Quiet and gentle...

Our puppy is now fully a year old.  She still has LOTS to learn. Her manners are not great and she gets too excited when new people come to visit. But in the midst of all Lucie's anxieties and wildness there is a sweet dog who will eventually blossom.  I have come to love her dearly and tonight we sat together for a bit with me holding her gently so that she might relax - and eventually she fell asleep. 

That's how much of this day has been for me: tender and quiet.  It began with a conversation with a local visual artist who sometimes comes to worship. I love his sculpture and poetry and for the past year we've been trying to come up with a way to display the creation of local artists in our Sanctuary.  We also would like to create some hands-on workshops so that artists can be in conversation with the wider public, and, ordinary people can hear about what takes place during the creative process.  I think we've come up with a plan to make it happen, so we'll take the fall to work out the details.  It felt grounded.

Later I had lunch with a colleague and friend at Dottie's Coffee Lounge and we just checked in and visited with one another for nearly two hours.  (This is a wonderful place on North Street in Pittsfield so please check it out @ http:// dottiescoffeelounge.com/)  He also happens to be my predecessor at First Church, so it was fun strolling up and down North Street together.  He has great stories and memories from his time in ministry - and I got to turn him on to some of the new places that have changed over the years.

I got liturgies ready for the clergy who will cover for me during my end of the summer vacation run and sent out invitations to local musicians for our Thanksgiving Eve 2013 show. I spent 90 minutes with colleagues from a sister church planning for their web page and then sat with my puppy. It was a perfect day - quiet and tender - warm and still - with nothing very big happening.  At the same time, however, each encounter was fully alive and without any agenda or anxiety - something I choose to believe is at the heart of kingdom living:  come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden... and I will teach you the unforced rhythms of grace (Mt. 11: 28-30 with a tip of the hat to both King James and Eugene Peterson.)

Each night for the last week I have been closing the day with a poem from the Mark Halperin book Dianne gave me a few weeks ago:  Falling Through the Music. It, too, is quiet and tender - and I am especially taken with one called "Growing Up."

1.
I believed my father was a spy. He had been born in Russia, he had an accent and he was older than other dads, which confirmed it.  He was always disappearing into the basement - to work, he said.  I guessed he sent secret message to Moscow late at night. If they caught him, I would defend him, but I knew what he was doing was wrong. I loved him though he was a spy.

In the Soviet Union, I had learned at school, people had no liberty, but he argued education was free there: college, even medical-school. Later, when I asserted the superiority of the Soviet Union's treatment of women, he angrily informed me that women doctors were paid less than men who dug ditches. He kept me unbalanced, uncertain. No matter which side I took, he took the other. No matter what I believed, what I believed was wrong and based on insufficient knowletge. Father knew if you knew more...

2. My father wasn't a spy, though he did spend a lot of time in the basement, where he worked on plaster casts, the furnace and making cabinets.  He could have been thinking.  Maybe English didn't feel comfortable or we didn't in those days, in his late forties. Then I was almost grown and he was old. He stayed upstairs, even more a mystery.  Polite, handsome in an Old World way, with generous, deep, sad eyes, he could be mercilessly ironic with me.

3.
Since Father was never a regular dad, that role devolved to Mother,a native-born American and accentless. I fought with her rather than my father. She liked the brio of engagement, the stir of conflict, but our disputing horrified him, who was the youngest, last and twelfth, or the twelfth of thirteen.  He had been raised by sisters he loved absolutely. How could a child argue with his mother?

I lost regularly and the battles were drawn out, but I'd find a wedge of Swiss-cheese in the refrigerator, a peace offering.

4.
After my father died, I thought of everything I didn't know about him and never would.  I still do. His distance remained as if it were all that could be saved. One day, after my mother died, I came across my camera.  What did I need it for? Who would I send pictures to?

As this closes I am grateful to have savored it and came across this tune from so long ago...