The sad, glorious, fragile spring of this year

Posted the paragraphs below the photo yesterday afternoon (Sunday, May 5) on Facebook - and (why was I surprised?) though I felt like a voice in the wilderness when I posted it, it drew many comments, most of which expressed kinship and understanding. So perhaps I was giving voice to something many of us feel right now.

The photos are from yesterday and the past few weeks in Boston.

This spring feels sad. Glorious flowers everywhere, here one week but gone the next, and the world a mess. Like my friend Lindy, who wrote about this a couple of days ago, I find that some days are just for weeping --or at least grieving if the tears don't come, which often they don't. It is worse on the days one can't cry, I think. I find consolation in the fact that Dorothy Day, surely one of the strong holy people of the 20th century and among the ones who did the most good, tough as she was, sat and wept with great frequency.

Once in a blue moon she got to weep with a friend. This is a passage about times with her friend Catherine de Hueck Doherty ("the Baroness"), a woman of very different background and temperament from hers, but who was her comrade in Christian work of mercy and justice, and who after Dorothy's death, remembered:

"When I moved to Harlem, Dorothy Day and I became even closer. There were only about five miles between her house and my Harlem house. So occasionally when we both had enough money, let’s say about a dollar, we would go to Child’s where you could get three coffee refills (for the price of one cup), and we used to enjoy each cup and just talk.

Talk about God. Talk about the apostolate. Talk about all the things that were dear to our hearts.

But we were both very lonely because, believe it or not, there were just the two of us in all of Canada and America, and we did feel lonely and no question about it.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Restoration, February 1981

This story came via Fr. Bob Wild (who is doing research on Day and Doherty) on the Madonna House website, but I remember reading it in the Dorothy Day anthology edited by Robert Ellsberg.

All photos (c) Jane C. Redmont. If you reproduce them without permission or attribution, the archangel in  charge of copyrights will get fiery mad. Please give credit where credit is due. Thank you.

"My spiritual life needs some help..."

Did you just say that? Or think that?
 
Hurry Up and Slow Down, an online retreat designed to fit into the daily lives of busy people, might be just the right thing at the right time for you. Have a look here. 
 

(c) Jane Redmont

  

We'll be back soon - and a few words about Teresa de Ávila and #OccupyGSO

Greetings, friends.

The blog has been dormant for two and a half months for a variety of reasons: some travel, the start of the academic year in a continually demanding job, a lot of Facebook activity (I am going to start cross-posting, I think), a bit of illness (nothing life-threatening), and other demands and choices. I'll be back soon though with regular posts. Just wanted to leave a note to let readers know that the blog is still alive.

Today, October 15, Catholic, Anglican, and some other Christians in the West celebrate the feast of Teresa of Ávila, 16th century Spanish Catholic woman of Jewish descent (her paternal grandfather was forced to convert to Christianity), reformer of the Carmelite religious order, mystic, and theologian. The Roman Catholic Church also honors Teresa as one of only three women "Doctors of the Church." Her prayer-poem "Nada te turbe" ("Let nothing disturb you") has become well-known and exists in a beautiful chanted version from the Taizé community.  Enjoy the chant by clicking here. 

The original poem is longer, but the words used in the Taizé chant are these: 

Nada te turbe, nada te espante

Quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta

Nada te turbe, nada te espante

Solo Dios basta

Also, #OccupyGreensboro, one of the many gatherings related to #OccupyWallStreet, begins this afternoon. (I currently live in Greensboro, North Carolina.) Local newspaper story here. (I think the man quoted at the end is overly optimistic: we are in another Gilded Age already.) For the human stories at the base of the movement around the U.S., see here.  In fact, read them first.  Stay tuned.  Peace to all.

St. Teresa as a young woman, painting by François Gérard (France, 1770−1837)

Summer

I have been in and out of town, partly for work and partly for the first real summer vacations (yes, plural) I have had in years.

I have been posting a lot of photos on Facebook, especially from the last trip, which took me to Spokane to speak and lead worship at the Women of the ELCA Triennial Gathering, then to Idaho for a couple of days of R&R including hiking and kayaking (and sleeping!), and finally (via Seattle) to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands for nearly a week.

Here are a few photos from Orcas. Just a glimpse of the beauty: some views from Mount Constitution and some of my host's land.

As always, you can click on each photo to enlarge it and see more detail.

Madrone tree after the rain...

Beth Johnson, reliable guide

Many of you have doubtless heard about the brouhaha about Elizabeth Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, whose book Quest for the Living God was criticized, yea even condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in late March. If you have not heard about the controversy, all the more reason to read the article linked below and links embedded in it.

Prof. Deirdre Good (who blogs at On Not Being a Sausage) and I have written an essay on Prof. Johnson, her theology, and the controversy. The article just came out today (Easter Monday, April 25) at the Episcopal Café. Have a look here (permanent link, will stay up even when article is no longer on the front page) and please feel welcome to leave a comment at the Café below the article.

Keep prayin', please

For the wordy request, see here.

Thank you.

The first figs

Saturday was also the day of the first figs. The house I rent has a biblical back yard: a vine and two fig trees! The figs are now ripe, more of them each day, and the first harvest was Saturday. I'm going to be giving away figs a lot. Greensboro friends take note. They are delicious. In the photo some of them were still wet from the recent rain.

In other news, we've had rain, grey skies, and lower temperatures. Climbing back up today, but with a bit of rain. It's been heavenly keeping the windows open. And yesterday it was cool enough for me to talk a walk. The birds were happy too and singing loudly in the trees.

Book sale! Get your cool books! ("Cool" rather than "hot:" it's a steamy summer here in the U.S.)

The writing crawls along. Some days are worse than others.

In other news, my paperback publisher has a sale on my book on prayer at deep discount, so buy it! (Let's hope this doesn't mean trouble, just summer sales. Addendum: Nope, no trouble, just some overstock.) It's less than half the usual price! You know you want it. So does your mother. So do your rector, pastor, best friend, father, sister-in-law, lover, parishioner, and spiritual director. Seriously.

I posted this little announcement on Facebook (woe is me, I returned to Facebook, but only for that announcement - true!) yesterday and several people wrote very nice things about the book in response to that update. Those people includes a prison chaplain, an M.D. pathologist, a counselor-in-training, a vocational deacon who works with people who are down and out, and others. Here endeth the shameless self-promotion. Buy the book. Buy ten of 'em.

Prayer Posse, this one is for you, with my thanks

My friend Paul the BB is much more faithful than I in posting prayer concerns and requests in his "heart threads" and "Oremus" posts, but I am making bold to join him with a few requests for you intercessors out there.

First there's Kirstin, who is undergoing chemotherapy in an experimental protocol for a nasty recurrence of cancer. She is surrounded by love and very good care and has a strong will to live and live well, but this is one of those cases where the potential cure is very tough on body and soul. Please keep her in your hearts. Pray also (or offer merit or chants -- whatever your tradition is, we welcome it) for her best friend Andee, who has been faithful and compassionate in her attention and care. And for the medical people, of course.

Then there's Joel, beloved spouse of Margaret and informally-adoptive parent of Juan Manuel. Joel has had a bad attack of myasthenia gravis and they almost lost him a few nights ago. He is doing better, "guarded," as they say, and has a host of praying and caring folks in his life, not least of them our Margaret. Please pray for Joel, for Margaret, for Juan Manuel, and of course for the physicians and nurses and other caregivers.

And Fran of Smallbania, dear friend of mine and of many of us both irl ("in real life") and in the blogosphere, has had to forgo a vacation abroad with her spouse and daughter because of a most unpleasant episode in the hospital involving a gall bladder (now gone, bye-bye gall bladder) and several related complications. Fran is at home resting up and improving every day, but she could use some more prayers. She continues to be her thoughtful self and is black to blogging, a sure sign she is on the mend.

Here's a link to the Taizé chant "Bleibet hier" (literally "stay here" and known and sung in English as "Stay with me, remain with me, watch and pray").

Please pray also in happy thanksgiving for Nathan, a young man I've prayed with and mentored a bit, who was baptized yesterday at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Greensboro. Nathan had been baptized as a child but in the tradition of his family, the Jehovah's Witnesses, who do not baptize in the name of the Holy Trinity. So, after becoming quite involved in the Episcopal Church, he asked to be baptized with the ancient Trinitarian formula which is that of most Christian traditions including the Anglican one. Nathan is a member of St. Andrew's but is also involved at St. Mary's House, where he has been co-convening the Centering Prayer and Taizé Prayer with me. (We are on break for July-August but will resume our hour of contemplation -- half Centering Prayer, which is a Christian form of silent meditation, and half Taizé prayer, with chants from the Taizé community, readings, silence and simple prayers -- in the fall semester.) He also helped start a local chapter of Integrity. He is a wonderful young man with much enthusiasm and feels blessed to have found a welcoming and inclusive church with a strong and long historical tradition.


Finally I ask your prayers for me, Jane. I am in hermit mode, chugging to the finish on a very large and long theological project known to the general public as The Big Tome. I have burrowed deeper into solitude and struggle in order to get it done and it is very intense work, even when I am not working consciously. I am well and healthy, I get good nutrition and enough sleep, enjoy the solitude much of the time, and have the wonderful company of Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire. She is very good at sleeping, napping, being playful, and keeping me company at the keyboard. She usually sleeps all afternoon but in the evening she tends to be in supervisory mode and hang out here in the study. I have no idea what she does in the morning, since I am keeping odd hours and am asleep much of the a.m. +Maya does come and visit after the alarm clock rings and usually settles on my chest for a while. She is a very civilized cat and does not wake me at 6 a.m. as some other cats are wont to do to their human companions.

I need and welcome your prayers, good vibrations, chants, meditations, and other holy expressions of support. Thank you! Come, Holy Spirit.*

*That's a link to the Taizé chant "Veni lumen" -- "Come, light" in Latin. "Come, Holy Spirit, light of our hearts," etc.

It is beastly hot here in Greensboro as in much of the Eastern part of the U.S. but I do have an air conditioning unit in the study and another in the kitchen/dining room, so I am managing, though the air conditioning is noisy and it is odd to be spending 90 to 95% of my time indoors in the summer. The phlox are blooming outdoors and surviving nicely. The humans, however, are wilting.

Peace to you all, and to all sentient beings.

Lily season

The first lilies bloomed a while back, but now they are here in full force, just as the hydrangeas are fading.  You can see the Humongous Lawn, as I refer to it on Facebook, in the first picture.  I spend my time mowing. Then again, it burns calories and it beats going to the gym, except for the heat and the bugs.  Speaking of the bugs, who just love me, I think the proper order of things is 1) apply sunscreen, 2) apply bug spray.  For a while I wasn't sure.  But I digress.

I took the three photos above in the bright sun on Sunday after returning from church, sometime after 1:00 p.m.

Yesterday, La Virgencita got some day lilies.  (The first photo is a bit fuzzy.)

Same lilies, close up.  They look Van Gogh-ish in this photo.  They are a much brighter orange in reality.

 

 Here endeth the tour of the day lilies.

Hydrangea catch-up

Good heavens.  I neglected to put up pictures of the hydrangeas when they got really blue.  Though there is one small bush of purple hydrangeas (the color of hydrangeas has to do with the acidity of the soil) the other small bush and the really huge one are both blue, and they went from pale blue (mixed with cream at the core of the flowers when they were just "ripening") to periwinkle.  I took most of the photos with the BlackBerry camera, which distorts the color a bit, so the periwinkle-ness is not obvious, but you can see that the blue is more intense than it was in the first week or too of hydrangea blooming. 

The hydrangea is the only thing I've taken care of this year.  The garden is my landlady's doing and the flowers pop up in due season, one wave after the other.  The hydrangea bushes were full of dead wood --no one had trimmed or pulled it out in years-- so in the late winter or very early spring I got rid of it.  It took a long time and the wood filled about three garbage bins.  I had scratched arms after that, having been attacked by the hydrangeas as I worked.  I now understand why garden ladies garden in long sleeves. The reward was a huge, really huge hydrangea bush, much larger than last year, and even more flowers than last year. Spectacular.

Otherwise, all due credit to the house's owner, to Mother Nature, and to Godde, not necessarily in that order.

 

This is a little purple hydrangea flower after the rain.

In the variegated bouquet below, the middle flower was in fact more blue-purple than the dark blue it appears to be and the right hand flower was more of a dark purple than it appears in the photo.

I'll take photos with a regular camera next time around, but it is handy to have the BBerry in pocket - I just whip it out and click over to the camera function and take a picture.  The camera is especially good with flowers.  It is a little less so with pictures of +Maya and even less so with people pictures, though in a pinch it is helpful to take quick snaps of humans.

I've had flowers next to the Guadalupe candle for weeks now.  Here is Guadalupe with the last of the hydrangeas.

  And this is what some of these flowers looked like as early adolescents.

 And here is the way one looked as a green, unripe baby flower.

Good news re: the Adorable Godson

The Adorable Godson has a job!  Hurrah for him.  It didn't take long for him to find it.  He graduated with his second bachelor's degree in May (physics - the first bachelor's was a couple of years ago with a double major in computer science and math) and received the job offer about a month later.  He will be doing Serious Tech-y Things for an Interesting and Useful Company beginning in July.  The company is in California, so off he goes ten days from now.  I --and we in his little congregation-- will miss him, but we are all very happy for him and proud of him.  

In addition to this, he got a haircut for the job interview (not a short short one, mind you; he has much too beautiful hair to go for a buzz cut, but the hair was a little too much in his eyes and down toward the shoulders to look professional, even for the high tech world) and looks very handsome. 

Of course this is all very first-time-ish and scary too, so we welcome both your prayers of celebration and your prayers for a smooth landing in the world of full-time employment.  I haven't yet asked him whether I can use his real first name here, so for now, you can just pray for Jane's Adorable Godson and Godde will know quite well whom you mean.  Thanks!

The purple minority

The smallest of the three hydrangea bushes is producing purple blooms this year; the soil composition must have changed.  The blue hydrangeas are more plentiful and bloomed earlier and have now turned from pale blue with cream centers to periwinkle. These purple ones are few, but they are beautiful.  I have a vase of them in the kitchen.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

Some +Maya photos from early spring

It's been too long and you have been waiting patiently for the latest photos of the Right Reverend and Right Honourable Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire. Enjoy.

Slightly edited --two photos added-- 15 minutes after initial posting.
As always, click on photos to enlarge and see detail.

In the late winter especially, +Maya was very fond of sleeping on the desk chair in my study.


It was a long, cold winter. Flannel sheets, anyone?




The house is all right, but not half as pretty as our old place, the one on which the tree fell. No more pretty windows with wood trim. Cement walls, windows cut out of the walls with no window sills, a bit of peeling paint, a bit of rust. But it's still cozy: a cat lives here.

The author of the definitive pastoral letter on naps continues to be very good at zonking out.





She's also good at waking up.


She's not bad at balancing on the mantel, either.


And here we have Lady Radar Ears (who made an appearance on Facebook recently).


This is when we were working on a sermon about a passage from the book of Revelation...

She likes to help me write.


+Maya has several sleeping places. This is a perch in the bedroom. The pillow is all hers.


Of course, one has to clean up after naps.




This is +Maya seen from outside through the living room window on a sunny day in early May.


Alert, wise, thoughtful, and lovely. The perfect feline bishop.


She is a good Anglican with an inquiring mind.


These next two photos, taken with my BlackBerry, have already made their appearance on Facebook:

Get me away from the paparazzi!

Yes, Your Grace. For now.