Martha, Mary and Michaelmas (And Cheryl Wheeler and Louis C.K.)

Sept. 29, 2013

Scripture: Luke 10:38-423

8 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things,42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

…and second scripture:

In every instant, two gates.
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries—ecstasy? horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?
-Jane Hirshfield


Today is Michaelmas, a lesser Catholic feast that somehow always gets my attention. It makes me think of midlife. Maybe it makes everyone think of midlife. It comes, after all, just a few days after the autumn equinox, and autumn is certainly the season of midlife, what with the balding maples, the falling leaves, the drama before the long quiet.

This year Michaelmas falls also on a waning moon. It seems all of nature is conspiring to force us to think about the brevity of life. The two readings—the Martha/Mary story which Steve has preached about often, and the Jane Hirshfield poem—both touch on this idea of the choices we make, and it seems to me that midlife can be an especially painful time to sit with our choices. (Though I suspect every phase of life has this potential pain…)

When we were kids, we were Marys. My kids are Mary-like. They pay attention to the important stuff. They know that it’s good for them to play, to move their bodies, to climb on things. They know a good story when they hear one, and they also know justice. They have an acute sense of what is fair.

As we age, we become more Martha-like. We don’t pause from our dinner preparations to run outside during one of those summertime micro rain storms, to dance in the rain after a long dry dusty hot spell. We do the never ending laundry—Mount Washmore, my friend calls it. We go to the grocery store. We pick up the kids. We exercise—but on a schedule. And we justify our good, hard disciplined work: in any revolution there is work to be done, and Jesus surely was a revolutionary.

And don’t the ones who do the work get the praise? So why is Jesus saying that Mary’s the one who gets it?

Part of the gift of midlife is that we do get it. We see how painfully brief it all is. Now I know Mary’s got the right idea. And I still can’t stop doing doing doing. Still can’t stop frantically doing the dishes, doing the laundry, telling my kids to hurry up so we won’t be late to school. I do my meditation and my yoga—but I time myself with my iPhone and don’t let myself linger. I tell myself I will go on a meditation retreat when the kids are older.

But I have the usual questions. Is Jesus saying we should always listen to God? Or just when he comes over for dinner? Does Jesus really want us to forgo making the beds in the morning and instead practice piano? Wasn’t Jesus glad that Martha was making preparations? I know I’m not alone in having some feminist annoyance with this passage. Would it have been better if Martha had sat down too? But then there’d be no food for anyone. Maybe they would have just eaten locusts, then. Is Jesus saying “Sorry, babe. You’re just a Martha. Marthas cook and clean. Marys sit and listen. Try again next life, and you might luck out.”

Well, of course not. Jesus’s whole point was to free us from the binary thinking of the old world, teach us non-dualism. No I, no Thou. Jesus said, “I and the Father are one. And so it is with you.” Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Last time I looked, it was hard to tell the difference between vine and branches. We’re always Martha and Mary, just as God is in each of us, beyond all of us, and in the interactions between everything.

Moreover, when I grumbled a version of this to my friend Peter Ives, he pointed out that at the time of Jesus, women were barely considered human. For Jesus to say that Mary should sit and listen to him, and in fact Martha should put down her dishrag and join in too, was completely revolutionary. He was calling them, these two sisters, to be disciples, equals to his male followers. It’s not really news in Bible scholarship that Jesus elevated the role of women to that of equal, though the Nicene Creed and fifteen hundred years of organized religion put the kibosh on much of that. But when I heard this, I had to look at my own internalized sexism. It hadn’t occurred to me on first read-through that in fact Jesus might indeed have been saying, “Dudes, your turn. Go make the dinner while Martha and Mary get their time with me. And if you don’t know how to make the dinner, go find some locusts.” For all we know, that was in the original text, only to be nixed three hundred years later during the Council of Nicea. Three hundred years later, women were back in their historical place.

This came through my email-box this morning from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar:

Did you know the first half of life has to fail you? In fact, if you do not recognize an eventual and necessary dissatisfaction (in the form of sadness, restlessness, or even loss of faith), you will not move on to maturity. You see, faith really is about moving outside your comfort zone, trusting God’s lead, instead of just forever shoring up home base. Too often, early religious conditioning largely substitutes for any real faith.

Usually, without growth being forced on us, few of us go willingly on the spiritual journey. Why would we? The rug has to be pulled out from beneath our game, so we redefine what balance really is. More than anything else, this falling/rising cycle is what moves us into the second half of our own lives. There is a necessary suffering to human life, and if we avoid its cycles we remain immature forever. It can take the form of failed relationships, facing our own shadow self, conflicts and contradictions, disappointments, moral lapses, or depression in any number of forms.

All of these have the potential to either edge us forward in life or to dig in our heels even deeper, producing narcissistic and adolescent responses that everybody can see except ourselves.

And the other wise sage I came across was the comedian Louis CK who went on a rant about iPhones on the Conan O’Brien show. He basically says the same thing as Father Richard:

…you need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It's starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it...

To be an artist, or a revolutionary, or just a good person trying to feel our way through life with a modicum of consciousness, we need to rest, Mary-style, fill the well. We need to do nothing. We need to look up at the sky, notice what kind of moon it is, breath in the smell of falling leaves and pond scum and compost and fall-bearing raspberries. To love someone, to really love someone, we need to give them years of our attention. Years. Focus and appreciation every single day. That’s the sunlight they need to grow.

Last week, I happened to notice, as I occasionally do, all the people around me who were doing it better than me. By “it” I mean everything from having a music career to gaining spiritual insights. I couldn’t help but notice all my spiritual friends who all seem to be gaining enlightenment at a frightening clip. My friend Julie went on a 10 day silent retreat, and now she has no more anger. My friend Charlotte did this three year long inventory of her greater defects and now she hears God’ voice loud and clear and never has any questions about what she should do. All this makes me want to give up, give in, throw in the towel, text and drive, abandon my highly scheduled meditation practice. Instead I called my mom and asked her what she thought of Sheryl Sandberg, the latest voice in the Mommy wars. Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In, which points out the sexism still rampant in our culture, and how hard it is for career women to be mothers and gives excellent advice to women who want to fight to keep their careers thriving. Sandberg exhorts women to lean in rather than lean back when they even begin to think about having a child. Recently, I’ve heard my peers rumbling with discontent about this message. “The problem is,” said one of my closest friends, a highly successful author, “I really do want to lean back right now. I want to volunteer at my daughter’s school. I want to make her Halloween costume. Is that so wrong?”

“Well there’s just so much to hate about Sheryl Sandberg,” my mother began. “She has nannies raising her children! What are all these people thinking, making $300,000 a year! I am so glad I invested my time in you girls.”

I’m pretty sure my mother hasn’t read the book. She, like me, had a career and also had kids, and tried to balance them as well as she could, which seemed to involve a lot of yelling and tossing of backpacks into the car with a hot cup of coffee sloshing about. It’s true that when push came to shove, she would choose her children every time. But still, my mother worked hard. She sure as hell leaned in. She was always grading papers at the kitchen table, cooking our dinner, making our lunches, or playing extremely competitive tennis during those hours after school and before dinner. She did not get on the floor and play games with us, or engage in imaginative play. But she did sit on my bed at the day’s end and ask me to talk about things. She knew what the better part was. Mostly. Like all of us, she was sometimes Martha, sometimes Mary.

So if Jesus is calling us to be disciples, if Jesus is calling women to be disciples with the same urgency that he calls men, this brings us right back to the question women have been wrestling with since the dawn of the women’s movement. I, for one, certainly can make the dualism about choosing family over career, for instance. Last week, Katryna and I opened for a great singer songwriter Cheryl Wheeler. Cheryl is one of a kind. She looks like what she is: a 62 year old who dresses in LL Bean (onstage and off), loves her dogs and Cathleen, her wife of 10 years, and doesn’t give a whit about what the music business—or anyone else for that matter—thinks of her. She is hilarious, occasionally raunchy, onstage, so funny that my sides often hurt from laughing so hard when I am at one of her shows. She has a song on her latest CD called “Shutchier Piehole”, making the point that it would be really hard if your last name were “Piehole” and your parents named you “Shutchier.” Hard, yes, but funny. A few songs later, she delivered her 1980’s love ballad “Arrow,” a song so achingly beautiful we were all in tears by the end. Her following is as strong today as it ever was. Her fans are loyal; we opened for her in 1992 at the Iron Horse, and a couple from last Friday’s concert came up to us and said, “I remember seeing you at that show, 21 years ago…”

Cheryl has what I always wanted. A career that keeps growing. She sang songs she’d just written, along side songs that were over thirty years old. But what’s most enviable about her show is that she is just…Cheryl. She is totally herself. There is no artifice. She is completely unconcerned about whether or not we like her. She performs sitting down and refuses to leave the stage for the encore. She asked the lighting engineer to turn down the lights because “No one paid to see the visuals. If they did they would be sorely disappointed. They came to listen.”

Though I can try to make this about right and wrong, Martha and Mary, kids versus career, what I really want is that comfort with myself. I want to not care whether or not you notice that my face isn’t airbrushed. I want not to care if you notice that I’ve gained or lost a few pounds. But more than that, I want to not care what you think about how hard I’m working, how much I’m doing, how the fact that I spent the last seven years trying to raise human beings has resulted in flaws, in big gaping holes in my artistic work, not to mention the more painful flaws in my parenting. I want to stop trying to prove my worth by scrubbing the dishes for the revolutionaries. I want instead to sit around, the way Cheryl did, and chew the fat with her old buddies who’d paid $25 a head just to see her. And I want the humility to keep learning, keep growing. I want to laugh. And this is both the gift of an awake, aware midlife passage, and the gift of discipleship.

As Hirshfield seems to be saying, every instant has two gates, but it’s true that we mostly go through neither. We’re just not that awake most of the time. Martha didn’t choose incorrectly just because Mary happened to see the instant and go through the gate of paradise. Martha just missed seeing the gate. We all do, all the time. We get worried and upset—that’s a guarantee if we are human. It’s more than guaranteed if we’re parents. In fact, every single day I vow, on my knees, that I will do better, that I will be patient with my kids, that I will not be short with them, that I will react to frustration with humor (in fact I have “react to frustration with humor” as a reminder on my iPhone, and it pops up regularly, along with “don’t read your iPhone right now—pay attention to the kids instead.” And still, every day, I lose it. I lose it even as I am praying not to. Even as I am thinking, “don’t shame her, let her be herself,” I say, “You’re wearing THAT to school?”

But then, there is grace, too. Somehow, I can sometimes see the gates and choose the better one. Yesterday, a perfect September afternoon with a cloudless sky, I abandoned my agenda and let the kids stay late at school to play on the playground. Johnny found a pick up game of soccer. I stood and watched him race across the field, galloping after the ball, kicking, falling, getting up again, chasing the bigger kids, leaping from one foot to the other. I breathed in the sweet smell of cut grass, the late blooming sedum, and said Yes. This is the better part. Or maybe it’s just the thick honey of this good life.

Windows Onto Each Other's Lives

View of the new church from the Parish House

Last Sunday, the church that burned to the ground on Jan 17, 2010, rose from the ash and opened its doors to its faithful congregation: we, from many different backgrounds and faiths, who have come to know this little sanctuary in the hills as home. Since the fire, we've been worshiping in the Parish House, a quirky former UU church-turned-Ladies-Auxiliary-Club down the hill which houses a kitchen, bathroom, small office for our minister, Stephen Philbrick, and medium-sized, modest front room where--up until the burning--was the place our children held "kids church." When this became our temporary home, we arranged chairs in rows; another church had donated a shabby but perfectly serviceable pulpit; still other churches had donated hymnals, and Penny Schultz, our miraculous music director, had printed up supplements. Really, we had everything we needed, even a baby grand piano, and a view of the spot where the church had once been in a window behind the pulpit, the spot in most churches where a cross or crucifix would be hanging. As the months went by, we congregants got to watch the "new old church" being rebuilt, growing taller and more familiar with each passing Sunday. We'd worked hard as a congregation to figure out what we wanted, what we needed, what made the most sense. We'd agreed that the new church should look as much as possible like the old church on the outside. We'd agreed that the new church should have a bathroom. (The new church has two. In the old church, we stepped out the back door with our baggies of toilet paper and squatted.) We agreed that the minister didn't need a raised dias. We agreed that the windows--those huge, abundant windows out of which one could stare, half-listening to the sermon, half watching the snow, or new leaves, or atomic blue sky--needed to be the same.

The morning of Dec. 2, we gathered at the Parish House and practiced for the last time our three part a cappella version of "Amazing Grace." Jim brought his baritone sax, Kim her trumpet, Chris Haynes his accordion, Colin banged a tambourine and I strummed along as we all sang "When the Saints" and marched up the hill to the new old church. We paused on the threshold and Penny led us in "Amazing Grace." And then we entered for the first time, the place we had thought we'd lost forever. The place was packed, with the walls lined with folks who couldn't find seats.

Jim, Kim and Chris rehearsing in the Parish House

Marching up to the new old church; Parish House in background

The day before, I'd been in another packed church, this one in Washington DC, at St. Albans Chapel, on the grounds of the National Cathedral. My childhood friend Lavinia Lemon Pitzer had died in mid November of pneumonia, incurable because of an auto-immune disorder only discovered three days before her death. She'd left behind three teen-aged children, her husband Andy, her parents and step-parents, her sister, brother-in-law, nephews, and a league of stunned and striken friends. Vinnie was warm, engaged, thoughtful, loving, funny, sharp and now gone. My parents knew her parents, and so the three of us attended together. I had flown down that morning, rising at 4:20am to catch my plane. We arrived at the funeral fifteen minutes early to find that there was no room left in the chapel, but we could stand in the narthex and listen. I had a moment of frustration--I flew all this way to stand and listen?-- immediately replaced by the thought, "But whose place would I have taken if I'd arrived fifteen minutes earlier?" I had said maybe five words to Vinnie since 1981 when she brought me to Idaho to attend her beloved Van Der Meer's tennis camp in Sun Valley. Here, because Vinnie was 15 and I was only 14, I was separated from the one person I knew and stuck in the "little girl's" dorm while Vinnie went off with the big girls. Fortunately, I'd brought my guitar and two sheets of legal paper with lyrics and chords to two Bob Dylan songs, written out for me by my father. I'd also brought my Beatles songbook. And even though I'd loved the tennis, what I remember most is playing my guitar for the "little girls" who were aged 9-13, finding my place as their troubadour. And so finding myself.

I ran into Vinnie a few times with her family in the Adirondacks, but we had little to say to each other. I’d always thought we lived in different worlds. At the funeral, packed so closely I could see the face lift scars on the women in their tailored suits and perfectly coiffed blond bobs, I was struck by the difference. This was North West Washington, a slice of the Chevy Chase club lifestyle. I had fled this culture right around the time I went to Idaho, spending that summer’s early mornings lying on my back in my bed, realizing I had a decision to make. I could try to play the game Vinnie played so beautifully: get along with my classmates who seemed to have a play book I never received, who went away for mysterious ski weekends, who went to dance classes at Miss Shippen’s, who knew instinctively when to pull up their knee socks and when to let them bunch down over their ankles. I could try to get my hair to behave, to like the boy I was supposed to be “going with,” to smoke and drink at the scantily chaperoned parties. But I had another notion: maybe I was not one of them. Maybe I was never going to fit in. Maybe this insane obsession I had with music, especially the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan was a calling and not just a curiosity. Maybe I was an artist, meant to be a little apart. Maybe I had to find my own drum to march to.

Maybe so, but I am tired of this story, this explanation to myself of my difficult school-aged years. Do others have to be wrong in order for me to be right? Why couldn’t I have reached across that difference when I saw Vinnie in the Adirondacks? Why couldn’t I have made more of an effort to see how we were the same? Like me, she loved her children, her husband, her parents, her choices. Why couldn’t I celebrate that with her? Why see the chasm? Is there even a chasm? If I lived in a culture where everyone got a facelift at 50, I’d line up for mine. I just happen to live in Western Massachusetts where we judge each other by our carbon footprint rather than our wattles.

Back home in Massachusetts by 11pm, Bradley International Airport seemed shabby compared to what is now called “Reagan” in Crystal City, but which I stubbornly continue to call “National Airport.” There was a part of me that wondered if the trip was worth it. Speaking of carbon footprint, I’d spent a lot of fossil fuel and cash making the trip to DC in one day, and I’d spent a lot of emotional capital, not to mention life force to be at the funeral of someone I hadn’t been close to since the early Reagan era. I made my way home gingerly over the black ice on I-91, hung over each of my sleeping children and breathed in the scent of their bedtime skin; then crawled into bed next to my husband. And then, the next morning, at the new old church: yes, I cried as I entered, cried as I took in the sight of Steve standing in back of the same shabby borrowed pulpit (is a new one being made?) and in front of another window in place of cross or crucifix. This window shows the sky, the bare branches of late fall. And as I sat in the place we always chose at the old church—the front pew to the preacher’s left—it hit me. This was not the old church. The quilt Annie Kner sewed, our healing quilt, was gone. The place I’d gotten married seven years ago—unrecognizable. The very architecture of this new church was profoundly different on the inside. Lovely, yes. But not the same. We’d lost the old church. I hadn’t realized it as it was rising up before us from the distance of the Parish House window. I got to think, “The church burned down, but see, we’re getting it back! There it goes, good as new!” This was good; this was new. But I saw for the first time that something precious to me was lost forever. Now, face to face, there was no denying the loss.

Steve Philbrick, our minister

The interior of the old church

My father in front of the old church

So I cried a little more, this time for what was passed. And I realized why I’d gone to Washington for Vinnie’s funeral. There is a value is putting your face right up to death, destruction, loss. Some of us don’t get it otherwise; we just continue to live in our delusions that this one exquisite moment, this one exquisite child, this one exquisite note can be replicated some time in the future, so no need to look up from our tiny screens now. I won’t get another chance to catch up with Vinnie in the Adirondacks. Way more importantly, three kids have lost their mother. Our church—the church we knew—is completely transformed, transfigured, glowing white as Christ appeared to his disciples. And we have to let ourselves be wrung dry by life, by grief, by what is happening now and what is too precious to lose as it’s passing by.

Dancing for joy in the new old church

Elle's drawing during our first service in the new church

Jesus

This morning the sky was striped, horizontally, gray and blue outside our new windows overlooking the back yard. I held a sleepy Jay, still nursing at 3, and balanced the feelings of this early, too early, thaw. Like everything in our culture, it is too easy to go jacketless in January.

For one of my new year's intentions, I foolishly told God I wanted the courage to share my faith more openly. Also that I wanted someone to come into my life to teach me with a bit more structure than what I've been getting. But first to the faith sharing.

1. I don't really want to share my faith. Believing in God is mostly not cool, unless you are Bono or Anne Lamott or Jesus. But way more to the point, believing in God can associate one with a certain kind of holy that smacks of know-it-allness. As I am a congenital know-it-all, this is really dangerous territory for me. But about God, there is one things I am sure of: I do not know it all. For example, I do not know that there is a God. But I do believe. Those are different things.

2. I don't want to argue with anyone, ever. I don't want to convince anyone else to believe. I don't think I am better than anyone. Opposite. As I have said previously, it is not the well who need a hospital but the sick. So it is with church.

3. I am not in any way shape or form allied with the Tea Party.

4. I think fundamentalism in any guise is fundamentally dangerous. OK--perhaps that is arguing. Sorry.

That said:

5. When I first heard about Jesus I fell madly in love with him. I was about four, and we were standing around my mother's piano at Christmas time. She was playing and singing "Away in the Manger" and I burst into tears because I loved the little lord Jesus and his sweet head so much; the tenderness overwhelmed me.

6. I prayed to God every night, but not on my knees. Just in my head, lying in bed. I asked God to keep everyone I knew alive, to have them not get divorced and wished that they would all be happy.

7. When John Lennon died, I imagined him on a desert island playing guitar and holding court. I would meditate and visit him there.

8. My parents attended a Presbyterian church that met in a farmhouse in Northern VA. The minister was kind, smart, full of struggles which he generously shared with us, rather than pretend to be perfect. He wore a white backwards collar and a goatee. He and his wife became my parents' best friends. When I was fourteen, he died of Hodgkins Lymphoma. A few months before he died, my father finally joined the church. During the service, my dad came off the dias to embrace the dying minister who struggled to his feet, stumbled and fell into my dad's arms. He was thin, young and heavily freckled from the chemotherapy. His hair was falling out. I thought he looked exactly like Jesus must have.

9. I started to pay attention at church. When my father stood up and said that the third teacher in a row had quit trying to teach the sixth graders, and that "Any one in this room is qualified to teach them," I thought to myself, "He said 'Anyone.' But I'm in this room, and I am not qualified." The following Sunday I was their teacher. I taught those kids for the next three years until I left for college.

10. My uncle Brian gave me a book of poetry and photographs by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. I read it one school night when I was supposed to be writing an American history paper. In the low lamplight of my room, next to my collection of Beatles and Stones LPs I felt something land in my heart with a gentle thud. I was supposed to be a minister.

11. I told everyone. It was an unusual career choice, and I figured I'd only have to work Sundays. Perfect for raising a family, and way safer and easier than trying to be the Beatles.

12. I was in Campus Crusade for Christ for about six weeks after I broke up with the boy I had been dating for four and a half years. This was the first time I ever heard this equation: Adam sinned by disobeying God; therefore humans had to die. God had no control over this, but somehow Jesus sacrificing himself redeemed mankind, or at least those who believe in him. I could not get my mind around it, nor the idea that my best friend who was Jewish was doomed and I wasn't. So I left Campus Crusade, but not Jesus. I went to an Episcopal church and began to write songs.

13. I married right out of college, a man who called himself a secular humanist, and I visited Yale Divinity School and had an interview. Everyone there, it seemed to me, was 42 and female. "So," I said. "I am going to try to do this music thing. When I am 42 I will come back."

14. I had a music career. Deep in the bowels of that career, I got very sick with an eating disorder. I would pray to God, asking for help, but the answer always came back, "Why would God care about your ridiculous obsession with your weight and food? Just stop it!" But I couldn't stop it any more than I could change the color of my eyes. And one day someone told me I had a disease that I was powerless over. Someone suggested that God really might care that I was hurting myself. And I noticed that I was unable to sit still with myself. I could not sit and breath in and out without a surge of hammering thoughts, a kind of deafening pounding of my own heart. People suggested I meditate but that was as crazy an idea as would be telling me to fly. And I could not stop the compulsive behaviors. One night when I fell asleep in despair. I knew I had too much pride to ask for help, to admit that I was different from other people, to admit that as a thirty year old seemingly successful woman, I was incapable of caring for myself in this fundamental way. I could not feed myself. I went to bed utterly defeated. I woke up with this strange, calm willingness. There was a steady quiet voice inside that said, "I am here now. I will take care of you." And from that day forward, with a lot of help from my friends, I never hurt myself with food or lack of food again. The obsession and the compulsion were lifted. I was free.

15. I read everything I could. I had this Presence, and It did care about every aspect of my life, or at least It listened. I read Thich Nhat Hanh, more Henri Nouwen, Marcus Borg, Pema Chodron, Ram Dass, the Bhaghavad Gita, Jack Kornfield, Thomas Merton, Stephen Mitchell, Byron Katie, Eckhardt Tolle, the Bible, Elaine Pagels, and much twelve step literature. I made the twelve steps my path and slowly, a day at a time, my thinking changed. I became different. And I was the same. But in a lot less pain.

16. My marriage fell apart--too much God, he said. I was terrified, but on the first night alone in my house, I felt that Presence again. I lived well as a single woman. I followed the next breadcrumb. I met the guy I was always afraid I would meet--the one for whom I'd have to leave my first husband, or else suffer silently for the rest of my life. We found a church where the minister was a poet and a shepherd and not ordained. We pitched our tent. We got married there, baptized our daughter and then our son.

17. Being a mother proved to be the undoing of any pretense that I was holy. Every stitch of spiritual education was used until it frayed. I prayed on my knees to not yell at my kids, and by seven am I would have broken my resolution. But when I could remember to ask Jesus to show up, i became at least aware of my failings, if not able to act like the grown-up in the room. Sooner or later, I would apologize and the domestic tangles would unravel. I know how to apologize now. I can't live with my own half-turned shoulder for more than a day anymore. So I face front, heart forward. My children are my best spiritual teachers, by far. But recently I have yearned for a more orthodox teacher who can diagram sentences and answer my questions with experience rather than the koan-ic mutterings of my wee gurus.

So a few days after January first, right on schedule, I guess, one of our town's most beloved ministers, the retired pastor of the church where I found 12 step recovery, nabbed me. "It's time for you and me to talk about you going to seminary," he said. (How did he know that every few years I order the course catalogs from Harvard and Yale? Did someone tell on me?) "Do you have time to have lunch with me and another new minister?"

Of course I did. And so we are beginning a process called Discernment, to see if and when I will go on to the ministry. I don't know if it will be ten years or twenty years. I love my life right now, and I have a lot more music to make, a lot more retreats to run, a lot more HootenNannies to teach,and most importantly, a couple of small kids who need me near and close--body and soul. But I have comrades on the journey now, and it does feel as though I am on my way back home.

Update on our Church

Last Sunday, we drove up to church. The new building is going up. Two of the four walls are up. There is a new waterfall in the rock behind the new building--something in the blasting caused its existence. There was a way in which I hadn't really believed our church would ever come back, that it couldn't really rise from the ashes. But it did. It is.

We could see the new building from the window of the Parish House where we currently hold services. It's been almost exactly two years to the day that the circa 1839 building burned to the ground due to a faulty furnace. And today we learned that a Congregational church in Somers, CT just burned in an eerily similar fire. Before our service began, we brainstormed about ways to help the other congregation. Most of what we could give, we realized, was our experience.

For scripture, Steve read, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water."

That's it. Make a CD, do a load of laundry, pick up the kids, write a song, do a load of laundry, have a party for friends, do a load of laundry, do a photo shoot, raise money for your church that's burned down...do a load of laundry.