We had a primer one evening a couple of months ago on the difference between having a missional outlook and a consumerist attitude.

LightHusband, LightBoy and I had dinner out. LightGirl was at the rink and we had shopping to do in preparation for LightBoy’s long delayed birthday party. We went to a restaurant that is one step up from fast food and had salads. It was good and fairly fast. You know what you’re in for at these chains. The food, drink and service are fairly predictable and mediocre. The wait staff are friendly, but not too, and efficient, but not too. We’ve discovered that direct eye contact works miracles because it is, apparently, unanticipated. A smile and a friendly demeanor will also ensure wonderful service. Simply adding “please” and “thank you” to your order and being courteous as you deliver it, is grounds for special treatment. Which leads me to wonder what sort of behavior the wait staff must endure on regular basis.

Over the last year or two LightHusband and I have experienced a gradual shift in our attitude when we enter a restaurant. It’s rather difficult to explain. But we’re there to eat a meal. We’re not there to purchase an experience. There is a difference there. In that way, we’re sort of partners with the wait staff. Well … not partners. But the wait staff are not our subordinates to be sent at our beck and call. Unless they are pointedly not doing their job, they are not responsible for our experience that meal. We read the menu, we ask questions, we order, we eat our food, leave a decent (20-25%+) tip and leave. We believe in treating the staff as human beings who are doing a difficult job and need to be paid a reasonable wage. Since that wage is not included in the price of our food, we add it in at the end.

On the night in question, we had an example of the consumerist attitude. Another family came in and sat near us. They weren’t particularly loud or obnoxious. They seemed to treat the wait staff decently. But like the princess sleeping on a pea, none of the food was quite good enough. The wife sent her frozen drink back twice because “it’s not frozen enough.” As her husband explained, “She likes her frozen drinks to be … you know … really frozen.” and he waved his hands as if that explained it. Huh? The drink looked frozen to me. So did the second one. But apparently she meant frozen as in an iceberg. Undrinkable. Because these just were not acceptable to her. They sent back a couple of other items as well. There was not much at this restaurant that was satisfactory to them that evening. They were polite about it; just demanding, or perhaps persnickety is a better word.

As we left and went on our way. I thought about the difference between our two attitudes. It is possible that the other family had had a bad day and this was not their normal behavior in a restaurant. But this is normal behavior for far too many families. I had to sit silently as I was with a family when they sent a plate of spaghetti back because it had “green stuff” on it (dusted with oregano or parsley) and their 9 year old “… won’t eat it like this.” Interestingly the 9 year old never said a word. It was the parents who freaked out. It never occurred to them to just scrape the offending “green stuff” off and participate with the staff in the dinner. Or give their 9 year old the ability to own his own experience.

So, I’m coming to learn that having a missional outlook embodies an entirely different attitude about being out in the world. It means being involved with the people I come into contact with, even if only superficially. This is no stretch and I’d hope all of us were taught by moms or grandmothers or someone important, to treat others as we wish to be treated. But I think it’s very easy to forget that there are real people turning the cogs of efficiency in our big department stores and chain restaurants. Real people with families and hopes and dreams … just like mine.

It’s been brought to my attention, both privately and publicly, that there are some things I ‘need’ to take care of here at my blog. I don’t think I ‘need’ to … but I’m going to, in order to point out the magnitude of how ridiculous this is to those who have attempted to make the point.

I have left my my former faith community. I did so several months ago. I did so when it became very clear to me that there were irreconcilable differences between members of the leadership and I and my husband. We are now gone. There are no links or any other connections here between me and my former faith community (or CLB). I have many, many reasons for that. If members of my CLB read this blog, they are certain to read things about their leadership which will make them very uncomfortable. The leadership of my CLB caused me quite a bit of pain and this is the place where I write about that. I make no apologies for that. I have always written about the things that bring me both joy and pain on this blog. Now is no different. It is a source of enormous grief to me that a place that was once a place of great joy and sustenance is now a place of great pain and, yes, I write and process that here.

I invite conversation in my comments section. However, that conversation is limited to the content of my writing. I welcome agreement and disagreement philosophically, theologically, etc. In the future, I will summarily delete comments which are meant to chastise the imagined “intent” of my writing. No one … but God and I … knows what I intend when I write a piece. Any of you who imagine that you also “know” my intent are engaging in hubris of the worst sort. If you should then decide to chastise me for that imagined intent, I will delete the comment. No one has editorial privileges here but me. I own this site, I pay for the web hosting fees and for the domain name. Therefore, I decide the content.

Reading this blog does not make you my friend. It does not engage you in a relationship with me. Most of my readers understand that. Some, unfortunately, need to be reminded of this. I no longer have “peeps” … anywhere. I had to give that up … see paragraph 2. The few people I do engage in relationship with, I talk to outside of the blog forum (e.g. e-mails and phone). Reading this blog engages you in a very one-sided view of my life. The view that I decide to let you in on.

Last, I considered adding category called RAYOR (Read At Your Own Risk). I could categorize any posts which may offend those of you with overly sensitive eyes as RAYOR. Then you could shield yourselves from offensive content while enabling yourselves to continue your voyeuristic peek into my life. How utterly ludicrous. I will no more do that than I will fly to the moon. You must decide for yourself, just like all the other adults on the internet, what is appropriate to read and what isn’t. And how you will process it and live with what you’ve read. That is your responsibility … not mine. It is an unfortunate truth that my experience is not unique. So if you are reading Emerging Grace or Brother Maynard or similar blogs as they write about their CLBs and finding a grain of truth there, unfortunately, I have discovered the same ugly beast alive and well in my former faith community. To deny that is to deny the truth of my experience. I tried that … it didn’t work for me.

If I sound angry, that might be because … I am. I am angry because I was forced to leave a community and friends I loved more than any place and people I ever loved. I loved those people, all of them even the bully almost more than my family and I had to leave in order to preserve the community and my family. So, I am angry that leaving was somehow not enough. For some reason it is expected that I maintain utter silence, virtue and fidelity to that community which betrayed me. I won’t do that. I am not going to keep those secrets anymore … I won’t buy anyone’s salvation with my silence. In the words of Anne Lamott: “If people don’t want you to write about them, they ought to behave a lot better.” Make no mistake about it … this is a line in the sand and I intend it to be such. If you choose to cross it, you do so at your own risk. If members of my CLB continue to read my blog after this point, you will read things that will make you uncomfortable. You may or may not speculate as to my intent, but you may not engage in that speculation on this blog. Get your own blog for that and I won’t read it. You have no business delving into my affairs at that level.

I count myself among the lucky ones. The lucky few. When I was young, certainly this was not on our agenda. It was not going to be our heritage. This became ours rather later in my life. I’m speaking of our summer home on the lake.

We call it “camp.” This is somewhat of a misnomer. When I speak of camp, as in, “We’re going to camp,” most people think of a camp with bunk houses and mess hall and that sort of thing. Not so much. This is a turn of the last century Victorian summer cottage. There are five bedrooms and we’re right on the waters of Lake Champlain in Vermont. A few 100 feet from our front porch lie the remains of the old concrete dock where the Ticonderoga steam paddlewheeler used to dock. This boat brought people and goods from New York City to the people who summered here. It was quite fashionable back in the day for the wealthy and upper-middle class of the cities to have summer homes on lakes. The men would send their families to those homes for the summer. Often they also sent the wait staff as well. The men would join them for weekends and a week or two of vacation. Hence the necessity of the Ticonderoga and its sister ship the Chateaugay … they ferried men from the end of the railroad that had brought them up from the city to the summer homes on the lake for vacations and weekends, then back to the city at the end of each stay. Women and children stayed for the whole summer. The camps stayed in families for generations, or were given to new families. Each point has it’s own community and character or “feeling.”

It’s interesting being here. There’s a sense of community here that is permeable. Permanent. A sense of permanence that is from another time. We have traditions here that are silly and timeless, but tolerated. The roots here run deep. We come back summer after summer for truncated friendships that last for years.

It’s a funny place too. There is something in the air here. In the photo above, the dock is at the very tip of our point. If you round the point by foot you can’t get very far as the rocks rise high in the air out of the water. But right there, just before the cliffs begin, at the waters edge there is a clear spot. There is a large rock just off the shoreline and across the lake is Split Rock in New York. If you sit very still and quietly you can begin to sense the other world shimmering just over the horizon. You can hear it thrumming in your ears. It is a place where the glass clears briefly. I get the sense sometimes that it is an ancient passage. I wonder if it is because the Abenaki tribe used this spot for their rituals, or did the Abenaki get this sense as well and thus choose the spot?

These camps and our rituals here were established in era when men (humans) gazed into the future triumphantly. It was only a matter of time and trial before the key to utopia was found. The utopian vision of human perfection was fresh, the dream was real and realizable. I wonder sometimes if these little communities were established as a step towards achieving utopia … achieving perfection … at least for a little piece of time. Maybe only during the summer.

It has been a hallmark of the modern era to search for perfection. We have reached for the skies in our buildings, modes of transportation, and even discovery. We have dug down deep into the cellular and molecular level to find medical perfection. Perfect bodies can be sculpted with knives and silicon and other bits. Perfect minds can be created with medication. Perfectly comfortable environments can be created to achieve the desired mood … Do we want people to shop? Create this temperature, this music, that atmosphere. Do we want them to work? Then this temperature, that music, this atmosphere. Whatever we want from people, we have the ability to manufacture the perfect place … utopia. We have even achieved the ability to extend life beyond the time when perhaps it is wise … now we no longer know when death occurs in many cases. Or when it should. We argue over when life begins … and when it ends. May we live forever. Utopia.

I wonder if we’re coming to the beginning of the end of that era. If we are beginning to realize the limits of our human fallibility. The new so-called post-modern era may be the beginning the pendulum swinging back. It is a sea change of how the world works. If we begin to understand that all of life here on earth is not ultimately perfectible, how do we live? That basic assumption has guided western thought for the past 350 years. Search yourself. Think hard about how go about each day and how you think about the future … you will find that your assumptions are that your life is going to slowly but surely get better. We assume that it is a “rule” that each succeeding generation should “do better” than it’s parents. These are utopian ideas at their core. The idea that heaven can be achieved here, without God.

So, as I sit on the porch of this nearly 100 year old cottage, and reflect on the people who built it. I think about them and their dreams. Why they built this place, what they were escaping. Some of the things they were escaping were the same as I … the city heat and stink, cramped space and loud noise. Others are different and yet the same. They came here to get fresh air and so do I. Yet I come here to feel the fresh air, not canned, perfect air. They came here to achieve a little utopia and I come here to escape the modern version. I come here to understand, again, the limits of our human hands and feel, once again, the power of the elements on my skin. And I marvel at how a place from the past can be a bridge to the future. A future that will likely be stripped of utopian thinking, but will be all the more livable because of it.

This month’s SynchroBlog is a series of discussions on Utopian ideas. As is a perfect Utopian concept, we have not mandated the topic on Utopia to be specific to any one concept, or dogma. So please … follow the links to check out what ma peeps’s writ’n ’bout:

Steve Hayes at Notes from the Underground
John Morehead at John Morehead’s Musings
Nudity, Innocence, and Christian Distopia at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Utopia Today: Living Above Consumerism at Be the Revolution
Nowhere Will Be Here at Igneous Quill
A This-Worldly Faith at Elizaphanian
The Ostrich and the Utopian Myth at Decompressing Faith
Being Content in the Present at One Hand Clapping
Eternity in their Hearts by Tim Abbott
Relationship – The catch-22 of the Internet Utopia at Jeremiah’s Blog
U-topia or My-topia? at On Earth as in Heaven
A SecondLife Utopia at Mike’s Musings
Mrs. Brown and the Kingdom of God at Eternal Echoes

… but I used it for good!

Imagine my dismay when I saw this in the space where my blogroll used to be …

… as I was scrolling down through my blog one day last month. It was horrifying. Not so much in a real gut-wrenching “your daughter has just been attacked” kind of way, but more in the “oh no … I don’t know what to do now” kind of way. So I did the kind of thing I’m really good at … I ignored it and hoped it would go away all by itself. But it didn’t.

It mocked me every time I scrolled down to check. It laughed in my face and giggled at my incompetence. Waggled its ears at my consternation. Pheh. So I took all the wind out of its sails and stopped checking. Hah! That’ll fix it’s wagon … that dreadful code.

I mulled it over and thought for a while. Then I decided to take my links (blogroll) out of my sidebar altogether. I’ve moved them you see to their own page. I called the page, Beacon Hills after the mountain top signal fires in the Lord of the Rings. It seems fitting, given the name of my blog. Then I thought, “I’d love to have a dynamic blogroll. I wonder how hard that would be.” So I did a Google search. I found a way to hitch up my GoogleReader to a widget in my sidebar (HT to ZeroBoss) . So the links that are listed on Beacon Hills are providing the sustenance for the posts listed in my sidebar as “beacon hills” via sonja. It’s so Web 2.0 I can hardly stand myself. You probably can’t stand me either 😉

Sunday afternoon I left LightGirl on the campus of Penn State University amidst hoards of other teens, all there for summer sports camps. There were boys there for wrestling, football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, swimming and etc. There were girls there for ice hockey, basketball, gymnastics, figure skating, softball, swimming and etc. Hoards.

I left her with a few of her teammates. They were standing outside of their dorm caught somewhere in between deer in the headlights and small children who had spied a fresh plate of cookies. They uncertain of which world to occupy, I turned and walked to the car certain that they would choose rightly. The ensuing phone calls have done nothing to disabuse me of this notion. She is, indeed, thriving.

In the meantime, LightBoy is attending a hockey camp of his own here at our home rink and is having a ball. I have no idea whether or not he is learning anything, but he is coming home tired and smelly so he is, in the least, active all day long.

It’s been an odd week. I came home on Sunday to shocking news. A friend’s husband had committed suicide back in December and my mother sent the obituary. Her children and my children play every summer up at camp in Vermont. She and I spend a good deal of time on each other’s porches dilly-dallying and chatting about everything and nothing. We look forward to each other’s company each year. We look forward to our families’ spending time together. But now there will be a hole ripped in her family and a hole in each of our hearts where her husband’s laugh used to be.

So much to process.

“Pink cards and flowers on your window,
The sun will set for you
Your friends all plead for you to stay.

Sometimes beginnings aren’t so simple.
And the shadow of the day
Sometimes goodbye’s the only way.

Will embrace the world in gray
And the sun will set for you,

The sun will set for you.
And the sun will set for you
And the shadow of the day,

Will embrace the world in grey,

And the sun will set for you.”
Shadow of the Day (by Linkin Park)

My daughter, known here as LightGirl, is amazingly perceptive about other people.  She is especially perceptive about me.  She picks up on my cues when I think I have them deeply hidden.  And they are hidden … from most people.  But she can see them.  She’ll look me straight in the eye and ask a quiet question that cuts straight to the bone.  It never hurts, but it’s clean.

Yesterday, she walked in and asked, apropos of nothing, “Mom, are we ever going to start going to church again?”  She looked a bit wistful.  I asked if she had a particular church in mind.  No.  I asked if she missed church.  Not really.  “But,” she said, “I really think you miss it a lot.”

We got interrupted at that point.  But I started thinking.  Do I miss church?  What do I miss?  We haven’t attended a Sunday worship service since early March.  What is church?

I think the thing I long for the most is communion or Eucharist.  I know that there’s an Episcopal church right up the street that I could attend tomorrow and take Eucharist there.  But that’s not the same.  That’s akin to prostitution.  I want to serve and be served the body and bread amongst a circle of community.  Where the liturgy calls down Spirit among us and we wait upon It.  I’m inherently greedy … and I want communion of heart and soul with God and with my friends.  I want it all.  That’s what I long for.

Sunday was a huge let down. And we needed it. LightBoy’s party is over, capped off by a win in their roller hockey championship game. The Red Devils are now the Spring 2007 Champions. On the other hand, LightGirl’s team didn’t win one game this season. It was somewhat humiliating for them, but they learned so much technique, it was worth it. They all know it and feel good about it.

With little sleep, much energy put into planning and preparation for the previous couple of days, and little sleep the previous night, we all needed a low afternoon. We had one and it was made more relaxing by the rain we finally had after the drought that has been dogging the area. So, after a nice nap and some coffee I turned on the television to find something light and relatively disengaging to watch as I worked on a quilt. Gunsmoke fit the bill. So, with the LightChildren happily ensconced in front of their own television sets, I turned on Gunsmoke, a happy memory from my childhood. My sewing area is in our family room, so I can sew and watch at the same time. Or, really, sew and listen with an occasional glance at the screen for orientation.

It was a two-parter yesterday afternoon. Island In the Desert. The guest star was Strother Martin playing “Ben Snow” a half-crazed hermit in the middle of the desert who saved Festus from certain death. Here is the plot summary for parts 1 and 2 from IMDb:

Part 1 – Matt and Festus bring a particularly notorious killer into a town on the edge of a desert, where the sheriff cheerfully informs the killer that “tomorrow we start working on the gallows.” The sheriff spoke too soon: the killer gets the drop on him, murders him and flees into the desert. Festus, who stayed behind to borrow a new mule, goes in pursuit but is bushwhacked in his own right. Festus, however, is rescued by Ben Snow, a hermit who was a gold miner many years earlier — only to be shot in the leg and left for dead by his partner. Snow is half-crazed (“I’d even make friends with a snake!”) — but he actually found his gold mine, a spring which provides him with water and shelter and food from desert animals. He’s panned the spring incessantly and racked up a huge cache of gold dust. Snow might be able to get out of the desert (he’s tried before and left water caches as far as he could walk), but he’s so bent out of shape that he refuses to go without the gold — many dozen pounds of it. So he steals Festus’s weapons and handcuffs, turns them against them and makes Festus into his “pack mule.” When Festus asks why, Snow explains that he will buy up the town where his ex-partner fled and make life a living hell for the man. He also warns Festus that if he collapses, “I’ll shoot you like a mule gone lame!” With all the cards stacked against him, Festus sets out carrying the huge sacks of gold, while Snow follows in his tracks under the blazing sun. Written by Peter Harris

Part 2 – Festus is forced to pack gold dust across the desert, hoping to get to a town on the other end before his and Ben Snow’s water supply runs out. Matt and Newly, having been alerted by telegram, try to catch up to them. When Festus spots the tracks of the killer who also wounded him, he simply turns around and goes after the killer. Snow has a Hobson’s choice of shooting Festus and trying to make it out alone (which he knows he can’t do) or go along and pick up the convict. They find him, strap half the gold to his back, and force him to come along to face a noose at the end of the journey. A series of double-crosses follow, leaving Festus and Snow in the direst of straits. Written by Peter Harris

It is at this point, that the story gets interesting. The convict double crosses both Festus and Ben, discovers the gold, breaks all the water carriers and almost sets out for Ten Springs on his own. But not before he lays eyes on the last pack. In that pack is Ben’s pet rattler who strikes the convict’s neck and kills him. He dies with Ben’s voice screeching, “Greed’s what got you bit, boy. Pure greed!” in his ears. Festus and Ben must now make it to Ten Springs with no water. And somehow, because this is Hollywood and Festus is one of the stars of the show, they do get there. Along the way the relationship between Ben and Festus changes from confrontational to friendship.

On the hill overlooking the town Ben looked down and saw it in all it’s glory. People moving about, the saloon was in full swing. Lights were in all the buildings. It was a thriving town with much going on. Festus looked down and saw … tumbleweeds; heard wind whistling through the broken glass of a town long since abandoned. Ben grinned wide and strode down the hill into the town certain that he was to receive a rich man’s welcome. Festus followed, uncertain about his role in breaking his friend’s dream. They wandered through the town, Festus literally dying for a drink and Ben literally dying to enact his revenge until they came to the town graveyard. There they found the grave of the ex-partner (Sam Bristow) and the death date on it read 1859. Ben turned to Festus and asked what year it was now. And Festus replied that it was now 1875, “… and you’ve been carryin’ a grudge against a man who’s been dead all these years.” He walked away shaking his head. This information literally broke Sam’s heart. He cracked and shattered there at that graveside. He broke sack after sack of gold over the headstone, sobbing out his anger and grief. The gold was no longer of any use to him, it’s only value to him was to enact his carefully plotted revenge. Later, after Matt and Newly had rescued Festus, the three of them found him there, surrounded by gold dust. Dead. In losing his goal he had lost his will to live.

I was thinking about that later that evening when I read John Smulo’s most recent post about Churchless Faith. The post hit a nerve with me. Since early March this year, I count myself among the churchless faithful. I tried to comment on John’s post, but it didn’t go well. So I deleted the comment. I tried again in the morning and deleted it again. Then we were out and about and I found myself thinking more deeply about Ben Snow and his journey in terms of community. I began to put some pieces together and started to see some shadows emerging. These thoughts were too long to be a comment on his blog, so I did this post.

I found myself being a little too empathetic with Ben Snow this time I watched this episode. I’ve seen it before and understood that he had been driven sort of insane by his solitude. This time however, I began to empathize with his hurt and disbelief that a friend and partner could cause such pain and leave him bloody and alone in a desert. He did not know which way to turn or how to get out of the desert. Alone he was fed and watered in his oasis. That is how some of us are left after our dealings with “church.” Alone, we are fed and watered in our oasis with God, but we have no idea how to get out of the desert. On the other hand, remaining alone for too long creates a danger that we will begin to go slightly insane. Without the assistance and comfort of a community, how can we know where our food and water is coming from? How can we be assured that we are not in danger of focussing too much on revenge, or even that we need to focus on forgiveness when the time is right? Had Ben Snow been in a community he might have been able to move away from the pain and turn his mind away from his injuries. He had nothing else to do by himself but focus on how he’d been hurt. Alone that is what many of us do. In community with others, we have other things to focus on while our minds begin to heal. This is not to say we bury it or stuff the pain, but it is to say that we stop picking at the wound and allow it time to scab over and grow new skin. That we do not allow the eagles to come fresh each day and eat at our livers again.

So for me, I do not know what this new thought will bring with it. I know that I will need to be moving in the direction of community again. I also know that the time is not yet ripe. I also know that although I empathized with Ben Snow, I know to be wary of him too and that is a good thing. I have no desire to be lost and alone in the desert. Once this passes (and it will), my desire will be for community and I will get there soon.

I’ve been reading a book on parenting called Parenting Teens with Love and Logic. Actually, I’m pretty much finished with it now. It’s quite good. It’s really a guide to help parents understand how they can gradually put more and more responsibility for a teen’s behavior onto that teen. It’s a delicate balance and more difficult to achieve than you might think. It is difficult to love someone and yet allow them to accept painful consequences for bad decisions. This is difficult to even think about. But it’s been on my mind lately as I’ve had some conversations with LightGirl about issues like drinking and sex outside of marriage. These are issues that I have choices to make as I talk to her about them. I can make rules and forbid her from doing them. Of course, drinking alcohol is also illegal until she is a certain age. The problem is that when I make those rules, I put both of us in a really bad place. I put her in a place where she feels as though she must test the water and the boundaries I have set. I put myself in a place where I must eternally police those boundaries and that water. It’s bad for both of us. And it does nothing to nurture or grow our relationship.

In the last day or so, John Smulo posted about a recent Resolution passed by the Southern Baptist Convention concerning the use of alcohol by their members. I got to thinking about the resolution in light of the book I’ve just read on parenting. There are many styles of parenting. And there are many styles of living in community together. And there are many styles of relating to God. But somehow I think these are all intertwined with one another. I am coming to believe that the way we parent and look to parents is a reflection of how we interact with God and how we look to God.

For me, I believe that whether or not one drinks alcohol is a matter of personal preference. The consequences will be born by that person. God is going to love me no matter what, but it’s going to be painful for him to watch me go through that hangover. In the same way, if LightGirl chooses to drink when it’s not in her best interests, it’s going to make me very sad. It will be painful for me to watch her bear whatever the consequences are of that choice, but I will still love her. I’m going to give her lots of information, tools, and support to make good decisions. But they are ultimately her decisions … because it is ultimately her life, not mine. But she and I are in loving community with one another. We talk, we wrestle with these decisions. She knows I love her and have her best interests at heart and she has mine.

So, I wonder sometimes, about institutions and entities who feel that more rules will help these sorts of issues. I’ve come to believe that rules are put in place when community is lacking. Rules must be established when people feel they can no longer speak to one another face to face. Regulations and resolutions must be passed because it is no longer individuals who count but standards which must be upheld. Where there are laws, there does not need to be community, there only needs to be a police force … and life becomes more and more stark.

A very long time ago, in what seems as though it must have been another lifetime, I taught a womans Adult Christian Education Class at our CLB1. I taught on the books of Ruth and Esther. I began my planning with a reading of the stories in the Bible, but quickly knew that I needed some supporting material. I got some light reading (Lucado, Wiersbe, etc.) on my own, but asked our youth pastor/friend/mentor for some recommendations. He gave me the hard stuff. The Word Biblical Commentary, volume 9 by Frederic W. Bush. Whew … that’ll make your hair curl.

Thus began my first encounter with Biblical Hebrew. I skipped over a lot of it. At first. But then I began stumbling through the parts that dealt with the verbs and the tenses … and it seemed unintelligible. And I hated it. It was a discipline. But slowly it began to make a certain amount of sense to me. And I began to understand the book of Ruth at a whole other level that had never been available to me before. This was a story that I have always loved. It is a beautiful romance tucked in the midst of ashes and but now it has been cut and polished for me like a raw jewel.

As I fought my way through studying and presenting this material to my class, I grew to love Ruth even more. I also learned quite a bit about some of the traditions that have grown up around the story in the intervening several thousand years since it happened. I learned that the megillah (or scroll) of Ruth is read during the Feast of Pentecost or First Fruits. This is the Feast which celebrates the harvest and which celebrates the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai to the Hebrews. It is the feast which commemorates God making a commitment to live in community with His people forever.

So, why, might you ask, is this book about a foreign girl coming to Israel read during this feast? Well … the answer lies in many places. The first lies in Ruth’s declaration to Naomi early on in the story, “Where ever you go, I will go. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God Your land will be my land.” She gives up everything about herself, to become a nobody in a strange land and take care of her mother-in-law. It is a gorgeous picture of love in the face of adversity. It is also a foreshadowing of who Jesus is and who He calls us to be and it sets up the story to present to us the concept of chesed.

Chesed is a Hebrew word for which there is no precise English translation. The best we can come up with is covenental loyalty in the context of merciful lovingkindness … which is, to say … a mouthful! It is an aspect of God for which we do not have a very good lens. But we do have the book of Ruth, which is replete with pictures of what chesed looks and acts like. Chesed is found in Ruth’s declaration to Naomi in Ruth 1:15-16; then when Ruth follows through on that declaration we see chesed in action. Chesed is found in Boaz’s loving care and commitment to Ruth and Naomi throughout the harvest season and in the fact that he would chose Ruth (a Moabite) and work to marry her, when he might have passed her off on to another relative or ignored her altogether.

So, indeed this is a fitting story to tell on the anniversary each year that we celebrate the giving of the Ten Commandments. It is about more than the Commandments. It’s about God and His desire to live in community with us. He limited himself, and gave of himself in order to hang with us.

Here is the cool thing about Shavuot. The Jewish community celebrates this as a commemoration of the giving of the covenant; the beginning of their relationship with God. The Christian community also celebrates Pentecost and we both use the same name. We celebrate this day as a commemoration of the giving of the new covenant; the Holy Spirit. On Sinai we were given the Law, but after the crucifixion and resurrection, on the same day we were given the Holy Spirit to continue our redemptive, covenental, merciful relationship with God.

The Holy Spirit Comes at Pentecost

1When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

5Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. 7Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? 8Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? 9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs-we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” 12Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

Shavuot begins this evening at sunset. It is these moments which cause me to reflect that our separate religions might just be a human construct and not divine. It brings to mind the Eastern Orthodox tenet that I can only know where I might find God, I do not know where S/He is not. So, whether you are Jewish or Christian, I pray you spend the next day or so reveling in a God who ripped the seams of time to be with us. Here are some thoughts that are pertinent to Pentecost from other bloggers.

First … read about moving from desolation to consolation at emerging sideways. It is a wonderful picture of redemption and provision like the story of Ruth, or the Hebrews. Desolation and consolation.

Second … read the story of Ruth again here at Velveteen Rabbi with a little bit of commentary. Beautiful.

Last … here is a poem from Rachel Barenblatt at Velveteen Rabbi to prepare you for Shavuot … it’s really quite lovely:

LONGING

I’m thirsty for davening
in this gritty desert
of car wrecks and cell phones.
Every person killed
anywhere
keeps the promised land
blocked to our passage.

Who knows the path
to short-circuit
this wandering?
Some days manna falls
but others we’re back
to toil, scratching
like chickens in the dirt.

If I was there at Sinai
to sign the ketubah
God offered, black fire
on white, most days
I don’t remember.
Everyone forgets the unity
we started with.

This year
when our anniversary comes,
God, I want to stay up
all night
to feel the letters
traveling up my hands
into my heart.

I want to sing holy at dawn
with the birds
in the willow behind shul
who open and close each day
with praise.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for several days. But lack of internet connection and my general inability to maintain a course of action has gotten in my way. There was one very special thing we did when LightHusband and I were out in Colorado. I had to keep it to myself for a while, because it was magical and special and I wasn’t to certain about how to write about it. Then our internet went down and life sped up. So now that we have dial-up (poo) I am able to write again.

The special thing we did was that we got to meet some friends from on-line, in the brick and mortar world. Now they are friends IRL. We drove from Estes Park where we were staying, up through the Big Thompson Canyon (which is a magical drive all to itself) and through Loveland, into Fort Collins, Colorado. Via our NeverLost companion we found their apartment and met Makeesha and David Fisher and their two lovely young daughters. I’ve gotten to know them via a couple of e-mail lists I’m on and through the blog-o-sphere during the last 6 or 7 months.

They showed us their home town via a wonderful old timey trolley that we walked to. We rode the trolley to downtown Old Ft. Collins. This part of town really reminded us of Burlington, Vermont and we felt right at home. We felt at home with Makeesha and David too. Their girls were are really wonderful. They joyfully walked and talked for great long distances with us adults without complaining or whining.

It was really wonderful to have people who I’ve known in the two-dimensional virtual world step into the three dimensional brick and mortar world. Walking up the stairs to their apartment almost felt like a fairy tale … you know the one? Where the main character becomes real and pops off the page. I wanted to soak up every moment of the day; make it stretch out and last. Because it was just one day and they don’t live around the corner. It’s going to be a terribly long time before we get to see them again.

And having to say good-bye at the end of the day made it the worst of times.