Winterpast

Blessings 234 to 241

2012-02-16T13:53:00.000-08:00

234. The way he holds my hand in his sleep
235. First giggle
236. His absurd little diaper-bottomed hula dancing
237. Waking to the curiously violet light of a California dawn
238. Chai
239. Two little boys in slickers being pulled in a wagon by their daddy
240. Warren's ringlets
241. Lengthening days

Blessings 225 to 233

2012-01-15T09:35:00.000-08:00

225. Excellent service at a restaurant
226. Remembering all the good that has happened
227. Parsnip soup
228. Cabernet sauvignon with overtones of caramel
229. Remembering how to ice skate
230. A look of boyish freedom on my husband's face
231. Mulled cider
232. A panoramic view
233. Sleeping in on Sunday

Blessings 219 to 224

2012-01-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

219. The cut tulips, plunging toward the window, that remind me to seek the light
220. The soiled diapers that tell me he's getting enough nourishment (how worried I would be if there were no diapers to change!)
221. The marveling width of his eyes as he contemplates a pot of yellow roses
222. This gratitude, this feeling of absolute blessedness
223. Gluten-free pizza
224. Nerdy people and their fascinating conversation

Blessings 212 to 218

2012-01-09T06:33:00.000-08:00

212. Rediscovering sunrises
213. Rolling down the windows in January
214. Two years of marriage to my beloved
215. A big idea born out of love
216. Coconut milk lattes
217. New bedsheets
218. A pond full of Canadian geese, their arched necks settled contentedly into the down of their backs

Blessings 205 to 211

2012-01-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

205. A made bed
206. His two-hour naps
207. The gentle leading of the Savior
208. An apple corer-peeler-slicer
209. A latte made with coffee grounds from Haiti
210. The sweet, all-wise look of a nursing infant's eyes
211. Maternal instincts

Blessings 198 to 204

2012-01-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

198. The sounds he makes while sleeping
199. Arbitrary fresh starts
200. How unexpectedly good collard greens taste when prepared with shallots, nutmeg, and cream
201. Learning new things about my husband
202. Good habits
203. Little head burrowing under my arm
204. His first games

I Love You More

2011-12-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Our son entered the world twenty-seven days ago - one rotation of the earth for each of my trips around the sun. He came in wailing, as all of us do, a writhing ball of fury at the cold and the light and the trauma of birth. He is quieter now, asleep against my breast, drawing small, quick, breaths that sound like the opening of a door hung on old hinges.

I spend my days and my nights meditating on the clockwise swirl of his downy hair, his pink, shimmering, thirsty, tongue, the web of miniature veins in his eyelids and ears, as intricate, as perfect, as the wings of a butterfly. My son. My Brendan. My gift from a God whose goodness I have never known until now.

When he cries, I ache. When I sing to him, I must whisper the words, or my voice will crack with the tears surging behind my eyes. There is nothing I would not do, no sacrifice I would not make, to provoke that gummy, open-mouthed smile. And now I understand.

I always say, "I love you," to my mother when we hang up the phone.

"I love you more," she says.

"I can never win that game," I laugh.

"That's right," she says, "because I'm the mom."

Yes. Now I understand.

Blessings 195 to 197

2011-11-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

195. The good plan of God that I can't yet see
196. The steady beating of a tiny heart
197. Kicks, squirms, and wiggles

Blessings 188 to 194

2011-11-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

188. Invitation into patience
189. Afternoon sun through the sliding glass door
190. Waking next to one I love
191. Being alive
192. The flight of geese
193. A false alarm met with kindness and understanding
194. The last quiet moments to breathe, to read, to count blessings that fall upon me like raindrops

Blessings 182 to 187

2011-11-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

182. Homemade chicken and dumplings on a cold night
183. A well-timed whisper from the Lover of my soul
184. Blue October sky
185. Morning sun lancing the mist
186. Grace to persevere
187. Telling the stories that say who we are

Blessings 178 to 181

2011-10-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

178. A steeple rising up through the morning mist
179. The season's first frost across a great green field, like the breath of God upon a mirror
180. Leftover snow cradled amongst the tree roots
181. This day

Blessings 171 to 177

2011-10-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

171. An early snow
172. Hope
173. Every hour that brings me closer to holding my baby boy
174. A new friend
175. The tree that has burst into glory outside my patio
176. The endearing absurdity of pumpkins
177. Firemen taking the fire truck to buy pumpkins for their carving party

Blessings 160 to 170

2011-10-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

160. Unmerited favor
161. A sermon delivered with a British accent
162. A truth unsoftened
163. The patience of trees reaching for the sun
164. A mum the color of Christmas
165. Hunter-green gourds
166. Bags and bags of ripe apples
167. The soft voice of an old acquaintance
168. Permission not to worry
169. A hug when most needed
170. A skilled hair stylist

Blessings 156 to 159

2011-10-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

156. Itsy-bitsy socks
157. Teeny-tiny shoes
158. Wee little T-shirts
159. Dying of cuteness

Blessing 151 to 155

2011-10-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

151. A nested nest
152. Smell of fresh sheets
153. Trees with leaves like a low-burning flame
154. New friends
155. His growing spiritual leadership

Blessing 150

2011-10-14T13:28:00.001-07:00

150. Helping him writet his declaration of independence

Blessings 143 to 149

2011-10-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

143. Helpful, courteous technician visiting my home twice
144. Panang chichen leftovers
145. Finding just the right answer at just the right time to stave off complete frustration
146. The heat-absorption properties of silicon
147. A husband who understands when it's just the (raging) hormones talking
148. A full-sized washing machine!
149. A full-sized clothes dryer!!

Blessings 140 to 142

2011-10-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

140. Soothing sound of rain on asphalt
141. A dish lost and a temper kept
142. Waking to a thunderclap

Blessings 132 to 139

2011-10-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

132. Praying to a God who knows my needs before I ask
133. The cleansing that the rain brings
134. Stories worth the telling, stories worth the hearing
135. Restoration of power
136. A diner that's open late
137. Galoshes
138. A poncho the color of Barbie's convertible
139. My small group, the apartment-cleaning/box-moving brigade

Blessings 128 to 131

2011-10-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

128. Bursts of "nesting" energy
129. Storm-tossed evergreen tree
130. Spider's architectural flair
131. Rabbit fleeing across the lawn by moonlight

Blessings 124 to 127

2011-10-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

124. Being the only customers in the Thai restaurant on Columbus Day evening
125. A pond positioned just right to reflect the blushing trees
126. Pre-dawn waking
127. The memory of monarch butterflies raised on the kitchen counter

Blessings 118 to 123

2011-10-10T08:47:00.001-07:00

118. Crutches
119. Chicken shwarma sandwiches
120. Waking up to silence
121. Friends armed with packing tape and cardboard boxes
122. Elevators
123. Fountain in the courtyard

Blessings 114 to 117

2011-10-05T10:04:00.001-07:00

114. Warm chocolate chip cookies
115. Breeze playing with my skirt on the escalator
116. Golden majesty of sunset and clouds
117. The "pregnancy discount" at the auto service station

Blessings 112 and 113

2011-10-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

112. Crisp, cool autumn air
113. French landladies

Blessing 111

2011-10-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

111. The gliding descent of leaves from trees, like boats down an easy river

Blessings 101 to 110

2011-09-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

101. The Oxford comma
102. Flashes of unexpected virtue
103. Freshly laundered shirts
104. Clean water to drink
105. Warm milk
106. Hand-knit Afghan from my sister
107. The safe delivery of Hannah Marie Poole
108. Mail
109. Rich, outdoorsy scents of autumn
110. The anticipation of total joy

Blessings 89 to 100

2011-09-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

89. An evening with storytellers
90. Baby-blue balloons
91. Newborn-sized athletic pants that match my husband's perfectly
92. The crunch of dead leaves
93. The intricacy of grasshopper legs
94. A stranger's offer of a post-partum casserole and brownies
95. Afternoon sun-glow through the blinds
96. Our new place to live (don't have one yet, but thankful that the Lord is going to provide what we need just in time!)
97. A late-blooming rose
98. Grilled pineapple
99. September breezes
100. A ride home from the auto repair shop

Blessings 80 to 88

2011-09-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

80. Free shipping
81. A way forward
82. A diaper pail
83. Lustrous blue sky behind the dour-faced clouds (I believe it)
84. No stretch marks (yet)
85. No waddling (yet)
86. No back aches (today)
87. Invitations into grace
88. Iced tea, a bar stool, and an old friend

Blessings 78 and 79

2011-09-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

78. Carnations the color of fresh butter
79. The Compline, as lovely now as it has ever been

Blessing 77

2011-09-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

77. Just enough creme brulee

Blessings 70 to 76

2011-09-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

70. The welcoming yellow light shining from a friend's windows
71. Apples in season
72. Golden oil rubbed into the skin
73. Black-and-white photograph of wedding-day waltzing
74. Wind among the leaves
75. Rocking chair
76. Stillness of the chapel

Blessings 59 to 69

2011-09-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

59. Prayer with eyes wide open
60. Hushing the anguished voice
61. Wise words from old saints
62. The slow, steady thrum of a beloved heart
63. Warm water in the shower
64. Peppermint toothpaste
65. Deep indigo of blueberries in the cereal milk
66. Gas in the tank
67. Planning a party
68. The certainty of being understood
69. Freshly chopped basil leaves, smelling like the last of summer

Blessings 56 to 58

2011-09-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

56. Irish accents
57. Cleansing breaths
58. Joy from pain

Blessings 51 to 55

2011-09-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

51. Red leaf
52. Black butterfly
53. A feast of cloud and sky
54. Autumn fields overspread with mustard flowers
55. Pile of pale gold Gruyere cheese curls

Blessings 48 to 50

2011-09-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

48. White bar of moonlight clinging to the top of the mailbox
49. The laying on of hands
50. Friends to walk through hard times with

Blessings 43 to 47

2011-09-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

43. Six geese against a pale blue sky, honking to each other
44. Pumpkin spice latte
45. Discovering that the baby likes Wang Chung better than David Bowie
46. Salt-and-pepper mustaches
47. Nesting in heaped pillows

Blessing 43

2011-09-12T06:08:00.001-07:00

43. Acetaminophen

Blessings 35 to 42

2011-09-12T05:15:00.000-07:00

35. Strange woman chasing me across the lawn to rub my belly
36. Squirrel harvesting grass blades to line her nest
37. Cardinals and chickadees in the birdbath
38. Rocking chair on the back patio
39. A long exhalation
40. Stained green bowl in the dawn light, the first thing in the day to own its color
41. A kiss good morning
42. An excellent sermon

Blessings 29 to 34

2011-09-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

29. Raindrops dancing on the asphalt
30. Cricket song outside the bedroom window
31. Sunlight framing a hole in the clouds
32. Apologies
33. The generosity of strangers
34. The opportunity to wait on God

Blessings 25 to 28

2011-09-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

25. Thick wet grass under bare toes
26. Rain beaded into pearl drops (the miracle of surface tension!)
27. Unexpected chocolate
28. The first hug after a too long separation

How to Make God Visible: My Interview with Philip Yancey

2011-09-06T11:22:00.001-07:00

How to Make God Visible: An Interview with Philip Yancey (Part 1 of 2)

By Alyson R. Quinn | September 06 2011

Best-selling Christian author Philip Yancey has followed Prison Fellowship since its early days, and recently he was a keynote speaker at a worldwide Prison Fellowship convocation in Toronto, Canada. While he was there, he sat down with Prison Fellowship to talk about prison, grace and making God visible.

Prison Fellowship: When did you first learn about Prison Fellowship?

Yancey: I’ve known Ron [Nikkel, president of Prison Fellowship International] since before he was the director. We lived about a block away from each other in Wheaton, Illinois. I was the editor of a magazine and he headed up an organization called Youth Guidance, which dealt with…the euphemism they used was non-school-oriented teenagers, which is a polite way of saying juvenile delinquents. We became friends. I also knew Chuck Colson. I had a lot of friends who worked at Prison Fellowship, and then Ron was appointed director—I think Chuck actually made that choice right when they were first expanding into other countries. So I’ve known the organization right from the beginning of its international outreach.

PF: And what drew you in?

Yancey: Like a lot of Americans I was very unaware of the conditions in other countries. In many countries, of course, the prison doesn’t provide food. So the families are responsible for feeding the prisoners. Well, if the prisoner has shamed the family, the family isn’t motivated to provide food, so prisoners will literally starve to death unless someone steps up and provides. I got to know the appalling conditions, and the desperate need that Prison Fellowship International was addressing.

More positively, as I visited some of these prisons with Ron I found a devoutness, a vibrancy that you just don’t find in your normal, suburban Sunday church. I thought, Wow, this is really the Church here, because these guys had little but their faith in God to keep them going. They were in hopeless surroundings, and they needed hope just to survive. We visitors went away with more encouragement and inspiration than we brought in, by far. We learned from them.

PF: You’re a popular author and speaker with a busy schedule. Why did you accept an invitation to address an international convocation of prison ministers?

Yancey: Most of what I do is vicarious. I am not on the front lines of ministry. What I can do, however, is shine a little light on works that I believe in.

I sit in my basement office. I’m just writing words in hope that one day those words will jump out and help somebody, and I hear that they do. So, I’ve learned that’s what I can do. I can help motivate and bring encouragement to people who are doing the real work.

PF: You wrote a book called What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and recently you visited Old Folsom State Prison in California. While there you asked inmates who had been reading your book what they thought was so amazing about grace. What did you learn from them?

Yancey: One of the most articulate guys said that grace sets you free. If you don’t have grace, you’re bound to respond. If somebody hurts you, you’ve got to hurt them back. In a prison, if somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit them back. Prison is a very non-grace environment, often ruled by gangs who are quick to take advantage of any weakness. And so you get people who will cover your back, who will stick up for you. And if you’re insulted, you’ve got to respond in kind. That becomes a kind of slavery, said this prisoner. You are bound with the law of the jungle, as it were, and grace breaks that law. He went on to say, “Grace is the house in which I live. What I need to do is learn to invite other people into that same house.”

I thought, That’s a beautiful way of expressing it. He’s discovered the freedom of grace. Yet it’s hard to put into practice, isn’t it? Our instincts kick in, especially in a prison environment, and if you show any kind of weakness, others will exploit it. But no, there’s a better house. I’ve got to occupy that house, and gradually invite other people inside it. And that may be a metaphor for what Prison Fellowship does. We’re showing another way. We’re building a new house, and we need to invite other people in and say, “It’s a better house.”

PF: What else have prisoners taught you?

Yancey: A different prisoner said, “How would you like to be remembered for the worst thing you ever did in life?”

That’s the shame a prisoner wears. It reminds me of the old scarlet letter story by Nathaniel Hawthorne: you take the one thing a person did wrong—adultery, in this woman’s case—and make them actually wear it, literally, as the letter A, so that everyone knows, “Oh, that’s the woman who….” Essentially, we do that when we convict prisoners: for the rest of their lives, every time they apply for a job, every time they try to vote, they are known for their mistake.

We all do shameful things and wrong things, and the Bible is very clear that our artificial distinctions between the really bad things and other bad things are just that--artificial! If you go back to Romans 1 through 3, for example, Paul starts with the really bad things, like perversion and murder, and then he proceeds to say, “You who judge are guilty of the very same things.” Much like Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “If you’ve been angry, it’s no different than murder. If you’ve lusted, it’s no different than adultery.” More, Paul goes on to say, “Actually, it’s people like me who are the worst of all: self-righteous people.” Paul knew that syndrome well. Most people would see Paul as a righteous person, but he knew, “No, I was, a self-righteous person, and it was my self-righteousness that caused me to do things like participate in the stoning of Stephen. I became a murderer because of my feeling of superiority. I thought I was better than those guys.” And that’s the danger.

What I’ve learned from prisoners is that they are just like us. For whatever reason, we have put a label on them that puts them in a different class from us. That’s a danger for the rest of us because, as Paul said, it’s easy to slap a label on someone and say, “I’m certainly not as bad as that!” But Paul insists, “No, you’re not better. You may in fact be worse.”

Blessings 23 and 24

2011-09-06T06:41:00.000-07:00

23. To be of use to a friend
24. A sky that weeps so you don't have to

Blessings 16 to 22

2011-09-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

16. Straight stacks of clean, warm laundry
17. Envelopes the color of avocados
18. Smell of castile soap
19. Husband's voice on the answering machine
20. Hymns in harmony, ringing through the narthex
21. Bread and wine on the tongue
22. Joy of benediction

Blessings 13 through 15

2011-09-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

13. Baby hiccups
14. Hot bittersweet chocolate fudge
15. The memory of a perfect weekend we spent once, listening to the waves lap against the North Shore while we lay on the sand and talked about the bottomless happiness waiting in our future

Blessings 8 through 12

2011-09-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

8. Early morning silhouette of husband sleeping
9. The restless heaving of Irish oats cooking in the pot
10. Stirring honey into my herbal tea
11. Gray clouds in the northwestern sky, strange and beautiful
12. A new perspective on an old pain

Blessings Five through Seven

2011-09-02T05:15:00.000-07:00

5. Warm belly skin taut with my son
6. A praying husband
7. Making something delicious out of leftovers--a daily act of "redemption" from the back of the refrigerator

Blessings One through Four

2011-09-01T11:31:00.001-07:00

A thousand blessings:

Ruddy breast of robin
The first leaves on the first trees going scarlet
The arrival of the beautiful days, the days with just enough heat and not too much humidity
The bus driver going off his route to drop pregnant me at my doorstep

Honey, I'm Home!: Challenges During Family Reintegration

2011-03-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

From Prison Fellowship's Inside Out.

http://www.prisonfellowship.org/inside-out/io-issue/march-2011/entry/20/15221

Alyson R. Quinn

Before joining the staff of Prison Fellowship, Pat Nolan spent over two years in a California prison. During one family visit, their second daughter asked Pat, who had grown grayer behind bars, “Daddy, when you come home, will your hair turn dark again?”

When a prisoner is locked up, the world he leaves behind does not stand still. It moves on without him. So when his long-awaited day of release finally arrives, he can’t just transition back into the same job or community that he left. He steps into a whole new world. And his family life is no exception.

During the prisoner’s absence, roles have shifted, children have grown, and emotional and financial hardships have been endured. Even when daddy (or mommy) comes home, the prisoner and his family can never go back to the status quo that existed before prison, no matter how much they would like to. They must negotiate a new family dynamic that takes these changes into account.

Rebuilding a Marriage Means Tackling the Serious Stuff

In the early 1990s, Joe Avila was imprisoned in California for a drunk-driving accident that killed a teenage girl. When he entered the California Men’s Colony near San Luis Obispo, he left behind his wife, Mary, and his daughters, Elizabeth and Grace. Joe and Mary accepted Christ just prior to his incarceration, and they were committed to maintaining their marriage, but seven years of separation still wrought great changes in their relationship.

When Joe was released in 1999, he had to take things slowly. “I couldn’t assume I was head of the family just because I was out,” he remembers. “They were doing quite well without me for seven and a half years.”

During his absence, Mary had taken over Joe’s former responsibilities, and she had managed to thrive. After his release, Joe heeded the advice of wise mentors and took his cues from Mary. He looked for small ways to serve and worked hard to prove that he was becoming a better husband and father. Gradually, as he earned trust, he reassumed the role of head of the household.

When it comes to resuming the delicate balance of married life, many couples have a harder time than Joe and Mary. As Lennie Spitale writes in Coming Home! A Guide for Those Receiving a Loved One Back from Prison or Jail, the couple may have to overcome painful, guilt-ridden memories of abuse, addiction, and broken promises. The spouse who stayed at home may await the prisoner’s release with as much dread as expectation.

But for husbands and wives committed to the reconciliation and reintegration of their family, certain processes remain vital no matter the depth of past hurts: patience, true repentance, forgiveness, and communication.

For Pat and Gail Nolan, communication played a particularly important role in their success.

When Pat first came home, he and Gail found it difficult to discuss “serious things.” The children clamored for their father’s attention, and the couple tiptoed around volatile issues that arose from Pat’s reentry into the family.

“We would hold back,” remembers Pat, “and then it would burst like a dam.”

To overcome this difficulty, Pat and Gail reached back to a tool they learned during their engagement. They decided to set up family business meetings every Sunday—a structured time away from their children when they could both bring up pressing issues in a loving, gentle way.

It worked.

Pat and Gail enhanced those times of communication by holding hands, a physical gesture to remind them of their unity and commitment to each other.

Children Adjust Differently

The night of Joe’s release from prison, his daughters invited all of their friends over to the house. They could not wait to introduce them to their father.

“I’m pretty unique,” says Joe. As the executive director for Prison Fellowship in California, a role he assumed in 2000, Joe has learned that, for most children, a parent’s return from prison comes with more difficulties to surmount.

Ann Adalist-Estrin, a child and family therapist, identifies four stages that many children will go through when a parent returns from behind bars.

The honeymoon phase. Eager for everything to work out, children are cooperative and obedient, but anxiety can lie under the surface.
Suspicion. As they grow more comfortable, children will allow some of their more negative emotions to rise to the surface. They will question the returning parent’s position and permanence within the household.
Resistance. Children may go through a period of defiance, challenging the returning parent’s authority and love with rebellious behavior.
Expressing or withholding feelings. Children may ask whether it is acceptable to vent their emotions, or whether they need to hide their true feelings about the turmoil going on in their home.

Whichever phases a child goes through, it helps if the caregiver and the returning parent prepare the child before the date of release. Whenever possible, and with appropriate supervision and guidance, the child and the parent should interact through personal visits, phone calls, and letters. Maintaining a positive relationship before release will ease the process of reintegration. The child should also be included in discussions about the parent’s return and what it will mean for the family, though the complexity of the discussion will vary depending on the child’s age and maturity. Finally, educators, school counselors, and Sunday school leaders should be made aware of the child’s unique needs during the time of the parent’s return. Greater awareness can help these adults respond more positively when a child demonstrates stress, fear, or anger.

Ex-Prisoners Need to Put First Things First

Shortly after Pat’s release from prison, family friends invited him, Gail, and their children to spend a day at the beach. Excited for a respite from daily life, the Nolans packed up their family car with beach gear and prepared to hit the road. But then Pat remembered. The beach was outside of his parole district, and he had forgotten to inform his parole officer. In a panic, Pat attempted to reach his parole officer and, when that didn’t work, her supervisor. His efforts were to no avail, and he had to tell his heartbroken children that the trip was canceled.

“They were crying,” Pat remembers, as he also fights tears in the telling.

Pat’s dilemma highlights another important component of family reintegration. In the rush to become parents and spouses all at once, ex-prisoners should not forget that their own transition must come first. Whether they need to overcome an addiction, get a handle on their anger, or simply meet the technical requirements of their parole, ex-prisoners cannot become the trustworthy spouses and parents their families need until they resolve their own issues.

“They have to work on themselves a little bit at a time,” adds Joe, reflecting on the slow and sometimes tentative work of reentry and reconciliation, “but they get more respect from the family if they do that.”

Twelve Treasures

2011-01-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

Here's twelve things (people and fuzzy animals were saved first) that I would rescue in the event of a fire. What are yours?

1. My rubber stamp that I use to mark things "DONE" in giant red letters.
2. My childhood diaries.
3. The Bible my parents gave me for my thirteenth birthday.
4. The letters my husband and I wrote to each other during our courtship.
5. My laptop (It frightens me to think of how many vital documents I have not backed up.)
6. Heirloom jewelry.
7. The yellow party dress I've only worn twice.
8. My passport.
9. My backpacking pack.
10. My swing shoes.
11. My wedding dress and veil.
12. My toothbrush.

Now, that I think about it, though, I would probably do better to bring burn ointment and bandages.

"Can't Do It On My Own:" When Women Go to Prison

2011-01-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

Emily*, a slender prisoner with rusty-black hair, sports a tattoo of a panther curled over her left hand. On a Monday morning, she sits at a cafeteria-style table at the InnerChange Freedom Initiative^® (IFI) unit, a values-based reentry program at Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri. During worship, an inmate queues up a recording of Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” The inmates love this song. It expresses their need to turn their lives over to God, and they sing it loudly.

But 27-year-old Emily starts to rock in her chair, tears slipping down her smooth cheeks. She has a manila folder, labeled “Faith Lessons,” and in large letters she writes across the front of it: Jesus, take the wheel. She pauses for a moment and then adds another line from the song: I can’t do it on my own.

When the music fades, she wipes her palm across her face.

“I can’t believe it made me cry like that,” she says, embarrassed.

“A lot of people cry when I sing,” says an older inmate across the table.

Heather laughs and stands up, her prison grays tenting out unexpectedly from her abdomen. She is four months pregnant with her first child, she says.

Like women anywhere, the other inmates offer her their congratulations.

Since 1985 the population of female prisoners has risen at nearly double the rate of males. Because women prisoners have historically been few, however, corrections policy has often not taken gender-specific needs into account. The U.S. did not even have separate correctional facilities for women until 1873. But over time, it has become increasingly obvious that female prisoners have different needs than men. By learning about the issues specific to women behind bars, volunteers and prison ministry organizations can respond to them more effectively.

Walking Wounded

“A lot of them have scars from [alcohol-related] car wrecks or fights. Lots have tattoos or heroin tracks on their forearms,” says Janet McLaughlin, a retired Missouri school teacher and PF volunteer who has counseled female prisoners for four years. But, she adds, many of their scars go far deeper. “Many have traumatic and abusive pasts that they need to share.”

While many prisoners of both genders have abusive pasts in common, female inmates have a greater statistical likelihood of experiencing physical and sexual trauma.

In a presentation given to the Virginia Joint Subcommittee Studying Prisoner Reentry, Dr. Janet Warren, a professor of clinical psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia, shared findings from a study she conducted at Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. She found that 55 percent of the inmates reported they had been sexually abused as children, while 40 percent had experienced other physical abuse. Moreover, between 12 and 20 percent had been victims of sexual and/or physical abuse in just the six months prior to their incarceration.

Many incarcerated women need help to overcome the hurts that drive them to destructive behaviors like substance abuse, and their programs should look different from those offered for men. Lisa Thomas, an ex-offender and prisoner reentry advocate, has ministered to thousands of incarcerated women. She observes that in general, women respond more quickly than men to programs that draw on their affinity for verbal communication and emotional connection.

“They want somebody to hear them. They want somebody to love them,” says Thomas. “The men will respond to that, also, but women are willing to get down to the exact nature of what’s going on a lot quicker.”

Without programs that specifically target women’s abusive pasts through healthy, accountable relationships, warns Thomas, female prisoners risk getting trapped in a “habitual revolving door.”

Keeping the Peace

Incarcerated women may also face difficult relationships with other female inmates. According to Lana Black, who directs the IFI unit in Vandalia, many of the women who come into her office to talk want to discuss problems with their cell mates.

These problems can stem from a variety of sources, including under-developed conflict resolution skills.

While women prisoners commit fewer violent acts than men, “there is bickering . . . some try to manipulate,” says Janet McLaughlin. “[They] try to blame instead of taking responsibility.”

Many female inmates have never seen healthy models of conflict resolution, and so they act out according to what they have learned in negative relationships beginning at childhood.

But female inmates can change. “If they can get past the blaming,” says McLaughlin, “there’s hope for recovery and a better life.” Values-based units like IFI that teach positive relationships can help female inmates arrive at a place of empathy, responsibility, and constructive conflict resolution.

At other times, though, conflict can arise from undiagnosed or improperly treated mental health issues. According to a 2006 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at least 73 percent of incarcerated women have a mental health problem, a rate 20 percent higher than men. And that can lead to problems.

McLaughlin cites the case of one woman that had a hard time getting along with anyone because of her erratic behavior. As a former elementary school teacher, McLaughlin recognized the symptoms and suspected that she had adult attention-deficit disorder.

“I encouraged her to talk to doctors and get appropriate medication,” she says. “Things are much better now.”

McLaughlin hopes that mental health diagnosis and treatment of incarcerated women will improve, so that others can move forward, too.

Moms Behind Bars

Well over half of incarcerated women have minor children.

“It’s hard for them to adjust to separation from their children,” says McLaughlin. “And if they’ve been addicted, they probably weren’t good mothers in the first place, which is hard to face.”

Four to six percent of women, like Emily, arrive in prison pregnant. For those that reach the nine-month mark before their sentence expires, the experience of giving birth can vary widely. Some locations have special facilities that allow new mothers to remain with their infants while continuing to serve their sentence. In other facilities, however, women may be returned to the jail or prison directly after delivery, while their infant goes to family members or becomes a ward of the State. Depending on circumstances, the mother’s parental rights may also be terminated.

Separation from their minor children weighs heavily on incarcerated mothers, but it can also offer a special window for ministry that will help them turn their lives around.

"The quickest way to get to a women’s heart is through her children,” says Thomas. “An inmate can spot a phony a mile away. But if someone gives them something for their child with no strings attached, you cannot keep them away from Bible study, because they know that you care about them.”

To that end, Prison Fellowship offers the Angel Tree^® program to thousands of inmates and their children every year, delivering Christmas gifts in the name of the incarcerated parent. As relationships get stronger, mothers behind bars gain motivation to avoid recidivism, as well as hope that their children will not imitate their errors.

Holistic ministry that addresses women’s trauma, substance abuse, mental health, and family relationships can help begin the process of transformation. But “some things,” says McLaughlin, “they just need the Lord’s help to get through.”

*The inmate’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.

Humbug

2010-12-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

This year doesn't feel like Christmas. Not a whit. Not a bit. Not a jot. I've been to no parties. I've baked no gingerbread. I've neither strung lights nor rung bells nor sung carols. (And I do love to belt out 'Joy to the World').

We started out this holiday season poorly. Thanksgiving passed unobserved. Instead of the planned repast at my in-laws' Atlanta home, we caught an emergency flight to Boston and rushed to the bedside of my brother-in-law, diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. We prayed and we cried and we talked about anything we could think of to ease the tension of waiting. When dinnertime came, he ate slices of turkey and cranberry relish from a hospital tray. Later on, I excused myself down to the chapel and cried for my new brother and for all the hurts summoned by a hospital room. We were offered leftovers by dear, kind friends around 11 o'clock on that Thanksgiving night, but I was carsick and could not eat it. I fell asleep on their living room sofa. The next day I watched my mother-in-law weep great hot tears that fell on the cover of a leather Bible and wipe them on the bedsheets so that no one would see. But friend after friend like came a steady river, beseeching Heaven for healing. And there was laughter in that room, and kind words and embraces, and in that room Christ was with us.

After several days at the hospital, we returned home to northern Virginia, but only to pack up our apartment and move across town in freezing cold weather. We were joined in this effort with by friends that I think ought to be canonized, though one of them rejoined that he would have to die first, so would I kindly not rush the business. We missed that Sunday service, the second of Advent, rushing to scrub the dirt and grime from our old apartment. But as our friends helped us move, Christ was with us.

The following Sunday, it was my turn to work in the nursery. It was the Lessons and Carols service, one of my favorite services of the year. It's a time of lit candles and holy words and lovely songs, a reverent ushering in of the Christ child. So I was feeling perhaps a little curmudgeonly as I sat down in the basement with the goldfish crackers ground into the carpet while my husband went up into the pews. But then the two- and three-year-olds built a cake for Jesus out of building blocks and crayons and Scotch tape, and they sang 'Happy Birthday' to the infant Savior out of tune and out of rhythm. And I held in my arms the softness of a little baby boy who clung to my hands, and I stopped minding quite so much. And as the children sang, Christ was with us.

And the week after that, I went outside and waited for my bus to come. It never came. I stood for an hour in a five-degree wind chill, stamping my feet to keep them alive. Two days later I came down with a flu that has kept me housebound for the better part of a week. I missed church again, and with it my last chance this year to sing carols in the dear brick church where my husband and I were married. But it snowed. It snowed a soft, fine, bright shawl over the cold ground, as though to remind the world that its sorrow and sinning shall not stand forever. And I sat and drank the soup my husband brought home for me, and I watched the bits of whiteness fall. And in this apartment with its towers of half-filed cardboard boxes, Christ is with me.

And so, you see, this Advent, we have had none of that expansive joviality (aided, perhaps, by a mug of mulled wine) that Christmas seems to warrant. But then, we have had family, and friends, and the most angelic of choirs. We've had snow outside these walls and love within them. We have had the the dearest of all messages that Christmas brings: that now we have Christ with us always.

The End of the Story

2010-12-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

Think about the favorite, well-thumbed book of your childhood. Your Lord of the Rings. Your Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Your Gospel of Luke. Let it be to you whichever volume you kept under your pillow and read furtively with the lamp turned low past bedtime, while with one ear you listened for your mother’s tread upon the landing.

If you take any of those stories in the middle, you find a situation past resolution, the hero in the clutches of the dragon and the lovers sundered forever by their parents’ decree. The pierced Savior sleeps entombed and the disciples tremble in the basement. All is lost.

But even as children we somehow knew that stories could not end that way. Armed with that blessed assurance we slogged expectantly through pages of despair and defeat, onto the peace, love, and victors’ bliss that awaited us in the last chapter.

Twenty six years into my life, I believe that our lives are stories that have not yet reached their final chapters.

I believe that the passages of tedium, defeat, and sorrow will find their place in the purpose of the years.

I believe that the fruitless hours spent waiting in the cold, the painful accidents of chance, and the rout of our bodies by cancer and age and long hard use will prove all along to have fit into the Potter’s palms.

I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the live everlasting.

I believe in the end of the story.

Poems for Jesus: Things Born

2010-11-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

‘Neath the ice there lies, hidden from my eyes,

A brightness now dormant and dimmed.

In the deep, cold ground, far from sight and sound,

Waits a tulip with scarlet brimmed.

Never I hear in the wood dead and drear

The life that is raging within

The sap in the bough that flows even now

And promises leaves for the spring.

As the old year wanes and the new one gains

But the nights stay long and dark

Who’d ever guess that the brightest and best

Of the seasons now comes with the lark?

And beneath my skin there’s a soul grown thin

On the meager feasts of earth

But beyond this strife I will yet find Life

At my new and second birth.

Untitled

2010-10-26T13:01:00.001-07:00

Inspired by Antoine Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand and Stars

The hiker ascending Costa Rica’s Rincón de la Vieja, an active volcano east of Golfo de Papagayo, climbs 5,000 feet and passes through several ecosystems. First, near the entrance to the park, the forest spills over the footpath in a restless green vandalism. You see the horde of tree and fern sucking at the rich, moist soil and stripping from the sunlight all its effulgence. In the gloom breathes an armored blue iguana, invisible until it moves, like a thousand turquoise stones organized suddenly under a primary volition. Farther up the hiker meets a cold mist, and trees cowering away from a firm down-slope wind. Every few hundred yards the ground rises more steeply. At each switchback, the vegetation grows up from the thin, stony soil more dwarfish and hardy. At last there mounts up into the white mist, scoured by the wind, a trackless pate of gray and broken rock.

This afternoon, with my husband of six days, I climb over and under downed trees. For several days, the park closed as high winds uprooted trees and felled thick limbs, but today is calm. There is something foreboding in the stillness of the green canopy, where so recently the violence of the wind brought the dumb trees to a pitched and groaning battle. We walk through a world muffled and tangled, a world secretive to strangers.
The secrets of these volcanic forests include pools of bubbling, breathing mud and, higher up, ancient craters scalloped from the heights in eruptions of fire and ash. In the vanishing views offered by the shifting mist, the water-filled craters appear from above as smooth and luminous as the faces of cut gems; the crater walls seems to drop into them as if in homage to beauty, and from their hot, acidic surfaces steam rises toward the cooler mist. When the volcano last erupted, it rained plumes of mineral-rich ash down upon its flanks. Now insects unknown to science hum and bore into the wind-felled trees. A delicate biology thrives improbably upon the marriage of wind, water, and fire, not unlike man holed up in his pockets of civilation.
In the middle of the forest a single ficus tree with two interlocking trunks has grown high into the canopy and deep into the earth. It gathers into its trunks all it can of sunlight, rain, and nutrients. It draws us to it to itself to marvel and gape. It is a kind of forest deity, the two-in-one god. Locals call it Los Gemelos, or The Twins.
Near The Twins we hear a large party of Costa Ricans descending the trail. They round a bend, and we see them. Their eyes are round and vanquished.
“Turn back!” they say to us, who would venture. “Turn back, because the trees are down, and the way is slick, so you cannot pass.”
Having come so far, however, my husband wants to continue. We gamble that we are tougher than those that the crater has turned back, a family party with an old man amongst them. So I follow my husband over the raspy girths of downed trees, through the damp softness of muddy earth, behind the opacity of emerald curtains.
Finally, after hiking for several hours toward the summit, we cross above the last of the big trees. We see where we have come. A bird rides the air currents down to the dry, golden plain of Guanacaste. A gulley, carpeted with green, passes away to the east.
Above the trees grow only stunted shrubs with oar-shaped leaves. The earth is pink as a blood-soaked napkin, and fissured by a muddy watercourse which we traverse slowly, marking off the yards in roots for grasping. Slick ledges for toes. We make halting progress. Streaked with earth, I nearly cease to believe in the warm, humid, arboreal tent and sweet, loamy footpaths of this morning, effaced as they are by the chill, eager billows of descending cloud.
We rise up to the lip of the crater where nothing grows. It is a trackless, lunar ground, the unfriendly slope of a perfect cone. The wind has become a personal malevolence, and it hurls itself across the ground with a force I have never felt outside of a hurricane. Its noise rises like a pained cry and falls like stitches are being ripped from a garment. I halt and double over, afraid that if I stand up the wind will get a firm enough hold to toss me off its hip. My husband leans into the slope above me, zigzagging between rocks. Every several paces he stretches a long-fingered hand to the loose ground, as if ascertaining the reality of the earth in a dreamscape. He turns to look for me. The mist passes before him. Obscures him. He calls something that the wind carries away, so that his voice sounds to my left instead of above me. I hesitate, then struggle up to where he waits for me. We brace ourselves together against a fresh lash of wind. His thick hair flattens over his brow with the gust, and I laugh.
We are here on the edge of the cold, white abyss beyond the trees and all wise admonitions. All this whiteness! The cloud has erased everything, and there are no longer in the world any signs of life, of green, or warmth. There is only me and the man I said vows to at a church six days ago, who is still nearly a stranger. And there is our mysterious covenant to conquer this whiteness, and not to be plucked from it. How naked and doomed and brave now seems the pact between us, set down in a world that will never in truth offer us more clarity and hospitality than this cold and truncated circle! From whence will we draw the strength to arise from our isolation day after day and go to succor each other? The vows he and I have repeated seem but fragile links forged in a tender hour: a wind could tear them up, a fire burn them. Now we have climbed up above our heedlessness.
Yet we are together now. Somehow because of that sole fact I am not afraid. Together we dare the fierce wind and the white cloud and the universe to sunder us if they can. We may thrive improbably against all the violence. This absurdity and this unquenchable comfort are in my laughter hunched over on the rough, sliding stones. I read in the curve of my husband’s answering smile a similar exhilaration, a secret to bear down between us through the forest and among the habitations of men.

Helping Hounds

2010-10-08T11:31:00.001-07:00

His eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, Chris Goehner walks into a restaurant in Washington, D.C., shadowed by his service dog, Pelé. When Chris sits, the large, sunny-coated retriever curls up on top of his feet. The restaurant employees notice Pelé and assume that Chris cannot see—until they spy him typing text messages on his cell phone.

Chris is not blind. He returned from military service in Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a serious anxiety disorder triggered by traumatic events. Pelé, trained by a special group of inmates in New York, helps Chris cope with the otherwise crippling effects of his condition.

Invisible Battle Scars

Chris comes from a small, closely knit community in Washington State’s Wenatchee Valley. Eighteen days after his high school graduation, he enlisted in the Navy. Though his grandmother offered to pay for college, “I felt like I could do something better,” says Chris. “I could do something more.”

He received training as a medic and served two tours of duty. On the second tour, Chris worked at a base 30 miles southwest of the Iraqi capital. At all hours of the day and night, wounded soldiers arrived by truck, helicopter, or tank. “If you’ve seen the TV show M.A.S.H.,” remembers Chris, “it was pretty much like that.”

In 2005 a suicide bomber destroyed a bus near the base. A young boy wandered into the field hospital with a severe shrapnel wound.

“Boy walked in,” shudders Chris. “Not crying. Not screaming. Not blood everywhere. He moved his hand. Moved his bandage. And you could see right into his abdomen . . . You remember that stuff.”

Now, when Chris sees his young nephew, the image of the wounded Iraqi child comes rushing back.

Chris left Iraq in March 2006. Though he had left danger behind, normal events unsettled him. Fireworks caused a panic. Loud noises irritated him. Many nights, he lay awake for hours. When he did drift into sleep, he would wake from a nightmare covered in sweat. When suicidal thoughts plagued his mind, he decided to seek professional help. He was diagnosed with PTSD.

A psychologist prescribed medication to treat Chris’s anxiety and insomnia, but the young veteran still suffered. Though bright and articulate, he struggled in school, as though he had forgotten how to learn. He tried to find simple work in a hospital emergency room, but even with all his experience, no one would hire him.

Chris’s relationships suffered, too. Acquaintances judged him for serving in a controversial war. Old friends misunderstood him. His marriage, too, became a casualty. Nervous in public and distrustful of strangers, Chris turned inward.

Finding Help

A turning point came when Chris learned about Puppies Behind Bars (PBB), founded by New York resident Gloria Gilbert Stoga in 1997. Under this innovative program, now active in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, inmates volunteer to raise and train puppies. With careful instruction from inmates and PBB’s staff instructors, the canines grow up to become guide dogs for the blind, bomb-sniffing dogs for law enforcement, and life-changing companions for veterans like Chris.

Pelé, who was born in 2008 and named after the Brazilian soccer legend, was raised by inmates at Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, a medium-security men’s prison in New York. Pelé lived with inmates 24 hours a day. In addition to normal obedience training, Pelé learned specific commands that would help him serve a veteran. He learned to “block,” or stand close to his handler and keep strangers at a distance, and he learned to “pop a corner,” or go ahead of his handler to check for danger.

Pelé and Chris finally met in November 2009, when Chris traveled to New York to receive a service dog from PBB. Before Chris could take Pelé home with him, though, he also had to go to prison and meet the inmates who raised Pelé. Never having been to prison before, Chris was nervous. To prepare himself, he watched every prison show on television, and his tension mounted. He expected to find scary cliques of tattooed, muscle-bound toughs in the prison yard.

Instead, he found a clean, well-kept facility with inmates who were “nice and respectful.” Some had also served in the military.

The inmates who had raised Pelé sat down with Chris to help him understand his dog’s personality. And they shared some of their own struggles, chief among them the difficulty of reintegrating into a society that judged their past and ignored their contributions, like raising Pelé.

Although Chris realizes the obvious differences between serving time in prison and serving in the military, he empathized with their struggle to reintegrate. Wow, he thought when he heard the inmates’ stories, that’s kind of like getting out of the military!

A New Life

Pelé has made an enormous difference in Chris’s life. Chris no long suffers from nightmares, because Pelé jumps onto the bed and licks his face. Chris finds it easier to control his temper, because Pelé tugs on his sleeve when he raises his voice. Chris has stopped taking five of his psychiatric medications, and he has the confidence to venture into public. Together, Chris and Pelé have been to the White House, Las Vegas, and the inside of the Hoover Dam. Pelé even provides an easy conversation-starter when Chris meets strangers, and he is learning how to trust people again.

He also wants to help others like himself. Recently Chris worked for a senator on the Veterans Affairs Committee, helping to write a Senate resolution clarifying the rights of PTSD-affected veterans with service dogs under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Chris and other veterans are not the only ones to benefit from Puppies Behind Bars. Gloria Gilbert Stoga, the organization’s founder, says that inmates who participate also reap rewards.

“They learn compassion,” she explains, “and also increased self-esteem. They learn that they can undertake something difficult and succeed.”

From the Archives: 2008

2010-08-24T06:51:00.000-07:00

C.S. Lewis has written that raw kindness does not care so much whether its object becomes good or bad, but only that it does not suffer. God sees wickedness, and not pain, as the ultimate misfortune, and so he is willing for us to suffer in order to make us good. Sadly, pleasure and prosperity rarely make a man or woman better than before, unless the soul has already advanced far on the heavenward road.

------

Visitors

2010-08-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

In early spring a foolish robin built her nest in the side of our apartment building, right along the stairwell. I could have reached out and touched her with my hand. As I came around the corner, I always stopped to look at her, and she watched me warily with her round black eyes.

After a few weeks came her three eggs, blue and reflective as turquoise stones. During the raging storms of summer evenings, she spread her brown pinion feathers over the sides of her nest, that the eggs might not know a drop of moisture.

My husband and I looked in on her every day. We regarded her as a friend, a fellow sojourner surviving in our corner of Fairfax. We rejoiced and cooed when out of the eggs broke three robin chickens with pink, translucent skin.

But a couple days later I found the nest empty. No chicks. No robin. No trace of shell or feather. They have never returned. I suspect the grey housecat that lives on the first floor. Jim thinks the mother “carried them to a new nest,” which he says either to comfort me or to comfort himself. I cannot believe it.

We still glance reflexively into the nest when we come down the stairs, though nothing changes.

Then this summer there came a mint-green luna moth with a fuzzy, white body and antennae like tiny ferns. Dramatic plumes curled from its back wings. Day after day it stayed motionless by the lintel of our door. Once I made him to crawl up on my finger and brought him into the apartment. I called him Simon, spoke to him, and tried to feed him sugar water, as I used to do with monarch butterflies. I put his feet in the water, since moths and butterflies have their taste receptors in their toes, if they can be said to have toes. But I found out later that it did no good. Luna moths live for only a week, their sole purpose to mate before death.

I took him out into the stand of trees in our complex, hoping that there he might have better luck.

He to Whom We Call

2010-07-14T12:55:00.001-07:00

We use it all the time. We whisper it. We curse it. We sing it. It’s part of our basest slang and our most sacred expressions. But where does the English word “god” actually come from?

The other languages I am familiar with all have a Latin base. The word for “god” in Latin languages comes, originally, from “zeus”. It survives in English in terms like deism or theology.

I’ll cover the Latin roots in a follow-up post, but the roots of “god” are not Latin, but rather an ancient Germanic language. Many of English’s most basic words come from this source: man, woman, child, hunger, thirst, sun, death, birth, and water all have nothing to do with parlance of Rome. The word we use for the One we worship is no exception.

So let’s take a look at where we get the word for “god”.

Before “god”, says the linguists who study Proto-Germanic (the theoretical, reconstructed root of all modern Germanic languages), we had the word “ghutan,” which was used in the sense of “supreme being.” But that word had an even older root (ghut), which in turn had an even older root: “gheu”. And “gheu” once upon a time meant “to call, to invoke.”

So when our ancestors spoke of god, they meant not merely a spiritual being, but one on whom they called. One with whom they could interact. A relational Person. God was “the one to whom we call.”

I like this—very much.

Because regardless of our personal theologies, we all do this. In the foxholes of our daily lives, we invoke the help of a Being we may say we don’t believe in. How many atheists have been forlorn to hear themselves cry out, “God, please!” in the moment of their personal distress?

It’s as is we cannot help ourselves. Because at some level beneath reason and will, we poke our fingers through our measurable, material surroundings in search of the spiritual we instinctively know to underlie it.

Scientific studies sometimes bump up against this phenomenon. http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/

One of the scientists quoted in the above article explains at length how the human experience of “god” is an evolutionary adaptation, an almost universal response to the pressures of sentient, rational existence.

But what if it’s the other way around? What if we call upon God because He designed us to call, and because He loves it when we do?

Chasing Tony (From Jubilee, July 2010)

2010-07-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

“Can you get a gun?” asked Tony, then 16.
He and two friends had run out of drug money. To get it, they robbed seven convenience stores with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. “We just wanted play money,” remembers Tony.
At the seventh store, the cashier reached for the phone. The boy wielding the shotgun fired, and the clerk went down, a red stain blooming on his flank.
How had it come to this?
When small, Tony was raised by his Catholic grandparents in Chicago, and at the church of a believing aunt, he remembers reciting John 3:16 before the congregation.
But when he turned eight, his father, who lived in Dallas, brought Tony to live there. Tony resented the change—and his father’s battle with alcohol. He started failing school and fighting.
“Every week,” remembers Tony, “I had to bring a note home explaining my bad behavior. . . But it didn’t seem to deter me.”
Tony stole to fund his spiraling drug addiction, and he ran away to avoid the consequences. Whenever he ran, his father patrolled the streets all night in search of him. Tony failed to recognize his father’s love at the time, but now he recognizes that “my father never gave up on me.”
After he was arrested for the convenience store robberies, Tony was released to his father’s custody pending trial. Before long he ran again, hiding from both his father and the police.
On February 1, 1989, Tony was apprehended fleeing from a stolen vehicle. He was certified to stand trial as an adult and sentenced to 25 years.

When Lightning Strikes
By then, whatever faith Tony possessed had dwindled to a faint memory of brimstone and catechisms.
“I was 16 going on 17,” he says, “and I wasn’t going to be nobody’s fool.”
Prison only honed his criminality; after 10 years of incarceration, he lasted four months on his first parole. Tony returned to a hole that no light penetrated—until lightning struck.
Tony’s pregnant Aunt Tina was hit by a lightning bolt. Though she survived, doctors recommended terminating her pregnancy. Tony’s Aunt Margie offered God her life if He spared Tina’s child. When Tina delivered a healthy boy, Margie surrendered her life to Christ.
Margie and her husband, Mark, began to visit Tony. He scoffed at their mention of a caring God, but their own compassion bewildered him.
“Don’t worry about me,” he assured them. “This is my world.”
They wept for the nephew who could imagine no life but prison, but eventually, their perseverance bore fruit.
“God started giving me a soft heart,” says Tony.
He began to pray before parole hearings. When denied, he would give up on God again. But God never gave up on him.
In 2006 Tony reviewed his note card with scripted statements to impress the interviewer at yet another parole hearing. But something made him throw it away; for the first time, he approached God without conditions.
“I’m tired of the games,” he confessed. “If I serve the rest of my term, that’s fine. I want to know the power that’s behind the people who come into prison to visit me. Just help me.”
Tony was shocked when he was offered parole and his choice of reentry programs: nine months of drug rehab or 18 months in the InnerChange Freedom Initiative® (IFI), a reentry program developed by Prison Fellowship and based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
Though tempted by the shorter program, Tony remembered his request of God. Here was his chance to meet the Power behind his aunt. He asked to be sent to IFI.

“God Never Turns His Back.”
“He was just a different person,” marvels Margie, remembering the first time she visited Tony in IFI. On the four-hour drive back home, Margie and Mark wept tears of gratitude.
Tony grew to know God in IFI’s structured, values-centered environment. He also learned to release the pain of his childhood and to understand the consequences of his own choices. And when his business plan won at an IFI business fair, “it amazed me, and it gave me a new viewpoint of my capabilities.”
After his release Tony continued IFI’s post-prison phase. After a difficult job hunt, he finally found employment with Artifex Technology and was promoted to project manager. “I would trust him with anything,” says Artifex owner Jacob Cervantes.
Tony also married Annie Cervantes, a relative of Jacob, and became an instant father to her 11-year-old, Nathan, soon followed by baby Giovanni.
Giovanni’s birth left an awestruck Tony determined to make it on the outside. “Two nights ago,” says the dad, “I was holding Giovanni and the thought crossed my mind if there was a way I could earn some fast money. But he was just looking at me . . . and I realized that my son will look to me as the example.” For his own example, Tony can look to his father, about to celebrate eight years of sobriety. They talk daily.
Tony “understands what life is now,” says his father. Someday Tony wants to use his life to help other ex-prisoners, but for now he serves and loves his family. Despite some transitional struggles, Annie says he’s doing “excellent.”
Day by day, he looks to God for strength because, no matter how far Tony ran in the past, “God never turns His back.”

Raising Up Fathers (from www.prisonfellowship.org)

2010-07-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Raising Up Fathers from the Inside Out

View This IssueOn Father’s Day in America, the tangy smoke of barbecue will float over countless backyards. Young daughters and sons will present their fathers with hugs, homemade cards, and breakfast in bed. But for over one million children of incarcerated men, one thing will be missing: Dad.

The hundreds of thousands of fathers behind bars have an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children, and they need training and practical tools to become better parents. Prison Fellowship has partnered with the National Fatherhood Initiative® (NFI) to develop InsideOut DadTM Christian, a curriculum based on solid biblical principles to help men become the fathers that God created them to be.

And it’s available for your use!

Life Like a Locomotive
Rev. E. Gregory Austen, Jr., director of corrections programming for NFI and primary author of InsideOut Dad Christian, compares the situation of many incarcerated fathers to the biblical character of Samson. “Samson spent most of his life as a man who was unaware—going through life like a locomotive and not fulfilling God’s purposes for him. He couldn’t see clearly until he was in prison and blinded.”

Likewise, says Rev. Austen, men who have made serious mistakes and entered prison have an opportunity to see themselves clearly for the first time, especially in their parental roles. InsideOut Dad Christian is designed to illuminate for men their God-given purpose as fathers and equip them to begin to live it out.

Speaking to the Man
InsideOut Dad Christian “speaks to the man—not at him,” says Raeanne Hance, executive director of Prison Fellowship Florida. Through 12 core sessions, 26 optional sessions, and a reentry module, the curriculum addresses issues central to men, such as: exploring faith, handling and expressing emotions, improving communication, maintaining mental and physical health, and managing stress.

Check It Out for Yourself!
Click here for sample lessons of InsideOut Dad Christian.

Holistically grounded, men will be better able to tackle the fatherhood portion of the curriculum, which helps men to write letters to their children, understand their children’s developmental needs, and reestablish relationships with caregivers.

Each volunteer-led core session comes with optional sessions that expand on important themes. Participants study the curriculum, journal their thoughts, and discuss their findings in breakout sessions. The curriculum also suggests creative ways to interact with their children from afar, such as: “Paper Hugs from Daddy,” chess by mail, and recordings of storybooks. Woven throughout with Scripture, InsideOut Dad Christian is edited for a sixth-grade reading level.

“Volunteers . . . love the curriculum. They love the principles that are being taught,” says Raeanne. She has made InsideOut Dad Christian an integral part of reentry programming at four facilities in Florida and hopes to add a fifth in the near future. She also plans to train inmates to become peer facilitators and lead the program on their own.

The inmates’ “attitudes have changed,” adds Shawn O’Neill, who directs reentry for Prison Fellowship Florida. They have “that eagerness to take that rightful, God-ordained place as father of the family.”

From Sorrow to Hope
When participants were confronted with the importance of godly fatherhood, “their reaction was remorse,” says Bill Anderson, executive director of Prison Fellowship Arizona/Oklahoma, who oversaw promising pilots of the curriculum. But soon participants moved from sorrow to hope as the curriculum offered them practical ways to reach out to their children—and wait patiently for trust to grow back in broken relationships.

Shawn tells the story of one inmate who had a broken relationship with his daughter. Though he had written to her several times before, no answer came. He wrote to her again to share some of the insights he had gained from InsideOut Dad Christian. Soon, she re-opened correspondence with him. By the end of the program, says Shawn, they were “well on their way to reconciliation.”

Robby, an inmate and the father of three boys, wrote to Rev. Austen to say, “I just want to be the father they need in their lives. I truly am blessed to be apart [sic] of a program . . . and I really do appreciate the guidance. It’s only by the grace of God! I plan to apply what I have learned over the last 12 weeks to the best of my ability.”

Not only does fatherhood training help men become better fathers from the inside, but it also helps ex-prisoners stay out. Behind a saving relationship with Christ, claims Rev. Austen, nothing can motivate a man more than the desire to be there for his children. “When they believe that they have an irreplaceable role in the lives of their children,” he says, “it gives them a reason to care.”

Returning mature, well-equipped fathers to their families also helps to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. With children of prisoners at significant risk of entering jail, effective fatherhood training can help mitigate some of the worst consequences of separation and betrayed trust.

Implementing the Program
Although it is sometimes inappropriate, and illegal, for inmates to seek contact with children or their caregivers, Austen emphasizes that in the vast majority of cases, reconciliation can reap a harvest of renewed hope for prisoners and their families. Even when caregivers return prisoners’ letters to their children unopened, prisoners are encouraged to save the letters so that one day they might prove to their children that they cared.

InsideOut Dad Christian is published by the National Fatherhood Initiative. You can view samples online. If you would like to bring the curriculum into the prison where you minister, please contact your local Prison Fellowship representative in the field, or call the PF National Program Support Center at 1-800-251-7411.

Dollars and Sense (From Prison Fellowship's Inside Out e-mag)

2010-06-16T08:15:00.001-07:00

When Jill Colon came out of prison, she walked into the arms of her Prison Fellowship mentors, Ginger and Esther. They treated her to a picnic lunch in the park before escorting her to a safe transitional housing unit. For a year before Jill’s release, her two mentors had met with her many times to help her prepare for freedom, and they continued to walk with her from the day of her release, gathering donated clothes, finding money to pay for her prescription drugs, and ushering her into a local church.

When Jill Colon (left) got out of prison, she had mentors and resources to help her succeed. Most released prisoners go back inside--crowding prisons and straining budgets.But for many of the 700,000 prisoners released to American neighborhoods each year, the return to society looks bleak. After months or years in an environment prone to eroding decision-making skills, many will take their bus fare and the clothes on their backs and head straight back to familiar territory: addictions, broken relationships, and crime. Nationwide, about half of released prisoners will land back behind bars within three years. Taxpayers will foot the bill for their continued incarceration.

The Big Picture
The alarming recidivism rates of offenders are part of a much larger crisis in American corrections—a crisis that many innovative legislators, corrections officials, and nonprofit partners are working hard to address.

But first, how did we get here?

In the last three decades, many of America’s national and state policy-makers—with broad public support—made sweeping avowals to get “tough on crime.” Harsher sentencing legislation soon followed, such as three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, and the abolishment of parole for certain categories of offense. Meanwhile, tougher penalties for drug use, possession, and distribution helped to keep more people in prison longer.

As a result, by the end of 2008, more than 7.3 million people were incarcerated or under correctional supervision. That’s more than the individual populations of 38 U.S. states, or one in every 31 adults.1 America’s prisons are the fullest in the world.

What Incarceration Costs Us
The cost of corrections has spiraled to roughly $68 billion per year.2 Nationwide, it costs $20,000 to $40,000 per year to incarcerate each of the country’s 2.3 million prisoners, and as the prison population ages, the cost of prisoners’ medical care climbs by 10 percent annually.3

Add to those the hidden costs of high incarceration rates.

When prisoners, especially nonviolent drug offenders, spend decades behind bars, state, local, and federal governments lose out on untold taxable income and workforce productivity.

The incarceration of a parent also adversely affects the family left behind, and minority families are disproportionately represented in their ranks. Seventy percent of children with a parent in prison belong to a racial minority.4 Once a parent is in jail, parent-child contact often fades away. Prisoners’ children—seldom recognized as victims themselves—face an elevated risk of long-term emotional and behavioral disturbances, including academic failure, aggression, and intergenerational incarceration.5

Finally, whenever corrections policy emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation, prisons risk becoming warehouses for inmates. Without access to evidence-based programs to combat addictive behaviors, improve literacy, and impart parenting and vocational skills, released inmates emerge from prisons no better equipped than when they went into them. Prisoners who have not addressed their drug addictions or skills gaps are more likely to commit new crimes upon release, creating new victims and compounding costs for corrections.

Truly dangerous criminals belong in prison. But many offenders could be diverted to alternative corrections without risking public safety, and others could be given tools to make their prison time a truly transformative experience instead of simply a brief hiatus in a life of crime. Because public safety is at stake and public funds are scarce, it is time to examine whether every taxpayer dollar spent on corrections is really making our society more secure, just, and compassionate.

Seeking Solutions
The economic downturn has hit state budgets hard. Combined, states face a projected $375 billion shortfall between FY2010 and FY2011.6 While tightening their belts, states have had to examine their corrections budgets—which previously ballooned 349 percent between 1987 and 20087—and find places to cut spending.

States have first attempted to slash corrections spending in the short term. They have worked to make daily operations less costly by renegotiating the cost of inmate pharmaceuticals, reducing staffing, reducing salaries or benefits, consolidating facilities, and canceling inmate programming.8 Twenty-two states have in some way diminished their corrections capacity by shutting facilities, reducing beds, halting planned expansions, or delaying the opening of new facilities.9 States have also embraced low-risk approaches to reducing inmate populations, such as reducing the number of technical parole violations that result in incarceration and allowing some low-level offenders to serve less than mandatory minimums for satisfactory participation in rehabilitation programming.

Reducing prison populations through innovative release and supervision policies is an important step in controlling corrections costs, but what consequences arise when states must also apply the scalpel to rehabilitative programming?

States like Kansas, Texas, and Colorado, which have in recent years put major dents in their recidivism rates, did so largely by proactively investing in evidence-based pre-release programming. But when the budget crisis hit, Kansas lawmakers slashed funding for community rehabilitation programs—particularly for substance-abuse treatment—that had shown dramatic success. “The money simply doesn’t exist to begin to restore those programs,” laments Bill Miskell, a spokesman for the state corrections department.

While the move has helped shrink Kansas’ corrections budget for the moment, the long-term consequences are already beginning to show. This year one of Kansas’ shuttered prisons will re-open, partially to help house the recidivists, whose numbers, after a promising dip in 2007, are again on the rise.10

So far, Texas has managed to exempt inmate treatment programs from planned budget cuts.11 Colorado has implemented sentencing changes designed to reduce imprisonment rates for low-level drug offenses, raise penalties for more serious offenders, and invest the savings in substance-abuse treatment.

Non-Prison Options
There are also cost-effective approaches outside of prison walls, like community corrections options. According to Dr. Joan Petersilla, community corrections are “non-prison sanctions that are imposed . . . instead of a prison sentence . . . to provide offender accountability, deliver rehabilitations services and surveillance, and achieve fiscal efficiency.” Not only are community corrections approaches generally found to be more effective, particularly for drug-addicted felons, but they can also offer significant savings. An Ohio study in 2002 found that the state saved between $2,000 and $11,000 by appropriately diverting an offender to community corrections instead of prison.

There are also more than 2,000 drug courts in the nation. The original drug court, an intense, community-based program to treat, restore, and supervise drug felons, appeared in the Date County Circuit Court in 1989. Drug courts divert nonviolent substance abusers into treatment. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, research has shown that drug courts “lower arrest and conviction rates, improve substance abuse treatment outcomes, reunite families, and produce measurable cost benefits.”

The Nonprofit Piece
Departments of corrections (DOCs) throughout the nation face difficult decisions. In California the secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations, Matthew Cate, summarizes the situation of many: “The budget reality has forced . . . tough choices as we weigh population reductions, staff layoff, and a significant cut to our rehabilitation programming. We must target our limited resources.”

Like Jill Colon on the day of her release, DOCs have friends eager to help them reach their goals of offender rehabilitation and public safety. Nonprofit organizations, churches, and entire communities can help to fill in the service gaps that the budget crisis has left.

Prison Fellowship is just one organization that works with DOCs in all 50 states to bring change into the lives of prisoners. The InnerChange Freedom Initiative® (IFI), developed by Prison Fellowship, is an intensive, combination in-prison/post-prison reentry program based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Research on one of the IFI programs, now active in five states, showed that its graduates have a much lower rate of return to prison than comparable prisoners. Prison Fellowship is working diligently to incorporate the most effective elements of IFI into programming in other prisons.

IFI and similar programs can complement the aims of Departments of Corrections who may have the will to fight recidivism but lack time, manpower, or resources. Further, faith-based organizations can provide spiritual guidance that helps change prisoners’ lives at the core level of conscience and character.

Beyond assisting with programming, nonprofit ministries can help DOCs create the community-based continuums of care that help ex-prisoners make a successful transition. Prison Fellowship has begun to organize Out4Life coalitions throughout the United States. Out4Life partners—DOCs, prison ministries, churches, community-service organizations, social-service agencies, and volunteers—work together to provide services and resources that help ex-prisoners gain employment, find housing, and reconcile with their families and communities.

The corrections policies of recent decades have taken an enormous toll—both financial and social. While many states have adopted evidence-based policies to reduce prison populations and ensure public safety, the current fiscal crisis imperils both goals. But in this moment of crisis, DOCs and nonprofit partners have a unique opportunity to collaborate in the interest of the law-abiding public, and for the good of prisoners who could safely rejoin the world outside the walls.

Why Mentors Matter (Visit www.pfm.org to learn more)

2010-05-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

Why Mentors Matter
Volunteer Dan Pearson on Filling the Father Gap for Ex-Prisoners

Alyson Quinn

Our Current Issue Includes:•Accountability: Helping Others Live Godly Lives

•Why Mentors Matter
•Unmasking Our Real Selves
View This Isssue“On Mother’s Day, there are tears shed at the prison. Father’s Day passes quietly. Most of these guys haven’t had a dad,” explains Dan Pearson, a Prison Fellowship volunteer and a 70-year-old grandfather from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Citing the absence of strong male role models in many prisoners’ pasts, Dan emphasizes the importance that mentors can have for their futures, especially upon release.

“I don’t think you and I can understand the pull of the world on these guys when they get out,” says Dan, “They are like children—giddy.” But after the thrill of freedom come the challenges of reintegration. Ex-prisoners can easily drift back to the places, friends, and habits that led to their incarceration.

Dan and Sondra PearsonThat’s when a mentor can make all the difference. “The recidivism rate is much lower for those who are Christians and have mentors,” Dan insists. Studies have linked involved mentors to significantly reduced rates of return to prison.

Mentors become even more important as states cut corrections budgets. In Michigan, where Dan has led in-prison Bible studies and mentored prisoners since 1996, the state Department of Corrections has decreased its inmate population by 6,500 since 2007, partially by increasing its parole approval rate. As more ex-prisoners reenter neighborhoods, “the answer,” says Dan,“is more mentors.”

“Whoa, I Think I’m a Mentor”
Dan’s path to long-term prisoner mentoring began when he met Prison Fellowship Founder Chuck Colson at a book signing.

When he first encountered the challenge to become involved in prison ministry, “it was love at first sight,” Dan recalls. He entered Prison Fellowship’s Volunteer-in-Prison (VIP) training in the spring of 1996 and soon entered prison for the first time at Deerfield Correctional Facility (ITF), a now-closed minimum-security prison in Ionia, Michigan.

Dan volunteered at Deerfield for 12 ½ years, but only after time, as men continued to call and write to him after their release, did Dan wake up one morning and say to himself, “Whoa, I think I’m a mentor.”

Dan’s mentor role has only increased. He and Sondra, his wife of 48 years, pray for 40 men released from Deerfield. They maintain contact with half of them, monitoring their tenuous progress on the path to a new life.

The Road to Reentry
“I need to find a job,” Dan’s mentees often tell him when they’re about to “ride out.”

“No, you don’t,” Dan responds, “You need to find a good church.”

Dan, a deacon at Heritage Baptist Church in Kentwood, Michigan, tries to first steer ex-offenders toward a healthy Christian fellowship—one that will embrace them and fit their needs—as a foundational step toward successful reentry. Through the church, ex-inmates can usually find jobs and eventually advance their education and careers. “Deacon Dan,” as he’s sometimes known to his mentees, practices what he preaches, introducing ex-prisoners to the pastor at his own church. Some attend services there and have even found employers and new mentors within the congregation.

But growth comes slowly.

A parole officer may call to say that one of Dan’s mentees is on the run. Or the mentees themselves may call with perplexing, or even “goofy,” questions. Dan remembers one ex-prisoner who planned to make a living shining shoes at a shopping center, failing to realize that in the 12 years since his incarceration, shoe-shine boys had become a thing of the past. But if tempted to impatience, Dan reminds himself, “They are asking you for help because they don’t have a dad.”

While he may not have all the answers to their problems, Dan offers his mentees the same vital lifeline any volunteer can offer: a listening ear, encouragement, and his faithful prayers in their behalf.

“We All Need Jesus”
Dan helps “his guys” learn to live and stay on the outside, but the process teaches him as much as it teaches them.

“As a volunteer, I’ve learned patience, understanding, and the importance of keeping myself in the Word. We all need Jesus, prayer, and the Word every day. If any mentor doesn’t stay strong spiritually, he will lose his desire to mentor, and eventually he’ll lose his effectiveness. The prisoners look to their mentor because they see something in them that they desire for their own lives.

“Honey, I’m Your Daddy”
With all his experience, Dan continues to grow as a volunteer. “As long as I’m a volunteer, I’ll keep learning,” he says. Part of his instruction comes from ongoing training through Prison Fellowship.

In 2009 Dan attended a Prison Fellowship conference at Calvin College that helped volunteers connect with other ministries to holistically address the needs of prisoners and their families. There, Dan encountered Forgiven Ministry, Inc., for the first time. On December 4, 2009, Forgiven Ministry and Prison Fellowship volunteers—including Dan—partnered to hold a One Day with God Camp at Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Center in Muskegon, Michigan. The warden and the chaplain selected 20 inmates to invite their children and their caregivers to come and spend a day of structured, spiritually based relationship building and fun with their fathers in the prison gymnasium.

“You can imagine the emotions,” says Dan, recalling the scene. “Thirty kids in that gym going to play with their fathers. But one little five-year-old girl just stood there on the side, watching. The volunteers urged her to go and find her father. But she couldn’t. She had never seen him before. Finally, a prisoner got down on one knee in front of her and said, ‘Honey, I’m your daddy.’”

Scenes like these encourage Dan to continue as a mentor. He’s spurring redeemed ex-prisoners on to rebuild their lives as responsible parents and members of the community, replacing cycles of alienation and despair with connection and hope.

What to do with 520 hours?

2010-04-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, I recently changed jobs. Along with that, my commute has decreased by 2 hours per day. Considered in the long view, that's 10 hours per work week, and 520 hours per year. That's 21 days of my life back! I think I feel younger. Any thoughts on how I should use my redeemed time?

~ AlyRose

She Speaks Writing Conference

2010-04-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.shespeaksconference.com/index.htm

Check out this link!

She Speaks Writing Conference

2010-04-16T07:04:00.001-07:00

2010-04-10T14:34:00.001-07:00

"The prayer just goes out of you," says that woman in front of me, trying to explain her depletion.

The second day has almost ended. I am in the prayer room for Cebu. Andrey, the Field Office Director, is here, and so is Gary Haugen, and several dozen GPG participants. We are tired now, fighting hard to pray with the same intensity we had this morning. I pray with my eyes open, lest I doze off. I feel more than usual sumpathy for the disciples who, tasked to watch with Jesus in the garden, instead feel asleep.

Why is intercession such a fierce exertion? Perhaps because, though seated, we strain to the utmost the muscle of our faith in our desire to move Heaven. What glad work it is to labor along with those who have come far and ask no pay! How sweet a reward to know that whatever we ask in His name and according to His will, we must receive! May He grant us all wisdom to ask rightly.

2010-04-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

For me, a four-year IJM staff member, the Global Prayer Gathering starts here: 5 o'clock on Friday night, shivering in the stiff breeze outside of the Sheraton Premiere. IJM staff from across North America, Europe and the developing world congregate in the sunken garden for a brief meeting. Dressed all alike in immaculate black suits, the IJM uniform, we are also united in some degree of exhaustion. Long, exacting hours of preparation for the GPG have brought us to this point: cold, tired, and standing on the brink of a weekend of yet more work.

But in defiance of the sobriety of our dress and the numbing tiredness of our bodies, the meeting is charged, surprisingly, with joy. Laughter ripples through the throng of us. We cheer, clap and smile at the leaders who lead us in the litany of final details. Why should such gladness infuse us today, when the hours of preparation have led only to this: a Friday, Saturday and Sunday on the job?

For one thing, the GPG is our family reunion. The staff, many of whom labor in distant countries or in lone-ranger outposts, come together again. Our community rejoices in the fulness of its numbers.
But there is another reason behind the lightness of our spirits.

The reason lies in the nature of the work that we undertake this weekend. Our work will be the labor of prayer.

Make no mistake. Prayer is work of the hardest kind. Starting tomorrow morning, during the prayer room rotations, we will expose ourselves to the depth and breadth of depravity worked against the poor, and in prayer we will saturate our own hearts with God's sorrow over injustice. This work will bend our bodies to the floor with the weight of sin and our own incapacity to circumvent suffering. This work will wring the tears from our eyes and sap our strength and sleep.
But it is also true that this weekend, we will remember the extent of our Father's power, the brightness of His glory and the prodigality of His love. In return for our tears, we will have His smiles, as we believe that He exists and rewards those who earnestly pursue him. In return for our exhaustion, we will unleash His omnipotence on behalf of the widow and the orphan. Though lowered to the floor, we will glimpse His exaltation amidst the pain and oppression we decry.

So why do we laugh on the eve of our hearts' breaking? We laugh in anticipation of this work, this scandalously unequal exchange of poverty for riches. For to us this weekend falls the work of remembrance, the work of joy - the unrivalled and holy work of prayer.

Easter from an Ancient

2010-03-24T08:50:00.001-07:00

THE PASCHAL SERMON OF ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

EARLY CHURCH FATHER 347AD – 407AD

If any man be devout and love God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast.

If any man be a wise servant, let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord.

If any have labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense.

If any have wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward.

If any have come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast.

If any have arrived the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings, because he shall in no wise be deprived.

If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing.

If any have tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him also be not alarmed at his tardiness; for the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first; he gives rest unto him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who has worked from the first hour.

And he shows mercy upon the last, and cares for the first; and to the one he gives, and upon the other he bestows gifts.

And he both accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, and honors the acts and praises the offering.

Wherefore, enter ye all into the joy of your Lord, and receive your reward, both the first and likewise the second.

You rich and poor together, hold high festival. You sober and you heedless, honor the day.

Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast. The table is fully laden; feast sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away. Enjoy the feast of faith; receive all the riches of loving-kindness.

Let no one bewail his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shone forth from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Savior’s death has set us free: he that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it.

By descending into hell, he made hell captive. He embittered it when it tasted of his flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, cried: “Hell was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions.”

It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked.

It was embittered, for it was slain. It was embittered, for it was overthrown.

It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains.

It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered heaven.

It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen.

Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns.

Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave.

For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages.

Free Drycleaning

2010-02-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

Over Valentine's Day weekend, my new husband and I traveled to St. Louis, Missouri. I had never been to Missouri before, ("Who would go there? It's a place called mis-er-y!" I can still hear my little sister say from many years ago), but it wasn't too bad: a broad, friendly place with snow on the ground.

We went for a wedding, our first as a married couple. At the reception, the bride and groom were toasted by the best man and the maid of honor. We've all been to weddings. We've all heard the usual offerings of meager prose and poorer poetry put forth when an honest "Best wishes" would have sufficed. But at this wedding, the maid of honor gave a startling and beautiful confession. To the best of my memory, here it is:

"I couldn't confess this to you earlier, my friend, but now that you are safely married, I can tell you this. In my capacity as maid of honor, it was my job to bring your dress with me from New York, where you had the fittings done, and where I live, down here to Missouri. On Thursday night, just before my flight, I had some pins in the dress for some last minute fixes. I pricked my finger. I didn't notice I was bleeding. But later, when I went to pack up the dress, I saw it: down the front, drops of red, like Jackson Pollock's later work. Horrified, I went online to try to find the best cleaners in New York. And on yelp.com I found the aptly named New York Cleaners. With three hours before my flight, I grabbed the dress, ran across town on the Subway, and with trembling hands turned it over to the Korean man behind the counter. He pressed the fabric down, examining the stains, and his brow furrowed. This worried me. 'Wait here,' he said, 'Let me see what I can do.' A while later, while I contemplated whether you would ever forgive me, the dry cleaner retured and held out the dress. It was perfect: without stain, wrinkle or blemish. 'How much do you think you owe me for this?' he asked, eyes merry and triumphant. 'I would gladly empty my bank accout,' I responded - though I'm a young professional in New York, and my offer would still not have been a large one. 'But,' I said, 'Tell me what you think is fair.' He cocked his head at me and looked me over in assessment. 'It's free,' he said at last, and he handed me your perfect, white wedding dress."

And that, dear readers, is gospel.

From the Archives: Seeing Bobak in Berkeley

2010-02-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

Written maybe early 2009? Not sure.

Bobak. Like always you were willow-thin, with skin the color of almonds, and hair black and curly as a dark lamb's. You, the most polite of boys. You used to say, "Thank you, sir," to the referees when my father, your coach, subbed you into the back row at volleyball matches, but you laughed at your opponents through the net and from the bench, taunting them in the tongue of the shah. They could not understand you. That day, though, you were walking down College Avenue. Your shadow was long in the orange light, and it crossed mine, coming up the hill towards you. The air was warm. I had not seen you since we left high school, and after we said hello I took it upon myself to spoil your afternoon by telling you that my father died, believing, as I still do, that you loved him a little. When I told you, you were very polite in your condolence, as I knew you would be, and I still wonder why I told you. You would never have known otherwise, and your afternoon would have gone on warm and beautiful in the orange light in Berkeley.

Notes from the Frozen East

2010-02-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

Snowmageddon has entered day five? Day six? Who can count? It's all a great white drift. Trees kneel prostate under their crowns of snow, like princes called too early into kingship. Roofs threaten to collapse under the burdens, and workers walk the frozen rooflines gingerly to shovel it off. And still the snow falls.

Within, days bleed together, busy, cozy, restless. And always the beeping of Snow Cats, the scrape of shovels, the tromp and slide of galoshes through snow deep as the thigh, driven into sculptures by the wind.

Snow Day

2010-02-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

The week before Christmas, I shoveled the driveway. That's no act of breaking news, but for me it was a first - and what a first! The sky had opened and blasted the earth with twenty inches of chilled whiteness. My roommate's car was blotted out, a vaguely vehicular hump. The stairs had ceased to be.

So in the first clear morning after the storm, when the sky was penitently blue, I began to shovel the driveway. It's sixty or seventy feet from the front door to the road. Three or four hours later, with swollen pink blisters on my hands and the sense that my bones had dried to powder with the effort, I retired inside, believing I should, mercifully, never see such a snowfall again. Not here in D.C, the capital of sloppy winters and torpid summers.

But six weeks later, and behold: the snow comes on, cold and silent and perfect, a great hand falling to hush the mouth of the world. Twenty to twenty-eight inches of it.

In. Out. Often.

2010-01-09T04:32:00.000-08:00

Some changes come without foresight, like a car pulling out from a blind driveway. While the double-shot of adrenaline pumps through your heart, you put on the brakes and invoke your sacred loves. Only afterwards do you have a chance to assess the change wrought in you by what you never saw coming.

And some changes you see coming from a long way off, like a little town on a long stretch of open highway. Miles away, you see it, but for a while it seems no closer, just a dark pinprick that might be a bit bigger than a moment ago.

But events along awaited do come at last. My big event is here.

Today is our wedding day. Many things shall end today, and many begin. I woke long before dawn and could not sleep again. I feel calm, but charged, and alert to the end of my fingertips: alive to divine presence and all that's good to see, smell, and touch.

But with the constant, slow release of adrenaline, I often catch myself holding my breath. I make myself then take long, slow, steady draughts of air, and it occurs to me that we ought to pray in the same way that we breathe: in, out, and often.

I remember because prayer must be the breath I breathe today - especially today - because today is not, in fact, about the dress and the tux, or the cake and the flowers, or even, at its most profound depths, about the bride, the groom, or our loved ones. Today is about God. For God it was who brought two strangers on the intricate paths that brought us to the right place at the right time, and God it was who over the last months made a man and of woman of no relation into kin of soul. And God it shall be who laughs the loudest with joy to give Adam back his rib again.

In all the imperfection that mars us and the world there works a perfectly good God. Today I stand on a mountaintop where for a brief transfigured hour, the goodness of God in all of life, which we celebrate in the ceremony and the reception, is easily traced.

And to give him glory, I breathe and I pray: in. out. often. May I do so still when we descend again below the clouds.

Whatever joyous or hard thing awaits you today, breathe, dear friends, and pray: in. out. often.

Advent Thoughts

2009-12-05T08:02:00.000-08:00

This season of life, while not the busiest I have ever known, has pulled me in the greatest number of directions: everywhere a task to complete, a deadline to bear. Endeavoring to succeed in all, I fear to please in none. I have, for example, been an indifferent blogger, neglecting even to mention that in a month or so, I will marry.

Not that I regret what has felt like a necessary silence on my part. This blog is not intended as any kind of a faithful record of life events, nor even a confessional. And I have studiously avoided a discussion of issues and events that intimately concern others besides myself. There is a time and a place for such things, and the Internet, with all its advantages, is neither. That, and my time has been otherwise and joyfully apportioned in all that led to the engagement, and all that has followed it.

All that aside, yes, I am about to most happily join the ranks of those that have and hold til death do them part. And that is the background of today's writing.

One of the fascinating things about marriage in America is that people give you stuff - lots and lots of stuff. It arrives on my doorstep nearly every day in a cardboard box from a major department store, swaddled in packing peanuts and plastic wrap: a rice cooker, silverware, a crockpot, candlesticks, bamboo sheets, wine glasses, a toaster. An avalanche of possessions without which, apparently, my intended and I will not have a hope of felicitious union. I am grateful for these things, truly I am. The Kitchenaid mixer has fulfilled a lifelong yearning, and virtually everything on our registry will have legitimate practical use in our daily lives. It's not that it's too much, but rather that, as I seem to know instinctively, it is too little . . .

A cake platter, to hold together two disparate souls? A blender, to help us put off selfishness every morning for the next fifty years? It is a ludicrous proposition.

The averge fourth-grader knows that marriage is an institution in peril, and that the reasons for its disintegration go much deeper, most often, than what "stuff" has or has not been accumulated. Why, then, do we offer material answers for what is basically a spiritual challenge?

I am having my second (of three) bridal showers today. The year's first snow falls earnestly outside the window. And the question I am asking myself is this: What present does God give for weddings?

In just that question, I find much to help me.

For the first and most obvious answer, during Advent, is that God joyfully gives Himself wherever He is welcomed by glad and eager hearts. And this instantly reverses the marriage odds in our favor. If a husband and wife have, living in them and through them, Christ the Lord, their chances pf prevailing over all smallness of heart are immeasurably improved.

Secondly, God gives marriage to married people. It is His creation, one of the things He allowed us to bring from Eden. And though I stand still outside the covenant of marriage, I cannot help but think it must improve matters to always view the marriage as a gift - not as an obligation, or as a competitor against one's own self-realization, but as gift that, like a young tree, holds the potential always to grow larger, more fruitful and more beautiful so long as we give ourselves to tending it.

Maine Diaries: Scraps from a Writer's Notebook

2009-08-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

Main Street, Bar Harbor, Maine - July 2009

Ray's Barber Shop

Across from the Grand Hotel, Ray's Barber Shop looks even less grand than it otherwise might, but through no fault of its own - it never tried to be much, with its siding weathered to the color of bad milk and shingles put on to keep the rain out and who cares what they look like. It's hard to know whether Ray is a woman, or if the woman I see now, sixtiesh and heavyset, with pouches under her eyes and a comb in her quick-moving hands, is Ray's heir, or Ray's employee, or if she bought the modest shop from the original Ray in some past year and kept the name to please the regulars. In any case, she moves expertly in the execution of a $12 haircut for a customer. The customer, a young man, reclines in an old-fashioned barber chair before the glass front, in full view of passersby on the street, though there aren't many in the middle of a Tuesday morning. The barber's long gray ponytail swishes against her back as she runs the tines of the comb along her patron's scalp. They share a joke and she chuckles. The pouches under her eyes get to looking like drawstrings purses cinched up too tight. She brushes the cut hair from his shoulders with a soft-bristled brush and sweeps the great green bib from around his shoulders in a practiced movement. When he's gone, she plunks herself into the chair to watch a program on the small, boxy grey television in the corner by the window, picking at her gums with short fingernails and swiveling the chair a little left, a little right, when the program makes her laugh. It's a short, amused, pale little sound, obstructed by her fingers in between her teeth.

The Country of Marriage

2009-07-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

My little sister is getting married this weekend. (Because I remember the day she was born, my brain keeps telling me that this should be impossible, though clearly it's not. I have the plane ticket to prove it.) She will be a beautiful bride, and - what is somewhat rarer, because have you ever seen a bride who was not beautiful? - a devoted and happy wife. She simply has that kind of character.

In her honor, and also Aaron's (her husband-to-be), here is the link to one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems, "The Country of Marriage". http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-country-of-marriage/

I Have Played the Role of Hiram

2009-06-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

“Florence, there is nothing wrong with your clock!” bellows Alexander Phillips, the village clockmaker of Bar Harbor, Maine, leaning over the counter on his elbow to achieve maximum volume. Florence looks like a Florence, willowy, white-haired, and elegant, and she laughs at him as the door swings shut behind her. Alex fetches her time piece, a square mantle clock with a rendering of Mount Desert Island on its face, from the warren-like recesses of his shop, low-ceilinged, and smelling of old oiled brass.

He has looked at it. Nothing is wrong mechanically. Heads bent together, they go through a checklist of potential maladies. Has she been winding it the right way? Has she jiggled it, just so, to get the balance wheel going? Beside them on the counter, a tall hour glass in a wooden frame has spent itself out.

The ticking of a hundred clocks, meting out the moments, nearly drowns out their conference: Dark and dour English tavern clocks. Camel-humped Tambour mantle clocks. Cuckoo clocks with Bavarian milkmaids dancing from a spring to the rhythm of the second hand. If one of the clocks weren’t keeping a good second time, Alex would hear it, like a mother knows which child is sick. But they all keep good time, and underneath them plays, subdued, the “Moonlight Sonata.”
Between the clocks, Alex has pasted various signs, now faded. They all say, “Do not touch,” in various languages: Serbian, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin. When cruise ship passengers stop in town, Alex persuades them to translate the signs for him. Which one spoke Latin, he does not divulge.

At the counter, maintenance issues resolved, Florence and Alex discuss a price. It sounds like a conversation they have had before.

He argues it down.

She argues it up, but he wipes his fleshy palms on his soiled denim apron and lifts his craggy brows at her, as if insulted, and the price stays where he wants it, with no further haggling.

Interactions like this one may sum up why, for the last twenty years, Alex has worked in the underground floor of 110 Main Street, his shop accessible only by a steep wooden staircase hidden from plain view. If his shop, where he specializes in the repair and sale of antique and custom clocks and watches, made a bit more, he might move into a street-level space with higher rent, where the tourists and the daylight could find him easier. Instead, on days like today, in the dim, yellow fluorescent wattage leaking from overhead, he labors at his work bench with his constant companions: the clocks, ever noisy; a chocolate labrador named Finn, ever silent; and a yellowed old phone, which clangs intermittently from the wall.

“Alexander Phillips,” he says when he answers it, pressing the receiver to his ear. Under the denim apron, he wears Oxford pants, an umbrella tie, and a blue pinstripe shirt, buttoned to his rosy neck but rolled once at the sleeves. Around his neck he wears spectacles, purely industrial in function and design, with a magnifying glass mounted over one lens with a bendable wire. He pulls them on whenever something excites him. Sixty-four, he’s a stocky man, with tousled gray hair gone white at the temples. His light hazel eyes go almost blue around the rims of the iris. He has a bulldoggish face, loose, folded, happy, and as though there had been just one brush available when it came time to render him, all his features are thickly drawn, from his broad-lipped mouth to his blunt and link-like fingers, equally unexpected for a classically trained pianist, or for a master clockmaker. Alex is both.

When he answers, his voice is gravelly gruff. Though it lacks the Maine vowels, it’s still a Yankee voice: crisp, blunt, and matter-of-fact when profane.

Alex came by his accent honestly. Raised in Connecticut, which Alex likes to think of as the heartland of American clockmaking, he showed early musical promise. His parents sent him to study the piano at a conservatory in New York City. Though not unsuccessful as a musician, Alex found himself gravitating towards a family tradition and a childhood fascination: tinkering with the spinning gears of clocks. He spent his spare hours after class in the workshops of New York’s master clockmakers. Before long, he became an apprentice. He learned the trade naturally, instinctively, by feel and by heart.

That was forty years ago, but Alex still works out those lessons with the undoused passion of a boy.

“At the bench is how you learn,” he insists, opening the face of a pocket watch to reveal its innards. In his mind, it’s the only way. Of course, he explains, showing off the coiled mainspring, (“That’s the engine of the watch.”) and the balance wheel, as intricate and crushable as a dragonfly (“the watch’s heart”), there are vocational courses that people can take to learn watch repair, but only “at the bench” would a person learn all the little tricks. A graduate of the vocational training wouldn’t know, for instance, that village tinkers used to “fix” clocks with bailing wire or a cotton ball doused in kerosene and jammed into the works, or that certain clockworks, though now valued as antiques, were mechanical failures to begin with (“The Seth Thomas 124!” he cries, like a fond father’s empty scolding, “What a dog!”).

Alex sometimes makes his own custom repair parts, because no one sells the parts that he needs. To do this, he pours over old reference books in his horological library at home to figure out what the part should look like. Then, he tools the piece out of bronze stock salvaged from a junkyard. He can tell just by its heft whether the bronze has the right amount of zinc in it. The tools he uses to make parts he purchased years ago from clockmakers’ widows when their husbands had died. His newest machine is from 1935.

In homage to his virtuosity, Alex receives repair jobs from as far away as Alaska and Chile, and from names as illustrious as Leonard Bernstein and Josephine Ford, on whose name he lingers with particular warmth. “Dodie,” he calls her.

Sometimes, Alex receives an order for a custom clock. For these, he charges between $50,000 and $60,000. The last one, a mantle clock in the shape of an arrowhead, he recalls with flashing eyes, his hands fondling the air in remembrance of its dimensions. Such jobs come only rarely, though – perhaps one every five or six years.

Most work is more pedestrian. He services the clock at the First National Bank and the clock on the village green, both less than a block from his shop. Or he helps neighborhood ladies remember the right way to wind their watches. Or, as he does now, he removes the extra links from a cheap drugstore watch, belonging to nurse named Melanie, while she’s on break from her shift at the medical center.

They decide on four links; it’s the work of a moment.

“Do you want these back?” he asks.

“Not unless I grow back a couple sizes.”

“Well, you could get pregnant. Things happen.” He lifts his shoulders roguishly.

“Don’t jinx me,” she says just to shush him, pays her $5 repair bill and leaves.

It’s like that all morning. Alex stands content behind the counter as long as he can tell stories, share inane horological trivia, or make a pretty nurse blush. He rarely needs prompting, unloading his encyclopedic brain with liberality. Each clock reminds him of a story, a customer, a pet piece of history, often vague or romanticized. He could go on for hours, and does. The clocks’ incessant ticking is the music of a small solar system, and Alex is its sun.

But though content with his shop’s more trivial traffic, Alex considers himself first and foremost a craftsman. “I have played the part of Hiram,” reads a laser-printed card taped to the wall, by which Alex links himself to Hiram Abi, the master artisan who, in Freemason lore, superintended the construction of Solomon’s temple.

It’s a craftsmanship that’s dying out, though. Alex estimates that only a few thousand of his kind still exist, most of them, like himself, in the waning days of their careers. When asked about the barriers to entry for new clockmakers, he sniffs out a one-word response: “Torts.”
A climate of litigation, says Alex, has made it harder for clockmakers to take on an apprentice for work with dangerous machines.

“More trouble than it’s worth,” he adds, and rolls his heavy shoulders up and down.
Added to these difficulties is the increasing anachronism of Alex’s profession. Few people even wear watches, he points out, leaving clockmakers with the increasingly slender market of belfry clocks, museum pieces, and heirloom grandfather clocks. The new quartz watches don’t even allow for traditional repair, instead requiring the rote replacement of its entire inner workings. So easy. So cheap.

Alex himself wears a quartz watch. He used to wear a Bulova Accutron tuning fork wrist watch, a beautiful machine, the object of his obsession, with its petite tuning fork vibrating at a fantastic rate of 30 Megahertz. In its day, it was a dramatic improvement over the balance wheel, like the one in the old pocket watch, which managed only 18,000 oscillations per hour. But as the Bulova aged, Alex could no longer find the parts to repair it, and he abandoned it, adopting instead the inexpensive quartz timepiece that a customer had left behind. The quartz watch, worth perhaps $10, keeps better time than either the $2,000 chronometer taken from a British destroyer, better time than even the $20,000 English tavern clock which dongs dolefully on the hour.

Alex tells the story of a deadly train wreck (which one is difficult to tell, nor is it important; it’s part of a general principle he wants to convey) in the 19th century, caused, in part, by the failure of local railroads to adopt standardized timetables. The clockmaker’s trade, lagging behind the technological vanguard of timekeeping, seems likewise bound for a fatal collision with the future.

Alex acknowledges the downward spiral of his livelihood, and, as if in sympathy, he plans to keep returning to his workbench until equally moribund. When a local EMT visited the shop recently, Alex advised him that if he died in the shop, they should carry his body out through the back door, beneath the glinting watch chains and the serpentine mainsprings dangling from hooks in the ceiling. Above all things, they must take care not to knock over any of the clocks. His wife, dear, responsible Ellen who winds all the clocks on Monday mornings, will know which clock belongs to whom, and how much they owe for the repair, from a hand-written card affixed to its face with a bit of adhesive tape.

Beyond that, Alex has not troubled himself. He has no children to whom he could pass down the business, nor has he bothered at any time with an apprentice, the inconvenience being too great.
“My nieces and nephews might like to have the heirloom pieces,” he reflects. “I’ve got that grandfather clock from Uncle Fleischmann. He was a clockmaker. It’s got that nice, deep, German, chime. Ja! Das ist deustch!” (He does not speak German, but he likes to play at accents.)

When Alex dies, the shop, with its clocks all teeming to that moment like a hundred beating hearts, will also die (though not a moment sooner). Alex takes this philosophically, even cheerfully.

“When it comes down to it, the clocks are machines, and I’m a mechanic, not an antiquarian horologist,” he asserts. He adopts a mockingly pedantic accent for just the last two words, and he holds the magnifying piece over his eyes in the manner of a monocle.

Adoring all machines (though harboring, one must suspect, a deep fondness for the quaint quirkiness of older clocks), he finds ample consolation in the march of progress. Anything with wheels, with gears, with movement, becomes at once his darling. At home these days, he’s working on an 11,000-pound international harvester with 500-pound parts, of which he says, “It’s the cutest thing!”

He might hate cell phones, which all the young people seem to carry instead of watches, for ruining his profession, but he doesn’t. He thinks that they are marvelous devices. In fact, he suspects that we will all soon have chips inserted under our skin, much like those embedded under the skin of his two labradors. “I would get one,” he insists, just to see how it works!”
Some years ago, he even sold his Steinway. He replaced it with a Yamaha Clavinova, a digital piano that he loves to distraction. One gets the impression that as long as the future promises new devices, it may come as soon as it pleases.

And if clockmaking is a natural casualty of progress, Alex will see it off with a cheerful wave of his thick and nimble fingers, having played Hiram to the last living tick of his own beating heart.

“’Apres moi, le deluge.’ Salvador Dali,” says the clockmaker, the French words coming out chewed and spit from his Yankee mouth. After me, the flood can come.

In point of fact, those words belong to King Louis XV of France, but in Alex’s romantic and richly associative mind, it is perhaps more fitting to attribute them to Dali, who painted the clocks that he saw in his dreams, melting away.

The Maine Thing

2009-06-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hi, friends -

Not that I write all that much on here these days, but a little bit of blog silence is coming your way. On Saturday morning I'm taking a 17-hour (because I'm crazy) bus ride (because "high net worth" will never be attached to my name) to Maine (because I've always wanted to see it) for two weeks (because it's not benefit dinner season any more, and I can escape without anyone minding too much).

But when I come back, I promise you lots and lots of musings on life that only oodles of free time on a rocky summertime coastline could inspire. You'll wish I had never come back.

A Rose

Poems for Jesus: Trust

2009-06-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

You have never done a thing
To merit my distrust
My hedging, my second-guessing, my covering the bases
You have never done a thing
It is in me - the brokenness
That can't quite span
The goodness
The wholeness
The embarrassing extravagance of your self-giving
It's not your fault
If I come to the wrong solution
If I still calculate
With the wrong constant
You have never done a thing
But pour the fulness of mercy
Onto me
You have never done a thing
But sit beside me in the darkness
Of need and not knowing
You have never done a thing
But spin me dizzy in the dance
Until I forgot to cry and laughed instead
You have never done a thing
But everything
And I don't understand it.

DC Spring

2009-05-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

I know that it must be the spring. Every morning, the sun creeps in a little earlier than the day before, like a small child entering its parents' bedroom because it can't quite wait for the day to start.

And so, every day, I wake a little earlier. I relish the morning hours. Since I was the small child, waiting for the day to start, I have felt like they were somehow consecrated. The long busy day is for the work at hand, and the evenings is for friendship and washing the dishes, but the morning is for me and for God.

It's raining today, and so the dawn light comes a little later and a little weaker than it otherwise might. So many days it rains. I have never quite gotten used to the wetness of DC springs: the full green leaves plastered to the sidewalk, heavy with a rainstorm; running from the the thunder while walking between metro stations; the buzz of cars along the highway through the puddles. In California, I always boast, I could rest assured of planning an outdoor party any time between Memorial Day and Columbus Day, without thought for rain ruining my gathering.

But this is a different place altogether, I remind myself, as I enter my seventh year. And the rain falls, a full-bodied and anointing kind of rain, though the winter is long past us now.

Poems for Jesus

2009-05-24T16:48:00.000-07:00

When did the stone become a gem?
When the tear a smile?
When without knowing came I to the end
Of many a weary mile?

When did the sighs become a song?
When did the clouds disband?
When poured the bright and golden sun
Over the dreary land?

When love enfleshed came down to stay
When from the grave it leapt
When dawned one glad eternal day
Where no more tears are wept.

Sourdough is Famous

2009-05-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

I feel like I'm making a birth announcement. I'm happy to tell you that the Washington Post is running a version of the sourdough memoir, complete with pictures and recipes, on Wednesday, May 6 (Food section). If you are interested in getting a copy, and you live outside the D.C. metro area, bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble tend to carry major papers like the Post.

Thanks for reading.

Yours humbly,

Me

You Know You Live in DC When . . .

2009-04-30T10:08:00.000-07:00

1. You never use the full term when an acronym will do. You practically swim in the national alphabet soup, and without any mental fumbling you know the meaning of: DOS, DOJ, DOI, DOD, LOC, NGA, HHAS, DHS, INS, FBI, CIA, DEA, SOL, DCA, IAD, BWI, SAIS, GU, GW, DCU, NOVA, CHBC, CLC, CDC, IMF, MCC, GAO, OMD, NSA, NASA, FDIC, WHO, USAID, GWOT, and dozens of others.

2. You don't look up, much less flinch, when a formation of military helicopters flys over your head.

3. You know better than to trust a roadsign within a 10-mile raidus of the Capitol building, you never go anywhere without knowing if your destination lies within SE, SE, NE, or NW, and you have sat aghast at the intersection of Glebe Road and Glebe Road.

4. Seven o'clock is going home early.

5. Your friends regularly ask you if they can list you as a reference for the background check on their security clearance.

6. Your next-door neighbor has a special government passport and travel overseas for long periods, coming home at strange hours, but he or she is always very vague about the details of their job.

7. You manage to get "Where are you from?" into every conversation with a stranger, since you can be sure that, 9 times out of 10, they come from somewhere else.

8. Your favorite obelisk is actually two-toned, and you know why.

9. You have a pretty well-defined idea of what's wrong with the world, and how to fix it.

10. If you don't have your Master's or your PhD, you've at least given it serious thought, and you've probably taken your GRE, just in case.

11. You know which side of the street to catch a cab on in order to avoid extra zone fees.

12. No matter how much you complain that your job doesn't tap into your true passions and talents, the cherry blossoms still make everything worth it for you.

Live blogging from the GPG this weekend

2009-03-26T09:27:00.002-07:00

Hey, friends, starting tomorrow, I'll be part of the team of live bloggers at IJM's Global Prayer Gathering this weekend (hard to believe it will be my third go-around!).

To follow the events of the weekend, go here: http://www.ijminstitute.org/index.php/gpglive

Bluegrass Revisited

2009-03-26T09:27:00.001-07:00

I feel guilty for living in the suburbs. There is so much wrong with them. Alienation from what we consume (where does it all come from?). Alienation from what we discard (where does it all go?) The suburbs don’t mesh with the life of connectedness and consciousness that I say I want to live. But I still live here. Enlightened hypocrite that I am, I am always coming up with ways to atone for the rootlessness of my suburban life. In an upstairs bedroom, I am growing cucumbers, squash and carrots in a tiny planter. I will till the soil and eat of the fruits of my labor, I tell myself. I have even started buying black market Amish groceries from a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer named Yoder who trucks it down to a discreet drop-off site every two weeks. It’s not quite “local”, but it’s better than apples grown in Argentina. This sense of unique character, of more than passing connection to the soil underneath my feet, assuages my conscience. But nothing does more than the bluegrass did.
On the first fine Sunday of the year, I stroll down to Lyon Park. Sunshine and warm temperatures have filled the grassy block with sound. Dogs bark at the pale-legged joggers. A Spanish-speaking nanny scolds a blonde child. Orioles – are they?- yes, orioles, early migrants, sing in the leafless tree, boding more pleasant days to come, though it snowed so heavily last week. A Frisbee whizzes by; the chains on the swing set squeak and whine.
I am not listening for these everyday suburban sounds, though. I am listening for the bluegrass players. Catherine, the friend through whom I order my Amish produce, told me that they come every two weeks, rain or shine, from all corners of the Washington beltway. Where are they?
Now.
Now I hear it floating above the other sounds – plucking, twanging, crooning – faint upon the air, unamplified. The sound I hear is the music of place itself. It’s bluegrass, come to settle in this suburb, like a strange bird blown far off course, but here all the same.
Though I never knew they were here until this week, just three blocks from my house meets a floating bluegrass jam session of the Capital Area Bluegrass and Old-time Music Association (CABOMA). The Association, a non-profit corporation dedicated to the loving preservation of bluegrass, boasts about 150 dues-paying members. On the second and fourth Sundays of every month, at least a handful of members haul out their strings for four hours of melodic fellowship here in Arlington. On sunny days like today, dozens gather around the picnic tables with no song sheets among them, playing, talking, singing, laughing. Occasionally, they do all four at once.
Today, the neighbors amuse themselves with their springtime pursuits, not paying much attention, and the bluegrass players occupy the eastern half of the park, a tribe unto themselves. I sit beneath a tree, as if on the invisible border dividing the groups. The bluegrass crowd stands around in ragged half-moons, tapping their toes, gesturing to each other with their fiddle bows. Most seem on the far slope of fifty, and one sports a beard with three years’ growth. The cut of their hair, the style of their clothing, looks a little hill-country. Their music seeps across the lawn unamplified, unsynthesized. It falls on my ears strangely soft and raw, reaching hardly farther than a human voice speaking. To hear it, you have to get quiet. You have to get close.
Just so, a young man with a mental disability stands on the outside of the circle, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, trying to listen.
A middle-aged woman, clearly a beginner, saws away at her fiddle strings.
Later I learn that this first part of the day is set aside for a “slow jam”, where novices learn from longtime bluegrass musicians.
Kim, a middle-aged mother who plays a Gibson guitar and calls herself new to bluegrass, tells me how much she likes the slow jams. She’s seen all kinds of instruments here – even a recorder and a cello – she reports with wide eyes.
The tune picks up. It’s a spiritual with a melody I recognize from the soundtrack of O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, and my feet begin to tap as if of their own accord. What would happen if I joined them? I played the flute once, in my California childhood, and I wasn’t that bad. I can still count beats and read music. I halfway suspect they might even find room for a flute out here, as blades of grass will bend beneath a passing foot. But out of some reverence, I wouldn’t try. Anyway, I sold my flute on Craigslist for $75 in 2005.
But neither can I go pull myself away. This group lays itself open with a trust I both envy and pity, leaving their expensive instruments unguarded among the roots of sheltering trees. While the novice fiddler grinds her way through a chorus, a guitarist, two banjo players, and a scruffy man with a mandolin go gently along with her. The song? “Let the Circle Be Unbroken.”
Like me, many of the bluegrass players transplanted near Washington, D.C. from another part of the country. John Seebach, a thirty-something staffer for an environmental non-profit, grew up in Kentucky, the Bluegrass State. He’s been coming to CABOMA’s jam session for the last five to six years. While we talk, he cradles a gleaming black mandolin against his chest and picks out sweet-sounding scales.
“It’s a funny thing,” he says, “I grew up in the city, Lexington, and I hear more bluegrass here than I did when I was growing up.”
That’s not so surprising. The Washington, D.C., area has actually had a strong bluegrass tradition since the 1950’s, when bluegrass first emerged as a recognized musical genre. Back then, the hill music inspired by poor Scottish and Irish immigrants to Appalachia morphed into its more popular form, led by D.C. area recording artists like Buzz Busby and the Bayou Boys, plus Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.
John Seebach is one of those, like Kim, who discovered bluegrass later in life. Others, like Tom Smith, can trace their bluegrass roots right back to the hill country where it came from. A white-haired, gap-toothed Missouri native and a National Incident Systems “guru” for FEMA, Smith doesn’t just have a guitar. He tells whoever will listen me that he has a Dobro resophonic guitar with a built-in resonator. It shines live polished silver in the late winter sun. He wears it around his neck with the side flat again his rib cage.
“Some people think it’s whiny, but me, I like it. It puts that high, lonesome sound in high, lonesome music. Before amplifiers, they needed something to cut through all that orchestra music so a guitar could still be heard. Some Czech brothers came up with a resonator. Now they got amplifiers. They don’t use resonators anymore, except some blues-players down in Memphis, and up in the hills of course. If you don’t have any electricity, what good’s an amplifier?”
Tom grew up in a place where amplifiers didn’t do much good.
“Hoo, boy!” he laughs, “Let’s put it like this: I saw very few strangers before I was 18.”
I ask how he came to live in Washington.
“Now that’s a sad story,” he says, deflating. Picking at the Dobro, he starts to sigh along to a mournful little tune from the next group over, something about train whistles and suitcases.
It turns out the Smith moved because of his ex-wife, a professor at the University of Maryland. They divorced after 27 years of marriage. He brightens visibly, though, at the sight of Alexia Roberts, a frizzy-haired woman in high-waisted pants. He met her playing bluegrass at a jam session.
“My current life’s companion,” he calls her, and strides along the grass to meet her with the gait of a man going in his own front door.
On the other side of the lawn, John Seebach has finished tuning his mandolin. He walks straight into the cadre of players, flicks his wrist until he catches the rhythm, and begins to pick away with a smile on his lips.
“That’s the thing about bluegrass,” he told me a little while ago, “I play in a couple of bands, but out here, you can just walk into the middle of a field of strangers. You all know the same music, and you can play together. Sometimes it’s just good to do that.”
The young man with a mental disability still watches them. Noticing him, a female banjo player (she likes to sing shrill harmonies), steps out to meet him. She takes him by the crook of the arm and guides him to the middle of their ragged half-moon, where he can watch her nimble fingers dance all over the truss board.
-
Bluegrass is indeed a funny bird to find in Lyon Park. In the one of the wealthier and well-educated areas of Virginia, and one of the most proudly secular, it’s a music about faith and poverty. Amongst the locked and shuttered homes of those who often fear their neighbors (I admit that I have gone online to memorize the faces of all registered sex offenders in a mile radius), it’s a music of trust and community.
The musicians, though, seem unfazed by any sense of discord with their surroundings. Perhaps it’s not so hard to reconcile. For the bluegrass players, the music is not ultimately about any particular place, but about the people the music came from, and the people it leads them to.
And by and by, several of the neighbors have stopped whatever they were doing to sit in the grass, tap their toes, and let a music of place – and people - wash over them while the sunshine ebbs.

Life in the District: I got this warning at work today

2009-03-23T13:28:00.001-07:00

Please be advised, there is a simulated explosion scheduled for this Wednesday, March 25 between 9:30 am and 12:00 pm near the Key Bridge in the District. Here is some additional information:For the filming of a TV pilot, there will be a simulated explosion on Wednesday, March 25, 2009, between 9:30 a.m. and noon near Key Bridge in the District. The explosion will produce a 20 to 30' fireball that will last for approximately two minutes.The explosion will take place on the Potomac River just north of the Key Bridge and Jack's Boathouse (K/Water Street, NW under the Whitehurst Freeway). In the scene to be filmed, there will be six (6) sculling boats on the Potomac River and one of them blows up. CBS Paramount television is filming a pilot titled "Washington Field."This is a new television series about the elite Washington field office of the FBI and a team of agents with exceptional and diverse skills who are called together for only the most critical cases.The Department of Homeland Security and D.C. Police and Fire departments have been notified, along with the Washington Airports Authority. The Virginia State Patrol and Arlington Police Department will also be contacted.

Song of the Day - An oldie but a goodie (The Kry)

2009-03-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

I know there are times
your dreams turn to dust
you wonder as you cry
why it has to hurt so much
give Me all your sadness
someday you will know the reason why
with a child-like heart
simply put your hope in Me

Chorus:
take My hand and walk where I lead
keep your eyes on Me alone
don't you say why were the old days' better
just because you're scared of the unknown
take My hand and walk
don't live in the past
cause yesterday's gone
wishing memories would last
you're afraid to carry on
you don't know what's comin'
but you know the one who holds tomorrow
I will be your guide
take you through the night
if you keep your eyes on Me
take My hand and walk where I lead
keep your eyes on me alone
don't you say why were the old days better
just because you're scared of the unknown
take My hand and walk where I lead
you will never be alone
faith is to be sure of what you hope for
and the evidence of things unseen
so take My hand and walk
just like a childholding daddy's hand
don't let go of mine
you know you can't stand on your own

Bluegrass in the Beltway

2009-03-09T09:56:00.000-07:00

The sound takes me by surprise.

On the first fine Sunday of spring, sunshine and warm temperatures have filled Lyon Park, in Arlington, Va., with people ecstatic to shed their winter coats. Dogs bark at the pale-legged joggers. A Spanish-speaking nanny scolds her blonde charge. Orioles – are they?- yes, orioles, early migrants, sing in the leafless tree, boding more pleasant days to come, though it snowed so heavily last week. A Frisbee whizzes by; the chains on the swing set squeak and whine; a Tibetan flag slaps in the breeze from a deep front porch.

I’m not in the mood. Sometimes, though I grew up in one, I notice a numbing monochrome in the manicured American suburbs, so blissfully immune to local rootedness (Why should the neighbor fly a flag for Tibet? Does he even know who lives next door?). Today, I could be in a park anywhere between Tampa and Buffalo. You could blindfold me, spin me around ten times, and shove me in any direction, and I could not fail to eventually arrive at a Starbucks identical to every other in this country. The thought depresses me almost more than I can say.
I sigh, but not for long. Among all the normal noises floats another sound, or rather, a family of sounds – plucking, twanging, crooning – faint upon the air, unamplified. I walk further into the park, and then I realize. The sound I hear is the music of place itself. It’s bluegrass, come to settle in this suburb, like a strange bird blown far off course by a hurricane, but here all the same.

I have stumbled, just three blocks from my house, on a floating bluegrass jam session of the Capital Area Bluegrass and Old-time Music Association (CABOMA). The Association, a non-profit corporation dedicated to the loving preservation of bluegrass, plus some of its musical cousins, boasts about 150 dues-paying members. On the second and fourth Sundays of every month, at least a handful of members haul out their strings for four hours of melodic fellowship here in Lyon Park. On sunny days like today, they gather around the picnic tables with no songsheets among them, playing, talking, singing, laughing. Occasionally, they do all four at once. On days of foul weather, they still come, but they all have to crowd into the Lyon Park Community Center. They don’t much like that.

“The acoustics inside are just overwhelming,” confides Kim, a middle-aged mother with a Gibson guitar who will not give her last name. “It’s better when it’s outside.”

The CABOMA musicians are just an out-of-doors crowd. They like to stand up, tap their toes in the grass, leave their mandolin cases in the sheltering roots of tall trees. Their music seeps across the lawn unamplified, unsynthesized. It falls on my ears strangely soft and raw, reaching hardly farther than a human voice speaking. To hear it, you have to get quiet. You have to get close.

For John Seebach, that’s the point. From Kentucky, Seebach now lives in Maryland and works for an environmental non-profit. He has come to the jam sessions for the last five or six years, mostly for the sense of community it provides.

“That’s the thing about bluegrass,” he muses. While we talk, he cradles a gleaming black mandolin against his chest and picks out sweet-sounding scales, tuning the instrument, “At its core, it’s a real social kind of music. It’s a shared experience. I play in a couple of bands, but you can walk into a field full of strangers, and if you all love the same music, you can play together.”
That’s another strange thing about bluegrass that strikes me: it’s a portable community. Plunked down here in the Washington suburbs, where “Fear thy neighbor” is a maxim much lived by (I sure don’t know mine), such an embrace of strangers (expensive instruments lie unguarded in the grass) feels out of place. But it also feels good.

All the musicians seem to make a point of inclusivity. Kim, new to bluegrass, tells me that CABOMA sets aside the first hour of every jam session as a “slow jam”, so that beginners can learn to play together with those more experienced. Even now, a middle-aged woman saws away at a fiddle, while two banjo players and a guitarist go gently along with her. The song? “Let the Circle Be Unbroken”.

On the other side of the lawn, a young man with a mental disability has stood for almost an hour on the outside of things, smiling and swaying with the music. A banjo player takes him by the crook of the arm and guides him to the middle of their ragged half-moon, where he can watch her nimble fingers dance all over the truss board.

Though he hails from the Bluegrass State, Seebach grew up in “the city” (Lexington, population 275,726). He says that he runs across more bluegrass inside the Capital Beltway than he ever did in Kentucky. Thus the music appeals to him more for its present charms than for any nostalgia. For others, though, Sundays afternoons are a ticket to home and memory.
Tom Smith, a Missouri native and a National Incident Systems “guru” for FEMA, doesn’t just have a guitar. He has a Dobro resophonic guitar with a built-in resonator. He wears it around his neck with the side flat again his rib cage.

“Some people think it’s whiny, but me, I like it. It puts that high, lonesome sound in high, lonesome music. Before amplifiers, they needed something to cut through all that orchestra music so a guitar could still be heard. Some Czech brothers came up with a resonator. Now they got amplifiers. They don’t use resonators anymore, except some blues-players down in Memphis, and up in the hills of course. If you don’t have any electricity, what good’s an amplifier?”

Tom grew up in a place where amplifiers didn’t do much good.
“Hoo, boy!” he laughs, “Let’s put it like this: I saw very few strangers before I was 18.”
I ask how he came to live in Washington.

“Now that’s a sad story,” he says, deflating. Picking at the Dobro, he starts to murmur along to a mournful little tune from the next group over, something about train whistles and suitcases.
It turns out the Smith moved because of his ex-wife, a professor at the University of Maryland. They divorced after 27 years of marriage. He brightens visibly, though, at the sight of Alexia Roberts, a frizzy-haired woman in high-waisted pants. He met her playing bluegrass at a jam session.

“My current life’s companion,” he calls her, and strides along the grass to meet her with the gait of a man going in his own front door.

I come to bluegrass an outsider. In some murky past, I used to play the flute not too badly, so I can still count beats and read music. They might even find room for a flute out here, as blades of grass will bend beneath a passing foot. (Kim tells me with some astonishment that she has seen a recorder, and even a cello, joining in the jam.) But, out of some reverence, I wouldn’t try. A California transient from the San Francisco suburbs, with no real cultural roots that go deeper than Brian Wilson, I am too much a product of the cul-de-sacs I feel proud of disliking. I would not know how to join in. Instead, I will sit back and let some “hillbilly soul” wash over me, wondering that it’s here at all, hoping it will do me some good just to hear it.

Bluegrass is indeed a funny bird to find in Lyon Park. In the one of the wealthier and well-educated areas of Virginia, and one of the most proudly secular, it’s a music of faith and poverty. In the rootless cul-de-sacs, it’s a music of place. Amongst the locked and shuttered homes of those who can afford to flee urban crime, it’s a music of trust and community.

The musicians, though, seem unfazed by any sense of discord with their surroundings.
“Let the Circle Be Unbroken” has ended, and the banjo player, a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, pounds his fist against his chest.

“The past couple weeks, I’ve been singing so well,” he says, “But then I woke up on Friday with this gook in the back of my throat. I went to church this morning and there was no way I could sing the b-flat. You just sing the baseline, and you pray for it to go away.”

But he launches into another song anyway, an old-timey gospel peace about death and heaven.
“I do got the gravel,” he observes philosophically, and the others chuckle. He croons on:

I’ll fly away, oh, glory! I’ll fly away in the morning. When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away.

May the bluegrass musicians of CABOMA not fly far – or soon.

The Inauguration - Part 3

2009-01-20T08:36:00.000-08:00

What pomp and circumstance surrounds today. The powerful, the educated, the rulers, all stand arrayed on the platform like the planets of some strange system waiting to welcome a new sun. -- Except for Dick Cheney. He looking decrepit in his wheelchair (He injured his back trying to move boxes for the big move-out from the admiralty residence), mopes in a corner. Al Gore is also there, reliving his disappointment -- The marine corps bands lets loose a burst of fanfare.

Obama descends the Capitol's marble steps with measured steps, right behind the Speaker of the House. His face is pleased, grave, inscrutable. The world is his today. The crowd waves half a million American flags, dancing pink pixels from this distance, while sharpshooters survey them with binoculars. Every few hundred yards sits a box capable of detecting biological and chemical weapons.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California delivers opening comments; Rick Warren delivers the invocation in the name of Jesus, enough to make a great may in that crowd greatly uncomfortable.

I cannot help but think today of another king who came - into another capital - riding not in a limousine with three-inch steel, but on an ass, cheered for an afternoon and put to death the next.

To be a believer in Christ puts one in a strange position. We honor authorities. We cheer the triumph of justice and the exercise of wise leadership. But we withold from it our hopes. Instead we pin them to the cross, that symbol, lest we forget, of rejection and humiliation, believing that He who game Himself for all is made greater than all, and those who take their oath today are nothing more than stewards until He comes again.

Inauguration Post - Part 2

2009-01-20T07:33:00.001-08:00

You may remember when 200,000 Germans cheered Obama while he gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. While many questioned Obama's bravado in playing the international statesmen even before the election, there is no doubt that many in the world have embraced the president-elect as though he would be their own leader. They warmly predict a sea-change in American foreign policy.

You can see the international interest in the composition of the crowd. French television is interviewing Miss France 2009. Bermudans are shivering beneath a leafless tree, almost delirious in their happiness. I spent most of this past weekend in the emergency room/hospital. The little boy in the next room, whose parents spoke with thick African accents, had flown from London for the inauguration. He was sick with scarlet fever.

Everywhere, the crowds stretch infrastructure to its limits, but no-one feels it more than the doctors and nurses manning the hospitals this weekend. Lines are long. People are far from home, confused, hoping their insurance will cover out-of-state services.

Bush's face flashes briefly on the screen, then pans quicky to Barbara Bush, a less contraversial face for the cameras to focus on. Today, the media are happy to forget their cynicism. They are eager to be pleased.

Live from Arlington

2009-01-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

Inauguration coverage from your faithful Washington correspondent . . .

Okay, so I'm sitting on my couch in north Arlington, approximately four miles from the National Mall, but I'm still a darn site closer than most of you.

For most of the country, the inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama is an event of much-anticipated historical significance. The people who live in and around Washington, however, waited for it like the approach of a Category 4 hurricane. Imagine if you heard that millions of out-of-towners were going to descend on your city, take up all the hotel rooms (even churches are renting out cots in their Sunday school classrooms), and crush into your public transportation. For weeks, we have talked of little else. Many local residents have either headed out of town or holed up at home.

I just heard that a 68-year-old woman was pushed off a platform on the red line and struck by a train, and a child was crushed against a barrier on the Mall. Four people have collapsed from hypothermia. It's 23 degrees and feels like ten. Many have stood behind the barriers since four in the morning.

Check it out

2009-01-13T10:53:00.000-08:00

www.ijm.org/gpg

Thoughts for the Day

2009-01-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

"To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without being ever realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understanding, is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity. By Christianity I here mean what is accounted such by all churches and sects - the maxims and precepts contained in the New Testament. These are considered sacred, and accepted as law, by all professing Christians. Yet is is scarecely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his individual contduct by reference to those laws. The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouchasafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and on the other hand, a set of everyday judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of wordly life. To the first of these standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance. All Christians believe that blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by this world, that is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not, lest they be judged; that they should swear not at all; that they should love their neighbor as themselves; that if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also, that they should take no thought for the morrow; that if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed . . .

The doctrimes have no hold on ordinary believers - are not a power in their minds. They have a habitual respect for the sounds of them, but no feeling which spreads from the words to the things signified, and forces the mind to take them in, and make them conform to the formula. Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A and B. to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.

Now we may be well assured that the case was not thus, but far otherwise, with the early Christians. Had it been thus, Christianity never would have expanded for an obscure set of the despised Hebrews into the religion of the Roman empire. When their enemies said, 'See how these Christians love one another' (a remark not likely to be made by anybody now), they assuredly had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their creed than they have ever had since." - On Liberty of Thought and Discussion by John Stuart Mill, 19th century sociologist

This is a Coup

2008-12-25T07:30:00.000-08:00

Last night, I went with my family to a Christmas Eve service. This being California, rain - and not snow - fell in sheets outside the windows, and, conspicuously to my eyes, no one had to remove scarf or gloves before sitting down in the aisles.

The service began with up-tempo carols - "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Joy to the World". It was all in the vein of my upbringing. Energetic guitar strumming. The congregation singing back in full voice, children and adults together.

Next came a duet by two very talented sopranos. They sang a song that was new to me, their voices soaring in the rafters with trained virtuosity (sometimes in Italian, no less), but the longer they sang, the higher heaped my dismay.

These were the words that they sang:

"Let this be our prayer,

As we go our way.

Lead us to a place;

Guide us with your grace,

To a place where we'll be safe.

[. . .]

We ask that life be kind,

And watch us from above.

We hope each soul will find

Another soul to love.

Let this be our prayer

Just like every child

Needs to find a place

Guide us with your grace

Give us faith so we'll be safe.

And the faith that

You've lit inside us

I feel will save us."

It was a beautiful song, beautifully executed, but there my praise for it must end, since it was, from start to finish, a load of hogwash.

"Give us faith so we'll be SAFE?" Is that the point of advent, then? Is that why Christ came? To be safe? To make me safe? Have the authors of this soaring anthem so entirely forgotten that the child Jesus did not, in fact, find any place but a feed trough to receive him?

Nothing could have been less safe than that night in Bethlehem. The great I AM makes himself infinitely vulnerable in the shape of a squalling infant. A worn-out pregnant teenager, with none to attend her but a coarse-handed carpenter, lays her head-covering, perhaps, over the animal dung to have a place to wrestle through the contractions. And in the capital city, a paranoid tyrant is plotting the child's murder.

This is not about safety. This is an act of desperation by a God determined to reconcile to Himself his estranged, rebellious creatures. In the great war for men's souls, this is Omaha Beach, the toehold from which God will reclaim out of enemy hands all that He has made.

The earlier songs, though perhaps homelier, spoke far more truth:

"God rest ye merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay. You know that Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan's grasp when we had gone astray!"

"Joyful all ye nations rise! Join the triumph of the skies!"

"Let earth receive her King. [ . . .] No more shall sin nor sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings known, far as the curse is found!"

This is no silent night. This is a coup. We have long lived in occupied lands, but the real king is coming to take back his own.

Ranting aside, the song does speak some truth. In the end, when Christ comes again in final victory, He will grant to us shelter at His table, in His home. When once are souls are bought by Him, no power can do them harm. In that sense, we are "safe". And even in this life, in His presence, there is a security, a peace, a joy, that no evil circumstance can touch. But let us not deceive ourselves. The battle has not ended, and we should not act as though it had.

When Christ has laid himself out for us in the vulnerability of human flesh, being born and dying like us, shall we then, before victory is final, ask him, simpering, that life be kind to us? That we all find a hand to hold and a bunker to hide in? Would it not be a more fitting tribute to Immanuel the Infant King, on Christmas Day and each day, to offer Him a life yielded for His purposes, though like Him we have no true home on this earth, though like Him we may face dangers and indignities, though like Him we may still do battle in a world that is decidedly unsafe and unkind?

The World That Has No Covers

2008-11-25T16:29:00.000-08:00

As a little girl I was never without a book. I took them with me in the car, into bed, and into the bath (I would have taken them into the shower if my ingenuity could have devised a solution). Late at night, my mother used to rap her knuckles on the outside of my bedroom door, nudge it inward on its hinges, and chide me to turn out the lamp.

“You have school tomorrow,” she would say.

“Just let me finish this chapter,” I would answer, my eyes returning to the pages even before she could shut the door again. I would go on until my eyes burned and my head ached. Once, I went until the sun rose, and I closed the book with genuine surprise to see dawn supplanting the lamplight.

I loved best the old, hard-cover books bound in cloth. I loved the world-weary smell of their slowly moldering bindings, the soft, whispering, rent-fabric sound the pages made when I turned them over. I loved their heft, their immutable solidity, and how, when it was full of them, my book bag strained against my shoulder blades like the weight of a pair of wings.

I read new, glossy paperbacks, too, and I read them over and over again until the covers fall apart like old wash rags. Indeed, for all the love I bore my books, I treated them roughly. I broke their spines. I dog-eared and creased the paper. I smeared the pages with chocolate, grease, and sometimes tears. I made them my bedfellows and rolled over them in my sleep. I loved them not like deities, but like extensions of my own family: Brother and Sister Book.

Not that I lacked for siblings. I was sandwiched between two sisters, and I spent hours with them at girlish games. But somehow I always wound up with my books again, skinny, scabbed knees drawn up against my chest, the book supported between the palm and thumb of my right hand, and the sticky, oxidized brown core of an apple long forgotten in my left.

Reading was a bonfire with me, and I found it hard to come up with enough new books to feed it. I “stole” books from my older sister’s backpack, reading her literature class assignments two years before I would go through the same curriculum. I feasted my bibliomania at the library from time to time, but, given the tendency of books to get lost or damaged under my guardianship, I preferred to own instead of borrow. After Christmas and my birthday in August, with gift certificates burning holes in my pockets, I would spend hours examining the shelves of the retail bookstore for the treats I would take home and devour.

Mostly, though, I re-read books: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne books, Jean Craighead’s My Side of the Mountain, Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows, Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano d’Bergerac, Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places, plus Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare in their glorious canons. I read the Bible in its sonorous entirety, putting a small dot and the date next to each chapter as I completed it.

I would read my favorite books twelve or thirteen times, until whole paragraphs played in my mind with the resonance of liturgy, until the authors’ voices leaked out of my pen (Thanks to Dickens, I am still trying to exorcise the Victorian narrator wont to show up in my writing). If my family taught me English, books taught me language – its rhythm, its variety, its power – and I have never forgotten the lessons, though my self-guided tours were not without peril. To this day, I still come across words that I pronounce incorrectly because I have never heard them – only read them. Until I was fifteen, I thought that “unsh” was a verb, meaning, onomatopoeically, to scrunch up one’s face to hold back emotion. I derived it from the phrase “unshed tears.” How I mourned the loss of that word when I discerned my error.

The books I re-read offered me some kind of emotional release, some field on which to play out the conflicts of a reserved, bookish child. I identified especially with female misfits – Laura Ingalls, Caddie Woodlawn – and all the more so with bookwormy misfits – Jo March and Anne Shirley. Over and over again, I would cry along with their travails and self-doubting, at how the world misunderstood them, and over and over again, I would hang in anticipation for the moment when love vindicated the heroine. In more cynical moments, I longed for the resigned, self-effacing sweetness of Beth March or Mercy Wood.

It seems likely, looking back, that the books kept me sane. Into them I funneled my unresolved complexity, to be faced at my own pace, and with the buffers of vicarious distance and melodic language safely in place. If I sometimes disappeared for days, my family seemed to sense my need, drawing me up from the pages only often enough for food or sleep.

As an adult, I still spend occasional afternoons ensconced in the pages of a book, but I no longer read with my former rapacity. I grow bored. Sometimes I skip to the end, scanning for interesting chapters, and sometimes I put a book down forever, unfinished. As a child, I never missed so much as a preposition, cleaving to my books with the fidelity of a soldier to his squadron. The books have not changed; it must be me.

While this change feels strange to me, I try to take this as a good omen. If I find myself less absorbed in the makings of an author’s mind, I will hope that the traffic has improved between me and the world that has no covers.

On the First Cold Morning

2008-11-19T14:18:00.001-08:00

On the first cold morning I walk
Through the crinkly decadence of trees
Heaped into bags
Like the papers of an old professor
Who has died
Obscurity
profanity
and ingenuity all together
Fit only
In the end
For love
Or burning

After a while I pass a
A mother with a bicycle
And two children
That she tries to keep from freezing
And a woman with a coffee cup
And roses in her garden
That she tries to keep from freezing

And I think as if for the first time
That trees die in winter
From yearning for the sun

Go Vote

2008-11-04T07:14:00.000-08:00

Congratulations. If you are reading this blog, you (probably) live in a country that has enjoyed 44 consecutive bloodless power transitions*, a feat unreplicated in the history of mankind. However you feel about the present state of national affairs, and however you feel about who wins tonight, get out there and exercise your civic privileges, and afterwards, celebrate that tomorrow there will be no civil war.

*I do realize that the American Civil War was a bloody and drawn-out exception in part touched off by Lincoln's election to the presidency.

Gilead's Balm

2008-10-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we come suddenly face-to-face with our own brokenness, and it's as though we could feel its seams like the raised skin of a scar beneath our fingertips, and we are only too aware that we cannot heal ourselves.

There is a song that I like for such days.

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

Sometimes I get discouraged

And feel my hope's in vain.

But then the Holy Spirit

Revives my soul again.

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

If you can't preach like Peter,

If you can't pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus

And that He died for all.

A Poem Written Long Ago in a Legal Pad on an Occasion I No Longer Remember

2008-10-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

Mantengo mi silencio come la nieve
Que cierra las montañas
Una belleza escondida, tranquila, olvidada
La belleza de monjas rezando
Es mi silencio
Mi silencio una pregunta, una duda, un pacto
Esperando
Mi silencio mantengo

(I keep my silence like the snow
That closes the mountains
A beauty hidden, still, forgotten
The beauty of nuns at prayer
Is my silence
My silence, a question, a doubt, a covenant
Waiting
I keep my silence.)

In Defense of Fake Cheese

2008-10-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

I believe that Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese is good for you – or, at least, it’s not going to kill you tomorrow. Here’s why: I have two sisters, and when we were growing up, my mom sustained us on a relativelt healthy diet, punctuated with our favorite stop-gaps: Bisquick pancakes, beef-flavored Top Ramen, and, yes, Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese. I still remember the royal blue cardboard box. The noodles, innocuous enough, had a semolina base. To the boiled noodles you added milk and butter, but the true magic lay in the cheese packet. You ripped open the package with your teeth, and out came a clump of powder glorious to behold, better to taste. God only knows what the fine folks at Kraft put in their fake cheese (fire hydrant paint, from the color of it). Whatever plants or animals it came from originally, upon consumption it was processed, hydrogenated, and emulsified into a vegan’s nightmare. Paradise on a plate. Julia Childs it wasn’t, but it filled me up, and the preparation was simple enough for me to slay my third-grader hunger until dinner time.
Many would gainsay me, among them, presumably, the designers of the food pyramid and legions of parents. I see their point. I’ve downed my share of square meals, and I like it when my food has ingredients I can pronounce. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are massive health care concerns, and they must be addressed with improvements to our overall lifestyles. But I think, sometimes and in some places, we’ve gone over the edge. I have seen juice cups wrested from the hands of babes. I encounter parents in the aisles of the supermarket, angst-ridden over the choice between seven-grain Kashi crackers and organic carrot sticks. Don’t we have enough to feel guilty over? Aren’t their enough menaces to truth, justice, and the American way with finding them in the peanut butter jar?
My sisters and I have grown into intelligent, active, cancer-free adults. The occasional enjoyment of fake cheese did not permanently stunt our development, but we might well stunt the rising generation in more grievous ways if we expend our energy on minor battles instead of major challenges. A warming planet will kill us. Multi-resistant TB will kill us. Wars of religion and ideology and oil will kill us. Give the mac ‘n cheese a break.