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 |
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“ . . .this life is but the childhood of our immortality.” August 27, 2024 Beloved: The quote isn’t from a Christian devotional but a novel about CIA activity in Vietnam, as the main character, an undercover operative, reflects on his mother’s recent death. He is not a Christian, but she was. Fervently so, to his embarrassment until she died, when he finds himself hoping all she believed turned out to be true, if for her sake only. Nine words. Nine words, all of which I use regularly and have never once strung together in this particular order, an order which slayed me outright when I saw it on the page. We call it fiction and yet, there it is: profound spiritual truth tucked inside a novel about the CIA in Vietnam in 1968. He’s thirty years old. His daddy was killed at Pearl Harbor. His uncle is a war hero and his mentor. Disillusion and disappointment in his country and in humanity are hurtling toward him and he doesn’t even know it. This life is but the childhood of our immortality will most certainly find its way into my funeral liturgies from now on. The collapse of years between a short life and a long one in the span of immortality. Each life is a full one, no matter how much time it occupied nor the sum of breaths it drew. Which is to say, the very best this life has to give is knowledge of itself – that we are alive, have been and always will be. This existence is but a glimpse. Nothing is ordinary, or maybe what seems most ordinary is positively loaded with the universe itself, the stuff of immortality. A bird on a branch. A cat on a step. A toddler coloring. All of it positively exploding with life. Glory barely concealed in the most daily business of human activity. Stay indoors if you can today, friends, and be glad you don’t live in Las Vegas, where the temp is predicted to be 104. We’ll only get to 95. I pray the day is kind to you all. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette Note: * Pastor Annette is away from work most Saturdays and all Mondays. Apart from emergencies, calls and messages received these days will be returned and answered on Tuesdays. Thanks!
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August 20, 2024 Beloved: Having a much busier than usual Tuesday and a terrible case of writer’s block, I went looking for an August column from years gone by and came across this one about Rosie Cotton, the second of the four golden retrievers who came to live with our family. We lost her in 2022. She was the sweetest soul. Here she is as a pup and about a year before she died. Enjoy!
August 9, 2016
Beloved: Rereading old journals I came across a memory of Rosie Cotton who is now the older of our golden retrievers, from when she was just a baby. Rosie Cotton is in deep denial regarding her tennis ball addiction. Convinced there’s a ball in the powder room, she accidentally shuts the door while searching. Stuck in the bathroom, she sings like a heartsick coyote until someone lets her out. At first she’s joyful, but the cravings soon return and she is powerless over them. She cries to get back in. If I keep the door shut, she cries some more. Rosie has no desire to change nor any idea how she keeps getting stuck. How many times a day do I find myself stuck in a loop of negative thinking, deprecating myself and others? Or turning to habits and appetites that numb the ordinary stresses of living? Or to conversations that edify none, but taste so delicious in the moment? Epiphany! The lesson isn’t about sin, but grace. As our powerlessness grows, so we grow ever nearer to the Loving One who is on pins and needles, delirious with the desire to open the door and escort us to the divine reality of our helplessness and God’s grace. I pray this day finds you living fully in the grace of God. peace & prayers, ~ pastor annette  August 13, 2024
Beloved: I love how a hummingbird up close sounds like a helicopter way off. They’ve finally arrived at my feeders, four months past when they usually show up. My neighbor speculates it may be due to insecticides being sprayed on our lawns. The worker must have sneezed when spraying near my flower bed, because some of my lavender got hit and died alongside the broadleaf. Next year we are going to put up little “do not spray” flags on what sad grass we have. My milkweed still doesn’t have any caterpillars on it either, another clue that the good bugs may have up and left the neighborhood. The point is, the hummers are finally here, hovering around my flowerbeds in the front and my screen porch in the back, resting on the arch of the shepherd's hook which holds the waterer and the suet feeder. I put a wire fence around it because the mower ran too close and hooked himself like a sheep. He likes to mow really fast. It’s only August 13th but I can feel the summer winding down. The end of every season makes me just a little sad, no matter how much I love the next one. And I love them all. Each reminds me of ones before – like this end of summer picture I took years ago in the garden of my previous house. I loved that garden and think about it often. I wonder if it remembers me. Do hummingbirds still come and go from the perennials I planted, drinking grass and flowers never sprayed with poison? I like thinking so. I live here now, in a place becoming more precious by the day. I have dirt to dig and feeders to fill, neighbors with whom to share the small news of the day. I am safe and loved and watched over by more people than I remember to thank. And finally, the hummingbirds arrive in their own time to hallow this season, this house, and my life with that up-close-way-off music of their tiny wings, to remind me that as much as some things change, certain things never do. For which I am more grateful than I have words. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette  August 6, 2024
Beloved: This thirteen minute film was extra interesting to me this morning. I hope you are able to see and will take the necessary thirteen minutes to watch this Swedish film in which ordinary people are challenged to overcome their fear and self-doubt by stepping off a 33-foot diving platform into a swimming pool. I found it enormously interesting to see them work up their own courage and encourage each other, or to give in to their fear. If it were a cliff into a lake or rushing water, I’d likely be too afraid. But easily do I imagine being able to leap into clear water where the pool floor is visible. My almost three year old granddaughter likes looking for snapping turtles in a leftover quarry at Woolery Mill when we shop at the Saturday morning farmer’s market. She doesn’t like my vice-like grip on her wrist when we stand on the limestone blocks around the pool. I may be looking for turtles, but what I see most clearly is her bending for a closer look then tumbling six or eight feet into that reedy, slimy water and me jumping in right behind her, no doubt breaking my ankle, again. Because I would jump. Of course I would jump, and a whole crew of firefighters would have to haul me out in front of the crowd who gathered to see the grammy with the algae in her hair hoisted back on land. I’d miss that farmers’ market too. They have lovely coffee. But seriously, this whole movie plays out in my mind every time we look for turtles there. Jumping in to catch your grandkid isn’t courage, it’s what people do, and hopefully not just for their own, nor just for kids. Even if it’s come to count for courage in a world of hyperindividualism, hopefully for folks of faith some remnant remains of the connection between community and courage, between our own lives and our life together. We ARE our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. No one is getting through this world on their own. No one. Most days, the greater part of courage may be accepting our dependence on and need for one another. Then living accordingly, by serving others and letting ourselves be served, as the days demand. If only, amen? If only we could concede our need of our neighbors, how much less might we wish them harm, or worse? All I know to do is practice. Practice. Practice. Practice. Like the ringer at the end of the Swedish film. To trust God’s grace as completely as they trust the water to catch them would be faith made perfect, it seems to me. I pray this day finds you held in the grace of God’s goodness to us all. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette
says no eggs yet, but the monarchs will likely find them soon. My own yard could take days and days of steady rain like this so I can just imagine what farmers wish-hope-pray for in such weather. Their heads must be full of math, factoring time and cost to pinpoint the day when their water bills exceed the profit on the very crops upon which that water falls. I could stop watering today and lose some flowers, a few tomatoes and even fewer peppers. They could lose their farm.
Balance is everything . . . in everything. Not just growing food and flowers, but spirit too. Like in nature, the boundaries within which we might get spiritual life right are huge, enormous, vast. There is no single way of growing tomatoes or hydrangeas. Nor of being faithful. Each life has their own set of trouble and trauma to navigate, and from which to heal. As we heal ever so slowly in one area, we may grow by leaps and bounds in another and incur new sorrow in still another. Such is the way of things in nature, our own lives included. All of which is accounted for in the will of God, I trust. What if God is more kindly and patient with us than we are with ourselves? What would it mean to work this notion into our thinking, praying, believing selves like working compost into clay? That no believer’s life is perfect, end to end, top to bottom, back to front – any more than any garden anywhere is in full bloom everywhere? Both are constant works in progress. Both are dependent on factors out of the believer’s (gardener’s) control. Both necessitate the long view, the recognition that neither work is ever completed, but rather joined for the season we are given, learning to receive with grace whatever grace comes our way: rain and sun, work and rest, food and flowers. All in their own time. |
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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