The Renovating Reverend

For centuries, the spring equinox has been a time for sowing seeds and celebrating a time of regeneration, new growth. In some places and religions, it has also been a time of purification with an intention of starting life anew. We had a few inches of snow last night, which covered up the crocus that had just started to bloom, and could seem to delay the arrival of more spring growth, but I’ve learned that even a late snow can be a helpful part of spring and hint at the hope of warmth and growth to come.

A good part of our yard was torn up when the dead trees and broken down chain link fence were removed last fall. Then the guys who did the work on the fascia and trim last month left some ruts behind, from positioning their large, diesel powered lift. I spent some time over the past few days attempting to rake those ruts out of the damp soil before the snow flew. We’d like to grow grass over that area of the yard until we’re ready to landscape it, a few years from now. I had thought we’d need hold off on the grass seed, at least until we approached the last frost date, which, for us, is the first week of May. Turns out we didn’t really have to wait that long. My husband remembers hearing old farmers talk about scattering grass seed on top of the last spring snow. In this way, the seed would “melt” down into the soil, make good contact with it, and have some moisture to help it germinate. Especially since the temperature is going to go back up into the fifties this week, this made good sense. This morning, Steve pulled on his rubber boots and slopped through the melting mess, scattering the grass seed. It is seed that will eventually help bring grassy cohesion and growth to the bare landscape.

Feeling as though a fresh start, warmth, and growth are just out of reach? They might be much closer than you think.

I’m sure you’ve heard the very old saying, “A thing worth doing is worth doing well.” I often think of this saying as I’m stripping woodwork in preparation for refinishing it. A person can strip just enough to make the wood smooth and ready for sanding, primer, and paint (as we will do in our bathrooms and kitchen), or go further and remove every last bit for staining and sealing (which is what we’ll do everywhere else). Some folks go so far as using dental tools to pick wood completely clean. You will find one dental pick in my tool bucket, but most of our wood trim has gotten rather dinged up over the past 112 years, and maybe even had a bit of water damage here and there, so it will never look anything like it did the day it was installed, no matter what amount of effort I put into the job of refinishing it. This could make the job seem futile, as in, “Why bother. Just paint it all.” That’s certainly a valid option. However, if you like stained woodwork, because of the warmth or the look of the wood grain, a different mindset is needed.

The English writer G.K. Chesterton once said, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” This twist on the older saying is one that I have lived by since the day I read it. Chesterton made an important point, in his trademark paradoxical fashion: If something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing, no matter the quality of the end product. If we allow ourselves to freeze up because we’re worried the end result will not be perfect, the thing worth doing will never get started. If we endlessly toil at a project because it just isn’t good enough yet, the thing worth doing might not happen.

Are there times when precision is called for? I know there are. Do we sometimes look at things we’ve accomplished and see how we might have done better or differently? Surely. Are there times when we need to let someone else do a thing? Absolutely. Am I going to let perfectionism prevent me from digging into the things-worth-doing that I can tackle, or keep me from appreciating the things-worth-doing that I’ve done? I certainly hope not!

Extending Chesterton’s philosophy, I can try to appreciate the efforts of others with a less perfectionistic eye.

Today, I’ve got the day off so that I can spend a good chunk of time stripping paint and varnish from the parlor wood work. I’d better get back to it, with an updated version of Chesterton’s saying in mind: “Do your best, and git ‘er done.”

I’m blogging during my lunch hour, today. It’s cold and flu season in cubicle land, here at work. With sneezing going on all around, I often hear people say “Bless you!” Sure, it’s meant as anything from an expression of goodwill to a full blown religious statement, but the concept has always seemed just a little odd to me, nonetheless. It sounds as though we feel God won’t bless someone unless we wish it, or as if God’s blessing hasn’t already been poured out on a person. Odd, when viewed this way, isn’t it?

When I first heard the Wiccan or Neo-Pagan parting expression “Blessed be”, it made me think–not just because of the old English word order in the expression, but because of the slightly different shade of meaning this word order can convey. Just as the Christian scripture encourages followers of Jesus to “pray without ceasing,” to be aware of our constant connection to the Divine, I find the traditional Pagan expression “Blessed be” to be a reminder that God is in us, with us, and for us. In other words, it is a reminder to behave as if we are blessed, as if we are in God’s presence. After all, if we know that we are already blessed by God, already welcome to a constant, loving connection with the Divine, then we should let that fact sink deeply into our hearts and minds, so deeply that we live out the blessing in our daily lives.

The next time you hear someone say, “God bless you,” may you be reminded that you don’t have to wait for the blessing. You are already blessed, already welcome to live each moment in the loving presence of the Creator.

Blessed be.

Renovation is a messy process. Things often look awful before they begin to look good. And you sometimes jostle and disturb the nice parts of the house as you work on the damaged parts, resulting in repairs to the parts that had been nice to begin with! We have a couple of examples of this. As the trees and shrubs in the yard were being removed, parts of our sidewalk crumbled under the weight of the machinery being used. With winter coming on fast, in a neighborhood where everyone walks everywhere, we pretty much had to have professionals repair this right away. Then, when plumbers began removing the gas and water pipes from the old kitchenettes that are upstairs, they knocked loose the ductwork that feeds heat to the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom. Our budget couldn’t take another hit. This was something that I’d need to fix, and it would require entering the crawlspace beneath the kitchen.

Many Midwestern houses are built on basements. This allows easy access to utilities that come into the house, like plumbing, which has to be buried deep in the earth to avoid freezing in the winter months. Most of our house was built on a brick foundation, and has a basement with a decent height to stand upright, to work on things that are under the house. The basement floor is finished in concrete, which also makes moving around clean and easy. However, the kitchen and the level above it were built over an old porch, so that part of the house has a crawlspace that ranges from 1.5 to 2.5 feet above the dirt and rocks that were in the ground when the house was built.

I’d been in one or two tight attic spaces, but I’d never crawled beneath a house. I wasn’t very excited about sticking my head into a break in the brick wall of the bright, open basement, to shimmy my way into the dark between dirt and kitchen subfloor. I don’t mind darkness so much, but it can be uncomfortable under certain circumstances. And I’m not real crazy about tight spaces, either, although I can tolerate them for a time. I have to say that cobwebs just aren’t on my list of favorite things, either. Although the creepy-crawly creators of the cobwebs might be long gone, I just don’t care for them. And though I can usually figure out basic mechanical-type things that aren’t familiar to me, I’d never done anything with ductwork. Despite all this, I realized that necessity is the mother of invention, and often is the creator of courage, too. No matter what, I had to give it a try. I was going in.

I crawled my way over to the ductwork. I hollered to my husband, Steve, that an iron pipe made it difficult for me to reach the ducts. It turned out to be the remains of the disconnected gas pipe to one of the kitchenettes, which needed to come out, anyway. As I lay there, looking up at joists and subfloor covered with cobwebs, conduit, and pipes going every which way, and waiting for Steve to get the Sawzall for me, I had time to think about exactly where I was. I turned off my flashlight, to save the batteries. The sheer weight of the house, just inches above me, seemed very real. I could just about feel all of the old timber, lath and plaster. And I was about to fire up a power tool that would shake and vibrate a pipe that reached two stories above me. Focusing on the light that filtered in from the basement seemed like a good idea. It was the reminder of a wider reality outside of the limited space I was in, a reality that I much preferred! The view from the crawlspace was reassuring—or was it? It almost seemed like a reminder of just how cramped my position was. I turned the flashlight back on. I swung it around to look at the tuck pointing job our mason had done several weeks before. I found a cap for what was probably a 1940’s Coca-Cola bottle. There was a disintegrating paper wrapper for a block of Right-Cut chewing tobacco. More than a few folks had been here in the crawlspace before me. I began to collect old bits of brick, glass, and metal, and move them closer to the opening, so that I could clear them out of the space at a later time. When my focus shifted from potential doom to the task at hand, my fears settled down to a healthier level. I was able to make repeated cuts to that iron pipe and bring it on down. I managed to wrangle the ducts just enough to get the heat flowing in the right direction again. I eventually slid back out into the basement, covered in dusty crud.

I’ll have to go back into the crawlspace with the necessary materials to complete repairs to the ducts. But I’m not entirely dreading it. I’ve been there once before. And I’ve seen evidence of others who’ve been there before me. That’s reassuring. This is analogous to scripture, I think. The scriptures of our faiths are a chronicle of other folks’ experience of life, and of God. They usually aren’t full of perfect people who did all the right things. Scripture and sacred stories are as full of fears, screw ups, and regrets as they are holy decisions and acts of love. I’ve ceased to see sacred stories solely as roadmaps that tell us to take a left here, and a right there, and have come to recognize them as sign posts on a journey with God and others. They are reassurance that my path is not so unlike those of the founders of our faiths, and encouragement that it’s not just about doing or saying all the right things. Jesus of Nazareth certainly warned that following the rules for the sake of the rules was an empty exercise. Scripture doesn’t just direct us to look to the light outside the crawlspace, to a holy/whole-ly goal, it reminds us to continue on with our lives, just as those before us have done, growing in our sometimes cramped, sometimes bumpy relationship with God and others. Keeping this in mind can make sacred stories come alive to us in ways that might be surprisingly new and relevant…especially when we’re spending some time in the crawlspaces of life.

I invite you to read, listen to, or share a sacred story sometime soon.

Opportunities and expectations. They can be tough to get a handle on. Opportunities can present themselves at the most surprising times, and they can be missed when they are disguised in a cloak of misfortune or disappointment. Expectations can be described as inflated or unrealistic, and sometimes they can even be said to be too low. Since beginning the renovation of our house, I’ve been reminded on a daily basis that, even when one responds to an opportunity with what seem to be realistic expectations, there is no guarantee of a smooth process or an ideal outcome.

When I think about people who are written or spoken about in holy texts—of Jewish, Christian, and other faiths—I realize that I’ve got a lot of company in the struggle with expectations. From time to time, everyone seems to have expectations that don’t match up with the reality of a situation. Jonah expected God to wipe out the town of Nineveh when the residents of that city did not respond to his call to return to a life mindful of God. Some of Jesus’ disciples hoped that Jesus, as the Messiah, would drive out the Roman army of occupation so the Jews could return to being self-governed. I don’t think we have to go much further than these two examples to get the message that the least healthy or least realistic expectations are those we build on our idea of what God wills, of how God operates. Jonah didn’t understand the depth of God’s grace. Some of Jesus’ disciples didn’t understand that the scope of Jesus’ ministry went far beyond their own place and time. They had trouble comprehending that their understanding of God was incomplete, or that it could even be twisted by their own motives and desires.

And so, as I think about these and other figures of our faiths, I’m reminded that I do myself no favor when I try to stand in for God and judge myself or others, or when I imagine what direction God is taking some situation. However I conceive of God, I will never be able to see the whole of God in my lifetime. And, you know, that’s okay. It takes a lot of pressure off of me! I’m not in control of the universe. God is in control. I can focus on taking care of what’s in front of me and doing what I can to deepen my experience of God. God will take care of the rest. And when I have trouble really believing that—in the midst of the ups and downs of daily life—I can reconnect with God and release my concerns, as often as necessary. A minister from my childhood put it this way: “Pray any time of day or night, and don’t hesitate to hand over your worries to God; God’s going to be up all night anyway.”

Perhaps, if I’m not struggling so hard with expectations, I just might see opportunities more clearly.