Call

I love the song White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane and always wanted to use the line "A hooka smoking caterpillar had given me the call"  in a story talking about my "call"  so here it is.

Alice in Wonderland was my favorite book these lines always haunted me:
Caterpillar: “Who are you???”
Alice: “I hardly know sir, just at present, I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

The question posed by the Caterpillar intrigues me, even as a child I would ask myself that question. As I grew older I would play with the question accenting different words; WHO are you?, who ARE you?, or who are YOU?. The question wafts around me like the smoke coming from his pipe. My answer is always the same. It is the same answer that Alice gave. Well maybe a little different; “I knew who I was last year (week month) but I think I must have changed several times since then”

As a young girl I saw myself dressed in white robes and lying prostrate on a floor. It was like a brief snapshot in my head. If you read week one you know that I didn’t have much use for God. I thought he kind of sucked…. But I was drawn to movies and books about the saints. I thought I was bonkers because in that day women were NOT priests. In these visions/pictures I did not have a head covering so I knew I wasn’t a nun.

When I was 19 I went to nursing school. It wasn’t because I wanted to be a nurse it was all about job security. Growing up poor left an indelible mark on me and even 37 years ago I knew that nursing was a good choice. I remember my first patient as a nurses aid, a middle aged man with lung cancer. He used to push his IV pole in the hall and I would ride on it. But he became weaker and one day the “head nurse” told someone to find me. She grabbed my hand and quickly led me down the hall to be with him when he died. She was a crusty “old” army nurse about 35; I was 19 alone in San Francisco. Together we sat with the man as he died. It was at that moment I realized that I had compassion…I had always been told that I was selfish. That lie was shattered in an instant.

Flash forward 20 years and I am enrolled in an evangelical/charismatic, inner city, and multi ethnic bible college. I “got saved” 10 years earlier and wanted to follow the call I saw in my head when I was a child. I went to a non denominational church, where “women are not allowed to teach men” But I taught a bible study for men and women, the pastor liked me and when people complained he told them I was “facilitating” the group. We later became great friends and spent many hours discussing theology…

I worked part time as an associate pastor in an Assembly of God church, while in the MTh. program. It was fun really…I got to teach about Grace. Many, even though they had been Christians all of their lives, had never heard a message on Grace. I was there for 5 years, but I never really believed the theology and could not buy into the political agenda of the religious right. I knew it was time to go but didn’t want to leave the people behind. One day a women who I had gone to school with walked in and I heard clear as a bell “look up for your redemption draweth nigh”. I left… it was time.

In the meantime I hooked up with a “neo-monastic” group who’s leaders I was familiar with from the charismatic renewal movement of the mid 1990’s. We discovered or rediscovered the sacraments. Our Abbot and Abbess were ordained as priests in an Indy Anglican movement, they were later consecrated as bishops by and Indy Catholic Bishop , and Indy Anglican, and an Indy orthodox woman Bishop…After 3 years of classes and training I was ordained as a Priest, on the feast day of St. George, the Dragon slayer.

As a new monastic, or as our Bishop calls us “secular monastic”, group we have been on a journey together. Nothing is static, I started a home church but after a year that dwindled so I started attending an Episcopal Church. I was later kicked out five years later, the priest in charge said it was because I didn’t respect her authority. I served on the vestry was a Eucharistic minister, lay preacher etc… she was nuts and everyone who disagreed with her it was ”off with their heads”

Now I attend a church in another diocese. I love it and feel loved and accepted. I don’t have any titles, I am a Eucharistic minister but don’t serve on any boards or committees. I talk about healing, theology, Barbie Dolls, and religious crime novels with the Rector. I’m healing from the last experience. It is good…

So I’m still a Registered Nurse, I work in telephone triage and love it. People at work sometimes want to talk to me about spiritual things so I listen and when necessary tell my story or some of it…. Yes I am ordained and can do all of the “stuff” but I am not called to be a Rector or associate pastor. I am called to be me at least for today.

I have a frame around my license plate that says “Following the Wild Goose wherever She may lead” The ancient Celts called the Holy Spirit the Wild Goose… That is my call… It is ever changing… I don’t know if you’ve noticed but geese are loud…very difficult to ignore.

Who Am I? I am compassionate and worthy of God’s love. I am the mother of an amazing daughter who is in her second year of college; she is a good and strong young woman. She has qualities and strengths that I thought I didn’t have… I guess I was wrong because she got them from someone…

I wrote this for a class last year.  Some things have changed others haven't.  I'm happy being....

More

I’ve been thinking about all the judgment day hype.  I’ve seen the billboards, heard it mentioned on progressive talk radio, seen blog postings about it and even added to a post rapture song list.

I want to live every day as if it is my last, I want to walk in the light of God.  This coming Sunday the Epistle reading is from 1 Peter 2, and while some could see this from the perspective of judgment, I don’t.  I see in this reading grace.  As followers of Christ we are called love, to show mercy and to walk in that marvelous light.

May 21st

Ground control to major Tom

Ground control to major Tom

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

(Ten) Ground control (Nine) to major Tom (Eight)

(Seven, six) Commencing countdown (Five), engines on (Four)

(Three, two) Check ignition (One) and may gods (Blastoff) love be with you

Last week I was driving in the Sacramento area and saw signs warning people that May 21st is judgment day “the bible guarantees it”  I took some pictures to post on Facebook but they didn’t come out.  I’m glad they didn’t.
Where to start, what to say... I come to this from a unique perspective of one who was and still is close to many people who believe in “The Rapture”  I never did ascribe to rapture theology yet I read with horrified fascination several of the Left Behind books.  About180 years ago a young girl had a vision of Jesus returning twice, a preacher grabbed that idea and ran with it.  The word rapture doesn't appear in the bible. I could write a thesis on the topic but I won’t.

It is so easy to mock the people who believe that the rapture will occur on May 21st at 6pm.  It isn’t right but it is easy.  In 1988 there was a booklet printed called 88 reasons the world will end in 88. I remember reading in the SF Chronicle an article about a church not far from where I live that taught  Jesus was returning that year in September and people really believed it.  Many quit their jobs, maxed out their credit cards and (skip to the next paragraph my animal loving friends).... euthanized their pets.  No animals in heaven.

I can’t help but think about the children who weren’t quite sure if they were saved.  Can you imagine what they must have been feeling?  Were they really saved?  Were they going to be raptured, were their parents going to be raptured?  Anyone who has every gone to a pentecostal or baptist church remembers altar calls.  Every week the same people would come forward to be “saved”.  Back in the mid 1990’s popular evangelist said “people go to hell with ordination papers on their walls”  If that isn’t enough to make a scared kid question their salvation then I don’t know what is. So what about the kids.  Jesus is coming to get us, they are told by the parents who are supposed to be caring for them.  Jesus didn’t come and now there is no house, no money to pay the bills, and the beloved family yellow lab is dead.  What the F@#k?  What about today?  What about those children?  What about the adults who have quit their jobs and given all of their savings to these charlatans...These preachers speak for God, we can’t question them or can we?  Each one of us can read the bible and think for ourselves.

I can’t find anywhere in the bible, Jesus saying that it is all about us versus them.  I can’t find where he advocates violence.  Yeah we can cherry pick and  quote Matthew 10:34 out of context.  Using one or two verses in the midst of forgiveness, love, and acceptance doesn’t make sense. 

So I need to find Christ in the people who teach this stuff.  I don’t need to make them agree with me.  I know that Christ loves me and loves everyone (no exceptions).  I know that judgement day isn’t May 21.

When we pray the prayer that Jesus taught we pray for God’s realm to come on earth as in heaven we aren’t praying to escape the world or that Jesus will come back in combat gear and kill everyone we disagree with and destroy the world, we are praying that God’s reign will come to the earth.  So what do we do?  We love, we serve and we forgive.  We pray for people even if we don’t agree with them.

This is major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door

And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today

Here am I floatin' 'round my tin can far above the world

Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do

Joke Sunday

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person's strength. Proverbs 17:22 NLT

I love laughter.  I love how I feel when I laugh or when others laugh.  I love how laughter transforms peoples faces contorts their bodies and relaxes them.  Even the most uptight person is relaxed when they laugh.  Laughter is contagious.  Look at all of those laughing babies on You Tube, who can watch one of those videos without laughing?  This Blog was originally called “Laughter and Light”. 

Today, the first Sunday in May, a group called Laughter Yoga International promotes World Laughter Day; World Peace through Laughter today.  This year the Sunday after Easter happened to fall on the first Sunday in May.  In the early years of the Christian Church some celebrated this day as Holy Humor Sunday or Bright Sunday.  Today at Saint Francis of Assisi we had Holy Humor (or joke) Sunday.  Joke Sunday is beautiful mixture of the sacred and the absurd, and sooo me.

I laugh in church anyway and I’m sure some would think me irreverent, but oh well.  I mean sometimes things are just funny and a chuckle is appropriate. 

What was my point?  Oh yeah..laughter is healing, it reduces stress, it increases blood flow.  One study shows that it burns calories another that laughter boosts the  immune system.  It helps breathing and expands the lungs.  The bottom line is laughter makes me feel better. “mindful laughing”?  Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry and that makes me feel better.  So Laugh, Smile, Dance......








Did you hear the one about the Priest, the Rabbi and the Minister? 

Good Friday

So today is Good Friday and as you may know, it is probably my least favorite day of the church year along with Palm Sunday when the Passion is read. I was starting a rant about Palm/Passion Sunday but I contained myself.... I like the Good Friday Vigil at the church I go to. People take turns sharing short meditations on the last 7 words allegedly spoken by Jesus. I volunteered this year and oddly enough chose “I thirst” to talk about. There was so much I wanted to say but with only 3 minutes I had to leave most of it out. Not to mention that I put off writing it until Thursday night at 7 and had to hurry because I had to watch “Vampire Diaries” with my daughter at 8....

I Thirst

Most of you know that I am an RN so when I saw “I Thirst” I thought, “well of course he was thirsty, he was dehydrated” Those of you who know me probably know what I would have sounded like if I said it out loud. I mean Duh! Jesus had been hanging on the cross for about 3 hours after being interrogated, beaten, and carrying a heavy chunk of wood up a hill. I start going through the signs and symptoms of dehydration and the effect that dehydration has on the body. I don’t stop there though....I started to wonder if I could have put an IV in him. I mean I was good at it. I used to brag that could get an IV in a stone. I once inserted a small IV in the thumb of an elderly person with “no veins left”. So the idea of talking about “I thirst” seemed pointless at first. I wasn’t going to chose it but I was drawn to it. You could say it spoke to me.

I’ve been an RN for 34 years but I started working in a hospital when I was only 19..... Still a child really. Nursing seemed like a sensible carrer choice but was never my first choice. For the first 22 years of my career I worked in Intensive Care/Coronary care and Pediatric ICU.

Many years ago, before Hospice really started in this country, we kept people alive on Ventilators for much longer than we should have. We put people on life support who were not going to survive, prolonging their suffering and separating them from their families. We pumped them full of drugs, put tubes in arteries to measure the pressures, took away their ability to talk by putting a tube in their nose or mouth and almost every other orifice. We took away their humanity and their dignity

Visiting hours were limited so they were often alone only nurses and other staff who may have been working 16 hours and exhausted, or burnt out or preoccupied, and humming beeping machines to keep them company.

Tubes were everywhere but what I remember most was

Dry parched lips

It was the dry lips that bothered me the most. So after checking the machines making sure everything was working, checking vital signs, and medications were infusing I would try to relieve the dry mouth. If the person was conscience I would offer them ice chips...most weren’t....most were on ventilators and were NPO (nothing by mouth). So I would clean their mouths. Back in those days we had Lemon Glycerin Swabs which were like giant Q tips with a lemon flavor. People who were thirsty and couldn’t drink for a few hours would refuse them. Those with dry cracked lips bit on them, sucked on them, holding tight to the swab as if it would revive them perhaps it was a reminder of life or a reminder of hope..... Or maybe a reflex

Yes, Jesus was dehydrated I am certain of that and I know that his thirst was much more than dehydration.

He had endured horrific pain. The life was draining out of him he was indeed parched in body and spirit..... Water is life...... he had told the Samaritan woman that the water he gives will become in them a spring of water gushing up into eternal life. I wonder what he was thinking....I wonder if he felt like a phony a con artist. I wonder if he believed anything that he had said.

He was tortured, he was mocked, he was dying. Worse, though, than the pain and the mocking and the fact that he was certainly going to die soon, many of his friends had abandoned him. Who can blame them though? They were afraid, things were NOT going as they had planned and nothing would ever be the same. They had deserted him and it seemed as though God had deserted him. God’s voice, that voice he was so accustomed to hearing was gone as well.

Have you ever felt abandoned? Alone? Afraid? Have you ever felt that you would never hear God again?

I have. People have hurt me, done horrible things to me and I wonder. Where the hell is God I mean really where!

All week a part of psalm 63 has been rattling around in my brain. Days before I even thought about which “last word” I wanted to talk about, these words were in my thoughts and on my tongue:

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.


O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

What imagery! Can you see the cracks in the land the dry adobe here in Sonoma County that cracks and pulls apart in the summer. Weary, burnt out, exhausted, over used land. Today is Earth Day as well as Good Friday...and you know what to do.
Back to Jesus...I wonder......... In the midst of his agony........did that psalm run through his mind He said I thirst. Was he calling out to God only managing to squeak out “I Thirst”
Water is essential for life so a thirst for water is a thirst for life......
A thirst for life is a thirst for God who promises streams in the desert who promises to heal, to sustain us and to wipe away every tear.....

Sometimes in life those promises seem impossible. From the cross, I suspect that those promises appeared to be very far away.... Yet Jesus said I Thirst. It is my prayer that we can all say that in our own way when the distance between ourselves and our friends or ourselves and God seems so far apart we too can say I thirst.

I thirst

Voting and Health Care Reform

Matthew 25:35-40
35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

I am a socialist...if it were up to me we would have single payer healthcare. I work for an HMO and my job depends on it’s survival. As an RN my priority is the welfare of my patients. To some this might seem conflicted at best, but I’m at peace with it. In the words of Mick Jagger, “You can’t always get what you want but if you try you might get what you need”

Some of you are going to the polls tomorrow hoping that your vote will make health care reform go away because it is “socialized medicine” Please trust me when I say that it is not. Some of you think that it will cost us too much money but war and killing people in foreign countries cost us more. The tax cuts for the top 1% of americans add more to the deficit than health care reform. Folks I hate to break it to you but none of you are in the top 1% and never will be.

On March 23rd, the president signed the health care reform bill and with many other progressives I was complaining that it wasn’t enough, but on September 23 several things happened as a result of that health care bill.
First my now 19 year old daughter will be covered under my policy until she is 26. If she wasn’t she would be uninsurable because as an infant she had so many ear infections her ears are scarred and her eardrums perforate every time she gets on an airplane. Second your child who might have asthma or have been born with a minor cardiac defect can no longer be dropped from your insurance plan. Third, if you have a catastrophic medical problem your insurance company can’t say, “Oops you’ve exceeded your limit.”

In addition there won’t be co-pays for preventive services. Things like mammograms, cervical cancer screening, bone density studies, colorectal cancer screening, immunizations and some blood work will not incur a copay. You will be saving money.

Some of the insurance companies want you to think that this is going to drive costs up. I don’t think it will. I was privileged to listen to the president of the HMO I work for speak recently. We aren’t worried because we are forerunners in preventive health care; our patients will continue to come first, and we will remain a “not for profit” HMO.

I am writing this tonight because I know some of you have been given incorrect information about health reform. Certain candidates are telling you that they will fight to repeal health care reform. What they are telling you is not in your best interest. These people are masters at manipulating and inciting fear in people. Some of you I know who are against health care reform have your kids on Medi-Cal. I don’t condemn you for using government funded health care but think about that when you vote. Think about the kids who will be denied health care while yours are covered.

I started this post with words from the gospel of Matthew; “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Meditate on these words as you fill out your ballots and follow your heart. Vote for who you feel is the best person for the job.

Peace

Mortgage

It's finally over.  My mortgage was modified after 18 months of jumping through hoops for the bank.  I think that they expect you to cave and give up...I refused to do that...We were taken advantage of by a friend who worked for a large mortgage company.  We didn't have a sub prime mortgage but we were told that our payments would only go down...If something sounds to go to be true it probably is...  I am so grateful that this is over.  We now have a 2% interest rate that will adjust in 5 years but never will go over 4.2% which is reasonable.
I think what bothers me the most is that friends can't be trusted.