On the twelfth day of Christmas...

I posted this on the congregation's blog a week ago, since I love Miss Piggy's "pa dum dum dum" after the fifth day of Christmas. And I couldn't let all twelve days go by without posting it here, too.

10 years + 10 days

9/11 was 10 days ago. Does it feel like more or less than that? I was intrigued (and to be completely honest, slightly annoyed) by all the media coverage of the anniversary. Somehow it felt like no one was asking the right questions. And I'm not sure how helpful it is to watch footage of planes flying into the World Trade Center on endless repeat.
I thought a lot about "where I was on 9/11" - in Randalstown, Northern Ireland - sort of a suburb of Belfast. I was upstairs at my friends' house, reading something theological, when Liz hollered at me to come downstairs and look at the TV. My first question, upon arriving in the family room was, "What movie are you watching?" Of course, it wasn't a movie.
Having the BBC as my primary news source in the days following 9/11 shaped my experience of those days differently than Americans watching network news or CNN 24/7. And being in a country that's had more than its fair share of terrorist activity in the last multiple generations shaped the way I started thinking about the events of that day, too. Over and over again I heard versions of "I'm really sorry for those who lost their lives, and for those who lost loved ones, but it's about time Americans felt what it's like to live anywhere else in the world." The naivete (and arrogance?) of the shock and "I-can't-believe-this-could-happen-here-this-is-America-and-everyone-loves-us" attitude portrayed in European media was, frankly, shocking to folks in Belfast - as it was also in France, where I spent a week at Taize in mid-October 2011.
I didn't think I had much to say about the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I guess my own rememberings havven't really said much. I've appreciated these people over the last few weeks - people who've said what I wanted to say, far better than I've found words to say it.

Will Willimon, presiding bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, wrote for Christianity Today:

On 9/11 I thought, For the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.

The silence of most Christians and the giddy enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

September 11 has changed me. I'm going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God's own Son.
Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today

Diana Butler Bass is brilliant, here.

A colleague I hope to meet someday posted this sermon.

And thanks to Mary Hess, one of my favorite seminary profs, for posting an Indigo Girls rendition of the first couple verses of Finlandia, below. I hadn't even considered putting a patriotic song in the liturgy on 9/11 (a Sunday, remember) until Saturday afternoon, September 10th - too late. And on Sunday morning, during Communion, a member of the congregation handed me a note asking to sing America the Beautiful before worship was over. I knew I had to do it, but I didn't want to. It's not that I'm unpatriotic, it's just that too many American Christians get their patriotism and their faith blended and confused in ways that aren't good for either. I'm thankful that Finlandia is in our hymnal. A little perpsective - and humility - is good for us.

A day plus three years

Yesterday was our third wedding anniversary. Grant says it feels like we've been married that long to him. To me - sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I guess it's just a good thing it doesn't feel like longer than that, right? And it's a good thing that most days we're very glad to be married to each other. We celebrated with a tasty dinner out, at The Emerson Grill - gotta love it when a half-off coupon arrives in the mail on your anniverary! The food was yummy (especially the calamari appetizer) and the setting was cozy, too. Neither of us had eaten there before, so it was a good treat. Even with the coupon, by the time we had an appetizer and entrees we'd blown through the cash my parents sent, so we went through the drive-through at McDonald's and each got a $1 hot fudge sundae for dessert, which we ate at home snuggled up on the couch in front of the fire. Not bad! One of the songs sung at our wedding was "Grow Old Along with Me," which I first heard performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter. When our soloist wasn't able to make it to Arizona from Montana for our wedding, one of my bridesmaids and one of Grant's brothers pinch sang/played the guitar, and it was lovely. I couldn't find a video of Mary Chapin Carpenter singing the song online, though there are some touching video/photo montages folks have put together to the song available on youtube. Here's a version with just the lyrics on the screen.

*8 Things I Fell in Love with in 2009

Rachelle at Magpie Girl has another *8 Things list - of things she fell in love with last year. Here's my list of *8 Things I fell in love with in 2009: 1. The baby I lost. 2. The house we now live in. 3. Car camping - who knew? We had a great week on the Olympic Penninsula in August. I highly recommend the Fairholme Campground on Lake Crescent. 4. Our CSA - Cloud Nine Farm. 5. The Bozeman Public Library, and my trusty library card. 6. Writing - National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month. It hasn't always been pretty, or even readable, but the discipline helped boost my creativity... 7. Having a piano in my house. 8. Thanks to Pandora, English folk musician Kate Rusby.

Ready for the Light

Happy Winter Solstice! I am looking forward to a little more sunshine, though with the Weather Channel forecasting a 100% chance of precipitation in Bozeman tomorrow, I may have to wait a day or two... I thought of this song by Dar Williams today. A good one for solstice.

Mary's Song

I'm preaching this weekend, and so have the Magnificat on the brain. It's not a bad state to be in, really, though I'm still waiting on the Spirit to help me narrow down my sermon. My tendency lately is to have more than one sermon mushed together, which isn't exactly helpful. We'll be singing "Canticle of the Turning," a hymn I like a lot, despite the fact that we all end up sounding so cheerful about a turning upside down of the status quo. I'm not so sure those of us who really are pretty privileged, in the grand scheme of things, should be quite so happy about the rich being sent away empty... Anyway, thinking about Mary's song also made me think about this song I was glad to stumble upon a while back. The singer is Catherine Hessler, a UW classmate of mine (we took Scandinavian linguistics together, and maybe one or two other classes - she studied Swedish while I studied Norwegian, and we were both involved in the university ministries at University Presbyterian Church - she much more so than I). The song's composer, Katie Freeze, can be seen at the keyboard in the video (she was a couple of years behind us at UW, and also a UPC-er). As Catherine writes on her website: "How Many Angels" is Mary’s Song, an interpretation of the reflections of this new young mother after the baby Jesus was born. Mary holds the little miracle in her arms and knows that the angels too rejoice over his life. A life that will change the world. Mary considers both the enormity and the grace of her situation. With wonder and humility she embraces the truth that God chose her to play a beautiful role in the life of the Savior. Hope you like the song.

Tune Anticipation

Let the music begin!

Tomorrow morning at 10am the piano I inherited will finally be tuned. It had lived for several years at my parents' house (I don't know why they didn't want to ship it to me in Phoenix...) and they delivered it to our new house here in Bozeman over Reformation Sunday weekend in October.

Since its arrival we've been letting it acclimate to its new home, and every once in a while I'll sit down and struggle to play something from memory. Badly. Its out-of-tune-ness doesn't exactly help my mediocre ivory tickling skills.

However, there's a box in the garage labeled "Sheet Music" that I can hear calling my name. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I hope to drag it inside and sort through it, and begin to get the music back into my fingers. There was a time when I could lose whole afternoons at the piano, practicing the same hard measures until I could get them without looking, playing old favorites out of the hymnal.

I'm not sure how the man of the house will react to a functioning piano at our house. The piano room is dangerously close to the kitchen and family room where TV watching and napping happen. I hope he'll love it as much as I do. Maybe the Easter Bunny will end up bringing him some lessons.

The Swell Season

Grant and I saw the movie Once in Minneapolis almost two years ago, and we both loved it. The music (Oscar winning) was great, of course, but I loved more that it was set on the street in Dublin. It's funny how different sounds - and more so smells - take me back to the year I lived in Northern Ireland. This past summer I was walking on Main Street in downtown Bozeman, and it started to rain. As I rounded a corner and passed a local burger joint I could have sworn I was in Strabane, I could even picture the chippy in my head. Crazy. Anyway - here's a new video by The Swell Season. I'm thankful to have come across it on Chris Scharen's blog. (And I'm hoping Santa will bring me The Swell Season's newest cd). Hope you like the video!