A baby’s birth isn’t just the event itself, but is a symbol of new beginnings, of uncountable possibilities, of history and hope and peace in a bundle.

Else was almost Petrea.  Petrea was my paternal grandmother’s sister’s name, and is the middle name of my sister.

In the end, she got the first name of my quite fantastic sister; it’s also my cousin’s name and that of my father’s Danish cousin.

Her middle name is Kristine, which was my paternal grandmother’s name; Kris was the name of my maternal grandfather, and is also the name of my wonderful cousin on this same side of the family.

She has another two names following ‘Else Kristine.’ Up until she was a year old, they were Madsen Coning: my last name and the last name of my late husband.  I had kept my name, you see, and yet after Karl and Else were born, we wanted to have one family name.  As a gift, I was willing to take his name once we returned to the States.

But then he died.

And it seemed a bit pointless to change my name, so I changed the kids’ names, and so now we have Karl Overgaard Coning Madsen, and Else Kristine Coning Madsen.

Familial connection is key to me, you see.  To the minds of my late husband and me, names anchor our children in something.  Else and Karl are expressions of whence they came.  Their names recall that they are not random blips; unique, truly, but not isolated incidents.

We know who we are in large part by knowing our history.

In fact, just two nights ago, Else crawled on my tummy with watery eyes, which rarely come.  ”Baby Girl, what is wrong, Sweet One?”  ”Mama,” said Elsegirl, “I miss Papa.  It’s just sad that I am the one who knew him the least.”

And so we spent time, her tiny body burrowed into me so that she could hear and feel new stories about her Papa, so she could know more about him, and therefore about herself.

Else was only eight months old when her papa died.  Her first aware “normal” was chaos.

I think that’s partly to what she owes her depth.  She knows that chaos exists.  She learned that it’s o.k. to ARG at the universe (in our family, the kids are allowed a swear word.  They’ve chosen Scheisse, the German word for “shit.” I don’t think that they know what it means in English, but sometimes the power of cussing comes just because it’s a word that somebody says you’re not supposed to say).  Once one ARGs for a while, one moves on, because otherwise one doesn’t just say the ARG.  One becomes the ARG.

Her depth showed itself early on.

When she was only 18-20 months old, Sweet Baby Girl stopped her toddling across the kitchen floor.

It creeped me out.

She never stopped.

Ever.

So I leaned down, and said, “Else, honey girl, is everything o.k.?”

And she looked at me with big blue eyes, and was clearly shocked at something.

“Mama,” she said, and then slowly, “I remember God.”

I stared at her, and got to my knees, and grasped her shoulders, and looking directly into those eye pools, said, “Tell me!”

And she simply shook her head, “No.”

Else knows things that she shouldn’t know.

She knows about empathy, about compassion, about metaphor, about symbol, about wry humor, and about grace in ways that she isn’t supposed to yet.

She knows about delight, and serenity, and defiance, and righteous indignation.

She knows that when people act badly toward others, there might be something troubling them.  That fact doesn’t excuse what they are doing, and it doesn’t mean that one needs to tolerate it, but it does mean that it might be up to us to offer the kindness to them that they can’t seem to offer to others, or even to themselves.

She knows about acupuncture needles in Karl’s body, and knows to sing to him when he’s scared, and to get toothpaste after he throws up, and to wait patiently until he actually says what we all know he will say, and that we can’t go on hikes or camping as other families, and that none of this is Karl’s fault and so we love him and us through it.

She shouldn’t have to know these things, but she does.

Sometimes, when she knows she’s gotten herself into a bit of a pickle, she will say in rapid-fire succession, “I know I know I know!” And then realizes that were she really to know, she wouldn’t be in a position to protest that she did.

She knows, then, that she could be wrong, and that Mama can also be wrong, and that it is o.k. to be wrong.

Perhaps most of all, however, she knows that she is known.

We have two verbal rituals, my children and I:

Every morning before I say goodbye to them on the playground, I say: “You are my….” and they add “sunshine…” and then I pick up, “and you are a….” and they reply “miracle.”

Every night before they fall asleep, I say to them as they are snuggled into their beds and blankets, “You are beautiful, you are safe, and I love you.”

Imprinted with notions of sunshine, and miracles, and beauty, and safety, and love, the two of them know that they are treasures, and treasured.

And on this, her 8th birthday, let me take this moment to let the world know a bit of my daughter, a child of God, a blessing to this world, and even still a bundle of history and hope and peace.

Call me provincial, living under a rock, or clueless, but I had never heard of Terry Eagleton before.  Where have I been?  The guy is fantastic, his prose saturated in wry wit, razory rhetoric, and provocative thinking.

I want to be him when I grow up.

His preface begins this way:

Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs.  For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology.  I therefore have a good deal of sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics.  But it is also the case, as this book argues, that most such critics buy their rejection on the cheap.  When it comes to the New Testament, at least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion’s own.  It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood’s opinions of it.

Although it’s not clear whether he’s any particular flavor of Christian now, he was certainly raised as a Roman Catholic.  Some dicey experiences with the tradition helped to offer a healthy skepticism about the Church.

The book itself is essentially a publication of the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale in 2008.  And of the invitation to give them, he wrote:

My delight…was quickly tempered as I read on to discover that the Terry Lectures are traditionally devoted to two subjects I know embarrassingly little about, namely science and religion….[and] I should also confess that since the only theology I don’t know much about is Christian theology, as opposed to those kinds I know nothing at all about, I shall confine my discussion to that alone, on the grounds that it is better to be provincial than presumptuous.

And that’s the cadence of writing that carries the reader throughout the text.

But for the moment, there’s a section near the end of the book that I found myself a-ha-ing (as in a moment of insight, not as in laughter, both scenarios being very possible when reading Eagleton) even more than otherwise, and so naturally I thought “blog it!”  Eagleton reframes faith here in such a way that demonstrates that a) all people have faith in something; and b) faith isn’t an archenemy to reason.

That is, you don’t have to be a non-thinking cheeseball to have faith.

In the indented passage below, the object of his words is Ditchkens, an elided form of the prolific atheist authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the former of whom he was once friends, “comrades in the same far-left political outfit.  But he has gone on to higher things, discovering in the process a degree of political maturity as a naturalized citizen of Babylon, whereas I have remained stuck in the same old political groove, a case of arrested development if ever there was one.”

While Eagleton appreciates their writing (writing of Hitchens’ God is Not Great as “stylish, entertaining, splendidly impassioned, and compulsively readable” while offering Dawkins only that his “doctrinal ferocity has begun to eat into his prose style”), he is bothered by their disdain of the notion of ‘faith’ while extolling ‘reason.’  At one point he critiques Hitchens who wrote in God is Not Great that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” (282).  ”But Christianity,” says Eagleton, “was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place.  It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

I LOVE THAT!

O.K.  But back to the point at hand.

So Eagleton wants to spend some time examining why the operating assumption is that exclusive reason is laudable anyway, even if one were to grant that it is possible.

A hunger for absolute justification is a neurosis, not a tenacity to be admired.  It is like checking every five minutes that there is not nest of hissing cobras under your bed, or like the man in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations who buys a second copy of the daily newspaper to assure himself that what the first copy said was true.  Justifications must come to an end somewhere; and where they generally come to an end is in some kind of faith.

Christopher Hitchens would appear to disagree about this question of grounding.  ”Our belief is not a belief,” he writes of atheists like himself in God is Not Great.  ”Our principles are not a faith” (5).  So liberal humanism of the Ditchkins variety is not a belief.  It involves, for example, no trust in men and women’s rationality or desire for freedom, no conviction of the evils of tyranny and oppression, no passionate faith that men and women are at their best when not laboring under myth and superstition.  Hitchens is clear that secular liberals like himself (we lay charitably aside here his neo-conservative fellow-traveling) do not rely “solely upon science and reason,” so he is not contrasting belief with scientifically based propositions.  What he is really doing is contrasting his own beliefs with other people’s.  ”We [secular liberals] distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason,” he observes (5).  Most Christians do not in fact hold that their faith contradicts science–though it would be plausible to claim that in some sense science contradicts itself all the time, and that this is known as scientific progress.  Hitchens fails to distinguish between reasonable beliefs and unreasonable ones.  His belief that one should distrust anything that outrages reason is one example of a reasonable belief, while his belief that all belief is blind is an example of an unreasonable one.

Ditchkins does not exactly fall over himself to point out how many major scientific hypotheses confidently cobbled together by our ancestors have crumbled to dust, and how probabl it is that the same fate will befall many of the most cherished scientific doctrines of the present. (124-25).

Just before this passage, Eagleton points out that we have ‘faith’ in many things we’ve never seen before: the unconscious, the expertise of specialists, and even in things that don’t exist, such as a “wholly just society.”  ”The whole question of faith and knowledge,” says Eagleton, “is a good deal more complex than the rationalist suspects.”

Let me be clear: I’m not knocking science, and I’m not knocking reason.  That I feel compelled to write that disclaimer points to Eagleton’s agenda.  Christians have been misunderstood–perhaps most egregiously by themselves!–to disdain science and reason, and therefore be unreasonable, believing in a “mere myth.”

I think that what Eagleton brings to the table is a helpful reminder that life demands acts of faith.  We cannot function without some measure of faith in something, because, in point of fact, not everything is provable.  Not even the laudable and recitable “with liberty and justice for all,” E=Mc2, or “I love you.”

That said, he is also right that Christians are compelled to be able to provide some reasons for their faith claims!  On what basis do we believe what we do?  Is it consistent within its own faith claims?  Does it jibe with our experience of reality?  As I have said before, many reasons can be given for many claims, but not all reasons are equally valid.

In short, Eagleton seems to think that Christians have a responsibility to know why we say we believe what we do, and that secular humanists have a responsibility to not dismiss (or just plain old diss) Christians by tapping into their weakest and most stereotypical expressions.

I have faith that that is a reasonable proposition to make.

What do you think?

I was reminded of this on today’s Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor.  We wake up at 6:00 a.m. to classical public radio in my family, and at 6:15 Garrison lulls us right back to sleep with his tales and poetry and voice.

But it’s worth your time to look up Keillor’s superb summary of Bonhoeffer’s life here.

By 6:41, seven-year old Elsegirl and I had had a thoughtful little conversation about Dachau, gas chambers, Hitler’s suicide, pacifism, ambiguity, and grace.

She is so going to need therapy.

I know I’ve linked to this page before as well, a show done on him by the extraordinary Speaking of Faith program.  It’s worth your time on this day too.  53 minutes of stimulating thought, or a lesser amount of time scanning the transcript.

We Lutherans speak a lot about the both/and-ness of life.  The reign of God is already here but not yet, God has given us both Law and Gospel, and we are all saints and sinners.

Bonhoeffer is the poster child for Lutheran ambiguity.

A self-declared pacifist, Bonhoeffer recognized, as the darkness of Hitler’s regime spread over and through Germany’s land, government, church, and spirits, that resistance–even violent resistance–might be the only appropriate, and even faithful, response to his evil agenda.

And so Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in several plans to assassinate him.

Of course an assassin (wannabe…well, he didn’t really want to be, but felt compelled to be) is the closest thing we Lutherans have to a saint.

Martin Doblmeier (whom Krista Tippett interviewed for the Speaking of Faith segment mentioned above) made an astonishing documentary on Bonhoeffer.  In it, he makes the case that Dietrich was a brilliant theologian, but an assassin?

Not so much.

Bonhoeffer’s ineffectual efforts got him hanged three weeks before his camp was freed.

But his theology?  Wow.

Listen to this observation regarding the connection between faith and life–or, more accurately, the connection between Church and politics:

The church has three possible ways it can act against the state. First, it can ask the state if its actions are legitimate. Second, it can aid the victims of the state action. The church has the unconditional obligation to the victims of any order in society even if they do not belong to the Christian society. The third possibility is not just bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. No Rusty Swords

Or this thought regarding the possibility that God says different things in different ways to different circumstances:

The will of God is not a system of rules established from the outset. It is something new and different in each different situation in life. And for this reason a man must forever re-examine what the will of God may be. The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.  Ethics

Or this assertion refuting quietism:

There is no way to peace along the way of safety. Peace is the great adventure. It has to be dared.  (Speech in Fanö, Denmark, 1934)

So today, on Bonhoeffer’s birthday, it seems a good moment to pause and consider the possibility that life is messy.  That things are not always clear.  That God’s call can be ambiguous.  That inaction is itself an action of sorts.  That paralyzed by fear that we might have it wrong–and obsessing that God might just therefore damn us (or at least hate us for a while)–we might be more wrong than we can imagine.

Consider this quintessential observation of Luther’s (found here):

If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

• Letter 99, Paragraph 13. Erika Bullmann Flores, Tr. from:Dr. Martin Luther’s Saemmtliche SchriftenDr. Johann Georg Walch Ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, N.D.), Vol. 15, cols. 2585-2590. [3

Bonhoeffer did just that.  He trusted that he would sin, but he trusted in the grace of Jesus Christ more strongly.

So he acted out of trust in grace instead of the stultification of fear.

Of course, he got killed for it.

There’s precedence for that, I suppose.

When he died, however, he said, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.”

There’s some active freedom in that.

The Gospel for the day, this birthday of Bonhoeffer?

Sin boldly.

——————————–

These are fantastic, articulate questions.

I brewed myself a strong cup of coffee, and sat down to settle into it.

1. Your distinction between “reacting” and “responding” intrigues me.

Reacting reminds me of what reptiles do well. They tend not to thoughtfully consider situations, options, motivations, and complexities.

Responding suggests more of an evaluated reply.

As I read the reports of Anne Rice’s departure with your question in mind, I found that on the surface she appeared to “respond.” She spoke of having deliberated for some time about this move, and that there was indeed wrestling involved.

However, her reasons for leaving were stunningly simplistic. To be sure, one can find examples of precisely what she is naming: sexism, prejudice against homosexuals, close-minded and dogmatic thinking.

But two thoughts came to mind:

a) that sort of thinking is surely also to be found in the secular world;

b) that sort of thinking is surely not to be found across the board within the Church.

I was struck with the irony that her decision came not long after my tradition, the ELCA, voted to welcome gays and lesbians in relationship. An interviewer brought this point up to her. She replied that although she was pleased with the vote, she needed to “walk away from the whole controversy, the whole conversation.”

I appreciate fatigue, truly I do. And I appreciate disgust even at the Church, truly I do.

But I don’t appreciate blanket statements so very much.

There is much that the Church has done and continues to do that deserves righteous indignation. But one appears awfully simplistic and judgmental if one suggests that these acts define the Church through and through, and that one somehow is above reproach enough to find something better….alone….without the interference of relating to others….because that always muddies the waters.

Really, I wondered if she knows of Jim Wallis and Sojourners, or of the recent UCC ad that suggests anything but stodgy thinking.

2. There are some parallels, I suppose, to Anne and Martin. Martin left because he thought that the pope usurped his appropriate powers, and he felt that the Church’s teachings were skewed.

But there are some key differences:

a) He did not want to leave. What he wanted to do, despite all of the muck and frustration and danger and anger, was to stick around and reform the Church.

b) Once he left, he did not retreat to a private corner, or shake the dust off of his shoes and blast the entire Church. He set out to build up a new way of being Church.

I really really understand why a person would want to leave the Church. The Church can be clumsy, capricious, and downright wrong.

But it is indeed hard to remain a Christian and not be part of a Christian community, for a couple of reasons.

a) Jesus did not just come for me. Jesus came for the entire world.

I respect a private faith as much as I respect indignation at the Church! There are good reasons to be so frustrated that one walks away! And there are good reasons to craft a deeply personal, private faith. That is not the point.

The danger is that one establishes an “exclusivity” with Jesus, and assumes that whatever one has going on privately with Jesus is way better than what those church-goers are up to, do the degree that one doesn’t need others for one’s own faith.

I’m not so convinced that that is true.

b) Connected with that is the reality that we are all fallible. Community (granted, a healthy community) helps us think through matters collectively and conversationally, so that one doesn’t become navel-gazingly arrogant.

See, I know of specific congregations who would largely agree with Anne Rice’s perspective, and I think that both she and these other gatherings of people suffer the loss of that possible relationship.

I must add, however, that there is a reason that denominations are suffering such attrition these days. We have too often made ourselves and our message irrelevant and/or archaic. Ann speaks a prophetic voice to us, and that ought not be missed in this dust-up.

3. There are reasons to leave certain doctrines and denominations which uphold them.

Although, as I’ve made clear in other blogs, I actively supported (and still do) the recent ELCA decision on the ordination of gays and lesbians in relationship, I understand better the grief and anger of those who are leaving if I imagine how I would respond were the ELCA to withdraw the validity of women’s ordination.

To be in relationship with anyone–person or institution–necessitates a fine balance of humility and principle.

If one concedes that no one–including oneself–is perfect, then one greets frustrating exchanges with more compassion and less haughtiness.

Still, there is a reason why I am ELCA Lutheran, and not Missouri Synod, for example, or Roman Catholic, or Jewish. There are some things I hold to be central, and the ELCA folks seem to resonate with my convictions more than do other traditions. So I suppose I have, to use your language, left those doctrines.

But were I to blast these other traditions with a wide swath of disgust, I would not only ensure that present conversations would cease, I would also guarantee that further conversations would be that much more difficult.

And I would do a fine job of making clear that I am certain that I cannot be wrong, and am always right…or at least on balance right-er than these other misguided or ignorant people in the other pews.

So. A first run at your question(s).

In short, I have felt most every one of Anne Rice’s frustrations. But I’m not sure that leaving the Church with a generalized Pox on the House is helpful, accurate, or fair.

I’m eager to hear if you have some follow-up!

Anna

This is why theologians get paid the big money [insert ironic chuckle here].

We are supposed to know what is going to happen when we die and why.

Let me be straight up and, on behalf of a whole bunch of us, say: We don’t. For sure. We have hunches, we have hopes, we have hints, but we don’t really, really know.

It’s tricky, right? There are texts that can really scare the dickens out of a person. Take a look at the one you mention: Hebrews 10:26-31.

And why stop there?

Matthew 7:13, Luke 16:26, 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Revelation 20:13-15 all can be cause for deep fear and even despair….and there are a lot more where these came from.

Of course, other texts aren’t so frightening, and actually suggest a wider door.

1 Tim. 2:6, 1 Cor. 15:22, Romans 5:17, Col. 1:20, 1 John 2:2.

Of course, each of these texts are bound to the verses before and after it, and bound by the author’s historical context, and many can be interpreted a number of ways.

My point here is that the Bible (in the cases listed above, the New Testament) isn’t as monolithic as one might believe.

Not that it is a huge surprise for those who read my blogs carefully, but I am of the mind that the question of what happens after we die is largely a theological question, and that in the end, we have to humbly say that we don’t know…and that we will not be paralyzed by that notion.

The way in which you phrase your thoughts, however, raises some interesting questions. You begin by saying that “If we are saved by God’s grace….” and close by wondering if we can “fall short of God’s grace.”

My immediate thought is, saved from what?

My second thought is, what is grace?

And my first answer to the first thought is, sin.

And my first answer to the second thought is, the gift of something undeserved.

And so two theological questions:

If we really believe that God offers grace (an undeserved gift) to we who sin (namely we who reject God in favor of something else) then:

1. isn’t the demand to repent, to stop the sin, to pray, etc…..aren’t these all acts to make us deserving of grace? And along side of that (this doesn’t cut into my two questions, btw! ), then what is grace, really? Can we fall short of something we don’t deserve in the first place?

2. Who doesn’t sin, and (again, still part of the same question!) who is aware of all the ways in which one sins? Is it ever possible to confess and repent of all our sins?

These are just beginning questions. Then begins a whole run of ‘em.

Like,

Are all sins choices, or could there be sinful behaviors which are bound up in mental illness, in fatigue, in family systems?

Do we really want to say that only Christians are going to heaven…and does even Scripture make that case?

Is this a slippery slope to universalism?

And if “all people get into heaven,” then what’s the point of believing?

Ah, but then there are counter-questions:

Like, if a person believes to get into heaven, isn’t the integrity and authenticity of the belief self-serving, since it appears to be motivated by a protecting one’s own eternal hiney?

When does one believe “enough” to be in God’s good graces?

Is there anyone who is purely good? And even if not entirely good, are there parts of people which are fundamentally good, and then are those parts not in need of salvation….and what would that mean?

But don’t good deeds matter somehow?

And yet if we say that they do, then don’t we say that we in part can save ourselves?

And what happens if we’ve lived a pretty good life, and in the moment that we allow ourselves to wonder these sorts of things, get hit by a car? What is going to be God’s final answer?

Regardless of how one comes down on the question of heaven/hell, salvation/damnation, this much is safe to assert is true:

If one says that they believe in God, then there are implications for how they live their lives, for the choices that they make.

We all mess up, sometime quite gloriously, even those who say that they–and in fact really do–believe.

There’s a reason why we have the word “grace,” in other words. We need it.

But generally, if one says that something is core to who they are, then they live life consistent to that notion: not to get something, but because they can’t help but to live in such a fashion.

I tell my husband that I love him not to get him to love me, but because I love him. I play with my kidlets not to get them to respect me, but because I adore them.

Actions are an expression, in other words.

And let it not be missed that some of the most life-giving people are those who are not connected to any one particular religious tradition.

So the point is not to “diss” confessing and repenting and praying and discerning what is faithful and striving to live accordingly.

The point is to rather raise the question about whether these are pre-reqs for salvation…and if we answer that they are, well….who doesn’t fall short of that?

It’s all clear…as mud.

Peace,

Anna

That’s what it was like to be in Germany.

Europe illuminates a part of me that is otherwise not seen, sometimes even by myself.

Kathleen Norris writes about the notion of “Spiritual Geography,” this idea that a person is shaped not only by people and events, but also by place.

I imagine that implicitly, we know this to be true, but that we’re not often called to think on it, because we don’t often leave places of familiarity.

When I first arrived in Germany in 1999, every night, for many, many nights, I was exhausted, physically tuckered out by thinking in, reading in, writing in, speaking in, dreaming in, German.

Clearly that part of my brain, that part that concerns itself with new language, was weak, out-of-shape, ignored.

And it needed rest to meet the new day.

That experience, by the way, consoles me as I look at my sweet boy Karl, who tires so easily (and is sleeping beside me this very moment) because his brain is engaging in mental Pilates every moment of every day.

Returning to that place, however, I found myself in a home that I never would have known that I had, had I not made the strange choice to sell all that I owned (or store it with my parents, God bless them) and move to a foreign land with a foreign language and foreign ways.

Suddenly, this last trip, I realized that the foreign had become the familiar.

Now, this is not to say that I am enamored with all that is German, with all due respect to that fine land.

Customer service?

Often enough, I found myself missing the idea of a Wal-Mart Greeter–and I never even shop there!

Heightened formality?

I ought to, but don’t, do hierarchy so very well.

Lots of people in little space?

This introvert yearned for open prairie.

But that said, savoring extended meals outside with the background music of contented conversation–and even accordions, which generally make me want to curl up in the fetal position and weep?

Insert longing sigh of satisfaction.

Progressive medical care available to all?

Humaneness in action.

Raising children with the collective agenda to appreciate and respect nature’s wonders?

Isn’t that how it should be?

And the tangible history of thousands of years can’t help but remind a soul that they are not alone in time or space.

With that, the soul becomes acquainted with the past, and the present, and the future–and itself–in profound ways.

My point isn’t that you need to see the the familiar land only in the rearview mirror.

My point, vis-a-vis this evening’s blog, is that if one only lives “safely” by never venturing forth, never challenging the known, never availing oneself to the possibilities that newness extends, never considering that one might be wrong, one might never realize that home still has the light on a bit further on down the road…or at the very least, there are some souvenirs to be had to adorn your homey mantel.

Engaging new thoughts about God, truly “pondering anew, what the Almighty can do,” tends to exercise a part of the brain somewhat content with not moving particularly much.

And the process is exhausting, and somewhat scary, just like our first many days in Germany. Just like it is for Karlchen.

However, one has the distinct possibility of discovering a home one never knew one had. Who knew that there is an active–and fruitful–Buddhist/Lutheran dialogue? Who knew that women medieval mystics were in part behind the regularizing of Holy Communion? And for some, who knew that Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew?

Worst case scenario, one learns to appreciate–and understand–even more one’s home-of-origin. For instance, my English grammar benefitted tremendously by learning the difference between the nominative and the accusative case alone, not to mention my discovery of etymologies heretofore unknown, and a new distinct ability to remember German surnames thanks to knowing what the name originally meant…sometimes in awfully amusing ways.

Learning about religious history, ecumenical dialogue, feminist and liberation and African and Black theology makes me tired, exhilarates me, and brings me home to new places.

—————–

As an aside, Karlchen is making wondrous newness too. Watering eyes, relaxed muscles, emerging complex speech, and new bodily functions.

Was it scary, and is it still?

I cannot express how deeply that is true.

But living, loving, mothering, is.

So we wait, and weep, and hope, and rejoice when the foreign becomes familiar again.

Peace,

Anna