers back. He used to cut his grass in the pitch dark if the sun dared go down, using his headlights so he could see. He'd rive through the downtown in his pickup, yelling jokey hellos to people every 30 feet. He crashed a Halloween party we gave once; appeared in a gorilla suit, joined the dancing briefly, made apelike gestures and, even grabbed a sandwich before leaving without ever opening his mouth to say who he was.

Seeing his widow I suddenly realized something. “You know what I just remembered Joanna? I dreamed about Dave last night!”

“Oh! You did really?” she said with a face of inexpressible longing. “I haven’t dreamed of him in so long! How is he?”

The longer I live the more I think that last remark reveals the larger truth: when we leave here we don’t go lie down in a box. We take off our seatbelts and fly.

Museums in Florence: the Lowbrow Tour

All these Holy Family scenes: you gotta love ‘em. You could write a whole dissertation on the expressions seen on the Virgin’s face alone. My favorite: that “How did  I get HERE ?” look of hers with Joseph’s face a close second. "How did YOU get here?!"And the Baby Jesus who sometimes looks a lot like Jon Lovitz? He often has a face only a mother could love. Sometimes in the painting he’s squeezing a bird and sometimes a pomegranate. Sometimes he’s got his fingers going in funny ways: "You got a little something right here," I thought one of them said but Dave insisted it said "YO! Keep your eye on ME, bud! I’M the main event here!" I could see it since I myself caught a look like that in the painting I call "So Whadja Bring Me?"You can entertain the daylights out of yourself with all kinds of jokey thoughts like this until one day, ONE DAY you stumble into the rotunda that houses the David and it just plain shuts you up. All around you are people sitting on benches just to be in its presence.That Michelangelo: dead on one level but still alive on so many others. Just think of David’s life: Pops Goliath with a tiny rock; plays harp for the king; BECOMES the king; takes another man’s wife, just because he wants her; sees the first child of this union die as punishment; sings in public for sheer joy though some find it unseemly. He does dumb things, he does great things, he is human. He dies and leave the throne to his kid Solomon whose Psalms are still singing in all our heads still especially that Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s, Arise my love my fair one....And all of this, all of this is in the marble that looks like flesh, like veins, like living muscle in this work that one man made. Ah!

You Think You’re a Saint but You’re Not

An Essay in Pictures 

When we got to Venice we were fresh from a visit to Padua and the cathedral shrine to St. Anthony who met St. Francis and demonstrated ever after in his life the power of that man’s example. There, in ancient glass cases, are St. Anthony’s lower jaw, teeth and tongue, the simple tools he used to spread the message relayed to him by one who heard it from one who heard it from one who heard it from One who, going back a good bit, said He heard it from His Dad.

What I learned about Anythony in Padua I know I will never forget. But it was his mentor St. Francis I was thinking about as I stood in front of St. Mark’s in Venice the other day. They say the birds flocked to him for his loving heart. They flocked to me for my chunk of bread. One minute I was just standing there, looking around at the brave people who would take some bread, hold it aloft and immediately be as covered with pigeons as the statue of General Patton there by the banks of my favorite River Charles.

Maybe I can be brave like that, I thought. So I crouched down and they climbed all over me.

Images of the REAL moment, when I looked like a living aviary, are missing and why? Because the person in this world who knows best how far short of sainthood I fall was laughing so hard the camera shook and the pictures came out blurry.  

 

Wednesday in the Park

Today it's raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It's raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other's dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women's correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let's have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you'd think they'd been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

The new and the old: Boston City Hall finished in 1968 and therefore brand-new in our minds,  juxtaposed with the Old North Church of "One If By Land Two if  By Sea" fame built almost 300 years ago: 

 

 

And finally a man waiting for what he needs to feel normal...

 

    

...which is all any drinker is trying to do when he drinks: Just feel normal. Just feel the way the rest of us feel when we get up, come sunny day or rainy day. We stand and stretch and the molecules sing and the bright blood froths and even the dourest among us must think - HAS to think - "Thank you God, for quick life and this new day to enjoy it in."

May He - or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.

Recipes for Healing

THIS IS NAN ON THE LEFT, WITH COUSIN ELEANOR

I’m in Florida, the land of scooting lizards and drinking water that smells like a swamp - only here at my sister Nan’s house Nature is banished. Her husband Chuck saw to that: he built this place five years ago and all night long the ceiling fans turn in rhythm with the comforting rumbles of the seeming dozen of systems all working to keep thing cool, dry and varmint-free.

The two of them were five years into their marriage when they came here. Chuck’s beautiful wife Betty had died of cancer and Nan’s high-energy husband Tom had died of a heart attack. Tom was one of the only two men I have ever known who would smoke while downhill skiing off the trail. He also would eat six raw hot dogs, chased by six-hard-boiled eggs, chased by a pint of ice cream. Nan and their 15-year-old daughter Gracie suffered so much when he died, as did the four wonderful kids from his first marriage all in their 20s, that tender and precarious decade.

Now Nan is suffering again: For the third time in four years she has a MRSA infection and this one is bad. She wants me to do a kind of 'public service' column about MRSA and I can try to do that as soon as I get home to Boston, but right now it's 8am and I'm sitting in this lovely tree house of a home on the bayou and the fans are turning and Nan is quietly infusing herself with the killer antibiotic Vancomycin, the only drug at all shown to be effective against this methycillin-resistant staph infection.

She has an opening in her arm where the PICC line enters, then heads north, then south again and straight to her heart. (The abbreviation stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter.) It’s very important that that site remain clean and a wound care specialist comes every day to look both at it and at her foot, where the infection began. It’s in the bone still, even these seven weeks into treatment, and everyone is praying she can keep her toes. At one point they thought the foot was even a goner. At its worst Nan says it looked like a shark had bitten her. It was raw and open, pulsing and red.

She wouldn’t let me come until now. “I'm fine. I have Gracie,“ she emailed me the one time. “I have Chuck.” But every single day she has to go for what could end up being nine or even ten weeks to lie for two hours each time in the Hyperbaric Chamber which is said to speed healing. And then there are the doctor’s appointments. And Gracie couldn't work from this house forever. And on the phone once Chuck said in a very small voice, “I’m just having a little trouble with the meals."

So I got on the plane the second Nan gave me the green light. I here came Thursday at 4:00 and I will leave tomorrow morning at 10:00 and in that time I have made a Chicken Cassoulet meal and a heart Meaty Loaf meal; an old-fashioned Roast with Pan Gravy, and a Baked Ziti that would feed a dozen; a hot Pear, Pork and Arugula Dish with Walnuts and Bleu Cheese and a Chopped Broccoli Salad with Bacon Bits Cheddar and Red Onion. Yesterday I went to the Winn-Dixie and bought ten Tupperware containers and today I will start freezing it all, because they have barely made a dent in it, natch.

It’s funny though: I’m just looking at this list to see that that while the Pork and Arugula Salad is a new favorite of ours everything else has meaning: The Roast with Gravy and the Zesty Meat Loaf were our Mom’s specialty. My girl Annie-the-chef told me to make the Baked Ziti and sent me down here with the recipe that bears her quirky stamp (“Mix the whole mess up in a bowl...”) The Chicken Cassoulet is our cousin’s Carolyn’s specialty and the Cheesy Broccoli Salad is Cousin Eleanor's. I’m pretty sure Eleanor herself is coming at the end of August. I know Cousin Sheila arrives in just two weeks. My girl Carrie is sending a CD and a book down. And faithful-hearted Cousin Mary Lou calls and calls, expressing love and compassion though Nan is too weak yet to tackle a phone call.

Dodson is a beloved honorary son of David and me and he might as well be son to Nan and Chuck too for how they love him and his new bride Veronica - just as much as we do. They came here to Tarpon Springs from Sarasota just for the day Saturday and just sat with us on our couch. We are all on the couch it feels like. We are together in spirit, and hoping for our miracle.

To Full Equality

This is My Independence Day Story: To Full equality, in marriage and everywhere else !

How would it be for you as a parent, if you gradually came to understand that your just-emerging-from-college daughter had fallen in love with another young woman, and six years passed and she loved her still?

How would you feel if you belonged to a church that around this time chose to examine the possibility of going on record as a place welcoming to any woman who loved a woman, to any man who loved a man, the same as it is to any person who entered there to worship?

And if one day during this 18-month-long period of study, prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, a woman stood and expressed her concern about how “these people” might fit in, I wonder if it would surprise you to hear the man in the neighboring pew whisper to his wife, “She doesn’t realize: she’s talking about our son.” Or if it would surprise you to learn that a half-dozen other parents present that morning were likely thinking the same: “You speak of our children, onetime singers in the Junior Choir and assistants in the Sunday School; our children, whom you have known since their infancy.”

I wonder how you might then feel if, after that lengthy consideration, your church voted “Yes. Let the word go forth that we in this 150-year old community of the United Church of Christ unanimously choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation.”

And if you were yourself one of these parents and if your above-mentioned daughter and her beloved sought to undergo a Liturgy of Commitment here, I wonder how you would feel to have the Deacons say “Yes. By all means yes, and we are delighted. For you are our own daughter, and this one that you love is our daughter now too.”

I wonder how you might feel if, during this ceremony, your husband of 33 years with his hair now white but his manner still so gentle stood to recite a fatherly poem to the two; if he prefaced it by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of your daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor; if he then paused and looked over at this young woman where she sat beside your girl and said aloud to the very large assembly there gathered that he couldn’t be happier that his daughter had chosen her for a life partner.

I wonder: Would it not lift your heart to hear the verses he then read by poet Gail Mazur?“What you want for it you'd want for a child, “it goes. “That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… “That she know, in her branchings, to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace... that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the year following, a baby should come to their house, would you not rejoice and be glad? As we rejoiced last month when we first saw this newborn with his grave and curious look, with his chest no wider than a lady’s hand, held so tenderly in their slender young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you in this way.

I think the realization might dawn within you that this is what is chiefly asked of us here: That we make a family. That over the long years we spend ourselves in many deeds of care and kindness, and make a place where such children as we are sent can shelter. And take root. And one day find their own place in the orchard.

Two Night Sleepover with a Side of Fries

At the end of every week when my column begins to appears in papers all over I often wonder if the people reading it would like to hear more of the story than those 600-odd words can convey. For example, the piece up this week is about the double sleepover-retreat held at my church lately, “we” being 15 youth, three of us adult leaders and the Reverend Judith Arnold, Minister of Youth and Parish Life.

Remember how Elizabeth Marshall Thomas said in her great book about dogs that all they wanted was to be with other dogs? Any group of teens is like that too. When they’re together they're happy. These guys mostly pop and sizzle, joke and nudge, but when it’s time to get serious they can stop on a dime to flip the switch and go earnest. In the open, Quaker-style prayer portion of things they arise spontaneously, each to light a candle and say a word about some person or struggle or issue in their hearts. Sometimes, one will rise and say nothing, but only light a candle. Sometimes, any one of them will choose not to even do that. There is no pressure or expectation.

In regular life, this group meets Sundays nights when we can all feel the new workweek bearing down on us and most Sunday nights for the last four year we have seen the now newly-graduated Steven light his candle and offer the same prayer: “For procrastinators everywhere,” he solemnly intones. And so on that Saturday night a whisker before midnight, with the kids set to buzz and seethe like bees in the hive until sleep at last overtook them Judy would be the one sweating bullets.

Why? Because it wasn’t enough that she was the one who'd called the whole thing into being, produced all the food, kick-started all the discussions and led most of the prayers; she was also the one who would preach to the hundreds of regular church-goers set to show up in the morning. Thus, as we gathered in that reverent candle-lighting circle it was Judy, loved unreservedly by teens and toddlers, by the ill and the well, by the young and the not-so-young and the very dogs who see her stoop to pick up her morning paper – Judy who rose, lit her candle and borrowed Steven’s prayer. “For procrastinators everywhere," she said referring to herself, then blessed us all a final time and withdrew to start on that sermon.