Midlife Meditation

  Here's a practice I'm not going to miss at all: the flowering cross. They come out on Easter, and I have wondered for years if the idea came from a florist. The sentimentality behind it is understandable: Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection, and it just happens to fall in early spring, so let's buy a bunch of cut flowers and decorate the cross with them! It's a popular custom, and typically the cameras come out after the service so people can take pictures of themselves in their Easter best, posing with the beautiful flowering cross. And I hate it. I always have. From the very beginning, I believed the cross should symbolize one thing: the death of Jesus. It actually does this best when there's a bloody corpse hanging from it, as can be found in many a Catholic church. But that imagery is deemed ghoulish by many, and probably properly so. It also teeters toward idolatry, which is why the Puritans removed it from Anglican c...

 A gay wedding presided over by a United Methodist Bishop? Can it be? Are the progressive leaders of the church finally putting their money where there mouths are, stepping up to the plate, diving into the deep end? Well--not quite. The symbolism of this wedding was significant. There have been same-gender weddings performed by Methodist clergy for decades. Some have even been out in the open, and have resulted in the pastors who presided over them being put on trial by the church. This is the first to be performed by a Bishop, who did so over the objection of the actual Bishop in charge of the Conference where the wedding took place. So it appears that Bishop Melvin Talbert was putting his career on the line, risking the highest-profile discipline yet meted out by the denomination, a church trial that could bust this issue wide open. Except for one thing: Bishop Talbert is retired. Which means there's little of real significance being put at risk. Bishop Talbert will no...

His name is Hank Green, and he's brilliant. He's a musician, entrepreneur, and vlogger (video logger) on many matters of importance. He creates short videos that run on YouTube and lay out well-reasoned arguments about such topics as the health care crisis, global warming, and human sexuality. I find him engaging, entertaining, informative, and unbearable. Yes, I said unbearable. I can't stand to watch his videos. The reason? He's edited out every single pause, every throat-clearing, every breath. Watching him for a few minutes, I find myself gasping, and not because of the startling things he says (though, as I said, I'm very impressed by his logic). It's the inhuman rapidity of what he's doing, the sense that he's got so much to say, and so little time to say it, that breathing is expendable. This is problematic. Humans breathe. That quality has shaped the way we communicate both information and feelings. Punctuation, sentence structure, grammar...

I've written thousands of words in this space about things I no longer believe, and why I have lost my faith in them. Ironically, my favorite part of the church service used to be the recitation of the creed. Methodism is not a creedal faith--the church has no official statement of beliefs (don't tell the conservative Good News lobby this unless you're up for a thumping of Biblical proportions)--but most Methodists spend a couple of minutes every Sunday speaking a creed in unison. Because none of them is official, there can be a different one each week. I liked the Apostles' Creed for its conciseness, and because I could say it from memory; and the Creed of the United Church of Canada for its contemporary social justice orientation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, felt like an exercise in dogmatics, which is exactly what it was intended to be from the beginning: a bureaucratic summary of those beliefs deemed essential to Roman Catholicism. For much of the histor...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....

"You're a saint!" whispered the special ed teacher as she helped the kindergarten teacher shepherd her class out of the gym. This surprised me. I had just had my best half hour all year with this particularly unruly litter of feral kittens, and while they'd been just as active and demanding as ever, the presence of two other adults throughout the class made things far easier for me. I didn't have to worry, for instance, about a particular boy bolting for the exit, or another boy leading a race-around-the-room rebellion. So I'd just had fun with them, leading a movement activity, teaching them to play two different clapping games based on the Spanish pronunciation of "chocolate," and telling them a story that included the ABC song. I had two helpers that day because the classroom teacher had quickly come to capacity with this group's impulsive behavior, and after getting assistance from the special ed teacher, had decided that both of them wo...

I had a rough morning. It started with the system update glitch that prevented my phone from waking me at 5 with "All Blues," my preferred wake-up music. (Try it sometime; it's a soothing, swinging way to ease into consciousness.) At 5:43 I opened my eyes, realized what had happened, and sprang into action, throwing together my lunch and a quick pot of coffee, then rushing out the door to pick up a couple of donuts at the QFC. I actually got to school a little early, but it was hard to shake that breathless sense of encroaching tardiness. And my foot was already hurting. That's right, my wounded little toe wanted nothing so much as to be elevated with an ice pack. Instead, I spent almost the entire day on it, moving about the gym where I teach, leading students in an especially vigorous jazz dance to "Sing, Sing, Sing," and, in one case, futilely chasing kindergartners around the room. Sassy fifth graders, a fourth grade substitute teacher who obliviousl...

Ow ow ow ow ooooowwwwww!!!! I was putting away groceries last night when I was reminded of one of the liabilities of using either cloth or plastic grocery bags: a 24-ounce jar of pickles, unsupported by the limp fabric around it, fell off the counter. It did not break on the floor, though, because it was cushioned by my foot--more specifically, the little toe of my left foot. I limped to the sofa, put my foot up, and accepted a bag of ice cubes from Amy, as well as a handful of ibuprofen. I've had a couple more doses today. My toe didn't keep me from working today, and as always, I was on my feet almost the entire day. Toward afternoon, it began to hurt again, but I soldiered on, doing a vigorous swing dance with my students. Once the last class was out the door, though, the endorphins fizzled and I suddenly remembered I was in pain. So much for working out after school. It's sore and swollen, but nowhere near as badly as the toe I stubbed a couple of years ago whi...

A couple of weeks ago, there was a story going around the internet about how the State Department had commissioned a Vermont company to make 12,000 pieces of official stem- and barware for American embassies around the world, with a price tag of 5 million dollars, one day before the Republican-engineered government shutdown. People posting links to the story on Facebook were shocked, shocked that such a wasteful contract would be pushed through at a time when clearly the government was running out of money, and, further, that so much was being spent on these glasses (and yes, $416 apiece is spendy by any calculation) when perfectly good glassware could be had at  Walmart. And yes, that's the argument that was being made. This scandalous purchase--5 million dollars to an American company for products that would be made by Americans for use in American embassies, where trade with America is promoted by American diplomats--came at a time when Republican brinksmanship wa...

I love my students. I always have. It's what brought me back to teaching after my long side trip into ministry, and it's what's kept me teaching through steep professional learning curves, lay-offs, underemployment, and problem students. That last item is what occasions this post: some students are hard to love. And yet I love them all the same. Teaching music in elementary schools, I see all age levels from kinder to tween. Over the years, I've created my own categories to help me deal with discipline problems. Some children are attention-seekers who just want to know the teacher cares about them. Often I can channel this need into performing a simple task: have one of them be the first to model a clapping game with me, and they'll be on board for the rest of the lesson. Others are looking for the firmness they don't get at home. I have to be stricter with these children than I personally like to be, but so long as am intentional about tamping down any...

I teach in a gym. Considering how important movement is to teaching music the Orff way, this space has many advantages. My students can make grand sweeping movements without fear of smacking anyone else in the face. I can teach them line dances, and never worry about someone colliding with a wall. I can separate the gym into two separate spaces, one for movement, the other for instruments. When we do body percussion, the hardwood floor makes a satisfying "smack" whenever students stomp their feet. And there the advantages end. The acoustics of a gymnasium cause my impaired ears to overload on a regular basis. I'd say it's like teaching in a barn, except that a barn has natural echo-reduction built into it in the forms of hay and straw. I expect this also contributes to the hyperactivity of some of my students: sensory overload, the stress of hearing so much noise and not being able to understand words. And then there's the temptation to run, screaming, be...

December 26, 1995, I set off on a vision quest. I had been separated (and eventually divorced) from my first wife for just over a year, and was embarking on what was to be (though I had no idea at the time) the endgame of my career as a United Methodist minister. The locale of my quest was to be Utah, more specifically the many National Parks that blanket much of that state. Given the state of my soul—I felt very much that I had been shut out of my marriage, and was beginning to feel that I was to be shut out of my vocation, as well—it seems (in retrospect) apt that I was shut out of most of those National Parks, as well, and had to find alternative wonders to explore. And why, you may ask, was I shut out of the parks? Actually, you probably don’t need to ask, because after eighteen years, the phenomenon is back: Republicans are holding the nation hostage to their demands, and the federal government has been shut down. I found plenty to gape at in Utah; it became, and remains...

There are times when ideals have to be seasoned with pragmatism. I mostly keep my hair short these days. Very short. I go in to Great Clips and ask for a clipper cut, 5 comb on the top, 4 on the sides. The reasons are twofold: with my hair this short, shampooing is a snap, and I can do it with any soapy liquid; and more importantly, I've concluded that my receding hairline has finally reached the point at which I just look better with a buzz cut. Any concessions to vanity in the form of longer hair soon takes on the aspect of a comb-over, and if allowed to get too long, can become Hitleresque. Better just to keep it short. Very short. This is in stark contrast with my youthful preference for hair that came down to my collar, and occasionally beyond. I was a frustrated hippie wannabe. I had a cousin whose ponytail went all the way down to his waist, but I never quite summoned up the gumption to go that far. Mostly I went for shaggy. But it's been years since I could pull ...

On the white board in the gym where I teach music I have written a set of four expectations, boiled down to just a few words: 1. One Voice (translation: in the big boomy space that is the gym, we can only have one person talking at a time, and I will decide who that person is). 2. Move--no running or jumping! (Yes, we meet in a gym, but when I'm there, it's the music room, and we will not be endangering each other by jumping for basketball nets or running during movement lessons.) 3. Permission (I will let students know when it's time to play an instrument. Until then, consider them off limits.) 4. Respect (Me, the instruments, each other). There's an after-school program that meets in the gym afternoons. A couple of mornings ago, I came in to set things up, and discovered one of the Boys & Girls Club leaders had added a couple of words to number 4 on my list, so that it now read: RESPECT MY AUTHORITY   I smiled for a moment, knowing exactly what ...