Midlife Meditation

I have now updated this post to include photographs I took of the eclipse. There are not as many of them as I remember taking, but at least one of them--my friend Bruce with a box on his head--is well worth taking a second look at this. And the eclipse isn't bad, either!   * * * * * The sky did not look promising that morning. There were a busload of us sleeping on the gymnasium floor of Goldendale High School. It was a field trip combining Philomath High TAG students and my senior physics class. We rode up to Goldendale, Washington, on February 25, stopping at the Bonneville Dam to take the tour of the massive turbine room and watch a barge pass through the lock. Those were awesome sights, but what we were really there for was to come early the next morning. I had a cold, and slept even worse on that floor than I normally would have, but I was awake at 6 like everyone else. I can't remember what we had for breakfast. We were all outside by 7:00, filling the staging ar...

I am underemployed. This is not news to most of you. I teach public school music, which has fallen on hard times in this economic downturn. Four years ago I was laid off. I had no income but unemployment for a year. For the next year, I worked 0.1 time--yes, that's four hours a week--teaching band. For the last two years, I've been a 0.5 time band and choir director. Things are looking better for my profession now, and the day may come soon that finds me working at or near full time. Meanwhile I've got private students and performance income to fill the gap. Thirty-four years ago, I decided to attend Willamette University, launching myself on this trajectory. This week, two headlines got me thinking about the other side of that decision. I had narrowed my search to two colleges: Willamette and the University of Oregon. Willamette was a comfortable choice, a good solid Methodist choice. I'd been on campus for a variety of Methodist events over the years, as well a...

There are a very few books I remember from my pre-reading days, books I'm sure my parents read to me repeatedly. The Bunny Book (written by Patricia Scarry, illustrated by Richard Scarry) was my favorite. It's a simple story with a surprise ending. There's some kind of bunny family reunion going on. It begins with a baby bunny being tossed in the air by his father, who speculates with his mother about what the baby bunny will be when he grows up. So do the baby's siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and maybe a few other friends and relations. They come up with the answers one would expect: a farmer bunny, a police bunny, a firefighter bunny. I can't remember all of those guesses because, in the end, they're wrong. The baby bunny knows exactly what he will be when he grows up: a daddy bunny. And that, I knew from my first memory of that book, is what I wanted to be. No, not a bunny; a daddy. I would love and nurture my children, playing with them, takin...

"The church is a whore, but she's my mother." --Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, possibly St. Augustine, et al "The church is full of hypocrites." --Most "spiritual but not religious" people I know explaining why they don't go to church. The best answer to the "full of hypocrites" excuse is this one, which I heard from a professor at my seminary: "If you needed care, would you stay away from a hospital because it was full of sick people?" Ideally, church ought to be the place people go to be cured of their hypocrisy, to be confronted with the prophetic Word that strips them of their pride and exposes them to the truth of their misdeeds. If you've been to church lately, you probably haven't experienced much prophecy. There may have been some social consciousness raising, depending on which denomination you attend. But there was likely--especially if you attend a large church, regardless of its flavor--a fair amount ...

  "The stranger who comes home does not make himself at home but makes home strange." --Marion Zimmer Bradley It's an old theme in literature: a young person leaves home to sojourn in other parts of the world or, if it's science fiction, on another planet, another star system, perhaps a different time or dimension. After a prolonged absence, the protagonist returns, transformed by the experience. Not only is he or she a different person, but through those differences, the home town or planet is also changed. I left America in 1988 to be a student pastor in Cheadle, Cheshire, a suburb of Manchester, England. I went with my wife, and while we were there, we had a child, Sarah, who will forever carry the distinction of an irregular birth certificate. (And no, she does not have dual citizenship; that possibility was shut down by the British a few years earlier to keep foreigners from having babies in Britain just so they could come back and take advantage of Nation...

My daughter Sarah in the window of an English castle, sometime in 1990. "There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign." --Robert Louis Stevenson In 1988, I became an expatriate. It was a temporary condition. I traveled to England with my wife Brenda for a one-year "post-internship," to gain a year's experience serving a British church. Our first child, Sarah, was born there, free of charge thanks to the fantastic National Health Service. We were supposed to return to America after one year, but then serendipity struck: the pastor who was to take our place (we were in an interim appointment) resigned from the ministry just a month before our departure date. We volunteered to stay another year, and what had been a students-abroad experience became a true chapter in our lives, probably the happiest time in our eight-year marriage, and a touchstone for judging every subsequent event in my life. Britain was a whimsically foreign land ...

Three umpires met for a drink. The first was a rookie, the second was in the middle of his career, and the third had been calling games for forty years. They chewed the fat for awhile, telling stories about their favorite moments behind the plate. After awhile the topic shifted to calling balls and strikes. The first umpire, confident in the accuracy of his eye, said, "There's balls and there's strikes, and I call them like they is." The second umpire, knowing from experience that his perception was occasionally off, said, "You're partly right, there's balls and there's strikes, but I call 'em like I see 'em." The third umpire chuckled, sipped his whiskey, and said, "You're both wrong. There's balls and there's strikes, but they ain't nothin' until I call 'em." I first heard this story 25 years ago, as part of a lecture series at the University of Manchester by Schubert M. Ogden. The title of ...