Pastor Annette's Blog
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"OF ALL THE THINGS GOD HAS SHOWN ME, I CAN SPEAK BUT A LITTLE WORD NOT MORE THAN A HONEYBEE CAN CARRY AWAY ON ITS FOOT FROM AN OVERFLOWING JAR."
~ MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG, 13TH CENTURY MYSTIC |
 March 26, 2024
Beloved: Inside Holy Week means services to finish, including a funeral for a precious congregant who died gently in her bed last week. Her death was a long time coming and she was more than ready. She was 96. Also in our congregation, we have a new baby boy named Leo. Leo will be 96 in the year 2120. I like thinking Dorothy and Leo waved to one another in their passage through eternity’s veil. No time is quite as right as Holy Week for a funeral or a birth, crushing our deepest grief and greatest joy together inside time and space. One does not exist without the other, grief and joy that is. We grieve in the same measure as we love, which is why it’s love that breaks our hearts.* Going deep into our own experience of love and loss, joy and grief can be scary, but deeply comforting as well, when below all that pain and fear, we discover the faith we claim is not just words to be recited, but something substantial, something dependable, like a solid floor in a shaky house on a really windy day, or a really windy year. The bottom will hold, as someone I know says, the bottom will hold. Even when everything else is falling apart around me, this faith which holds us close does not tremble or move. Our task is to keep close to it no matter what, no matter how tempted we are to reach for what can no longer keep their promises to us. Stay close to the faith that made us, saved us and sustains us, no matter what. May you stay close this Holy Week and always. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *Movie recommendation: Finestkind is streaming on AmazonPrime. It’s beautiful. Tommy Lee Jones should win an Oscar. The movie is about fathers and sons, hard work, and fishing. It is visually beautiful. I loved it, especially a scene in the donut shop in which TLJ’s character explains what a son means to a father. If you are looking for a movie with a Holy Week theme – this is one.
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Embarrassed or exposed as I may feel, the fact remains: it’s Spring, and Birdy knows it. The trees and flowers know it. The very ground we stand on knows it and is splitting with that knowledge held within itself. Even as I stand to the side, waiting for Birdy to finish exuberating, I too am invited. Invited to join this hemisphere in the great starting over which is Spring. To open and stretch this body which has been folded cozy against the cold. To pick up and pile the sticks and limbs, finally fallen so new growth has ample room to thrive. To bend very close to the earth and brush away the detritus, making space for tiny shoots to find the sun and breathe. This patch I tend is new to me, a place for starting over. In my second spring here it’s begun to feel like mine, mine to tend and fuss over, I mean. I am grateful for the invitation to stay present and stay busy in such a cosmic enterprise as Spring. As much as some things change, it’s deeply comforting to me that other things never do ~ daffodils and goofy dogs being two that come to mind. I pray this gorgeous day is kind to you in every way. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *My tiny front yard – think two parking spaces – is completely shaded by an oak tree, where good grass can never grow. The area is currently carpeted in acorns. Also, here is a good one from Julia A. :   March 5, 2024
Beloved: The recipe card is at least 30 years old and so faded and stained I can barely read it. My friend Cathy found the recipe somewhere when our kids were babies and we made them all the time. We called them nursing mama muffins, although I don’t think they are specifically nursing nutritious, just extra comforting and edible one handed. Needing freezer real estate, I got out the bag of brown bananas and made a double batch. Here are my extended notes: I can’t have a compost pile so I’m always looking for ways to keep my food refuse out of the trash. I put banana peels in a gallon pitcher of water to water houseplants; half tap water, half banana syrup. The Christmas cactus, purple wandering Jew, and peace lily seem especially improved by the potassium. I refill the pitcher and add peels until they turn into slime which I then pour on my flowerbeds outside. (As I’ve said before, I watch tiktok so you don’t have to!) Measuring flour vexed me for years; stirring air into the flour so as not to use too much, but how much air is enough air?? Then Jeremy P. , who makes the most amazing bread, told me he only ever weighs his flour. 120 grams = 1 cup, no guessing required. I feel practically European every time I bake. Once upon a time I needed the recipe card. Then for years and years I didn’t. I made those muffins from memory – dozens upon dozens. I toted shopping bags of double-size muffins packed with protein powder to the high school swim team fridge, then suddenly, all my muffin eaters were gone. The recipe card sat in its box and I sort of forgot about them until I started to live alone – and couldn’t eat my bananas fast enough. So I dug it out again, faded and stained with such precious memories of mine and Cathy’s, and so many, many more mamas and babies in those early hard days of nursing, when a muffin tasted like love and courage. The memories of all those babies, tiny, with that slightly sour milk smell, then huge with that powerfully sour smell of wet towels, men feet and chlorine. It might be the only food I’ve ever made about which no one ever said, “No thanks,” and yet there is literally nothing special about the recipe. Butter, salt, sugar and chocolate – a dopamine hit in any combination. And yet, all love when I visit their place in my heart and mind. Like most any other beauty one may come upon in the world, some feature of creation that feeds more than just our bellies. A bird, a cloud, a tree, an ocean. A leaf bug or combination of the elements where life connects to life and we gain a glimpse of how we fit this network of giving and receiving the love and effort and kindness that sustains it all. For our time, and in our place, and with our self. I can’t plainly tell, with right effect, how a muffin gets us there, only that with a certain quality of attention, it can.* I pray this gorgeous rumbly, rainy day treats you kindly and you accept the invitation to treat it kindly in return. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette *Quality of attention is a phrase Marilynne Robinson used in an interview with Ezra Klein on his podcast released today. I access it through the New York Times but you can also listen to it here. Robinson’s newest book is about Genesis, and the gracious, forgiving God at work in the stories there. The interview is really, really wonderful. Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins
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I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
Everything on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which gives you permission to copy freely, provided that you attribute the work to me, that you use the work for non-commercial purposes, and that you do not produce derivative works. Archives
December 2024
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