Episcopal Tidings

Disaster Dopamine

2011-03-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

   The 9.0 temblor that fractured roads and railways and reservoirs, and delivered a wall of seawater that swept away lives and livelihoods in northeast Japan has become a media experience that is crossing from news into entertainment, moreso than the first online disaster, the South Asia tsunami that killed over 200,000 in December 2004.
   Clicking on the video links for the first few days of the crisis was mainly about seeing and believing, and hopefully responding. But the posting and promotion of video clips, be it on Yahoo or YouTube, a week or weeks after the event seems more oriented to serving up vicarious thrills than deepening our understanding of the consequences of the tragedy still unfolding in Japan.
   When I click on the new tsunami video link on Yahoo, or MSNBC, or CNN, or search the YouTube channels for tsunami, am I looking to learn more or to enjoy the thrill of seeing mayhem unleashed on fellow but far removed inhabitants of our planet? I think we claim the first and deny and suppress the second.
   Take your pick: Japan Tsunami at full height from the ground level (360,000 views); Japan tsunami earthquake Best Japanese Films Sorry (1.27 million views); Japan tsunami destroys town (609,571 views). One even has a music compilation. This is beyond information. This is disaster porn.
   It appeals to our thrill seeking side, the one that straps us into roller coaster rides, parks us in the cineplex velour for Scream 4, or nudges us off the canyon rim at the end of a bungee cord. It is what fills the seats at NASCAR tracks and around the ice at hockey arenas. Take away the crashes and the checking and you end up applying the brakes to the dopamine cells, the ones that make thrill seeking, well, such a thrill.
   Nothing against stock cars or hockey--they are contests of skill and judgement as much as they are demolition derbies. But if they or our YouTube channels become mainly channels for pleasure or relief at avoiding someone else's pain, then we have some real soul searching to consider for this Lent.
   Even if it is only OMG, or that facile expression, "there but for the grace of God," that escapes our lips, we need to question not only what clips we click, but what clicking on them says about us. Are we engaging in empathy, or exploitation?

A Season for Deletion

2010-03-03T21:58:00.000-08:00

Let’s delete Christmas.

That’s the thread that was running through my mind in the closing minutes of the work day today, a day of serial meetings, one flowing into the other, management team into leadership team, noodles in the lunch room which is a sort of meeting, then into convention planning followed by DDB event planning (Diana Butler Bass). This day, Wednesday, was an interruption in the normal work flow. A big interruption in the sense that very little work flowed out of the communication office.

Just two weeks ago Wednesday was a very different day as well, but one not as at odds with the regular rhythm. We met and then we went to liturgy to pray, reflect and receive ashes. Then returned to the business of applying prayer and reflection to effecting mission. It all seemed to fit, to be in concert.

The fact that the days were consistently gray, the snow covering persistent, and the temps traveling in a very narrow wave band could have played a big role in buttressing that rhythm. The sun was out in a major way today, blazing in a blue canopy, and working well past its normal shift of a month ago. That for me was a little disturbing, interrupting as it did my accommodations to an interior season, one more oriented to the interiors of our homes and our minds.

It’s not a season I relish in late September when I am counting the weeks left for green leaves on branches, and blooms in the beds. There’s definite dread in the countdown to a landscape of ashen gray and bare clay. It’s not just about losing color and scent and daily recreation. Or about the ache of witnessing six months of labor undone in two hard freezes. It is knowing that I now have to shift perspective and expectation. Put familiar tools away, and take out others shelved six months previous.

Gardening is about faith, of subscribing to the experience of dying and rising, year after year. Each dying and each rising is a decision, a painful one. We let go of one assumption, one perspective, to take on another, knowing full well it has a pretty short sunset clause. But not so short that we can’t reach accommodation, enter into a new mode of being. Trowel is exchanged for snow shovel; hiking boots for ski boots; porch light for lamp light.

And that’s why Christmas has to go. It comes too soon, arriving in mid-transition of fall into winter, and working against the score begun in Advent. In Advent we set a rhythm that should run clear and fluid to the shoreline of Easter, expanding in time with the rising arc of the sun. But Christmas juts in with a brassy score, out of tune with the themes of reflection, reconciliation, renewal. It’s a season of celebration at odds with the meteorological season and the spiritual one. For me it’s the shamwow commercial interrupting Schubert’s Symphony No. 9.

And much of it is sheer manufacture: the shepherds, angel, star, magi etc. The Puritans of Boston did not find much endearing about Christmas, and chose to ban it with a law that stood for 22 years, and custom that lasted into the early 19th century.

. . .it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county." -- the General Court, Massachusetts Bay Colony May 11, 1659

Granted, there is not much endearing about Puritan perspective. But in the case of Christmas, I think they were on the right track, if not for the right reasons (resentment towards the Church of England). It is just 12 days long but long enough to disrupt the flow, and short-circuit the current that began flowing in First Advent. Epiphany becomes an afterthought, or roundabout for redirection. And instead of one culmination of the church year, Easter, we have a second highest holy day in which to certify our piety.

Deleting Christmas does not mean deleting the Incarnation. That must be brought back into Advent, its proper birthplace, and woven into the salvation story score. Just get rid of the other trappings, liturgical, ecclesiastical, and most definitely commercial. Otherwise, we just risk perpetuating an abbreviated experience of Christ’s journey to the Passion, reducing it to something like: He’s here! He’s great! He died! He’s alive! See you next Christmas.

How hard can it be, assuming you are not on the Altar Guild or the Standing Commission for Liturgy and Music, to forgo assembling Nativity scenes and orchestrating pageants, or to cancel caroling, and lay off the greening and de-greening? Okay, pretty darn hard if you have to face the pleas of your kids or the kids in Sunday School, or an irate music director. But it can be done, and in a way that incorporates all sensibilities.

Imagine four distinct but interwoven seasons: Advent-Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. Each timed to the arc of the sun and the track of the jet stream. With one breath you fall from autumn into winter, and it carries you through to spring. Submerge and reemerge, wade into the Jordan and walk out drowning in the Holy Spirit, anointed with Good News to share on the shores of Galilee.

Standby

2010-01-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

A year without a word may seem counterproductive for a product that supposedly has a shelf life measured in minutes, not months. But this production has been stalled at Act Two, Scene One, the better part of a year. Partly by procrastination, at least for the first quarter; and then gradually, and more assuredly, by intent.

Sabbaticals are usually seen as a time to stand apart from the ordinary commerce of your daily life, a time carved out to study, assess, reflect, and refresh. Then return to reengage whatever pastime or responsibility you needed relief from in the first place. Who takes a sabbatical from a virtual wayside on life’s expressway. I guess I do.

Last April at O’Hare I was on standby for a flight to Camp Allen Texas for four hours. An unplanned, and, at first, underappreciated four hours. I spent the first hour trying to cut my idle time to a minimum, and the rest realizing it was more of a pardon than a sentence.

Given a choice, which is more precious: our time (our being) or our status (our standing)? In this era of social media and 24/7, standing apart is easily outshined by standing out. No one on Facebook or My Space or Blogspot or LinkedIn or any other avenue of self-expression is laboring incognito, even under a pseudonym. We want to be noticed. We want to read. We want to be affirmed. And so we post, telling the world—or our tribe—what we plan, what we have done, or what we have lost.

Tagging and tweeting and texting can be lifelines—as we have seen with the world’s response to the cry from Haiti. Or avenues for forming or feeding community. Or just diversions from doing our laundry, or alternatives to living with the stillness, learning to just be.

So for a little over a year I have chosen to be on standby; standing down and standing apart, letting the remnants of last year’s trauma lie fallow, while attending to other fields and avenues. This is not in the footsteps so much of Thomas Merton’s epiphany in blindly picking a line from the Gospel of Luke: “Behold, thou shalt be silent.” It is, though, in concert with the Cistercian principle of avoiding unnecessary speaking, a practice that opens pathways for prayer, and clearings for presence.

I cannot point to any profound epiphanies during this recess from Tidings. That should not be surprising since the point is to leave a place fallow, untended, untilled. And it was a limited sabbatical. My keyboard was quite active on other accounts.

Everything that needed to be said in our loss of our companions, Suki and Milo, was said a year ago. More is being written in the embrace of new companions, Shiro and Misty.

It’s time once more to stand up. We are cleared for takeoff.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats

Shattered

2009-01-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

Our hearts are shattered. At half past noon on the last day of 2008 we whispered our final prayers for Milo and wrapped him in our last embrace as the overdose of anesthetic drug traveled through the tube that for five days had been his lifeline.

Nineteen days ago my wife Joanne and I drove him home from western New York where he had been in the care of a rescue organization, and three days later we were in an examining room at the Animal Emergency and Treatment Center in Grayslake, Illinois. He was losing weight and refusing to eat, no matter what we proffered—raw hamburger, tuna, chicken, and Gerbers augmented with chicken broth. At 35 pounds when we picked him up he was small for an American Eskimo and Samoyed mix, and getting smaller. Depression response, so we thought, and with fluids, Pepcid, and anti-nausea meds he might come around. But he didn’t, and back it was to Grayslake for a three-day stay with more fluids and monitoring. The day after Christmas he was back again, having still not eaten, and the next day an ultrasound revealed the problem: an obstruction in his stomach and small intestine. The surgeons found four perforations of the bowel along a critical stretch of the intestine between the pancreas and the bile duct. The culprit was a small towel or washcloth that had worked against its purpose, puncturing his intestinal tract and fouling his abdominal cavity. That section was removed and Milo seemed to be recovering better than anyone expected. But 36 hours later he had fluid build-up and a fever, and we faced the decision to authorize a second surgery that promised at best a 30 percent chance of success.

Be it a sliver of hope, or a prayer of a chance, we are not inclined to surrender a soul companion to dire odds or cost-benefit analysis. So we said yes, proceed with surgery. It went well, as before. Milo, for all he has been through, beginning with his first year of life in a puppy mill, does not give up. He showed us an enormous need to be companion and be companioned, but he could not defeat the odds or the infection. At the same point as before, the early hours of the second morning post surgery, the fever returned, he vomited, and the culture confirmed our fears, the repair was leaking into the cavity again. Not enough space was left of good tissue to give any chance for another surgery. So we made that ultimate decision to remove Milo from any more pain, any more invasions, and any more life. It was peaceful, and sacramental as we surrendered him to God’s boundless grace.

The night before, a dinner plate I was heating in the microwave popped, and a chunk was broken off the rim. A signal of what was coming that morning? All I know is life is fractured by the heat of our transactions with one another. We beckon, we bind, and sometimes despite our best efforts and intentions, we break apart, for what we have done or left undone, or we simply are undone by actions beyond our agency or authority. Solace proves elusive in the roundabout of grief and regret.

We scrape up the broken bits, and reassemble what we can of our confidence and convictions, much as we did a month before in the loss of our first rescue, Suki. Healing, we know, is at the threshold, and somewhere not too distant the breath of hope. As we heard last Sunday in John: “What has come into being in him was life; and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

A Season for Addition

2008-12-24T07:05:00.001-08:00

Advent tends to be a season of subtraction, or at least that is the theme of the lessons. Two Sundays ago we heard John the Baptist quoting Isaiah to the Levites: “Make straight the way of the Lord,” the subtext being clear out the clutter, remove all impediments to God’s action in the world. And what action it will be: delivery of the Word incarnate.

In southern Wisconsin our household has been removing impediments, namely snow, lots of snow, in making our driveway straight for the important but more prosaic deliveries from USPS and UPS. And that has meant a lot of subtraction through heavy lifting.

But Advent for us has been more about addition than subtraction. Meet Milo, a two year and three month American Eskimo with some possible Samoyed genes, who was raised in an Amish puppy mill (yes, we also had a double take).

He spent his first year there and was on the kill list when Joyful Rescues out of Cuba, New York picked him up and nurtured him, until we arrived December 12. A harrowing 600 miles later through lake-effect snow most of the way we were back in southern Wisconsin with our new addition.

Like Suki (who passed away November 21) we met Milo on the internet, and lost our hearts to him. Their resemblance is so close it almost is as if Suki is looking at us through Milo’s eyes. But Milo is a very different dog. For one thing, he is more fearful, a common trait among puppy mill dogs. And more anxious about change, which has landed him in the emergency animal hospital in Grayslake (where Suki was treated for lymphoma). Gastroenteritis, mouth ulcers, and a loss of appetite (presumably because it hurts to eat) has put him on IV fluids, and in the intensive care unit for three days. Today we bring him home, and hope and pray the drugs and our love will ease the pain and restore his appetite. Not just for food but for his new family.

The snow is now pouring out of the cloud cover, erasing yesterday’s efforts, and challenging us to locate the path that brought us home, let alone straightening it. It is Christmas eve, and some 2,000 years ago as the story goes, a family left the byways for a shelter, and delivered to us the sum of all our hopes. So let us praise addition.

Requiem

2008-11-25T19:21:00.001-08:00

She is gone. Suki, our Samoyed-Golden Lab companion, yard monitor, foot warmer, pillow opportunist, and front door herald has exited this stage with lines still waiting to be delivered. At Grayslake Animal Emergency Treatment Center they call her their ‘miracle dog’, a testimony to her resilience as a stage 5B (there is no stage 5C) lymphoma survivor. For five months and 20 some chemo treatments she held off and beat down the renegade cells to the point where she could be recognized, however tentatively, hopefully, as in remission.

Remission is not cure. We knew it would be a matter of time, but not this soon, not this sudden. Cancer doesn’t serve notice with much regard to the commerce of daily life—whether it be a backyard barbecue, a roadtrip for reunion, or in the case last week, the Annual Convention of the Diocese of Chicago. She was clear of tumors in all the vital organs, but the cancer found an opening where blood tests won’t work, her central nervous system.

At Evening Prayer on Friday, perhaps during the Phos Hilaron or Psalm 107, as the voices sanctified the Westin Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, my wife and I were in our room, juggling the consequences of owning or evading the decision to administer the drugs that would take her life and the life of the cells that had betrayed her. There was no doubt what was the right choice—she was unresponsive, her central nervous system totally compromised, and no arsenal of drugs at hand that could fend off or forestall the inevitable. The steroid injection that morning had been the last volley, to little effect. So we said yes, for her and not as much for us.

By saying yes five months ago when she collapsed on our porch and we rushed her to the emergency treatment center, we had given her a fighting chance to beat back the cancer and live. Which she did, a reflection of her tenacity and devotion to life. We had said yes to her five and half years ago when on a whim we stopped at the humane shelter in Pontiac, Illinois and invited her into our life, our home, our hearts.

There is awesome power in that simple word, yes, whether it comes as a signature on an adoption form, or in a phone call authorizing the ultimate intervention. When we drove her home the first day of the New Year 2003 we had some inkling we were acting the part of angels, or angel helpers, and that was occasionally reinforced when she found a way to be snared in the rose bush brambles or caught up in the wire fencing. Last June though we realized with far more trepidation what it means to be the agent for sustaining life.

Any interaction with creation is by nature, at some base level, sacramental, and more so where develops a deep, abiding relationship. That is what we had with Suki. She entered our lives, and purchased a portion of our souls, and we the same. And she and we were changed.

There is a void in our house and about our yard, but not in our hearts. There she still prances to greet us, there she still barks at the neighbor dogs, there she still moans when dinner is late, and there she still nestles at our feet on our patio or on our bed. She did not ask to be saved five and a half years ago, or five days ago. All she said was, yes, let us be.

Standing on the patio now, the beds now filled with the brown and gray bones of a season ended, I find myself still anticipating the pop of the dog door flap and scrape of nails on paving stones. The silence of this season is all pervading. But it will change. Soon our other rescue Samoyed, Christopher, will come out to survey the space, do his business, and maybe even pick up the patrol that Suki would have traced the full perimeter of our yard. For now, I whisper the words and harvest some assurance from the commendation: All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Reemergence

2008-09-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

I am finding gardening to be a hit or miss proposition--missed opportunities, inopportune monsoons or droughts (while on vacation usually), missed minor infestations of weeds or disease that loom to biblical stature, much like the zebra mussels blanketing Lake Michigan, and the occasional serendipitous emergence.

A year ago this August I capped my stream embankment creation with three spindly toadflax plants as a backdrop for the streamside rocks. Good to zone 4 with perfectly supple stems to create some movement in the breeze, and, if I had read more of its bio, prone to spreading. Toadflax is a European transplant, adapted to Mediterranean climate, and just the thing to fringe a patio striving for echoes of Tuscany or the Peloponesian pennisula.

Then spring came and the steady emergence of all those perennial investments (a perennial gardener is one who is perennially investing). Except the toadflax. In their designated parish nothing was emerging from the winter kill stem clumps. So I wrote them off and later deposited some husker penstemmon, which didnt so much flow as slump before the wind. This was after vainly searching the nurseries for toadflax and finally deciding I wouldn't be suckered again into a plant of ambivalent constitution (like the butterfly bush).

Come July the Japanese beetles arrived with an appetite for our Lindens, willows, roses and primrose. And as they multiplied I noticed some spires erupting all over the streambank, and the pond beds and around the porch stairs: the progeny of the late toadflax. Hundreds of shoots, crowding the penstemmon, and poking up through the primrose and cranesbill. The legacy of those half dozen stems making music with the breeze.

Purple toadflax, Linaria purpurea native to the Mediterranean basin and cultivated as a garden plant in North America. Grows to three feet when mature. Purple to pink flowers appear in mid-summer. Prolific self-seeder. Medicinal use as a laxative or an ointment to treat hemorrhoids and ulcers.

There are other wonders, testimonies to nature coloring outside the gardener's preconceptions. Those butterfly bushes? My first three did expire, seemingly, but a year after moving a dead stalk to my island bed one came back. In that same bed another butterfly bush, different variant, appeared one spring, and who knows how that was parented?

Somewhere in this is a lesson on church planting and revitalization. A money stream, deep research, creative and inspiring leadership, and support from local churches is no guarantee the plant will take root and thrive. Sometimes a congregation takes root in unexpected but fertile soil; or reemerges after being given up for lost. Careful planning and resources do work, as seen every Sunday at Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Waukegan where worshippers fill every pew and spill out into the narthax and beyond,the result of a partnership in planting between area churches and the diocesan office. And now in Grayslake at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church the congregation of Nuestra Senora has provided the rootstock for an emerging Hispanic congregation there, one that was not part of our five year strategic plan in 2003.

So with the garden I continue to plot out arrangements; match plants to sun, and soil, and drainage; and, hopefully more often, allow more space for resurgent toadflax.

Just do it!

2008-09-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

Hospitality, welcoming ministry, or more technically—reception process—are in vogue as the church continues to test its aptitude for evangelization. We plan for it and program it, and unleash ad campaigns (Hungry Hearts,We're Here for You, We Live in Very Complicated Times, and most recently, Put Your Faith to Work); and grand ventures (Decade of Evangelism, 20/20). And having lived through all of these, I think we would be better off with Nike’s approach: Just do it.

On a flight into Portland, Oregon this past Thursday night, my wife and I found a church just doing it (maybe that’s the thing in Nike’s corporate home). We stayed at the Quality Inn near the airport for a little rest before driving on to Walla Walla, Washington the next day. The staff were responsive and friendly, the rooms well-tended and clean, and free breakfast offered at the inn’s café. Not that unusual for a well-managed inn, particularly one with a high aspiration name, but this particular lodging is owned by the Eastside Four Square Gospel Church.
The connection was clear but not over the top: just a sign below the marquee and a plaque in the inn lobby. And in the lobby a patient and friendly clerk, and beside the counter an easel with poster inviting guests to add a donation to their bill to support a transitional housing ministry in Portland, My Father’s House. Which we did (point of sale does work in the right setting). No testimonial flyers with your room key card, no bibles on the pillows, and no invitations to attend Bible study or prayer services. Rather low key for an evangelical church.

Across the driveway is the Eastside Four Square Gospel café offering free breakfast (waffles, biscuits, muffins, cereal, hard boiled eggs, coffee and juice) to inn guests, and again friendly, even eager, service. The only church goods present there are the literature in a tract rack. It’s all about hospitality and comfort, just as the names of most chain inns connote. Walking out the door, you leave with two impressions: welcomed and well-fed; and your measure of the people at Four Square is much more positive than if you had been blanketed with doctrine and devotional pitches. No one invited us to attend a service or a meeting, nor did anyone hand out literature or point out the tract rack. The whole focus was on service and welcoming. This may reflect the religion averse nature of the Northwest, but I suspect the approach would be on target in Bucktown, Bolingbrook or Buffalo Grove. It’s what is known in emergent church as contextual faith: orienting the church to the community it serves. We are doing this to some degree in the Diocese of Chicago—All Saints in Ravenswood, St. Gregory’s in Deerfield, Epiphany on the Near West Side, and Trinity, Aurora come to mind—but we could do more, much more.

So your reading assignment: Radical Hospitality, and Take This Bread.

Reentry

2008-08-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

We are in the badlands in the southwestern corner of North Dakota. The land called Makoshika (bad spirits) by the Lakota, and in French, les mauvaises terres a traverse (bad land to cross). But not so bad nowadays being that I94 slices through the southern tip of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (locus for the most striking vistas) and historic cow town Medora is nestled there with ice cream parlors, the Iron Horse Saloon, and gift shops galore, some more appropriate for Williamsburg than a town built around a slaughterhouse. This is not the Dells. The town is truly historic and the local foundation does a good job of preserving and highlighting its past with a minimum of kitsch. The Medora Musical, set in the Burning Hills Gulch just over a hill from the town, may strike some as a little over the top with frontier spirit, but it is done well and fun for the family. A new addition, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, does a lot well in a modest space, using multimedia and a comprehensive take on the people and processes than shaped the western range (including substantial coverage of Native American culture).

For me this—meaning the badlands of the national park—is a sanctuary space, a place to reconnect with a very long line of creation, and to re-create. Having been to somewhere north of 50 national parks and monuments, this remains my favorite. Not the most spectacular in vistas and inclines, not the most enriching in historical and cultural exhibits, and certainly not the largest since the southern unit where I wander is about the size of the city of Chicago. But in freedom of access, striking topography, concentration of wildlife, and harmony of light and form (photographically speaking), this park stands apart.

Imagine a rumpled bed sheet and you have an idea of this eccentric land, creased and furrowed into haystack hillocks, knife-edged ridges, and capstone buttes and outcroppings. This park measures something like 20 miles by 10 miles and within that space you can encounter bison, elk, mule deer, whitetail deer, coyotes, badgers, pronghorns, wild turkeys, and loads of prairie dogs. So a lot to offer, depending on what you are looking for.

We are now closing on 4,000 miles and four weeks of travel, and out of that we have spent 12 days in the cab of a Ford F250 pickup, with a 28-foot fifth wheel trailer attached, rolling through the northern plains prairie, Rockies and Cascades, the Puget Sound, the orchard lands and vineyards of eastern Washington, and the rangeland of western Dakotas.

We have acclimated ourselves to the road and the anticipation that tomorrow or the next day delivers a different perspective. Our trip has been about reconnection (friends and family in Omak, Seattle and Bozeman), prayer and parting (my wife’s mother in hospice in Walla Walla), and chemotherapy for our dog Suki at vet clinics in Montana, North Dakota, and Seattle (we may have a guide book out soon). Two adults, a college student and two white dogs adapting to the quirks of trailer life, and a shifting panorama, and each other’s moods and tastes (the college student has cut back on the Cheez-Its, and is now overdosing on anime clips using the campground wifi service).

Last photo was last night of the Little Missouri River. And the end of the road tomorrow. We have a few rocks for the garden, a case of Walla Walla wine, and hundreds of pics, but the really precious acquisition is the shared experience. Even at $4.21 a gallon (Washington) it was worth every mile.

Travel as a state of being

2008-08-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

Three weeks now on the road and somewhere over 3,000 miles of asphalt, concrete and gravel under our tires. I’m beginning to sense how long-haul truckers feel on the return leg of a cross-country haul. It can be a chore, and some days almost an incarceration—I’m thinking of Will Turner’s dad on the Flying Dutchman (Pirates of the Caribbean). And some days a meditation. Tracking along the highway, passing by and passing through different land forms, weather patterns, communities, at once apart and part of a place and its consciousness, be it only momentary, we adapt to the rhythm of shifting vistas and viewpoints. Travel becomes a state of being.

Photos lately have been monochrome as I think that best gets at the essence of Montana. There is the whimsical (the expresso stand in the previous post), but also much integrity in the architecture of the range. I am noticing it more on this excursion than when we lived here two decades ago.

Heading east out of Paradise Valley yesterday (we had camped, fittingly, in Emigrant), we traveled along the Yellowstone River, past the same points of interest we had noted 18 days ago, through Billings and then northeast toward Glendive.

At the rest stop outside Custer I encountered this example of a welcoming ministry. And it really illustrates what good signage does for visitors: prominent placement (on the sidewalk leading to the restrooms); clear and concise with no hidden code; conveys vital information for a newcomer; and is up to date (there really are rattlesnakes in the sagebrush).

Out of Mile City we hit heavy rain and wind, or it hit us. Gusts to 60 mph from the west and torrents powerwashing our truck and trailer. So a slow go to Medora, North Dakota where we endured a lightening show and marble size hail (fortunately after parking and unhitching). So back on the plains. No more 7 percent grades, or falling rock signs. Three days here to recollect and reassess our experience as we explore the Badlands. Then due east.

Montana crossings

2008-08-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

A week in Montana now with an overnight in St. Regis and a drive up the Flathead Valley and back through the Rockies to St. Mary's Lake on the east side of Glacier National Park. Along the way I photographed one of the ubiquitous expresso stands that seem to anchor every junction in this state, not what you might expect in this harddrinking and harddriving state (until a few years ago there was no speedlimit on Montana highways).

We have also stopped by a couple of small Episcopal churches in Jeffers (the Madison River valley) and Emigrant (where we are camped this morning in the Paradise Valley, access to the northern entrance of Yellowstone N.P.) Small still works in the West, and is more the norm than parishes with fulltime priests. These congregations are usually part of an area ministry served by one priest. Others are served by retired priests. And for Trinity in Jeffers and St. Johns in Emigrant, based on their bulletin boards, their ministries appear active and well-supported. Faith works here where two or three,or ten or twenty are gathered.

Wait, there's more

2008-08-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

An addendum to yesterday's post. Lookout Pass on the border of Idaho and Montana not only marks the continental divide but also the change from Pacific to Mountain Time. I can't think of a better point to enter mountain time than that creeping climb to 4726 foot Lookout. It also marks a transition in climate: the temp in Washington's high desert (yes, Washington is more than the rhododendrens and western cedar)yesterday pushed 104. This side of the divide it might reach 84. And this morning we had the furnace on as the low dipped to the low 40s.

CORRECTION: Lookout Pass is not on the continental divide, and the valleys below it drain to the Snake River (and eventually the Columbia). Though it does demarcate the time change. The Divide bifurcates the Waterton Glacier International Peace Park further east along the Lewis Range and Livingston Range.

And I forgot to mention dog two: Christopher, our rescue Samoyed. All his parts are working fine, though at times he is like the lion in The Wizard of Oz. But his confidence is improving.

And for those interested in our conveyance:

Today we are leaving St. Regis for East Glacier via Flathead Lake and Columbia Falls and then bisecting the Rockies on Highway 2.

Rediscovery

2008-08-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

Communication is on vacation this month. Or, more accurately, on an expedition. Vacation is about disengaging and leaving; what we—my wife, two dogs, and a college student—are doing seems more about transport. Heading west from Wisconsin in a fifth wheel trailer pulled by a Ford F250 Superduty pickup, we have crossed five states with a good portion of our household packaged inside. We seem to be gaining more than losing: altitude as we crossed the Great Plains and wound through the Bitterroots of Montana, weight as we took on water and supplies; and time, as we gained first one hour crossing the Missouri, and then a second hour as we entered Idaho. And somewhere, subliminally, a different perspective.

So much of what defines this trip is the radiation from the sun: hotter and dryer as we venture farther into the plains; and more intensity in the glare off the hood and dashboard. We scribe a straight track into the sun from Fargo to Glendive. There is some variance in the heading, maybe 5 degrees, but for most part it is the straight and narrow of due west. In other words the left cheek and left forearm of the driver is getting a year’s exposure in the space of three days.

Did I mention this is also a palliative venture as our youngest dog is under treatment for lymphoma, stage 5B (there is not stage 5C)? And my mother in law is under hospice care at home? One is 9 and a half (about 67 in human years), the other 89. Going to considerable expense to save one, and considerable distance to bid farewell to the other. We can do no less. So, in one sense this is about taking leave.

Emigrants of the 1840s marked their progress by trading posts and military outposts; for us it is the weekly stops at veterinary clinics for the dog’s anticancer drugs. She has a name: Suki, Japanese for ‘pleasing’ or ‘sweet.’ I have added the sobriquet, chemo dog, at times.
Here in Walla Walla (many waters) it is mid-point on the calendar and on the itinerary. Much of the travel so far has been chasing light, and now turning northeast we begin to move against it. Along the way we have seen this: the world’s largest bison sculpture in Jamestown, North Dakota; mile long freight trains backed up awaiting clearance along the Yellowstone in Montana; expresso drive-ins in Big Timber and other ranch towns in Montana; hundreds of horse trailers and RVs in Omak, Washington for the annual stampede (center piece is the horse herd plunging down the bluff to the river); pillars of smoke from burning off the wheatfield stubble in eastern Washington; and Mount Rainier cloud free and dominating the Cascades like a sumo wrestler. And others.

Experiences have varied: using GoogleEarth to scout out the parking situations at the weekly vet clinic stops (turning a pickup truck tethered to a 28 foot fifth wheel trailer requires wide open spaces); attempting and barely succeeding in maneuvering our 28 foot trailer into a half-moon space at Rainier National Park’s Cougar Rock campground; emptying the trailer cabinets on the tortured pavement of Highway 706 in the forementioned RNP; hitting the wineries in the Walla Walla Valley; loading up on Cheez-Its for the student; chasing the light in the vineyards and foothills of the Walla Walla Valley one evening with a camera lens; and, on the final night there, floating in the shimmering island of the condo courtyard swimming pool—a sort of reflection in a reflection.

So there it is midpoint in the expedition. Not so much the 1805 version, journey of discovery, as reentry and rediscovery. More awaits in Glacier NP, and the North Dakota badlands. Stay tuned.

2008 Lambeth Conference begins

2008-07-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Somewhere over 600 bishops from 36 Anglican provinces are now arrived in Canterbury, England for the 14th Lambeth Conference which runs July 16 through August 3. Around 200 bishops have chosen to boycott the gathering. Most of the boycotting bishops are from central African provinces. Two provinces--Nigeria and Uganda--will not have any bishops attending. Though not invited, Bishop Gene Robinson is present at Canterbury, and meeting with Anglicans in gatherings outside the official conference program. Most U.S. bishops are present, including those in the Anglican Communion Network (Pittsburgh, Fort Worth, Quincy, South Carolina, Springfield et al).

Both of Chicago's bishops are there along with their spouses: Bishop Jeffrey Lee and Lisa Lee; and Assistant Bishop Victor Scantlebury and Marcia Scantlebury. Interestingly, both bishops are also assigned as press briefing bishops for the morning press briefings. Bishop Lee will be on the briefing panel July 22. Bishop Scantlebury has been paired with Bishop Peter Beckwith of Springfield for a briefing.

View the video messages of Bishop Lee and Bishop Scantlebury. Bishop Lee has a webcam on his notebook and will occasionally be posting his thoughts to youtTube. Check this page for links.

The official Lambeth Conference website has a photo library with fairly extensive coverage of the proceedings, including the concurrent Spouses Conference.

Odds and Ends from the News Margins

2008-07-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

SUGAR LAND, TEXAS— Sugar Land,Texas became a little sweeter Thursday July 17 when a tanker truck overturned on Texas Highway 6 spilling 5,000 gallons of molasses onto the major thoroughfare. Drivers heading to Sugar Land were rerouted Thursday after the afternoon accident shut down the highway for eight hours. City of Sugar Land spokeswoman Pat Pollicoff told The Houston Chronicle the road was closed until midnight Thursday because of the coating of "healthy, all natural molasses." The spilled molasses was supposed to be used in cattle food. Several navy bean producers are sending containment teams.

MENDOTA HEIGHTS, Minn. - Fire investigators said a fire that destroyed a Mendota Heights home last week was caused by a flowerpot. Fire Chief John Maczko said a flowerpot on the home's deck spontaneously combusted.
While rare, spontaneous combustion can happen to pots with the right mixture of soil, moisture and heat.
Homeowner Dan Stoven said it's hard to believe, but said he's just glad his 17-year-old daughter was able to escape when passers-by entered the home to wake her up. Investigators said the soil was in a plastic pot that had become hot after several days of high temperatures and humidity. It ignited July 8, and wind helped the fire grow and spread to the deck and then to the house.

Fireweed (E. angustifolium) is a perennial herbaceous plant in the willowherb family Onagraceae. It is native throughout the temperate Northern Hemisphere and is the state flower of Alaska. Its name is derived from its ability to proliferate in burned over sites following forest fires.

MIAMI - A Miami man who held up a McDonald's at gunpoint in 1994 is now promoting the restaurant's signature sandwich in song. Tamien Bain is among five finalists in the fast food chain's contest for a new jingle promoting the Big Mac.
Bain was arrested on Memorial Day 1994 for the holdup. He served 12 years in prison, where he became interested in making music. The 29-year-old Bain says he was up front with contest officials about his past when applying for the MySpace.com/BigMacChant competition. No word on whether the competition included the Osborne Brothers’ “Steal Away and Pray.”

GORHAM, Maine - A woman got the shock of her life when she found an 8-foot snake mixed in with clothes in her washing machine. The snake, identified as a reticulated python, somehow got into the water pipes of Mara Ranger's 1800s-era farmhouse and slithered into the machine.
After Ranger took her blue jeans out of the machine Wednesday, she reached back into the load and felt something move. "I jumped back and all of sudden its head starts coming out of the washing machine and it looked huge," Ranger told WMTW-TV.

Summer reading list

2008-06-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

Here is what I am reading (or at least attempting to read) this summer:

Preview copy of I Shall Not Want, by Julia Spenser-Fleming (release this June). Sixth in her mystery series about Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson and Millers Kill police chief Russ Van Alsyne. This excursion tackles migrant workers, gangs, Clare and Russ alternately attracting and clashing, Clare juggling parish and Air National Guard chopper duties while coming to terms with her actions in the previous volume, and a new member of the Millers Kill police department.

Take this Bread, by Sara Miles. Miles, raised an atheist, and schooled in the Friends World College and as a journalist covering the socialist movement in Central America, walked into St. Gregory of Nyssa church in San Francisco in 1999 and took communion, an event that changed everything for her. Out of that experience she founded a food pantry that blossomed into dozens throughout the city.

excerpt:

"What I heard and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new."

Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation by Stephanie Spellers. Spellers, minister for Radical Welcome at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, conducted 200 interviews with people all over the U.S. asking them: How do we face our fears and welcome transformation in order to become God’s radically welcoming people? For Spellers this has led to founding The Crossing, an emergent worship gathering at St. Paul’s which reaches out to the marginalized—people of color, gays and lesbians, homeless and working poor, and young adults. Spellers is also a member of the Episcopal Church’s Commission on Domestic Mission and Evangelism (the parent for the 20/20 initiative).

Preview copy of The Great Emergence, by Phyllis Tickle (to be published this fall). Tickle embarks on a journey from St. Gregory through the Great Schism and Reformation to the present, making a convincing argument that Christianity is in the first throes of the next Great Emergence. Quoting Episcopal Bishop Mark Dyer, Tickle observes that every 500 years or so the Church experiences a giant rummage sale, one that involves the shattering of existing structures and power trains, and the birth of new expressions of the faith.

excerpt:

". . . every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread--and been spread--dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity's reach as a result of its time of unease and distress."

65 East report

2008-06-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

The diocesan and cathedral center plaza has a new resident: a ten foot high amalgamation of rust red I-beams by American artist Mark di Suvero. di Suvero is noted for his momumental industrial oriented sculptures. The piece gracing the center of the diocesan plaza is Choopy, which had been on display at the Merchandise Mart in April and May. City of Chicago asked the diocese to host the sculpture for three months after its parking expired at the Mart, so we gladly obliged. It is one of six di Suvero scultures in Chicago this spring and summer, the other five have been on display in Millennium Park since April and will be here until October 12. It is attracting a lot of snapshooters, perhaps to the relief of the overexposed Peace Angel perched on the upper plaza. We are thinking of giving Choopy a more Anglican or at least religious name. Any suggestions?