Another Sewing Project

Memorial Day weekend has dawned in Seattle and as can be expected, the skies are gray, the temperature is in the 50s, and it's been raining/drizzling off and on all day. Lately I've had to face the fact that I am a fair weather outdoors person. This means today was an indoor day, despite the mild and manageable weather and despite the many things happening around the city.

So I sewed Jamie a skirt. This project turned out much better than my last sewing project, the ill-fated shirt. It took only 4-5 hours and would take much less time if I were ever to try the pattern again, seeing as how this is the first time I've installed a zipper since the old grade school 4-H days (thank you Harvey County East Lakers).

There are only two shaky parts of the project - my poor tailoring skills that led to cutting out the completely wrong size and having to adjust mid-project and the hem, which should not be examined closely though the fullness of the skirt hides my shoddy work-womanship.  The length may be a little awkward too, depending on who you ask.  Nevertheless, I think there's a good chance Jamie might even wear the product as a casual skirt.  Sewing success!

Here's a little look, the eye, hook and zipper and Jamie graciously modeling:

Nashville Flood

Last week Middle Tennessee flooded.  The city of Nashville shut down.  Vanderbilt postponed its final exams.  It was bad deal.  It is a bad, bad deal.  Jamie's been out in Tennessee the last few days on a trip that was planned a long time ago.  She's seen first hand some of the damage and spent an afternoon of her vacation working.  Today she's in Clarksville and says its bad there too as we've heard it is around the entire region. 

In case you haven't been to Nashville, here's the lay of the land.  The Cumberland River flows right through the city, separating East Nashville from downtown and the west side.  It runs right by L.P. Field where the Tennessee Titans play football and downtown basically sits in the river valley.  Last Monday, the river crested at 51 odd feet, 12 feet above flood stage.  The surrounding creeks and rivers also overflowed their banks after the region received 13-17 inches of rain in two days.  The damage is widespread.  Entire neighborhoods were soaked including the West Nashville neighborhood where Jamie and I lived last year.  The house we rented will have to be gutted and restored in order to be livable again.  Our church, Hobson United Methodist, was also hit and is having their first big work effort this Thursday through Sunday. 


The waters have receded this week, but clean-up will take a long, long time and a lot of money and effort.


The national news is providing some coverage, though I can't help but wonder why Middle Tennessee has been virtually absent from the Seattle Times this past week.  The Tennessean is a better place to look for info, including non-professional coverage and some remarkable stories about the cooperation and camaraderie that Nashvillians have shown throughout the disaster.  Volunteers are already pouring forth as well; it is the Volunteer State, after all. 


Here's a music video complete with pictures.  It's heartbreaking, especially for those of us who lived there but can't be there now.  If you want to help, check out what the Disciples of Christ's Week of Compassion is doing there.  Tennessee is well populated with Disciples, and this is an organization that is an excellent steward of its resources and money.  Mennonite Disaster Service is exploring the area to see what kind of response it will provide. 

Writing Retreat

Last week I spent two days over on the "east side" as Washingtonians call the other side of the Cascade Mountains.  I had signed up for a writing retreat after receiving a serendipitous invitation from Dave Bell who is one of the pastors at the mission where the Richmond Beach UCC youth are going this summer.  Dave is a Disciples of Christ pastor, and runs, along with his wife Belinda, a 40 acre farm where they hosted the retreat. 

My time there fit seamlessly with my new dedication to Wendell Berry, with the loss I feel in this lush, green, mountainous landscape, and with my rural upbringing.  Out there near White Swan, in the Yakima Valley, fields are everywhere: fruit trees, vineyards, hops, alfalfa, hay.  The protected hills are barren of trees, and only the extensive system of irrigation ditches allows the valley to be as fruitful as it is.  During the retreat itself, we considered some of these themes, in conversations and in our intentional writing on "place."  I felt entirely home with the few other pastor-types who were there, who also had stories of displacement and love of rural places, who know that this city may never be truly home.  Here is the most cohesive piece I wrote while retreating to the farm:

Thinking of place reminds me of home, which reminds me of the sky.

What day was it that God made the sky?  I can never remember these things - something about a dome, something poetic and holy.  Something worthy of our praise, and I can see why God made it after all, and who else could pull off something like this? 

Growing up the sky was our source for all things.  The sky brought our weather, the rain that nourished the winter wheat and quenched the spring corn, giving it enough moisture to make it through the three weeks of consecutive triple digit days in July.  The sky withheld the rain too, in the drought of 2002 and others every few years since before my time or anyone else's.  The sky giveth and the sky taketh away.  Blessed be the name.

In 1990, the sky brought its usual green to compliment the bright vibrant blue.  The year was particularly one for tornadoes, especially the Kansas part of tornado alley, and the same wind storm that knocked down branches in Whitewater produced a funnel cloud that knocked down one barn and several grain bins on the Klaassen farm.  It blew out the screened-in porch, Dad's study, and a whole bunch of glass right before taking a couple of cows for a wild and fatal ride.

By the time the county sheriff showed up that evening, the sky was gray and innocent, and by the time the church folk arrived later that week to pick up dime-sized fragments of glass the sky was back to its vibrant blue self.  The rubble from a tornado is nasty - twisted and shredded and splintered into thousands of pieces, any of which could carry tetanus or other infections.  Clean-up takes many hands and many hours.  Praise God that the sky provides a dome to work under. 

When I was twenty-three, not so long ago really, I took a trip to a pastor's cluster meeting out in Western Kansas.  The two pastors who invited me out were full of good humor, but the thing I'll always remember from that trip was an off-handed comment with serious connotations for my future.  We'd stopped near a wind farm to check out the roadside informational marker there on U.S. Highway 50.  When we stepped out of the car and looked around, Lou Gomez said this: "The sky is bigger in Dodge."  Dodge City, Kansas, along the path of many Old Western cattle drives and current home of slaughterhouses.  The sky is bigger in Dodge, 180 degrees in fact, horizon to horizon, uninterrupted by hills or mountains. 

Some people say it makes them dizzy or that it frightens them or makes them anxious.  For me it just feels like home, opening the spirit and body and abruptly placing back into perspective the stresses of those places that are not so broad nor so immanent nor so imminent as the sky.

Now I live in Seattle and the sky still gives life.  It makes things green - everything green, it seems like.  They sky gives and gives in consistent but small portions.  No downpours and none of that tense, life-giving violence from thunder and lightning.  In the summers it is vibrant blue and in the summers it is settled and gray but almost nothing in between.  I miss the contrast of the cloud shadows scattered across the land.  Here the sky takes from me something more than my house or a few cattle.  It takes my freedom and my openness.  It shoves me into the ground, cowering in that ever smaller place between mountain and clouds. 

I wish I could see it differently, but then again I don't, because for me so far, there's only one home. 

Just Living Farm

White Swan, WA

Chicago

One way to get the most out of half time church work is to take vacations during the week.  That way, instead of using one of my four precious vacation weeks, I only use a day or two even while traveling Monday through Saturday.  This, of course, is all possible because of the frequent 10-12 hour Sunday made possible by the great gifts and trials of youth ministry. 

Anyhow, the point being that I spent last week back in the central time zone with my twin sister, Hannah.  Among ten of the top highlights for the week:

1.  Lake Michigan -  ahh, the wide open view it affords and the big sky that goes along with it.

2.  Oak Park -home of a lesbian Mennonite to UCC couple who shared their home and son and their steak and potatoes meal with us, along with authentic conversation and deep sharing of stories. 

3.  Chicago Theological Seminary  - Hannah's systematic theology class is taught from a liberation perspective, a radical thing in theological education, when most classes teach "systematic theology" and then throw in liberation, feminism, womanist, or queer ideas.  Talk about subverting the dominant paradigm.

4.  Alice Hunt - the esteemed Reverend Doctor, who happened to facilitate my field ed small group at Vanderbilt, who took time to share a table with me at community lunch, who leads the seminary (as the current President) with courage and conviction and the kind of vision that makes me want to send anyone interested in theological education straight to CTS.

5.  Lunch with Megan Ramer - Hannah's pastor at Chicago Community Mennonite Church, and a gifted young leader in Mennonite Church USA as well as a former Seattle Mennonite Church member and attender of a non-Mennonite seminary, Iliff, in Denver. 

6.  The Navy Pier Ferris Wheel (see picture above) - It was a spontaneous trip to the Navy Pier in search of a t-shirt to bring back to Jamie.  It was an even more spontaneous purchase of tickets for the Ferris Wheel.  We had just sat down for our seven minute ride when we remembered our shared fear of heights.  I believe Hannah actually closed her eyes for part of the circular journey. 

7.  Hyde Park Produce - Pink Lady apples for 99 cents a pound.  Need I say more?

8.  Chicago Public Transportation - I found the buses and the L to be easily navigable, clean, and on time.

9.  Racial/ethnic diversity - obvious and apparent wherever we went.  I love hearing the many languages and accents and seeing the many colors and cultures, which varied by neighborhood.  Also of note: segregation by neighborhood, closely tied to race and economics.  The amount of broken glass on the sidewalks increases exponentially as one crosses the road that separates Hyde Park from Woodlawn.

10.  Lindsey - we spent a long and wonderful evening with my old friend from Vanderbilt and Hannah's new friend in Chicago.  For me, this was an evening to know and be known in ways that happen with friendships that last across both time and space.

Good Things Happen...?

I love basketball.  I just can't help it - those fifteen years of playing around the clock, around the year got down deep in my bones.  Today I recall fondly my multiple stages of sports fanaticism - reading Sports Illustrated cover to cover; shooting baskets for hours in the hot, stuffy hayloft; brooding over losses and dreaming about wins; beginning friendships that still exist today. 

Yet as some of you know, I've had my share of wrestling with the game, or more, wrestling with what the game is about.  Beginning about my junior year in college, or actually the second semester of my sophomore year, right when I was getting into Religious Studies, things started to look different.  Maybe it was that I'd reached a new level of brain development or, after twelve years, I was getting burned out.  More likely, I was waking up to a new world that went far beyond winning and losing and rendered such basketball-like paradigms quite troubling. 

Oh, there are the usual responses to my objections.  It's a game; it's supposed to be fun.  It teaches values like hard work and teamwork.  Sports bring communities together.  It helps cheer people and/or society up, providing relief and enjoyment in a serious and/or boring and/or stressful world.  Or for the more theological, we live in a fallen world and therefore must participate in institutions that are broken, even as we recognize their brokenness.  Yes, I've thought of and even tried to believe most of them.

Thus, the struggle rages inside of me.  Basketball has shaped my very being, but so has faith and critical engagement with the systems we participate in every day.  This year, I gave in to the young and innocent, sports-loving me.  I have watched basketball more in the last two and a half weeks than my last two years combined.  It's been lovely, really lovely, almost a return to self. 

Underneath, though, the skeptic reigns, and these darn coaches and players don't help much.  In a t.v. interview after their victory over Kentucky for a trip to the Final Four, Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale said this, "It's like (one of my players) said the other day: Good things happen to good people."  Really?

This is asinine in light of homelessness, poverty, racism, heterosexism...  Read a little Cornell West, Wendell Berry, or bell hooks, why don't ya, and then get back to me.  And yet it's one of the myths that props up our cultural fascination with competitive athletics.  Does it really take a good person to win a championship?  Really?

Sports would be better off if words like "deserving" were eliminated from athletic discourse.  

I wrote a paper last year about basketball.  It was for a theological ethics class, and I still consider it one of my last and greatest masterpieces.  I wrote how language affects our realities, how the words we use influence what we see and think.  For example from a theological perspective, to use words like battle and fight to describe an athletic contest frames competition into a harsh, oppositional worldview.  Is that really what we want from our sports?  Do we really want to be celebrating at the expense of another team or community?  One of my best friends from college recalled this notion after a particularly upsetting loss by saying, "Well, at least the other team is happy."  Think about that, next time you're upset when your team loses a game.  

I believe strongly that our sports could use a little more empathy.  That, and new metaphors to help us see new possibilities and new ways of being together on the basketball court.  What if, instead of battling, we were dancing?  Think about it: to win, you need someone else, a partner.  To score on a defense, you need that defense.  To be able to celebrate a victory, you, by definition, need the team that lost.  In basketball, we are ever indebted to those on the other team.  It's kind of like Paul's notion of indebted love, which is what I argued in my paper.  Think about that, next time you win a championship.