Church Talk and Holy Smoke

I have RealLivePreacher linked on the right side of here. He gets right to the heart of the matter with those of us that lean a little too far toward Rome. It amazes me that there are still folks out there that get skittish over words that for me elicit a lot of holiness. Maybe that isn't the right word, holy smoke, maybe. But when they have been used at you, around you, and by you they become old friends. Old friends that have lots of meaning even if they are sometimes a little hazy.

His blog entry for December 28th is written by Foy Davis. Or is it just metaphorical and this Foy guy is really RealLivePreacher. Whatever, the epiphany of Foy is meaningful for me. But maybe it is bacause I am in deep doo at church myself.


Surely the words lectionary, liturgy, Epiphany, Lent, or Ash Wednesday are not all holy smoke. I love those words. Even words like eschatological are fun to say, but I don't give the doctrine much credence. Maybe that is simply my own avoidance behavior.

I do like ephiphany a lot. If I get one occasionally I like it all the better. So far it simply means that I can procrastinate taking down the Christmas Tree until the 6th of January.

A woman might do well to forget those classes in assertiveness training. She just might use it someday. The real assertiveness class that I took 25 years ago wasn't worth the gas it took to get there. We women in the ELCA have a magazine called Lutheran Women Today and our little Miriam Circle uses it as a study guide. The last lesson was being bold with the authority. I have found out that if you are going to shoot off your mouth to the authority, you better be able to take the heat.

Christmas Day

He Who Must Be Obeyed and I were surrounded by seven of our family members yesterday. We shared meals, exchanged gifts and enjoyed one another and the presence of Zoey Jane, nearly three month old. Then as our family festivities wound down to a close we raced to St. Timothy's for the candle light celebration of another small babe, come to the world so long ago, but so foremost in many minds this day.

Being a restless sleeper and using more AA batteries than is imaginable, I woke up to my headset heralding Christmas morning with Grace Matters and Martin Marty out of Chicago. Following that was the welcome message from a Lincoln, NE mainline church and that pastor advising us to let God be small and grow in our own hearts. Nice point, I thought.

Things being a bit out of kilter during the days of December, I made moan about the fact that we hadn't heard any Christmas concerts performed by Omaha's fine choral groups. Staying home and paying some attention to our PBS television and radio offerings, I have heard and seen some breath-takingly beautiful performances of sacred Christmas music. The first was the St. Olaf Choir singing in Trondhiem, Norway, in the Nidaros Cathedral. After being there with my school friend from 1948 or '49, it was enough to make me gasp for the beauty of it.

Today the Concordia College of Moorhead, MN Christmas Concert kissed the air in our little home. What a heritage we have in our Lutheran College Music departments, and what talented students are sent to attend them by sacrificing parents of the midwest and around the world.

It is indeed, a Merry Christmas!

Santa Lives in Finland

Believe it or not, Santa does live in Finland. But then we knew it all along, didn't we? I don't know how long this little news item from Good Morning America on ABC will be available. But if you click the link you will see the same sight that my mother and I saw as we visited the Sami, we called Lapps.

Yes, of course my mother really visited them as they were as fluent in Finnish as she was. And as I walked with her on the dusty streets in Innari, past a tame and wandering reindeer, she assured me, then a tender 42 years old, that they would probably not hurt us, in spite of their rather forbidding looking horns. The Sami in Norway and in Finland dressed that way when we were there. Did they do that for the occasional tourist? It didn't seem like it to we Midwest wanderers all alone in our travels that month in the land of the Midnight Sun.

So today is Winter Solstice. The old earth will take one more whirl and we will see longer days and shorter nights and we ourselves will grow just a little older and wiser.

On a Bus Bench

As I was going to a store too close to noon and the traffic was backed up behind each light a half a block or more, there it was on a bus bench beside me: Every Choice You Make Shapes Who You Are. Well, isn't that just the plain truth of it all.

I had chosen not to go out until I had answered a handful of Christmas Cards that arrived in the mail last Saturday. If I had hit the streets sooner, I wouldn't have gotten to sit in traffic, thereby seeing the bus bench advice. It is a nice little maxim.

We hear it on televison more often than before, "Conventional Wisdom." One of the last Bible studies our dear, sweet pastor gone now, took us throug was the Wisdom of the Bible. We started out with sayings of conventional wisdom. It is the unexpected, unconventional wisdom that takes our breath away every time.

Every Choice You Make Shapes Who You Are. Think about that when you go to bed with a handful of butterscotch drops!

I am practing making Finnish Ice Lanterns and got my first one upside down. I will try again and hopefully be able to show it to you as well.

Ice Lanterns

One week and Christmas will be only a sparkling memory.  The days leading up to it are slip sliding away.  Advent has always been my favorite observance of the church year; this year that slipped out of my grasp.  Unfortunately for me as some times it takes me four weeks to get my mind around the fact that it isn’t all about bumping into strangers in malls or standing in line to buy a fruitcake.

The music of the season has only been on the sound system for me.  Oh, I have heard the special music at church and we sing caroling hymns through out these weeks.  Thank goodness for a church service.

I love winter in the Midwest.  I am trying to make ice lanterns tonight.  If it works I will show you.  It is ice covered candles. No, it is ice covering a candle.

Skrik, Munch's Birthday

The Scream (Skrik, 1893) is a seminal expressionist painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. ...it is said by some to symbolize modern man taken by an attack of existential angst." From GuruNet. If you don't have it you should, GuruNet, that is.

My friends, K.,J., and I saw one of the copies in the National Gallery in Oslo. The most famous was formerly in the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway. The original is currently missing from the Munch Museum, having been stolen by art theives in August 2004. (GuruNet, again.)

I have goofed up some setting again and can't seem to add pictures. Drat.

I suppose the Scream is surely painted out of existential angst. Is this why we can relate to Charlie Brown? It seems a little odd that it surfaces from cyberspace today on my computer. Thanks GuruNet.

Are You Busy?

One would think with years of practice, this hectic pre-Christmas freneticism, could be avoided. Two weeks ago I thought so. Even last week I had hope. This morning I can see it all slip away again. Instead of Merry Christmas, maybe we should be wishing one another "Calm Christmas." I long for that Bethlehem, "how still we see thee lie." A person could parse that phrase and come up with a different intrepretation around the word "lie."

I am not taking Christ out of my Christ-mas. Indeed, who do people think they are to even suggest it. But it would be nice to take the frazzle out of it.

Working on the Tuovinen manuscript and old photos is still in progress. But I can see the end of it. The most elusive character in it is my grandpa. He is still elusive. Only little hints define him, high hopes, energetic, political, highly literate in his native Finnish tounge but anxious to become so in his adopted land as well. He loved to argue, to sing, to be in control. Poor guy married into a family of matriarchs. I can recall his smell as clearly today as I could as a child leaning up against him, watching him as he packed tobbaco into his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match for me to blow out. His eyes were as light a blue as the sky above his homestead. He spurned the Czar of Russua to die too young of TB, miner's consumption, some called it. But we all know what it was and we were all tested for it upon his diagnosis. Only he and a small grandson suffered with it.

South Dakota Ice

Amazing is the only way to put it; the trip through the aftermath of the ice storm through South Dakota was breath taking. The beauty of that morning after, with everything in sight covered by sparkling ice, together with the trecherous Interstate was both captivating and terrifying. The Corn Palace was an icy wonder. The web cam shows it the same today.

Four days later coming home it was still the same, with the exception of the news from the Mitchell AM radio station, that the first estimate of 5,000 power poles snapped off under the weight of the ice covered transmittion lines was low. National Guard Helicopters were out counting the undiscovered carnage for repair by four states sending in power people with equipment and poles to warm up the almost 150 small towns still without power, as well as the uncountable farm connections.

Add to that the reality of a third of the entire state of South Dakota's schools closed with no power to heat them above the temperatures hovering slightly above zero. The road surface was not as slippery going home and the jack-knifed semi trucks had been pulled out of the ditches as well as the cars of dare-devil ice drivers.

So what were we doing driving that 500 miles in those conditions? He Who Must Be Obeyed was adament that R must be attended to. It was nearing the first of the month and he had assured the 'authorities' he would do that every month. No matter that it is 500 miles, no matter that he is 72, no matter that it is winter in South Dakota. It is a hell or high water situation that could be reworded.

Maybe it was providence that I-90 was opened again at 11 A.M. at Sioux Falls through Kadoka. We crawled past the now open closing gates around noon. It is not so hard to average 40 miles an hour with semis in the ditch with their lights still on, their drivers inside waiting for help. Makes a person glad one didn't hit us as they slid sideways down the Interstate; lethal weapons, every one that passed us.

The silver lining was an overnight visit with a dear high school classmate and having lunch with a third the day we started back for Omaha. It was a dear, warm, sweet visit and worth every slip and slide to get there and home again.