On poets and pastors...

We had a New Year's dinner tonight with a collection of pastors and poets - some who are actually both - plus a newspaper man and a pastoral counselor. It sounds like a liturgical joke but it was a sweet way to welcome in the new year: wine, poems, prayers and deep conversation about the hopes and fears we all share.

These new friends and colleagues help ground me in this new place. I need that. After 15 months of a full schedule in a new town and new churches - to say nothing of the many changes I have embraced personally and professionally - I spent this week grieving the loss of old friends, sunlight, bars and rock and roll bands and a cadre of trusted colleagues who can handle all of my wounds. I hadn't planned on spending the week between Christmas and New Year's in a Lenten mode, but I've been doing this long enough to know that when the grieving comes - and it takes about this long - then you have ride it out. Let Lent take you from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday even if it is only really a week. And then, when you least expect or deserve it, there appear small signs of light and hope and new connections. Tonight was one of them -and the invitation to strap on the snow shoes, too.

Buechner writes this: I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter's illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST.

What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the care turned out to be, as I'd suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plat itself, which sits up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered - and it is as holy a relic as I have ever seen.

Tonight helped ground me for the New Year. These are people I can trust. People I can love and who, in time, will come to love and trust me, too. The newspaper man is a rock music fiend like me - and a published mystery writer to boot! One pastor - who now teaches English at the community college - studied with the heirs of Tillich. We're cooking up a way to get me out to his classroom to play American folk music once a month to help his young students get a feel for what the music really means. (He had me out before Christmas when I did the history of African American music in America in 45 minutes!) And our host, a recently retired brother, is hatching a way to pull the local progressives together for prayer and support.

There was a healing for me tonight - and OMG was the food incredible. The whole affair brought to mind this poem I just read by Linda Pashtan, a Jewish woman from New York who now lives in Maryland and writes about the connections that bind our lives together.

In Monet's Water Lilies,
willows dissolve into
flowers dissolve into water,
and form becomes a dream
in purples and blues
without scent or story.
Consider the death of boundaries,
the way sight dissolves
the moment just before sleep
overtakes us. The way
a man can disappear
inside a woman. I remember
a day of ruffling waters
when we sailed west
in your creaky boat.
We steered for the horizon—
that penciled-in line between
ocean and sky, then watched
as it receded ahead of us.
The night my mother died
there were cells in her body
that didn't notice. For a while
the moons of her nails kept rising,
the hair kept growing from the apex
of her widow's peak.
Now by a barbed-wire fence
that divides two countries,
the invisible roots of an old tree
spread their living network
underground, in all directions.

I love Monet - I love making connections - I grieve when the connections sometimes fail or fall apart but I also see the promises beyond what is obvious. To my mind it is like what Willis does with the old Cameo's song, "Word Up." Made it something totally fresh and sweet... dig it.