"Well done, good and faithful..."

It is a Lenten morning, foggy and dank. It is the kind of morning she would love to be out in - when the snow melts and uncovers all those smells and memories from a former season. Our dog is dying. She looks out the window, strangely-tilted head bobbing.

The fog floats over the park, across the ball field, across the places where squirrels tease and possums run. A few geese are returning to the pond, reminding me of Joyce Rupp's poem in Praying our Goodbyes.

We got this strange-looking three-legged dog at the local shelter. "We have to take her - no one else will want her." The plaintive cry of the 11-year-old soon turned into, "We have to take her now - everyone else wants her!"

We pitied her, assuming she would be clumsy and slow and needy.  But taking her to a friend's fenced yard to enjoy some off-leash time, we discovered our error.

She could run like the wind, criss-crossing the grass in a wild dash that inspired her naming..

"She's so graceful!"  "That's amazing!"  Incredulous, we repeated those phrases as we watched, and her formal "Amazing Grace" (awkward to call out in the street while walking her) became, simply, "Mazie."

Her softest-fur-in-the-world caught a thousand tears from scores of griefs. The dying and deaths of parents and sibling and friends. Lost loves. Illness. Change. Bitterness, regrets. All. All. But also unbounding joy. Leaping with pleasure, Snoopy-like in a rapturous dancing twirling of delight. Glee at outrunning us, the last thing we see as she escapes; tongue flapping, eyes maniacally telling us - "you've been had..." All. All.

Mazie was a mystic, able to read us like an open book. She would stand in the middle of the kitchen when there was tension or sadness in our household, and look from one face to the other, communicating understanding, and empathy, and grace, begging us to be our best selves. She measured the spirit of everyone crossing our threshold, and was seldom off the mark.

She was with us for almost our entire marriage, with Jacob through his teen years. In her youth she was strong enough to pull him on his skateboard - until the local police officer put a halt to their neighborhood joyrides..

She would not eat until we sat down and started our meal. Willa remembers a time I was away and Jacob had moved on to college. Willa sat to eat; Mazie stood by her bowl, waiting. Willa finally realized what was holding up the meal... only after she said grace out loud did Mazie begin to eat.

Mazie was the pastoral care minister of our neighborhood. Willa took her to visit flood victims and workers - she always sought out the ones most in need, people we hadn't noticed. Exceedingly patient with tiny children in the park, she allowed them to face their fear and awkwardly pet her. Then, by visible example, she showed them that you don't need all your parts to be whole.

I wrote the opening words of this article a year ago, when we thought Mazie would die within days. She fooled us again, and lived another year, almost to the day of her stroke last March. In that year she taught us much about life, aging, disability, and dying.

Many people assured us that in heaven, Mazie would get her missing leg back. Willa insisted Mazie wouldn't need that leg in heaven any more than she did here, and recalled our late friend Nancy, who " was born with a foreshortened arm. It ended at the elbow with a stump of a hand. She always bristled when some religious person reassured her she would be whole in heaven. She said she already was whole. And she was."

So I quit wishing a new leg for Mazie, and wished instead for her a leg of lamb...

Now she is gone, and we have felt bereft and disconsolate, crying in this huge Lent-like void. We find ourselves bewildered by the sudden change in our 14-year routine. Death and grief do that - strand us in the wilderness for a while. That's where we are - in the "be-wilderness" of loss.

Mazie belonged to so many more people than the three of us. She was not a servant, nor a pet, but a spiritual companion who pointed the way for us..

On an achingly beautiful day in March, we said goodbye for now. Only remnants were left of the snow she loved to bound through, biting at it and burrowing her snoot to search for God knows what.

She was stuck at the end, stepped into a thin place but unable to cross through and out of it - circling, circling, always clockwise, searching for God knows what. She took me back to the deaths of my parents, the times they lay in the thin place and waited, as we kept watch.

We keep watch during Lent, hoping, hoping, every year, that it will turn out all right, that Easter will follow. 
It always does, thank God.

We believe in the resurrection, 
but does that include dogs?.

That, indeed, will be heaven.
______________________________________________

This article was first published in Iowa Connections April 2011
the newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa 

Helen Keefe is a research assistant at University of Iowa Hospitals and a member of Spiritual Directors International. Senior warden at St. Luke's Church, Ft. Madison, she and her wife the Rev. Willa Goodfellow live in Coralville, IA with the memory of their mystic wonder dog, Mazie.

Good Morning!

Good morning.

 

I am looking at sunrise over the Cascades and thinking about Aunt Vi.

Streaks of pink and gold and colors impossible to pin down are changing by the second.  The light outlines and gives clarity to the mountains and infuses hope into the coming day.  A new dawn. 

"Good morning". 

It was Violet Hager's standard greeting.  Phone call, letter, in-person conversation - - didn't matter, day or night.  Birthday or Christmas card - they all began with, "Good Morning". 

So we will miss that incongruous greeting now that we have lost Willa's Aunt Vi to the river of life and time.  But I am aware of her presence and the wisdom of her greeting as we step into Advent.

Advent marks the beginning of the new year for churches of the western tradition.

Like the morning, Advent is an expectant and hopeful time.  Some mornings for my prayer time, I light my little oil lamp and watch it rival the glow of dawn.

What better way to approach Christmas during this time of waiting and hope than to greet it with an enthusiastic "Good Morning"?

The new day lies ahead; anything can happen.  We are walking toward the birth of hope.  It is eternally a new day.  Good morning!

Violet Hager was old enough to have met the artist Georgia O'Keffe (she came to her rescue when the young artist was too preoccupied to keep her Jeep's oil level full). And Vi was young enough to welcome this similarly unorthodox Keefe into her family.  As elder stateswoman of her extended family, she could have made my entry into that family a rough ride. 

Instead, I found a vibrant and energetic welcome from the woman who insisted that "Take Me out to the Ballgame" be sung at all family gatherings.  I think she may even have cheated to declare us the winners of the sand sculpture contest at Rockaway Beach (although Willa, Jake, and I did have a fabulous design...)

Advent is like that.  God is like that.  No matter what time of day or night, there is the prospect of a new day wrapped in an enthusiastic welcome. 

Start over, be new, walk forward refreshed. 

Good morning!

9/11 x 9

I serve as chaplain to the

Commission on One world One Church of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa: http://www.iowaepiscopal.org/ministry_together/one_world_one_church.php

Generally I open our meetings with a short meditation or read from the Book of Common Prayer - nothing too spiritually-taxing for tired church folk gathered on a Saturday morning.

Encouragement. Comfort. Inspiration.

Today was different.

Today the recurring horrific communal memory floated around us, and I had to dig deep to know how to speak to the pain and fear that still surround the events of 9/11.

Here is what I said:

__________________________________________________

It's been rendered almost treacly by being used as the frosting of so many weddings,

but the scripture has so much to say to us today.

You know the one:

"Yada yada yada, clanging cymbal, ho-hum; move mountains, yadayada,

but the greatest of these is love..."

Yeah, yeah, but when can we kiss?

Love. Only this. This and only this

only God

only neighbor

only love them

What a concept. . . let's burn their holy books - that'll show 'em!

That a minister of a faith built on love and sacrifice would even consider this makes my brain and my heart hurt. I feel the same outrage I felt the day we buried my mother, when two people were handing out pamphlets about purgatory. In the door of the church! At my mother's funeral Mass!

I was restrained then, but at the funeral lunch, when they showed up to eat with us - plates full of tamales and rice and beans and salad - the words I threw at them were so angry that I didn't argue when they said they didn't think they were welcome there.

"You're right", I said.

"I was wrong," I tell myself now.

My momma taught me better than that. Given the chance to sit down with people I disagreed with, people who had hurt me, I couldn't do it.

"How dare you?" I continue to think about them.

"How dare you?" I think about the Florida pastor and those who agree with him.

But all it engenders in me is more hatred and bitterness.

How can we wrap our arms around those who hold our food in their hands, even when our mouth is full of ashes and bitterness?

But I am preaching to the choir, to you, my mentors in all this.

[and the OWOC members are my heroes, as are many of you who read this]

Certainly we don't forget the ones who died on this date. But at peril to our lives and souls do we cast aside those who caused the death and destruction, and the ones who continue it, no matter what "side" they are on.

There can be no sides, no us, no them, or this will never end well.

Love. Only this. This and only this.

God

neighbor

self.

love them all -

Amen.

"The Epistle of Helena"

I am the keeper of my mother's words.

Along with the wooden darning ball and the potato salad bowl, her letters, columns, diaries and trip logs are my inheritance.

She wrote every day, more than I knew.  I knew about cards to relatives and friends.  I knew about letters to the editor that made us cringe.  I knew about her love for postcards of jackalopes and giant ears of corn.  I thought I had seen all of what she wrote.

Her letters were cheery and her writing full of flowery romantic prose.  Not lovey-dovey romantic, but that optimistic bright-eyed Pollyanna-type of writing that must have made her California life seem all milk and honey to my Midwestern relatives. 

Their letters, especially those from North Dakota, were full of woe and lament, Job-like tales of illnesses, plagues, crop failures, infidelities, and way-too-early deaths.  My mother and sister and I sat once with Aunt Alice as she related the misery of neighbors.  It was a half hour before we realized she was talking about her soap opera characters.  The lines blurred in the whistling wind that rattled dust through the windows and made me want to steal the car keys and get my self out of there. 

So my mother's life was a contrast right out of the Grapes of Wrath.  South Pasadena, Santa Paula - - warm names full of sunshine and oranges.  She wrote to Alice and others of our days at the beach, picnics, swimming, gardening.  "All of it was true, some of it actually happened", my spiritual director says.  But there were other chapters I read only after her death, and some of it still waits.  Seven years on, I am just starting to dip into the notebooks lined up on my book shelf. 

My first inkling of her other writing were diary entries made as a young teacher in Antelope Valley, a wilderness at the time.  I was surprised to find not an excited young professional at the beginning of a career, but a woman 24 years old and depressed.  What self-imposed exile took a debutante in her red roadster out to the hinterland, away from the active social life to which she was accustomed?  What was she seeking out in that desert? 

One early piece begins, "Imagination is a tragic thing."  She fed us huge dollops of imagination, yet here I find that she viewed it as something sinister and to be controlled.   Her depressive side showed up in her interior but not her exterior life for the next 70 years .  She wrote of lost expectations, bitterness, spiritual questions and longings.  I wish we could have spoken of these, she and I, perhaps to ease them, knowing they were shared by someone we loved.

Our mothers are much more complex than we can know in this life.  That boxed-in role has changed in past decades, but to those of us who came from them, "Mother" is still a particular person and place.  Yet they were persons in their own right long before they ever got involved with us. 

My mother asked the questions we all asked as angst-ridden teens and young adults (or still do):  "Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  What's it all about?"  This from a parent who tutored me in the cut-and-dried answers of the Baltimore Catechism.  It's sad to think of the doubt that still haunted her in her last years.

Yet what lives is her writing that went out to the world:  "My gardening grandmothers said that friendship is the perfume entwined in our memories.  The main part of me always wants to plant many things, as I know the harvest will be beyond my wildest dreams."  She gardened, and wrote, and made friends like that - with lavish abandon.  Every year I plant, hopeful that things will grow.  Some do, but not as wildly or prolifically as for my mother.  But I am always encouraged by her example, her words, her hope.  So it is with writing, also.

And so, she wrote to the churches of California and Iowa and North Dakota, to the house churches in Ventura, Los Angeles, Oakdale, Sacramento, Mt. Pleasant, Dove Canyon, and Santa Paula, to school children and to strangers.  She wrote with news and needs and instructions and hopes for us, our families, and our futures.

Each year she planted, hopeful that something would grow.

Each day she wrote, hopeful that it would mean something to someone.

It did.

It does.

This article was first published in Iowa Connections May 2009:
www.iowaepiscopal.org/news_and_events/iowa_connections.php

"Did You Feel It?"

That's the question when we tell people about the earthquake.  Once we establish that our little place is fine, we are fine, and no, the tremor did not physically shake this part of Costa Rica, people move on to safer, more pleasant topics.

But for the people here, it is an ache as if it happened to their own family.  It DID happen to their own family.  This hit deep at the heart of the Costa Rican people, and deep at the heart of how we think of every other person.

That notion first shook me when I greeted Gaby, the cook at our family's hotel/restaurant.  "How are you?" I politely ask.  "Fine - but there is the sadness, of course."  "Oh my goodness - what happened?"  She looks at me with that Emmaus question, "Are you the only one who does not know the things that have taken place in these days? The earthquake."

"Oh, no - Did you have family there?" 

"No - but it's the same."

It's the same.  Surely as an Iowan I should remember that.  Well-meaning friends and relatives asked during the floods, "Did your house get wet? " and moved on to safer topics.  We remember how much we do feel it.  Tornados, immigration raids, floods, earthquakes.  "No man is an island,"  I learned long ago from John Donne.  Pain and loss affect the whole pueblo, village, town, country, church; the whole heart and soul of a people. 

This tiny nation with no army lives by the daily greeting "pura vida" - a saying I only come close to translating by invoking John's gospel.   Jesus assures us that he "...came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

Pure, peaceful life alongside all other creatures.  But the earth shook and they are all buried - in their grief, their care for one another, in their attention and attending.  They have not forgotten how to name those they love.  Instead of impersonal headlines of "23 dead in earthquake", the deceased are named, their photos shown repeatedly on TV, their information carefully noted.  It does not matter if they are an adult or child or baby.  They are named, as carefully as God names us.

Where the quake hit strongest, it is difficult to reach the dead and injured.  La Nacion, the national newspaper, profiles U.S. helicopter pilots who have set combat aside to help find and evacuate people and bring supplies.  Humanitarian efforts are hindered by the instability of the earth.  Like life, the earth can turn us upside down.  Our spiritual and emotional terrain become unstable, and we need the help of others to dig us out.

We are in the bleak midwinter between resolutions and valentines - our focus on self moves to focus on one special other.  But this event has wrenched my mind and spirit from individuals toward a focus on all other creatures.

It is beyond blood.  It is thicker than water.  It is not in the earthquake nor the tornado nor the flood, but within the silence that remains in each of us afterwards.  The spark of Spirit that touches the same Spirit in another as deep speaks unto deep.

Paul in Romans 8:22-23  "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."

What child can possibly be born from such upheaval and suffering?  Perhaps it already walks among us.

Suffrage from Morning prayer

"Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;

For only in you can we live in safety."

It's one thing to pray it.

It's another thing to feel it.

This article was first published in Iowa Connections May 2009:
www.iowaepiscopal.org/news_and_events/iowa_connections.php

Helen Keefe spends a teeny part of each year in Costa Rica to read, write, pray and play.  A research assistant by day and  spiritual director by heart, she belongs to various diocesan commissions.   She and her partner, diocesan missioner Willa Goodfellow, live in Coralville with their mystic wonder dog, Mazie.

Tai' Chi

This was supposed to be about satellite dishes, but that will have to wait until next time. Stay tuned.

I’ve been thinking more about a Tai’ Chi class I take during lunch hour at work. I started because I heard it was good for dealing with stress and bad knees. I need help with both. But I have come to realize what a good exercise it is for my spirit. “Tai’ Chi” means “supreme ultimate” and it reminds me of the “Supreme Ultimate” we gather around each week.

I had to learn how to stand. One stands on a part of the foot called “the bubbling well.” That reminded me of the little hands churning up the baptismal font a few weeks ago. Willa said the best place to baptize was moving water. Running water.

My mother told us during camping trips to drink from living waters, not standing waters. She showed us in streams where the water was aerating and full of oxygen and life. I thought of the need to aerate my soul – to let it run over the rocks of prayer, community, and service to others. Like running water, it needs to keep moving and growing, gathering life, joining with others as it travels along.

But back to Tai’ Chi. Another thing I learned is that my soles (soul?) must stand well-planted and balanced. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Spanish word for the bottom of the foot is “planta.” My feet keep me connected to the earth, to life.

I have to remember lots for a proper Tai’ Chi stance, before exercises even begin: lean forward, keep my head up, keep my balance, draw my energy down within myself – a good road map for my faith life.

Actually Tai’ Chi was developed by monks as a way of defending themselves without harming their attacker. They could draw the attacker past and away from them by a yielding and turning rather than by resistance and aggression. Take the energy from the action and absorb it. Use the good energy and let the bad energy flow through and dissipate. Even before I heard about the monks, I was thinking of it as a sort of “martial arts for the pacifist.”

Tai’ Chi teaches physical balance of movement and energy, and I also need that balance in my faith life. This whole energy thing is a paradox. I get into the stance, support my weight, let my energy sink down within me, and ... feel my legs REALLY burn. The Tai’ Chi master says this is ok – that what I’m feeling is energy. I think of the road to Emmaus: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us?”

The master walks around the room correcting stance or movement. He gets in close and guides with a light touch, almost imperceptible. He stands directly in my energy and adds his energy to mine. This is how God is with us. We may hardly realize it until the light touch has redirected our energy, our stance, our movements. But we know we feel better. And we know we have been changed.

Letting Go

I sit far away from St. Luke's looking out the patio view from what used to be my parents' home. Now it is no more; my father died three years ago, and my mother moved to an assisted living apartment in the next town over.

My parents loved this view. They picked out their lot because of the view. You gaze out over the Santa Clara Valley, where I was raised - out across the orchards of lemon, and orange, and avocado. My memories of this place are forever linked with the fragrance of orange blossoms, and I smell them on the wind now.

God brings us so much on the wind. Sometimes the Spirit moves over this land in a hot restless wind called the Santa Ana (Here in Santa Paula, we call it "the East Wind", because that's where it comes from, dragging the hot gritty feel of the desert with it.) But this morning there is very little wind - it is cool and the view of the mountains is shrouded in a haze of mist and L.A.'s smog traveling up various valleys to affect us as well.

My sister, my oldest brother, and I are gathering the last items from my parents' sixty years together (along with items stretching back through my mother's 90 years). There will be a yard sale tomorrow, and people will come and suggest that these things have much less value than we think they do.

I was reading the Confession of Sin [in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, or BCP] during morning prayer and realized for the first time a very old truth; something my faith has tried to get me to believe for fifty-two years: that God, like parents, lets us start over continuously. At least I hope you have or had parents like that. And if you don't or didn't - - try to know that you do have this truth in God.

Listen:

"We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we might delight in your will,
and walk in your ways..."
(BCP p. 79)

How many times have I said that prayer in my life, but thought more about my lapses than about God's power? If I believe in God's forgiveness, then I must believe that every day, every minute, is a fresh start. God constantly sets us free from ourselves, to delight in God's will.

I am thinking about so many prayers today, while my sister sleeps and my brother has not yet arrived, and the work of the day is not yet upon us. I look at the outline of the mountains my father so loved, and recite the psalm from his funeral; his protective steadfastness surrounds me:

"I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved
and he who watched over you will not fall asleep." (Psalm 121:1-3)

I look out at my mother's garden after spending the night beneath one of her quilts; her earthy creativity surrounds me:

"For you yourself created my inmost parts,
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I will thank you because I am marvelously made;
your works are wonderful, and I know it well." (Psalm 139:12-13)

I think of the physical imperfections and blemishes which mark each one of us as the special one we are. A dropped stitch, a different color thread; the garment becomes distinguishable from all the others.

The sun rises, the smoggy haze almost obscures the mountains, the work will soon start, and my back has anticipatory tiredness. We will sift through the grain of my parents' life, trying to let the chaff be taken off by the wind. Some of it will land in other hands; some of it will be gone. We will take some to our own homes, and tell stories about it until the next sifting and winnowing.

The air is full of letting go. It's what the Spirit moves over, creating and groaning, forgiving and releasing. It's the wind that strips us down to who we really are. Little by little, the Spirit erodes us, sculpting our truest self. Just look at the increased definition of the oldest faces among us.

The air is full of memories and letting go; they float upon it like balloons released from one's hand, full of color and glee and incredible lightness. Lift your face and feel the soft stories of ages of people. Know that some of the stories are your own.