The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
23 April 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
Pray out loud. Even if you're alone. Don't be embarrassed. There
are several things that can happen when you pray out loud that
don't happen as well when you pray silently.
1. People leave you alone. They'll interrupt
you if they think you're just reading a book, but if you're
mumbling, they think you're crazy and they give you a wide berth.
Especially useful on the subway, where mumblers always have
plenty of personal space.
2. It helps you cope with distractions. I have
written extensively on distractions and what you might do with
them; they're not always a bad thing at all. But absolutely
everyone who prays has them, and getting above their noise can
be tall order. When you try to squelch them, they become more
demanding than ever. But if your brain is working, your mouth
is moving and your ears are hearing yourself speak, enough of
your faculties are occupied with the task at hand that the distractions
have fewer places to look for a toehold.
3. It reminds you that the ancient words of
our prayers and our scripture are beautiful. They are beautiful
when spoken out loud. We are blessed to have such beauty so
ready at hand. Beauty is one of the central ways in which God
gets and keeps our attention. The spoken word is beautiful.
Your speaking voice is are beautiful, even if you are one of
those folks who cringe when you hear yourself on a tape. And,
also, hearing yourself speak can make your speaking more beautiful:
you don't have to speak the way you usually speak. Speak some
other way, and see how you like it. Who's gonna know?
4. Praying aloud creates alternate moments
of sound and silence. "The Lord be with you," you
say out loud and, in the silence that follows, everyone you've
ever known and loved, from Jesus to your own mother or dad,
answers you lovingly: "And also with you." This is
the communion of the saints. They're praying with you. For you.
All the time. The ancients believe that they prayed when we
pray. They were right about that.
Four things about prayer. Do it out loud if
you're doing it silently now, and see how you like it.
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
7 April 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
How can there be ten inches of snow at home? What will happen
to the daffodils, to all the flowers just waking up? To the
tiny sunflower seedlings along the side of the house? The cosmos
strewn artfully in between everything? The rosebushes, which
have been putting forth such an abundance of shiny new leaves?
The nasturtium and petunia seeds in the windowbox?
Actually, most things will survive. Snow in
April is not that unusual - I remember snow on more than one
Easter Sunday, greeting people at the door after the service,
funereal but warm in my long black cloak, and they shivering
determinedly in their new Easter dresses, or resigned and sober
in their tired winter coats. And it usually melts quickly when
it snows that much at this time of year, so most of the flowers
will be all right. Just a little surprised. These things happen.
Few things are irrevocable. What you planned
may not work out, but something else will, and sometimes it
will turn out to have been infinitely preferable to what you
had your heart set on.
I'm glad I'm here in Texas, though, where it's
seventy degrees. It'll give me a chance to rest up from my gardening
and not feel guilty, since the whole thing is under snow anyway
and I couldn't work on it even if I were home.
I could use a break. I fell off the shovel
the other day -- I was trying to jump on the blade, so it would
go deep into the ground, and I fell off and hit the ground hard.
I lay there for a while, wondering if I had broken my neck.
After concluding I hadn't, I got up and put in some more lilies.
But I've been even lamer than usual ever since.
Here at the conference center, you can lure
a massage therapist out from town if you can line up three people
who want one. I've been surveying the group, on the alert for
other people who hobble like I do. I've got one other person
already - she doesn't hobble, but she's got MS and loves how
a massage makes her feel. So that's two of us. I'm going to
go ahead and book.
During the recovery after the World Trade Center
bombing, my friend Rebecca worked overtime for nothing. She
and her colleagues leaned over their tables and whispered to
their weary clients in the back of St. Paul's Chapel for eight-hour
shifts. Shoulders and necks, she said of her aching visitors,
that's what these guys all need. After she was finished, they'd
pull their boots back on, put on the shirts and do back out
to the Pile. Even their faces looked younger. Such kind touch,
in the face of so terrible a thing.
Some people weep when they have a massage.
I am one: I don't allow myself to be fully aware of how much
my body always hurts until I am safely in the hands of somebody
who knows how to minister to its pain, and then the stored-up
tears flow. I can handle it, we say, and we can. But there is
a cost to handling it, and sometimes letting somebody else handle
it is like a miracle.
I wonder how the folks in Iraq are. The hard
soldiers, well-trained. I can handle it, they say to themselves,
and they can. The mothers, holding their babies on their laps,
not at all sure if they can handle it, but knowing that somehow
they must. The Iraqi leadership, telling everyone loudly that
they can handle it, that they are handling it, as it grows more
and more clear that they are not and cannot.
Sometimes the very best thing a person in power
can do for his or her people is give up. Sometimes that's the
best thing anybody can do. There is a necessary humility, built
into human power and essential to it: the knowledge of one's
limits. When it fails, human power becomes monstrous.
What massage does is put us in contact with
this knowledge and help us accept it. It's only our creatureliness.
Our aching bodies knew about it already. Our physical centers
are never very far from our spiritual centers. It does this
through honest encounter with what hurts, what's out of line,
what's trying to do what it's not built to do. What's not telling
the truth. Don't worry, say the strong hands on your sore neck,
you don't have to do this all by yourself.
I can see it: an army of massage therapists
airlifted into Iraq, greeting the scowling with kind smiles,
inviting them to take off their dusty boots and lie down on
their stomachs, stroking the children's tense little backs and
the mothers' tired legs, kneading their way up the spines of
the strong-bodied soldiers, who fall instantly asleep. Giving
them a cup of tea while they wait. Whispering, so that everyone
starts whispering.
And soon the sky is quiet.
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
2 April 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
I don't watch at all any more, my friend
says. I was doing nothing else, just glued to the
television,watching those explosions over and over. I don't
even want to talk about it.
How long can you watch something that looks
and sounds like the Fourth of July but isn't? Feel yourself
rocked with each flash and the terrible BOOM that follows it,
hoping that this bomb was as smart as all the others? We have
limits.
But don't boycott the news altogether. Don't
retreat into your shell until it's over. Just force yourself
to do something else most of the day, and most of your available
time off. Your work should take care of forty-plus hours of
it, since they probably don't let you watch CNN all day there.
And your leisure time should be that: in the garden, or reading
a book, or at the gym, in the park, hearing music, out to dinner
with a friend. It's important for us to remember why it is that
we think life is good. And most of our lives are good because
of the little things we have in them. The ordinary things.
We need to balance ourselves in this way because
God has business for us concerning the war, and overdosing on
it so that we can no longer bear to think about it at all makes
us unavailable for whatever that business might be. We don't
want people to come home, scarred and in need of kindness, and
find us too conflicted about their experience to offer them
any help or understanding. We did that thirty years ago, and
we are still trying to atone for our callousness today.
What's the business we will have from God concerning
this war? We need to pray now, and pray with an open heart,
not an exhausted, defensive one. The great river of God's love
flows all around this situation, touching each man, woman and
child affected. Our little trickle of love enters that mighty
stream when we pray, and we are in line with it, carried along
with its great power. Thus, we relate to people we will never
meet in prayer, people on both sides. And it changes us. And,
in ways we will never know, it changes them.
Well, can't God just work in them without our
prayers, and leave us out of it? Of course. But we wouldn't
be part of the work, wouldn't be in the river of God's love.
We'd be standing on the riverbank, wringing our hands, or standing
there with our backs turned, pretending nothing was happening.
We would have sat this one out, while other people gave their
lives believing we were worth dying for. And other people lost
their lives believing terrible things about us, or nothing at
all.
This will not last forever. It will be over.
Soon, soon, we pray. But whenever it is over, those who can
reconcile will be called upon to do so, and to lead others in
doing so. Those who have prayed constantly will be united to
friend and foe alike, in a new way ready to be led into a new
relationship. In Christ, war is never really about winning,
though each side desperately wants to win. Christ works for
the end of war, pushes past the failure of human efforts at
peace to the time when it is over, looks forward to the unknowable
peace He already holds in His hand, waiting to give it out to
all of us.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in the Diocese of New
York and author
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
27 March 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
We have two kinds of oatmeal: Quaker and Irish. Quaker is for
oatmeal raisin cookies and for when I only have ten minutes
to cook it -- there are times when I have oatmeal for supper,
if I am alone, and it's usually Quaker.
But Irish is real oatmeal. It come in a tin,
like a coffee tin, and your first hint that you're not in Kansas
is when you open it up and look inside: no soft uniform flakes.
Instead, hard pellets of oats with the hulls still on is what
you get with Irish. You have to cook it for about half an hour
or you could break a tooth. You put raisins in it at the end
of cooking, if you like raisins. Q adds buttermilk at this point.
Stay away from mine with that buttermilk, I remind him.
This morning, Q is downstairs making Irish.
The hulls have just now softened enough to burst open, and the
smell they release is heavenly. It reminds me of my father,
of mornings at our house when I was a girl. When my grandmother
was dying, I was convinced that she would get strong again if
I fed her oatmeal, and I would fill a nice tray with a breakfast
she probably could scarcely bear to look at. How she found the
strength to thank me so kindly every day, I cannot now imagine.
Q appears at the door to my office with a fragrant
bowl of oatmeal and a lovely cup of tea. How absolutely lovely.
The sun comes through the window and the birds are at the feeder
-- we are all having grains.
I am listening to the news. The sun is shining
in Iraq, too: the sandstorm is over, and it is late afternoon.
There are hours of light, enough time to fight again. Soon it
will be night, and there will be cover in which to bomb, in
which to peer through the darkness with our infrared scopes.
And tomorrow, everyone will need a good breakfast. Soldiers
eat a lot. Contrary to popular legend, the food is usually pretty
good, and there's a lot of it.
The children of Basra will awaken hungry, too.
A good breakfast is important for growing children -- the most
important meal of the day, my mother always used to say. I imagine
the mothers of Basra believe this too: all mothers believe it.
Cooking breakfast is going to be tough this morning: they're
running out of water. Running out of food, too, soon. Humanitarian
aid can't get through yet, and Red Cross engineers have not
been given access to repair the water delivery system.
The tea is hot and sweet in my mouth, and the
oatmeal was delicious. Now my stomach is pleasantly full. The
soldiers will have their breakfast soon -- maybe oatmeal, for
those who want it. Those out on patrol will eat some strange
things, nothing hot and wonderful like my breakfast, but enough
to keep them going.
It's the children of Basra who concern me.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in
the Diocese of New York and author
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
24 March 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
Before I could help myself, I had soaked nine bean seeds in
a cup of warm water for two hours, as you must do before you
plant them. Now it was fish or cut bait: they either had to
go in the ground somewhere or that was the end of them. But
they need to be in ground that's warm. Like in late April or
early May, not late March. So I put them into peat pots. The
kitchen table is covered with peat pots, the window is full
of them. They are everywhere. You can't eat on that table.
I spent a couple of happy hours both Saturday
and Sunday in the warm sun, doing things too early: putting
in sunflower seeds, planting nasturtiums. It's not too early
to sprinkle poppy seeds, though, and I sprinkled with abandon:
some in the rose barrel, some along the side of the house with
the sunflowers-to-be.
For the most part, the things that go in too
early will be fine: they'll just sit and pout until the soil
warms to their liking, and then they will get busy, with no
harm done. A sudden frost could end it all for some of them,
but I have it in my mind that we won't have one. I always have
this in my mind, every spring.
And there is usually a sudden frost.
I want something to be so, and so I expect
that it will. I expect the best-case scenario. I am regularly
informed by life that it does not always present itself, but
I continue to expect it nonetheless.
We will roll into Iraq like a knife through
warm butter. People will be thrilled to see us and welcome us
with hugs and happiness. They have suffered under a dictator
for too long, and they will cheer their liberators. Their dispirited
soldiers will surrender immediately. We might take the whole
country with barely a shot. This could be over in a matter of
days.
Some did surrender -- many hundreds, actually.
Another band of soldiers came out with a white flag, and then
ambushed those who came forward to receive their surrender.
So now they have prisoners of war, as well. Friendly fire has
claimed some victims. So did a terrible incident of fragging.
Once war is out of the box, its contradictory tentacles squirm
like snakes, everywhere, uncontrollably, all at once. This could
be quick. This could be long. This could be anything.
Prayer expects the best. It cannot demand it,
but it arises from hope and trust in a God who is good, and
it expects to see goodness in the world, signs of that good
God. Prayer is always puzzled and shocked by sorrow, as if it
had never see it before. Should prayer become more realistic?
Should it lower its sights, embrace more reasonable goals?
I think not. We force nothing into existence
in our prayer, create nothing. Make nothing. God creates. And
God hears, too: hears our longing. Our longing for the good
is part of the world's history, just as much a part as someone
else's terrible plans. And so we plant things too early, see
them beautiful before they even arrive, imagine the best and
pray for it. Without ever knowing for sure what will happen.
It is not given us to know. But it is given us to hope.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in the Diocese of New
York and author
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
22 March 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
Can I have that for the compost pile? Q said
as he saw the piles of wonderful moldy leaves I was pulling
off the garden. Well, of course: the stuff cries out to be food
for the worms, to pass in one end of their cylindrical little
bodies and out the other. I could have left it in place and
the worms would have done their work right there where the leaves
fell, but I really wanted to see what all was happening under
them, and wanted whatever was happening to have the benefit
of some sun.
What was happening was this: all 100 daffodil
bulbs are up and growing about a half-inch per day. The yarrow
is up, tiny feathery ruffles of bright green against the dark
brown soil. The butterfly bush grew tired of waiting for me
to prune it and began to leaf at the bottom -- I lopped off
everything above the highest leaf, and we'll see. I was pretty
brutal with the Dusty Miller, too, so it can begin to send out
side shoots and get nice and full. Nothing's happening with
the lavender yet, so I gave it an extra little chop. We'll see.
The plant whose name I can't remember is back, and I still can't
remember it's name. Maybe it will bloom this year and remind
me.
And the cannas -- no final word yet. The thick
stems I chopped off in the fall are rotted, and come away easily
in my hand. That doesn't really tell me anything. What matters
is what's going on with the tubers under the ground. So I still
don't know whether I killed them or not. And the balloon flowers
next to them: a careful examination of their stalks revealed
nothing. No buds. Do they want to be pruned down to the ground
each spring, like the butterfly bush, or do they want to bud
on their old stems? So I pruned half of them down and left half
of them up, and we'll see.
Q's fig tree will live. It is not native to
the northeastern United States -- too cold. But he planted it
next to the dryer vent from the basement, so it received periodic
blessings of light steam all winter, and he banked it with mulch
and Christmas tree branches. And its buds are tender and living.
I was avoiding going inside. I was in the dirt
with the daffodils, rejoicing with the fig tree. Q was inside
with the news report, terrible heavy bombing over Baghdad and
several other cities. I'm not going to get up in the night and
listen to the BBC, I had told my spiritual director, but I did.
I used my arthritis as an excuse to go in the other room and
turn it on. I don't know why. I need to give myself some space,
but I can't seem to do it yet. I remain fastened to the radio
as if I were running the war.
But I'm not running the war. If I were running
it, there wouldn't be one, I tell myself, succumbing to the
universal flawed asssumption that people in power call all the
shots. They call some of the shots. And some of the shots call
themselves.
Events spiral. Things happen you can't predict,
and you react. Nothing is as it was expected to be, certainly
not a war. Terrible but brief, we all told each other, altering
our hope after the bombing began. It is terrible, for sure.
We do not yet know if it will also be brief.
A garden changes daily. You walk out in the
morning and there is something new and lovely, some small surprise,
some small fulfillment of yesterday's promise. A war does, too,
I guess. You wake up in the morning and there is something new.
Something unlovely. Some new dashing of human hope.
And sometimes the two meet. The fall after
the bombing of the WTC, a million daffodils were planted in
New York. In all five boroughs, hundreds of volunteers tucked
the bulbs into the ground in parks, large and small. everywhere.
For years to come, years and years and years, brave yellow colonies
of daffodils will wind through the city and make us smile. Every
year they will multiply. After a time, nobody will remember
that they were WTF daffodils, planted in the dust of our sorrow.
Plant something in these dark days. Find a
place to put something in the ground to begin its life. If you
live in the city, get some flowers and put them on your kitchen
table where you can see them. Or commit the horticultural equivalent
of jumping the turnstile in the subway and sneak a seed or two
into a municipal planter when there are no cops around. Poppy
seeds will work -- tiny, and you don't even have to cover them
up. Give them a chance to live. Give them a chance.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in the Diocese of New
York and author
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
18 March 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
We decided to eat dinner in front of the television
so we could watch the president. We almost never watch the president,
or anybody else -- our news comes from radio. But there are
times when you want to see.
Fifteen minutes. He had finished before we
reached dessert. Q sliced our pears into delicious, juicy quarters.
We ate them as the commentators piled on. Then they ran a program
about the career of Saddam Hussein. Not an Eagle Scout, Saddam.
By the time I arose this morning, two cabinet
ministers had resigned from under Tony Blair. I knew it already:
I had slept with the BBC, so I could keep track of things in
my sleep. This made me dream unsettling things: I was with a
crowd in a burning building, pointed out the fact that the roof
was made of wood that the flames were reaching it. Then I was
on a train, cleaning up someone else's trash that had been left
on the seat. Yup.
This is one of those milestones in history.
One of those events by which we mark time: Let's see, now, that
was before my mother died, because she was there.....Let's see,
that was before Madeline was born....Let's see, that must have
been during the war, because we still had blackout shades up....
Who is to say how we will remember what is about to happen?
But remember it we will. We'll bookmark our own biographies
with it.
It is bigger than we are, and we will not be
its decision-makers. So what can we do? We, who were powerless
to prevent it?
We can pray. When someone says that, it's usually
another way of saying that a situation is hopeless. All we can
do is pray, as if that really weren't much. But it is. In fact,
it's really always all we can do: the arrangements we make in
the world are contingent at best. Our power doesn't count for
much, and it vanishes in a puff of smoke. We give it everything
we've got in the service of something we hold dear, but we do
not manage its end. Before, during and after we have worked
as hard as we could, all we can do is pray.
I've been praying for the leaders of the world
since forever. Been praying especially hard lately. Praying
for the ones with whom I agree and the ones with whom I don't.
Praying for the president and all his advisors. For all our
soldiers and all of theirs. For all their children and ours.
For their grandmothers, and ours. Praying for the United Nations.
Praying for Saddam and for Osama, and everyone who looks to
them. Don't think that hasn't been a challenge.
But it's all I can do. I can speak my mind
and write a letter. I can make a donation and attend a vigil.
I am one tiny voice, one little flame. With others, I became
many. But, perhaps, not many enough. We did not succeed in averting
what is about to happen. Not everything in life succeeds. I
knew that.
And now I must turn myself to a new reality,
a new prayer. A sadder-but-wiser prayer. That what happens,
happens quickly. That loss of life is minimal -- ours and theirs.
Minimal, I repeat, and a vision of one dead child reminds me
how defeated a word minimal is. That, somewhere on the other
side of all this, peace can take root and bloom. In my prayer,
I watch God watching us.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in
the Diocese of New York and author
The
Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm
February 2003
Copyright 2003 Barbara Crafton
From my window, I can see the trudge toward the school:
kids with musical instruments in their bulky cases, kids wearing
enormous backpacks -- What's in this thing? their parents say,
hefting the heavy bag -- kids in pairs, kids alone. Kids happy
to be going. Kids who don't want to go.
The school year seems to have gone on forever
in February. And it will go on forever, too, stretching into
the future with no end in sight. In February, it feels like
they've always been in the seventh grade and always will be.
A sign in front of the high school says that 8th grade parents
are invited to an orientation, to see what high school will
be like for their darlings. In case they've forgotten what high
school is like.
If they remember, they know that it's hard.
Not the work: the life. They remember that it takes a tough
kid to withstand having worn the wrong shirt to school: such
a thing sticks to your reputation mercilessly, and can stick
to it for years. If ever an institution invited people to idolatry,
it is the American high school. It prepares us for the practice
of paranoia, invites us to measure ourselves by the standards
of others, introduces us to the chimera of popularity and then
snatches it cruelly out of our hands.
The best thing anybody can do for a young person
is help him not take it too seriously. To remind her of the
self that lives independently of what everybody else is saying
and doing. To celebrate mightily whenever the courage to do
that appears.
Maybe adolescence is the best time in life
for some people, but I haven't met many of them. Sometimes I
think we've succeeded if all we've done is help them survive.
Later is better, after things have calmed down and you've had
the time to define yourself.
The people massing in the Persian Gulf just
left the world of high school, most of them. For most of them,
this is their first time away from home. Most of them are just
on the edge of the time of life when they can assert their own
beauty and goodness, claim themselves on their own, by their
own standards. I watch their younger brothers and sisters on
their way to school -- a year or two ago, that was them. Now
they peer through telescopes, stare at instrument panels, practice
with their rifles, run at a crouch through a training course
with a forty pound pack on their backs, the descendant of those
heavy backpacks we used to wonder about. They used to sleep
until noon. They'd like to now, do it every chance they get,
but most days they arise before dawn. They don't trudge now.
They march. Their parents at home imagine them marching. Is
that really you?
Dear God. Their youth fills us with fear. It
breaks our hearts. Soldiers are young -- younger than we realized
when we were young, too. The hard-jawed infantrymen we remember
are suddenly our own children, and it's more than we can bear.
The Rev. Barbara Crafton is a priest in
the Diocese of New York and author
