Bright and glorious

Sometimes, working behind the scenes in a church, you overhear and see disappointing words and actions. Other times, you get a glimpse of heaven. Today I had the joy of witnessing the latter. I was on a ladder replacing the 62 burned down Christmas candles in the windows (32 candles) and pew candelabras (30 candles) with all white Epiphany candles, which we celebrated today in advance of the actual feast day on January 6.

A woman who had emigrated from Denmark at least 50 years ago was preparing the altar with bread and wine. The pianist was practicing the hymns for today. He started playing "Bright and Glorious is the Sky." The woman exclaimed in her still-accented English, "Oh, that is a Danish hymn that we always sang at Christmas and Epiphany in Denmark!" Then, spontaneously and a cappella, she sang from the altar the first verse in Danish. It was beautiful.

[Note: the tempo of the electronic version of the traditional hymn tune linked to above is way too slow.]

New Year's Eve

I could be down on the Rose Parade route all night helping to save the 170 seats my church sets up along Colorado Boulevard, but I think I'll let others do that this year. I haven't attended the parade since the first year I moved here nine years ago but will probably watch it tomorrow in seats that others have saved for 20 hours.

This morning on my way to work I drove by people under colorful golf umbrellas in the rain already staking out their spot on the grassy median at the end of the parade route. The RVs have been parked in prime locations for three days now. It is clear of rain this evening with 20 percent chance of rain tomorrow—hopefully not until after the parade, which hasn't been rained on since 1955.

The work week was busy and absorbing after a lovely Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with friends. Christmas Eve meant another church service to help prepare. So it was somewhat of a relief when it was over—and Las Posadas less than a week before. I'm beginning to understand the daunting schedule clergy have at this time of year—and I didn't even have to preach!

I hadn't heard about the tsunami when I went to church on St. Stephen's Day. I had already been wrestling with the darker side of Christmas time. This year the liturgical choice was the martyrdom of St. Stephen, one of the first deacons in the book of Acts, or the First Sunday after Christmas, for which the Gospel reading is about the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem.

I haven't watched any television yet. However, all week at work I watched the count of the dead in the headline story on the online WSJ change upwards by increments of thousands and ten thousands, sometimes hourly it seemed.

A book I had just picked up by the founder of Bread for the World, How Much is Enough: Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture, by Arthur Simon (brother of the late Illinois senator, Paul Simon), seemed a fitting read this week.

So did this excerpt from the poem, "Classifieds," by Wisława Szymborska:

Whoever's found out what location
compassion (heart's imagination)
can be contacted at these days,
is herewith urged to name the place;
and sing about it in full voice,
and dance like crazy and rejoice
beneath the frail birch that appears
to be upon the verge of tears.

[Edit 1/1/05: Changed some formatting and added a couple links.]

Summer weather

Today is spectacularly beautiful. It's supposed to get up into the 80s. I have all my clotheslines full of laundry drying; just made quick and yummy muffins from the recipe on the Malt-O-Meal box; and will be going hiking in the mountains shortly. Fortifying myself for the next two weeks, which will be very intense with church-related duties.

Bulletin board

These days it seems all I have time/space for here are summary postings of reminders.

Last Sunday one thing I did make time for was clearing and preparing a space for my Advent altar. I drapped a beautiful blue with purple fringed silk scarf over the corner of my mantle and bookcase, placing on it two cobalt-blue glass candleholders with white candles and scattering white rocks gathered on a Washington beach to symbolize a path.

The other symbol I'm using this season is that of cleaning house.

Just as Lent is an appropriate time for spring cleaning, Advent, too, invites us to pay attention to our spaces, to eliminate the clutter and unnecessary furnishings....(Sundays and Seasons 2005, p. 23)

So, for this Sunday I chose the hymn "People, Look East."

People, look east. The time is near of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able, trim the hearth and set the table.

People, look east, and sing today—
Love, the Guest, is on the way.

Sparrow, at Mercy Street, is posting wonderful Advent quotes.

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Norwegian knitting: Arnhild Hillesland, via the Winter 2004 Interweave Knits magazine.

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How Iris Murdoch's novels have been analyzed to show traces of the beginning of her Alzheimer's disease: The Guardian article via Bookslut. I first heard the story on NPR. Dr Peter Garrard, the neuroscientist who led the study, mentioned that part of what informed the research was his undergraduate studies in ancient languages, where he was schooled in how to analyze texts.

Book reviewer

It's turned into a cold, rainy Saturday after a balmy Friday-after-Thanksgiving. I tried to make up for having had to work in a corporate office building yesterday by driving all the way home with the driver's side window rolled down. Today is a more typical Northern Hemisphere autumn-to-winter day.

I accomplished a number of tasks this morning, including finding someone to light the Advent candle tomorrow. I also have a number of gifts to buy today, so, naturally, I first went to a bookstore. Naturally, I found books that interested me, too, including discovering an author/book reviewer I didn't know of, senior editor of the Washington Post Book World (free registration required), Michael Dirda. I picked up his book Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments about books, reading, authors, libraries, bookstores, his Beloved Spouse and children, and buying books(!).

Then I came home and looked up Dirda's writing online: his reviews, including tomorrow's review of Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems, and an archive of his weekly online discussions. I see that he also has just published another book, Bound to Please.

Pleasures of a book reviewer: to open a new book tentatively, with indifference even, and to find oneself yet again in thrall—to a writer's prose, to a thriller's plot, to a thinker's mind. Let the whole wide world crumble, so long as I can read another page. And then another after that. And then a hundred more. (Readings, p. 13)

Bookworm

Finally, I've managed to download Real Player and have it work. So now I can listen to Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm online. I just listened to today's show with author Carlos Ruiz Zaphon Zafón about his book The Shadow of the Wind. The conversation was not as much about the content of the book as about the structure of storytelling and the experience of reading. Such riches!

Haberdashery entry

A vague memory from post-colonial boarding school days is the small room, the haberdashery, from which we were supplied shoelaces, amongst other things which I now don't remember. According to Webster's, a haberdasher is "Brit: a dealer in small wares or notions." This is another of those catch-up entries of small (although not unimportant) notions.

Working full-time and helping out at the church now that our pastor and her husband have accepted a call to another church have not left much mental space for writing here or even checking e-mail very regularly.

So I missed the date to write back to my aunt about her book club's selection, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, on which I do want to comment, perhaps in another entry (famous last words).

I've appreciated others' thoughtful, and passionate, entries on the election aftermath: Leah at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen; Charlotte at LivingSmall; Kerstin of At My Knits End, who has recently moved her political entries to homegrowndaisy.

Then, last night, Sister Joan Chittister was interviewed by Bill Moyers on NOW. (Hopefully, the transcript will soon be available in the archive.) She is a strong, prophetic voice challenging those who claim God's exclusive endorsement for their positions. At the same time, when asked what she has in common with those against whom she stands up so strongly, she responded, "Jesus."

I've also appreciated the mood of "November time" as the church year comes to a close.

As the church moves into November time, the procession of the faithful returning to gravestones is a lasting reminder of those who have gone before and by their witness have helped to sustain the church. Etched into memory and written into tablets of human hearts, our loved ones give us a living faith even in their dying. A cemetery walk at this time of year helps the members of its community ground itself in a story that extends far beyond what normally seems visible. At the graves, the faithful stand at the gate to eternal life. In this way, the church begins its move toward the end of the year, toward the fulfillment of all time, toward the culmination of twelve months of God's grace.

We remember that in every place, but certainly at the grave and in the church, the common prayers of the people have been shared. Our Kyries are a cry for peace. At times of grief and loss, we realize poignantly how prayer unites a people, even if the prayer consists of only a few words or even simple silence. This is counterintuitive to a culture that depends on convincing its members of the value of things through blizzards of word and image. The November church would do well to hold to silence in remembering the past. Sundays and Seasons 2004

As Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson preached in her All Saints Sunday sermon,

Real joy, for Christians, comes not from things or from comfort or from security, but from glimpsing what Jesus knew – that God’s reign is wonderfully near and wondrously surprising. Joy comes in participating in God’s bringing of that reign about, even if our participating causes weeping for a time when we recognize the disparity between what is and what will be in the fullness of time. [...]

The cost is that the closer we listen to Jesus the more we notice life’s disparities – the more we notice things that cause us to share in the mourning for a world where things are not yet as God holds out for them to be. But to listen to Jesus is also to joyfully discover what it is that’s worth dying for and, that the dying we do in Christ is bound for resurrection. Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”

Thursday night was a wonderful celebration of people coming together to honor those who are doing what they can where they are to live sustainably on this earth now. The City of Pasadena gave Outstanding Recycler Awards, and my friends at Path to Freedom were award recipients. The Patagonia company sponsored the event and provided a delicious spread. (Coincidently, the caterer purchased edible flowers from my friends to garnish the platters. See pictures here.) The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, was one of the speakers. His simple, unassuming talk emphasized the five points outlined in this essay:

• Lead an examined life
• Clean up your act
• Do your penance
• Support civil democracy
  ("The great social movements of the past 200 years – for democracy itself, for women’s rights, for social equality, for conservation and preservation of the environment – rose up directly from small groups of people who spread the word to others. Today in the United States, small groups of kayakers and fishermen work tirelessly to bring down dams; duck hunters toil to preserve wetlands. And it’s mothers who exert the most pressure to clean up local toxic landfills.")
• Influence other companies (Have a 100-year plan)

Photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum showed slides and made a plea to preserve SW Alaska's rich salmon-spawning habitat from oil drilling.