Work.

Last Saturday the Formed group had its monthly gathering to discuss the month's topic. (Follow this link if you're asking any of these questions at this point: "What is Formed?" Why do they gather monthly? Where can I find out more?") This month's topic was "work." Happily, one of the members of Formed is the man to whom I've referred in this blog as Our Glorious Leader, Kevin Rains, who owns a body shop, Center City Collision. Where better to discuss the concept of "work" than a place set aside for the fixing of cars, yes?
Kevin started us out with a short but meaty reflection on the place of work in Scripture. He pointed out that in the beginning God worked--the first passages of Scripture record God's six days of Creation. Because we believe in three Persons in one God, and that wherever one member of the Trinity is, the others are as well, we know Creation was the work of a community of artists.
Kevin also talked about order and chaos. He mentioned that in the Message, Peterson calls chaos "a soup of nothingness." The Spirit of God broods like a bird over this abyss--note this, Kevin said; God is not mired in the muck. He asked (he meant to ask rhetorically, but most of us raised our hands!), "How many of you sometimes feel mired in chaos when you work?"
The God who spoke light into existence can and will strengthen us if we ask. We should not forget work is hard, though. Our task as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, Kevin said, is to help bring order out of chaos. And good golly there's a lot of chaos out there. But discouragement and despair won't help. Kevin said he tried to frame work in this way, and it sounded to me like a useful prod to keep on keepin' on: "If you didn't do the work you do--if no one did the work you do--what would happen?"
The actual talk on Saturday was a discussion with Chuck Proudfit, Greg York and Robert Lockridge, who each first spoke on their own and then did a roundtable with questions. But if I do all the talking here, I wouldn't be engaged in creative work with a community of artists, so if someone else who was there wants to chime in about the rest of the day, this would be welcomed.

On Prayer, with Mary Laymon

Just got back (literally, like seconds ago) from a gathering downstairs at the Speckled Bird. It was a Formed gathering. (By the way, I love living in a hyperlinked world. Cuts down on the amount of space I take up explaining things. Go find out what Formed is and then come back.)
Mary Laymon spoke on the month's focus, prayer. She loves talking about prayer, and I love listening to people talking about what they love. Some thoughts, random but may give a taste of the experience of being there:
--Prayer can, and has, saved lives. "Save"--we talked about how "save" can mean "To heal and make whole."
--The voice of God is within all of us.
--It takes time and practice to learn to hear God's voice. He's quiet. But He is also willing to wait until you are willing to listen.
--If you're an extrovert, and you have a chatty sort of personality, God may chat with you right back, but there are other "languages" in which God may speak to you--it may not just be the classic sort of Inner Voice model. God can speak through songs, through images, through relationships, through dreams, through nature.
--How do we distinguish God's voice from our own voice, or the voices of darkness and destruction? a) God's voice will be congruent with Scripture, so it will direct us toward love of neighbor, love of the poor; following it will also produce the fruits of the Spirit: kindness, gentleness, peace. b) There will be an "echo"--God will be persistent, so we may hear the same message, see the same image, experience the same circumstances, over and over again until we stop and pay attention. c) A key way to check--ALWAYS take what you think you're hearing from God and check it out with a trusted "soul friend" who has some practice discerning God's voice. d) Sometimes you'll only know it's God's voice through hindsight--"oh! That's what God was saying! I should have listened!" or "Gosh, I'm glad I listened!"
--We practiced different prayer methods. We prayed using a picture, asking God to use the image to reveal something to us. Then we had a choice of activities: praying by molding clay without having a preconceived notion of what the clay should look like, praying while walking, praying while studying nature, lectio divina (praying using Scripture), etc. etc.
--To pray, you have to be brave. It's scary to be intimate with God--He wants to transform us. We'll see things in ourselves that aren't so lovely.
--God wants to heal us not just for our own sake but so that we can be a blessing to others.
--If you go are willing to trust God enough to go into a scary place, God can take you back out of it.

First Sunday of Advent

Thanks to Angie F., who invited various writerly folk to do reflections for the Vineyard Central Advent gatherings this year. This is what I contributed for today.

My family’s Advent wreath has a wire base, four metal candleholders, plastic holly leaves and berries. The greenery is splotched with purple and pink wax from, oh, probably forty years’ worth of candles. The candleholders likewise are well and truly blackened. We could get two years out of Advent candles, since we only lit them at suppertime; in the second year, on Christmas Eve, Mom liked to keep the candles burning until they melted to nothing. So the flames charred the sides of the candleholders which are four-petalled, like flowers.
The Advent wreath had to be fetched today, the first Sunday of Advent, from the basement, from wherever it had been stashed—someplace we’d put it with the thought that of course we’d remember where we put it, and of course we never did.
The Christmas decorations also live in the basement. The tree, the lights, the ornaments, the crèche would all be brought forth three Sundays from now and would not return to their homes until Epiphany or, if we were feeling particularly liturgically correct, the Sunday after that—the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. From January until the fourth week of Advent, I could visit them down in the basement.
Go there with me now. We’re in the basement of the house I grew up in. I’m a little kid, seven, eight, nine, ten. I’m wearing roller skates, and I’ve been skating for hours—goodness knows how the rumbling of the metal wheels on the concrete floor has been reverberating through the house. But I’ve taken a break from racing a circuit around the main room. I’ve gone back toward the washer and dryer, turned left at the wooden drying rack with its spokes like a turnstile, past Dad’s workbench with its ancient tools that none of us, Dad included, have the handyman wherewithal to use well. Back here is the water heater, the furnace, and a shelf of Christmas decorations—also a tiny squeeze space granting secret-passage access to the main room.
I’ve turned on the bare bulb above the workbench and I’ve dug out the crèche. I don’t unwrap any decorations or fiddle with the box of lights. I don’t get out Mary or Joseph or a shepherd or sheep, Wise Men or their camel or the angel Gabriel. I leave the stable empty of everyone, but I turn a key on its side, feeling the resistance of the gears, and when I let go, a tiny metal spool unwinds, and even tinier metal teeth on a metal comb catch on the bits of spool that are raised like Braille letters. The music box in the crèche plays “Silent Night.”
I listen a while, and then I return to skating, stopping or slowing at times to listen for the chime of the song. I go back upstairs and wonder through the day if I am really hearing it still or just imagining it. A music box, as it slows, sounds out its chimes at longer and longer intervals. When you think it has run out of faith, as if an Advent candle could melt to nothing before its vigil is complete, another note will ring, sweet as any that came before.

God is good--all the time! And all the time God is good!

Hello!
It has been a rather long time since I have written about my employment adventures.
Not long ago, I was working as a pre-kindergarten teacher. More recently still, I ceased being a pre-kindergarten teacher. They say you do not understand what something is really and truly like, from the inside out, until you do it. So it was with teaching--once I got through student teaching, finding a job, and then running a classroom, it was clear it was not for me, not at this stage of my life. It was not fun having to tell the people I worked for, people I had great respect for, that they would have to find a new pre-kindergarten teacher two months into the school year. It was even less fun saying goodbye to the kiddos.
It's all worked out, though. I got a job at my parish, St. Joseph's. I am there part-time helping with administrative matters, "office-y stuff" as I called it when one of my friends asked recently what exactly I am doing. I started this past week. We sent out a mailing to families of people who had died and who had their funerals at St. Joe's--we wanted to let the families know we will be remembering their loved ones at Mass this weekend. We also sent out our annual appeal letter. So far, this is similar to the sort of activities I was involved in at Our Daily Bread--letting people know what is going on with the parish, providing a means for staying involved.
St. Joe's has been my parish for almost five years now; I started attending there shortly after moving to Cincinnati. It's a lively place where the most amazing gospel music is wedded to the Roman Rite, the Catholic liturgical form I am most familiar with. So it reminds me a teensy bit of Mass at St. Thomas, my old home parish, after it became the center for the Vietnamese Catholic community in St. Louis. It is a place where the soul of the music we sing helps to shape the experience of Eucharist. "The Spirit is alive and well here at St. Joseph," one of our regular announcers is fond of saying.
Before I started the program where I got my Master's in Teaching, I was taking classes towards a Master's in Lay Pastoral Ministry at the Athenaeum of Ohio. So, interestingly, parish work was something I've been long interested in. I just didn't know how to go about getting involved. Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Free Veggies

M. parked the box truck on the sidewalk next to St. E's at one o'clock in the afternoon. S. drove up in her car moments later. I could see it all from my window--the produce boxes stacked five high or more in the back of the truck, S. chatting with curious local folk.
S. works for an outreach at a church in the Cincinnati suburbs. They'd gotten a huge donation of veggies, way more than they could distribute, so she'd offered to take it here to Norwood where she knew the need was also great. Plus, she knew she could recruit people to do drive-by veggie drop-offs to friends and strangers.
All told, she'd brought half a pallet of potatoes, cucumbers and yellow squash--enough to justify the use of a moving van.
I came down from my apartment in time to see most of the potatoes go. There had only been a few sacks of those--nothing like the boxes upon boxes of squash and cucumbers. Local Vineyard folk showed up on bike, in cars, on foot, to take what they could carry and share it round. S. called or texted others she knew who hadn't shown up just so they wouldn't miss out.
When cars would pass, she'd shout like a carnival barker: "FREE SQUASH AND CUCUMBERS!" Many cars slowed and parked in response, and many a box disappeared from the truck via this method. Other cars' windows were rolled up, the drivers protected by a/c from the scorcher of a Saturday. I amused myself wondering what they made of the scene--a woman yelling something unheard, surrounded on all sides by produce. S. got me to put a notice on the chalkboard outside of church: "FREE VEGGIES." That ought to have cleared up some confusion.
I brought out some grocery bags I had stockpiled so people wouldn't have to take a whole box if they couldn't use veggies in bulk. After a few folk had made use of this option, S. said to me, "We're running out of bags." I played Elijah and assured her, "The bags aren't going to run out." Sure enough, M., another Vineyard bud from down the street, soon offered to bring bags from her house's stockpile.
S. works with a Hispanic ministry; she was occasionally switching off yelling "FREE SQUASH AND CUCUMBERS!" to its Spanish equivalent. Doing this caught the attention of a fella who was headed to a church in Northern Kentucky, a Hispanic outreach one hundred members strong. We sent him on his way with eight boxes or so. "God provides!" S. told him cheerfully in Spanish.
We were never overwhelmed with a horde of people all at once, but folks came in a steady stream. We heard the word was spreading through the neighborhood--squash-and-cucumber recipients passing the news on to people on their front stoops. My friend D. and I went knocking on doors to see if a delivery might be welcome.
By three o'clock the box truck was empty, and S. was beaming.
At Mass the next day, when the priest came to Jesus' words, "Take this, all of you, and eat it," I heard S.'s voice ringing loud and clear, "FREE...!"

The End of the Year

One of the second-grade objectives is to discuss inventors and inventions. Another is to formulate "how?" questions--the beginnings of scientific inquiry. So this week I gave the students a challenge. I gave each table of children (six tables in all) some supplies--a double-A battery, a flashlight lightbulb, and aluminum foil. I told them to try to invent something.
A girl at one of the tables made the important discovery that if she wrapped the battery in the foil, the battery became warm. (In fact, the battery can get quite hot. Impressionable youth that may be reading this: this is an experiment that should only be attempted with adult supervision!) Some minutes later, a whoop of triumph came from a girl at another table: she had succeeded in getting the flashlight lightbulb to "spark," as she put it. Soon all the tables were giving her method a shot. Some could replicate her results, some couldn't; it's tricky to get the metal rim of the lightbulb to stay in contact with the foil, and to keep the foil in contact with both ends of the battery. But it's pretty darn cool when it works.
I asked them to try to explain what happened. One boy (who said he helps his dad with electric stuff all the time) said that the foil reflected the light from the lights on the ceiling, and that's what gave the lightbulb the necessary electricity; that, plus of course the nitrogen gas inside the battery.
We have five days left. Everything that needs to be graded has already been assigned, already turned in. The trick now is to continue our routine as closely as possible so as not to encourage more craziness than will naturally happen in the final week of school. That means we will still do language arts and science and social studies in the morning and we will still do math in the afternoon. I will still give out worksheets. The class has not yet risen up in mutiny.
We had a school concert yesterday afternoon. One of the songs was a Motown-inspired declaration of love for pizza (imagine first-through-fifth graders harmonizing "Pizza! Pizza!" to the tune of "My Girl", and you'll get the general gist). I was able to handle it up until the point a young'un went to the mike and started intoning a spoken part mid-song. Then I gave out a helpless cry of laughter that prompted a bunch of students to turn around--"Oh," I saw their thought balloons saying. "It was a teacher!"
Also enjoyable: a song about proper handwashing techniques set to the melody of Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Of Rainstorms and Rossini

The recent spate of bad weather in Cincinnati reminds me I have neglected to share a story from a week or two back in the second grade classroom, a day when I was flying solo (my mentor having to be in another room). It was a day when we didn't have "specials"--art or music or gym. We had done our math work as always just after lunch; I believe after that we were doing something related to social studies, but in the middle of it a massive storm hit. There was thunder, there was lightning, there was wind and great pelting raindrops. I was unprepared for everyone's reaction--one student asked to sit elsewhere in the room instead of next to the windows because she was afraid of thunderstorms. Other boys and girls were getting up to go stand at the windows to get a better view. It was chaos. So I said, "Everyone back to your seats, and I will tell you a story."
Magic words. I said, "Let me tell you what Miss Pancella's mother did when Miss Pancella was a little girl and there was a storm. Miss Pancella's mother--Mrs. Pancella--is a very wise woman. She knows a lot about calming the fears of children. I believe she became so wise because she had, not one--" I raised an index finger--"Not two"--I continued counting off and showed the count on my hands--"not three, or four, or five, but SIX children." Gasps of astonishment all around. "And Miss Pancella is not her first, not her second...but the sixth! So she had plenty of practice before I came around.
"When Miss Pancella was a little girl and a thunderstorm rolled through, Mrs. Pancella put a record on the record player. Who here knows what a record is?"
A little boy raised his hand. When I called on him, he said, "It's like a CD, only bigger."
"Close enough. This record was of the William Tell Overture. Now, you've probably heard part of the William Tell Overture--" I hummed part of the ending, the "Lone Ranger" portion. The class all agreed--yes, they knew it. "That part sounds like galloping horses; the beginning part sounds like the approach of a storm. There are low drums for far-away thunder, and notes that are like drops of rain--plink, plink, plink! And cymbal crashes for lightning. Mrs. Pancella would play that whole record so we could listen to the storm come and go. Somehow a storm was less scary when it was in music."
"Hey!" somebody called. "The rain stopped!"
Everyone looked out the windows and confirmed it. There was a brief outbreak of chaos again as everyone celebrated, and then one of these magical thinkers said, "Miss Pancella made the rain stop with her story!"
But of course, Miss Pancella did no such thing. Mrs. Pancella did.