Boy, can we use some joy about now in this world.  I recall sitting around the piano at Sprinkle House on Madison campus singing one of the Kingston Trio’s hits of the late 1950’s. …….words went something like this.  “ They’re rioting in Africa,,they’re starving in Spain.  There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain. The whole world  is festering with unhappy souls, the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.  Italians hate Yugoslavs, South  Africa hates the Dutch, and I don’t  like anybody very much”.   Change the nations and the year could be 2019.

 

Let’s take a recess from that.  Let’s find a different focus on what is truly important.  Right now I’m getting dressed to go to Sunday School and teach some great people how God’s gift to us came to the simple people first.  Not Rome or Kings but to an insignificant priest of the temple and his wife Elizabeth, and to a lowly teen with beautiful angel visits and their thankful songs of serving God in whatever capacity asked.      Can we do less?    Merry Christmas

Our Church sign reads,”Gratitude is Contagious!”  Which not only caught my eye, but set me to thinking about the truth of that statement.  How in the world do we get that attitude, and can we catch it from others?  Oh, I hope so, and in many ways, I know so.

My basic source of such an opinion is my own experiences as a child in a house that embraced the whole concept gratefulness—-grateful for life’s essentials, grateful for relationships, grateful for life itself.

There are certain images that are burned into my conscience that in many ways govern my own attitude.  One image is my Dad saying grace before every meal…not Mom, for some reason, but Dad.   I don’t remember the words, but the simple action of this great big, kind, benevolent man pausing to give thanks for sustenance, probably “contaminated” or rather fostered my own life of being grateful.

I remember, if we were still bustling around getting a meal on the table, or perhaps he was eating alone, he quite often bowed his head and said grace silently…we saw his lips moving, so we knew he was praying.  This led one neighbor to ask of a farm helper who ate with us, “Is Charlie still talking to his plate?”  Charlie wasn’t talking to his plate!!

In these somewhat puzzling days of uncertainty and words spoken with malice, and we find it hard to find that gratefulness, I hope we have a history to fall back on, or someone that will infect our spirits with gratitude.

 

 

 

I find myself reflecting upon the many times that my children taught me valuable lessons when they were children, and certainly one of those times came to the forefront with my last musing about children speaking out.

Hearing a mother recount a happening the other week about how her daughter had interacted with a peer with condemnation for what the peer was doing, was related in a way to me that, although the child did speak out about unacceptable behavior, the manner was a bit harsh and un-bending.  The mother seemed all right with that, and I found myself thinking perhaps another approach would have been better.

I immediately thought of an incident in our home that paralleled her story almost exactly.  I received Susan’s permission to use her story in this way and to confirm that my recollections were correct.  On the school bus, when Susan was about 10 0r 12, a neighborhood boy was doing or saying things that were completely inappropriate, so Susan called him to task vehemently, in not too kind words.  When she related her tale to me, she said, that I said, “Susan, I think you were wrong in the way you handled this.  You probably embarrassed  him in front of his peers.”  I didn’t tell her how to fix  it.

Without telling me, she walked to his house a mile or two away and apologized to him for the way she talked to him, only telling me she had done this when she got back.  I asked her what his reaction was and she said, “Oh, he and his sister, my age, stayed and played awhile.”   I have been proud of Susan many, many times in her life, but never more proud of her than that moment in her childhood when she acted as adults should act.

I don’t know what happened to that young man later in his life, but I know what that mature response did for my daughter.  It wasn’t me making her do something that must have been hard for her, but the fact that she did it.  I saw this benevolent spirit played out many times in Susan’s life–whether in the school system for troubled children, or in the various courts of law seeing that people were treated justly.

Let the children speak!!

Last night in our small group meeting we were looking at the Resistance Stories of the Bible as Rachel Held Evans tells them with wisdom and beauty.  Recalling times when people were brave and empowered enough to dare speak up about injustices, sinfulness, and how God’s plan for their lives was much different than what they were experiencing.

We know how prophet’s rallying cries echoed across history,  but we were drawn to the stories of the young.  Whether a shepherd boy with slingshot, or three young men dancing in a fiery furnace, or a young Queen calling to task King Xerxes for his debauchery and treatment of women, the young have many times led us to a better place in the world.

So it was a foregone conclusion that we would pay  heed to the words of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg when she walked into the United Nations and facing the leaders of the world she said, “Shame On You!”  And shame on all of us who watch with anxious breath as the world’s weather gets crazier and crazier with scientific proof of the cause, we cling to our conveniences of plastic everything, throwing it casually away for our grandchildren to deal with one day!!

Let the children speak.  We just might learn something.

With summer and family reunions, and family trips, it is natural to recall other trips, or other family memories that such occasions call to mind.   I know that has been our experience this summer.  Who we are and why we are becomes the stuff of conversations riding in a car, or gathering around a shared meal we feel free to voice our recollections with shared companions.

One of my daughters expressed to me this, “Mom, “things” have never been so important to you, have they?  You didn’t have a lot of things growing up, did you?”    I just smiled.   I didn’t have a lot of “things” as society thinks, but, oh what I did have!  First of all, I had a home where happiness was not measured by what you had, but by what you had to share.  Our home became on many occasions a food bank, a sanctuary, a repository of help in health and business advice for a small bit of real estate that society had forgotten.

We had a pristinely clean and orderly home, with a white fence that I had to keep painted!  We had glorious food, ample clothing, and a yard filled with zinnias on both sides of the back door, lilac bushes, peonies, hydrangeas, grape harbors, and two vegetable gardens that filled our table and our bellies.  Things!  If a thing was needed in our home it was for the comfort of our family, like a furnace to replace wood stoves, inner spring mattresses to replace feather ticks, or even straw ticks,  water piped into the house, electricity that changed our lives forever.  That was my world growing up.

Bill and I tried to replicate this style in our own home, and I think the girls got the message.  Time together was more important than things, time was that intangible gift that we could give them that didn’t have a price tag attached.  Grandchildren, get your Mom to tell you about the Holstein Convention trips she took!  Many times, loading everyone into a nine passenger station wagon or the “Barth” motor home and off we went. Eight track tapes blaring, cherries in the refrigerator, Barbara asleep before we got out of Rockingham county, Cathy sitting behind Bill’s seat talking about cuts and fills on the highway.    “Things!”  Not so many….just enough.  We all should know when we have “Just enough.”  Thanks be to God.

John Masefield’s poem resonated in my head in anticipation, and then in reality, as my primal urge was again fulfilled in an almost annual event.  Time and time again from childhood, when brother Charles or sister Carrie would load kit and kin into ladened cars and head to Virginia Beach, to our families Nags Head and Myrtle Beach outings, I feel the call to the ocean.

Last night, in reflection, I thought to myself about what was my favorite moments.  The ocean lived up to its promise of power and wonder in its constant pounding of surf against sand, and the sand still permeates clothes, skin and hair, the sea gulls still squawk as I remember.  Or maybe it was my early morning  three mile tricycle ride under the canopy of live oaks with an occasional spiked, scaled palm tree pushing through the leafy bower for its place in the sun.  It could be that grownup grandchildren prepared scrumptious dinners for us all, or perhaps it was witnessing the phenomena of porpoises driving schools of fish to shore and chasing them up on the beach to feed.

I loved all of the above, but the thing that brought a smile to my lips, as I lay dozing last night, was letting a small fifteen-month old boy hold my finger as he tottered over the beach, chatting an unintelligible conversation (except to mothers and grandmothers) as he pointed out an occasional dog, or a sea bird, or the ocean and allowed me to see my beloved ocean with new eyes.

As John Masefield said.”  I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;  And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls flying.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve told my girls that I have to be “inspired” to write my blogs, and this one is no different.  All happening from a thank you note from a special granddaughter thanking me for my  college graduation gift.  She said, in part, that my gift of an antique violet celery dish and salt saucers took her back to a memory of her own.  She said that in furnishing her doll house, she bought little violet dishes because it reminded her of me. That was her gift back to me!!

I don’t know if it is the aging process or some need to enhance the memory of a grandmother, but I have found in sharing a bit of my past and Bill’s past with our grandchildren has given me untold joy.  So passing on antique guns, sportsmanship plaques, high school and college rings, antique violet dishes, and charm bracelets seem to satisfy some primal need in me by saying, without words, this is who we were.

I have never been one to glorify the past by thinking nothing or no one can possibly be as great as we were, but recently, with a drive to Asheville with a nine year old granddaughter who hungered for stories of her family, told me that the new generation desires to hear that past…both good and painful.  A recent family reunion, again, told me how we long to connect with those who laid down the foundation for who we are today.

As Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher once wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.”  I hope that my sharing stories, tokens, and time may be the bricks my grandchildren build upon for their exciting futures.

I just got word that my college roommate and loving friend has died. I wrote an earlier post about her influence on my life, but a lot of that needs repeating, which in some way might make this reality a bit easier to process.

Faye contacted polio when she was about twelve, and for the rest of her life she used body and leg braces, crutches, and wheel chairs to navigate life. That navigation, I might mention, included, a stellar college career at Madison College, a Masters degree from Tulane, University, and a career of working with handicapped children in Virginia. So what’s that say to the rest of us.

She celebrated each of my girls as they arrived, she married a kind and understanding husband and held her family close. A dear great niece of hers sought me out when she came to JMU, and tolerated my stories of Faye and me as coeds and our tales of restrictions on us that made her laugh…such as having to wear a raincoat over any wearing of trousers or gym clothes when on campus.

She will forever be a positive force in my life and a very important memory of perseverance in the face of unwarranted obstacles. Rest well my friend.

Trying out a new web server for my musings, as that is how I best describe my writings.  Lately there’s been too much newness in my life.  Something there is about Change at my age that is a bit troubling, although sometimes exhilarating with new great grandchildren, and new careers for family members, but the news of a beloved minister moving to a new field of service will be one of those changes that will take some time of adjustment.

Newness is very often not a bad time.  As one of my daughters reminded me in her tribute to my 80th birthday.  When we don’t change,when we are content like mushrooms, sitting in goop up to our chins, we die.  Newness is life, newness is anticipation, newness is what we celebrate with this season as we await the birth of one who will tear open the heavens and come down to change our lives.  Newness….embrace it

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton