Church?
Jul 31st, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

So what is church? How do you define church? Or here’s one … where do you go to church? Jesus told Peter … “Upon this rock I will build my church.” I have to work through this every time I read it. First of all, Jesus was talking to a man, but calling him an inanimate object (rock). He renamed Simon, to Peter (or Rock). A very stable name for a very fickle guy (when you think of the cock crowing before dawn scenes). But Simon-now-called-Peter lived up to his name and became very stable, some would say zealous for Jesus. But … let’s move on. What did Jesus mean about church? How could he use a man as a cornerstone for a building? What was he talking about? What do we mean when we ask the question,”Where do you go to church?” … what should we mean?

Here’s a little bit about where I “go to church.” I go to the “coffee church” as one of my fellow church-goers called it this morning. We meet in a coffee shop. We’re rather informal. In fact, people get shocked looks on their faces when I wear a dress and ask me where I’m going that afternoon. “No where,” I tell them, “I just have these dresses, and nowhere else to wear them.” Most of the time we all wear jeans. We get antsy about technology tho. We make sure our techology is up to date and doesn’t intrude too much on the worship. We’re thinking about ways to include iChat or Podcasting for folks who can’t be with us that week.

Here’s another one of the important things we do. I just realized how important it is today. Every month we take one Sunday and devote it to service to the community. For the past year we’ve worked with an interfaith community service organization. But we’re in the midst of looking for a new organization to work with, so this month we decided to roll up our sleeves and clean the coffee shop we normally meet in. So we paid our normal rent for our normal time. And we cleaned. We rented carpet steamers. We bought cleaning supplies. We fanned out and we cleaned. I pulled a friend aside and we scrubbed a portion of floor that I personally believe has never seen soap before. My friend doesn’t think it has either. We scrubbed and talked … about nothing and about everything. We laughed in horror at the amount of grime on the floor. We learned new things about one another. We also learned that an oldest child (me) and an only child (him) should never be put together to clean anything because they keep going until long after they should stop.


It’s important to work together. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. But monks and nuns have something that us out here in the regular world don’t … they have time working together. Washing dishes is good. Painting is good. I found out that scrubbing a floor is good. But so is skewering kebabs for a meal. It doesn’t matter what the job is … putting your shoulder to some kind of grindstone side by side with others is good. It’s important to your own life, it’s important to their life and more it’s important to the life of your community … your “church.” Way, way more important than yet another sermon.

There Oughta Be a Law
Jul 29th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

So I’m usually a fairly laissez-faire kinda gal. Live and let live, I always say. I think we have too many laws. I really think that more people ought to be left to live out the consequences of their decisions, than be protected by laws. Really, being left to swing in the wind of their own foolishness ought to be protection enough … for the most part.

However, I’ve recently (as in this afternoon) discovered a segment of the population which has not been regulated enough. This would namely be … (imagine dramatic organ music here) The TOY INDUSTRY. I have decided that the toy industry has far too much latitude when inventing toys. First, there oughta be a law that forbids all toys that a parent cannot immediately recognize without the presence of their child. Second, there oughta be a law that all toys must have pieces that can picked up with adult fingers … not tweezers. Third, there oughta be a law that firmly regulates the kind of toys … in other words only one kind of Legos … not Legos AND MegaBlocks AND Duplos AND Transformers AND Bionicles … PUHLEEZ….

And if by now you’ve guessed that I spent a tedious afternoon on a perilous journey to the center of the floor of LightBoy’s bedroom … congratulations … you get a gold star!!

Poetry Thursday – Wilde
Jul 28th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas


La Mer
by Oscar Wilde

A white mist drifts across the shrouds,
A wild moon in this wintry sky
Gleams like an angry lion’s eye
Out of a mane of tawny clouds.

The muffled steersman at the wheel
Is but a shadow in the gloom; –
And in the throbbing engine-room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.

The shattered storm has left its trace
Upon this huge and heaving dome,
For the thin threads of yellow foam
Float on the waves like ravelled lace.

…. because we’re going to the ocean soon … but not soon enough!! Oh yeah ….

Denethor – Steward of Gondor
Jul 27th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

Have you seen the Lord of the Rings movies? Or at least the last one – The Return of the King? I’ve seen all three. All of them several times. I’ve read all three books. I read them first as a teen. Then again and again and again as an adult. I love the books … the books are better than the movies. But the movies are captivating. I was completely prepared to be disappointed with the movies. I’ve been disappointed with books that have been turned into movies all of my life. So in January of 2002 (I did NOT go to opening night) when I finally saw the first movie, I was HOOKED in a manner that I was completely unprepared for. The only other time I sat through a movie like that was when Gandhi came to the big screen in 1983 … but I’m dating myself.

So, I got hooked into this series and re-read the books, AGAIN. But, they are, after all good books. Tolkein spent most of his adult life writing them and the histories of the elves, and the dwarves and the hobbits and all of their languages. So … the books are good. The movies are good.

But here’s the thing in the last movie that particularly caught my attention. It was the series of scenes with Denethor the Steward of Gondor. He’s been asked by the remains of the Fellowship for assistance in their battle against the evil forces of Mordor. But all he can do is grieve the loss of his son, Boromir. He got so caught up in his own grief and, more importantly, the etiquette of his court that he could do nothing more than rage over the finer points of protocol. His end came rather harshly as he very nearly killed his comatose second son on a funeral pyre, sets himself ablaze, and hurls himself from a cliff. During all of these scenes, however, intense battles with evil are raging outside his very windows. Good people are dying and he is worried about who will serve the wine at dinner.

At the time that I saw this movie, I was involved in a conflict with the leadership of my former church. I saw in a very clear way that that pastor had many characteristics in common with Denethor. I’ve since come to see that many pastors and church leaders have characteristics in common with Denethor. They are so worried about who will serve the wine or grape juice at communion that they fail to see the people dying physically, emotionally and spiritually at the doorstep of their buildings. It’s very sad. Because we’ve forgotten what our mandate is to the people around us and are more worried about the buildings we serve than the people living around them.

I always wish I could write “they” here because I don’t want associate myself with **that** kind of Christian (in fact, I’ve found a church where we’re doing things a little differently). But the sad fact is that we are all one body in Christ. So I have to associate myself with them. My only hope is that in so doing, some of who I am and how I am being will rub off and circulate outwards …

My Home Town
Jul 26th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

So when I wrote the previous post it made me think of my home town. We used to walk to “the store” to get our mail. It was about a half a mile away. We would wave at every car that passed by. My home town makes Mayberry look like a bustling metropolis. Walton’s Mountain is more like where I grew up … altho we wore shoes … except in the summer. And it was a lot colder in the winter. Alot.

Have you ever …
Jul 26th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

… caught a stranger’s eye and given them a great, big smile? And then gauged their reaction? It’s a fun experiment. Of course, you have to be sort of careful when you go about this. I generally pick women. I find this to be easy on some days. Other days it’s harder. But the reaction is almost always the same. First, they smile back … for about a half a second. Then, they realize … oh, wait … they don’t know me. But why am I smiling at them? Some people just keep right on smiling back at me. Others get kind of wiggy and their eyes slide away. Some people just think I’m weird. Yeah … they’re probably right. And then, I wonder how Jesus did it.

On Why I Quilt – Part Two
Jul 26th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

I like to make things for people. I like thinking about the person as I’m making the thing. Of course in this case, it’s a quilt and it usually takes a long time. So I get to pray over the person too and do so quite thoroughly.

This is usually a joy. I especially enjoyed the time I made a quilt for my brother and his fiancee when he got married. I prayed over both of them and their marriage. I’ve made quilts for “my” kids that graduated from high school when I was in youth ministry at our church. I hope those quilts kept them a little warmer when they were away from home that first year.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t sit there, intoning the Holy Name of God with each stitch. I do not have a holy glow about me. I am not a monk. I am not holy. But while I work on the quilt, I think about the person I’m making it for, and I pray for them as the thoughts occur to me.

Sometimes this is hard. Right now, for instance, I’m working on a quilt for an aquaintance/friend – the man we bought our house from. My guild makes quilts for soldiers who have lost limbs in the war in Iraq and who are recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital. The man we bought our house from (and who also goes to our former church) was serving in Iraq and lost his lower leg and foot in Iraq on Memorial Day weekend this year. So the ladies in my guild made the blocks, my friend and I put them together and now I’m doing the quilting … that is making it into a quilt. And I’m struggling with this quilt. I’m struggling with the prayer. I know he will like the quilt … I know it will be meaningful for him. But it’s breaking my heart.

This happened once before. I started out making a lap quilt for my uncle who had been put in a nursing home with Parkinson’s Disease. But he died before I could finish it. So I made it bigger and gave it to our local police department so they would have it to give to a child who was being separated from his or her parents in a stressful situation. It was hard making the quilt when it was going to my uncle … because it made me cry, because I missed my real uncle so much. I did do a lot of grieving tho. But when I was making it to give to a stranger, it was easier somehow and I could pray more and it didn’t hurt so badly.

Regrets
Jul 25th, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

I like getting those invitations that end with the line: “Regrets Only.” I think that’s sort of funny. I think you should tell your hosts whether or not you plan to attend the event. I don’t think you should only send “Regrets.” It also always reminds me of me when I was a teenager.

Back then, it was my goal to live my life in such a way that I would never have any regrets. There were a few adults that I let in on this goal. They nodded and tried not to smirk. I couldn’t understand why they tried so hard not to smirk, after all … I thought, it was a good goal, why smirk? Well, now that I’m an adult, I guess I can understand that desire to smirk. In fact, I find myself trying not to smirk at the memory of my-teenage-self. And … well … I have some regrets now and I’m wondering where to send them.

On Why I Quilt – Part One
Jul 23rd, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

I also like to quilt (gasp) … hence my membership in a “quilt” guild. So … “SOMETIMES” I actually sit at my sewing machine and sew. Quilting is the process of taking large pieces of fabric, cutting it into lots of little bitty pieces of fabric, so that I can sew them back into much larger pieces of fabric again. Sometimes I think it’s a fruitless hobby. But then I look in my quilting closet and see all of my UFO’s (that’s UnFinished Objects) stacked in their plastic shoeboxes.

Quilting is also my homage to my foremothers. To all the work they did to make my life possible. I once read a book called A Midwife’s Tale it’s the recounting of the journal of a woman who lived on the coast of southern Maine around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. Not surprisingly, she was a midwife. What amazed me about this book was how separate the women’s lives were from the men’s. So separate that they really had a separate economy going. It’s an amazing book and an amazing look into the lives of how people scrabbled out an existence on the edge of so-called civilization at the time. It’s quite possible that this lady helped deliver some of my ancestors into the world … which is kind of funny (wierd) to think about.

So when I quilt … cut big pieces of fabric into little pieces, in order to sew them back into big pieces again … somehow it connects me with those ladies who have gone before me in time; with my grandmother for certain because sometimes I use her sewing machine that she gave me when she died. But with my great grandmothers and my aunts and their sisters, and with the slaves who slipped away from plantations and followed the quilt signals on the Underground Railroad, and with the women who left everything they knew and walked across this whole continent to find something new. It connects me across time and miles and helps me to connect those women with my daughter too and someday (I hope) to connect them with her daughter as well. For some reason what those women did is very important to me … they made meals, and washed clothes, and dreamed dreams so their children could grow up to be just a little better than they were. It’s important … and that’s one of the reasons quilting is so important to me.

Too Long
Jul 23rd, 2005 by aBhantiarna Solas

Apparently it’s been too long since I’ve put something new up. A friend wrote last night and told me that all Emily Dickinson poems can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I don’t even dare test that theory. It might lead me down some very bad paths.

We did something last night that we haven’t done in too long. We gathered our “community group” together for dinner. Well … we were missing one member, but it was a last minute thing, and she had previous plans, and it was quite surprising that we got such a good turnout at the last minute like that anyway. We haven’t gathered in about 4 months. There’s been a baby born in that time. He is 3 months old now, and very cute. His parents are very much in love with him … which is good. We all fell in love with him too. That is also good. It’s good for children to grow up in a community of lots of other grown-ups and other children too.

Next month we’ll go north. It’s been too long since we’ve been north. I’m looking forward to the cooler temperatures and the cooler spirits up there. I feel more at home in the lands and peoples where I grew up. That should come as no surprise. We’re going to spend 10 days in the land of the rising sun … literally … the town where the sun rises first on the continental U.S. It also happens to be the town where my great-grandfather was born. My great,great, great, great grandfather several times removed settled the town originally as a land grant in return for his service in the Revolutionary War. So my roots there run deep. I’m really going for the blueberries and lobsters tho. It’s been too long.

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