One by one. . .

In addition to these, and in the spirit of this, I participate in the gift of ritual I too often undervalue. Today I share gratefulness for:

Stories. Told, living and breathing in my memory, to be told. Their telling. The life and humor and insight and pain and growth and ridiculous and sublime they embody. Stories told casually, explosively, almost ineffectively. Told carefully, ritualistically, familiarly. I'm grateful for how much my dad loved telling stories, how many he told, and how often and freely and confidently and joyfully he told them. I undertake to listen for and to more stories.

Patience. And many other super-natural gifts of fruit I sometimes taste and people often give to me.

Food. I enjoy it. I don't lack for it.

Movement. I am rarely stuck, though sometimes I am, and then I like moving along even more. (Maybe next year I'll learn to be grateful for seasons of stillness.)

My vacuum. You should see it fill up with cat hair! What accomplishment it helps me feel! And, it's green.

The color green. And green food! (The kind that is meant to be green when it's eaten - not green too early, and certainly not green too late.)

Friends and family who embrace tradition and ritual before and more than me. Sometimes it helps to remind me in new ways of the blessings of old ways. As long as they're a little flexible.

Flexibility.

Carrying each other's burdens

As I think about my friends right now experiencing loss and grief, and some newness of life, I am grateful, again, for these reflections (linked above) from my boss this season:

And I hope I can discover, in the fortitude of others, ways of giving thanks in times of grief. Gratitude without blindness to others' sorrow. Unlike some colleagues at Westmont--and so many persons in the world--I enter this Thanksgiving with a home, without great deprivations. My life is blessed. But each year all of us can count some losses. There will be no Thanksgiving call this month from my father, given his dementia, the scorched neurology of age. But there are plenty of images in my mind of our Thanksgiving leaves, fully raked, only to be scattered by impromptu football games in our family's backyard. The psalmist would find in such irretrievable moments a glimpse of something eternal, something equally lost and luminous. More and more I see God's grace in the architecture of hope and memory.

The fortitude of others. The architecture of hope and memory.

Say Something Nice

How to reduce tension, get along now and in the future, exude the tasty fruit of kindness...

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/30/greene-if-you-can%E2%80%99t-or-can-say-anything-nice/

Eventually (maybe!) this election cycle will end. And we will have (maybe!) results, which will take, at minimum, months to play out in any tangible every-day-life ways.

Our rhetoric and our conversations now are necessarily different from what they will be after next Tuesday, given the urgency some feel yet to make a persuasive difference in the voting process. Still, what we say now has consequences for relationships and reality now and into the future.

Is it possible to be passionate, driven, righteous, wise, even angry, and at the same time able to see and speak of goodness in neighbors with whom we disagree?

Group hug-it-out in five days!

{semi-cross-posted on Fake-I-Mean-Facebook}

All we need. . .

Yesterday at the end of a rather long and discombobulated faculty workshop to start the new year, a professor was asked to pray and dismiss us. She asked us to close our eyes and think of something that we hoped for this school year. I'm not much investing in wide ranging hopes these days; I think hope has something to do with the future, and I'm not much imagining futures these days. But, I easily thought of one thing I hope -- in all hope's complexities of belief, expectation, and desire. To love my students.

I do love my students, of course I do. I love everyone In God's Way. Ha -- such the goofball phrase from my 70s-80s church-talk childhood. Did you ever say it? I remember in elementary school if we were asked if we loved someone that we really "liked" (romantically) we could preserve the privacy of a crush by answering quite properly, "I love him in God's way." As in, most definitely not in the movies or Top 40 radio way so no need to tease me. Oddly, the same response applied even more frequently to someone that we found quite difficult to like at all (not least of which romantically). Amy Grant's 1979 song "Giggle" serves well here: "Must I hug him real close now? He smells so bad I'll faint! What will my friends think if they see me? Kill my pride, I caint!" But do I love him? Of course I do, in God's way. Because the simple fact is, God loves everyone. So, I indiscriminately loved everyone, too.

But the less simple fact is to love a human being as a person, not a conglomeration of humanity, demands discrimination.

And sometimes that takes things I don't have a lot of in my natural state: patience under pressure in particular. When I get stressed, I get in a hurry, and the apparent most important thing is to do the tasks I'm supposed to do.

This morning at the annual Faculty/Staff chapel service, our Assoc. Dean for the First Year Experience gave one of the most refreshing reflections I've heard in a long time, miraculously saying words and painting pictures I needed. She spoke about hospitality, and all followers of Jesus being called to provide a welcoming place for strangers, being attentive to their needs at the time we meet them. Visiting them in prison (not necessarily breaking them free), a drink of water (not necessarily digging a well). I think my dad was good at this, what my brother and I meant when we talked at his memorial service about his generous and paradoxical interactions with strangers and with family.) Mainly what struck me this morning was hospitality not as "entertaining" (providing well-planned, shiny food and decorations) but as providing an opportunity for the people we encounter to be who they are with their needs and not letting them get lost in the big fat details of the doing and the tasks.

It's certainly a familiar idea (be present, love people, meet needs), and my reflection here is a fuzzy one, but her saying those things in the way she said them today was what I needed, and I now hope with more faith that I can love my students as I meet many of them for the first time -- strangers to me, to be treated as if entertaining angels unaware even though, as my friend said this morning it becomes clear they are not angels soon enough -- and as I welcome back so many more in a fresher, more discriminating way.

My to-do list is ridorkulously long and convoluted, and the tasks are not irrelevant or without some connection to meeting real needs, but I hope in some moments I will be more hospitable, providing a space for individuals to be present and to have some needs met by me that I might otherwise be inclined to miss.

Excellent job!

Work, schmork, I sometimes feel.

Then I read this article.

POLICE CHIEF WRITES HIMSELF TICKET

KEWASKUM, Wis. -- It's not usually news when a police officer writes a ticket -- unless it's the chief and he gives the ticket to himself.

Village of Kewaskum Police Chief Richard Knoebel said he was driving to work when he became distracted by a truck stopping on one side of the street. He said he didn't see a school bus with its lights flashing and a stop sign out on the other side of the four-lane road.

The chief said he didn't know he had passed the stopped bus until it was too late.

When he realized what he had done, he issued himself a $235 ticket. "When we get someone for not stopping for a flashing school bus we give them a citation. So I shouldn't be any different so I did," Knoebel said.

Not only did the chief have to pay a hefty fine, he gave himself a four-point penalty on his license.