First, I must cop to this: I have Shatner issues. Blasphemy, perhaps, but there it is. I liked TNG, and have seen some of the movies (thought "Nemesis" was pretty interesting). I know what a "red shirt" is, what a "tribble" is, and get the basic Kirk/Spock dynamic.
But we went to see the new movie, and I LOVED it. Seriously loved it. Clapped-like-a-second-grader-over-the-closing-credits loved it. This guy has said it so well, I need not say it all again. But read him. He's funny!
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Wrapping paper! In my gift-giving glory days, I worked for a Hallmark store. Now, if I can get paper all the way around the gift, and a bow slapped on it, I'm pretty happy. To date, I have achieved exactly ZERO shopping for this particular Christmas. Sigh.
2. Real tree or Artificial? Real. Frasier Fir, if possible. Need the smell. Like the short needles!
3. When do you put up the tree? Whenever we can find a couple of unfilled hours in mid-December. Last Sunday afternoon, this time around...though, if circumstances would permit, I'd do it the old-fashioned way, putting up the tree on Christmas Eve and taking it down on the 12th day of Christmas. Oh, well.
4. When do you take the tree down? Whenever we can find a couple of unfilled hours in mid-January...and the gumption, since this is much less fun than putting it up!
5. Do you like eggnog? In a paraphrase of the old Alka-Seltzer commercial: "I like eggnog, but it doesn't like me!"
6. Favorite gift received as a child? Hmmm...I'd have to go with boxed sets of the "Little House" books and five Judy Blume books, whose covers were read right off.
Embarassingly, I have a picture of me at 12-years-old-or-so, looking rather enraptured over Shaun Cassidy's first album. :-)
7. Hardest person to buy for? My sister
8. Easiest person to buy for? Beloved, hands down
9. Do you have a nativity scene? Beloved collects interesting "folk art" sorts of nativity scenes; we have them from Finland, Colombia, the Maasai tribe, lots of places!
10. Mail or email Christmas cards? Mail, but not 'til Epiphany...it's one of Beloved's favorite projects to write and illustrate a newsy account of our year. She's great at it; they're funny and warm...much more interesting than we actually are!
11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Two words: stretch pants.
12. Favorite Christmas Movie? We have a tradition at our house...Beloved & I watch the following together (usually all in a row) every Christmas week:
A Charlie Brown Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
A Christmas Story (this goes back decades in Beloved's family)
That'd be a three-way tie for me: I love the neuroses and music of "Charlie Brown," and the last scene where they're all "loo loo loo-ing" together (Beloved & I sent a photo card one year of the two of us doing that); love the "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" song, and like to root for his little dog; "A Christmas Story" is the single best repository of great cultural-reference lines since "The Princess Bride," and makes me laugh every time.
This scene, BTW, may be the reason I wanted to name my dog Linus; it's the most consistently meaningful cultural Christmas experience of my life:
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Spotty. No good answer.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Yep.
15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Homemade lefse and pepparkakor.
16. Lights on the tree? White, please. Red wooden beads. Ornaments in mostly red and clear-varnished wood, with the exception of Beloved's penguins and my Snoopys.
17. Favorite Christmas song? Situational.
Best CD Anne Sofie von Otter, Home for Christmas. FANTASTIC. Her version of "Dancing Day" alone is worth the purchase price.
Classical Britten's Ceremony of Carols
Congregation Silent Night, done simply and in candlelight. This year, we're having a harp accompany us.
Radio Amy Grant's "Tennessee Christmas" or Michael W. Smith's "All Is Well"
Choir "Before the Marvel of this Night" or the Schulz-Widmar version of "Midnight Clear," both found in the Augsburg Choirbook:
I especially like this verse, which is so relevant this year:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long; beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong; and warring humankind hears not the love-song which they bring; oh, hush your noise and cease your strife, and hear the angels sing.
18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? It's the most churchiful time of the year (save Holy Week), so we're in town on Christmas Eve (traditional dinner with friends between services), and usually my sister's place on Christmas Day. Big family thing over New Year's weekend, for which we travel.
19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer? Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph (the most famous reindeer of alllllll)
20. Angel on the tree top or a star? Rodney the Reindeer
21. Open presents Christmas Eve or morning? Whenever we're together is OK with me.
22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Vacuous parties, the fact that the retail season now starts in September/October, and electronic trees/snowmen/santas/ reindeer/penguins/night-of-the-living-ceramic-carolers beeping out carols.
23. Favorite ornament theme or color? Red!
24. Favorite for Christmas dinner? Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, green been casserole (with crispy French onions), lefse, a pretty tossed salad with pomegranates, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie with real whipped cream. Mmm.
25. What do you want for Christmas this year?
A light that shines through these rather dark times.
Peace on earth.
Safe travel for everyone.
Time to sit down and just BE with Beloved and the pups.
Practically speaking, more memory for the computer...so we can install the operating system upgrade...so that I can use my new orange iPod.
Singing Owl's got a fun plan for today's Friday five, based upon word association. Every time I think about word association, it's Bill Murray's voice I hear, in What About Bob. "Some free associations from my infancy: a beach ball, a dog, a frog, a lock, a poodle, a noodle, a doodle..." Hilarious movie.
Anyway, here we go:
Think summer......are you there? Below you will find five words or phrases. Tell us the first thing you think of on reading each one. Your response might be simply another word, or it might be a sentence, a poem, a memory, a recipe, or a story. You get the idea:
1. rooftop
Francie and Neeley talking on the roof in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, after their father dies. Tender and poignant.
Oh, and my house needs some roof work.
2. gritty
Trailers for TV cop dramas of the '70s were always described as gritty: picture Harry-O's squint, Streets of San Francisco's back alleys and Karl Malden's thoughtful gaze, Pepper Anderson undercover as a hooker in Police Woman, etc.
Also, food eaten at the beach. Puts the "sand" in "sandwich."
3. hot town (yeah, I know, it's two words)
Can't get that song out of my head!
OK, after a giving myself a good shake, a memory has surfaced: catching fireflies in the back yard with my sister, wearing our PJs, sweaty hair sticking to our foreheads and necks.
4. night
Crickets! Post-fireflies, lying in bed in front of a big box fan stuck in the window, listening to the crickets in the back yard and making sure my sister's foot didn't wander to "my" side of the bed.
5. dance
Well, since I've spent practically this whole post in the '70s, gotta go with "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine Band.
I know a lot of believers who don't belong to a church community. There are a lot of reasons for this...many, but not all, of them resulting from a combination of these two themes:
"I think the institutional church is a mess, and Christians are a bunch of hypocrites" (for many thoughtful reasons, and some based on untested assumptions or bad experiences) and
"I can meet God as easily on a walk through the woods on Sunday morning...maybemore easily than in a worship service that doesn't feed me" (one part love of nature, one part frustration, one part consumerism, several parts institutional cluelessness, in my estimation).
There's something missing in the woods, though, and that is community. We are shaped by the experience of seeing the same people every week...of trying, along with them, to live out our lives as followers of Christ. There are lots of things about this that are important:
the experience of communal gathering around word and sacrament, and SINGING about it :-)
intergenerational contact (which is less and less available in our lives with every passing generation)
the opportunity to NOT act as consumers in one arena of our lives, but to "ask not what our community can do for us, but what we can do for our community"
the ability to accomplish more as a group in mission than we can as individuals
a place to work out the moral/ethical questions of our time (not to pontificate, but to really knock ourselves up against the hard stuff and try to understand it and fix what's broken)
and MANY more things, not the least of which is the gift of knowing and being known...of having a group of people that gently reminds you that maybe (just maybe) you don't see all the boats...and it might be good if you learned to count 'em, to look more deeply at a question, to change your angle of approach.
I think this is one of the elements of community that is most critical for our development as human beings. Here's a clip from one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing, in which President Bartlet is playing chess with various members of his staff. He's given them all chess sets that he's received over the years, and playing a game with Toby, one with Josh, one with Sam. The games also become teaching moments...in that gentle way that grandparents and tribal elders and leaders of many kinds have passed on wisdom since there have been younger generations.
I was particularly moved by Jed's nudging of Sam to "look at the whole board." To find as many well-thought-out perspectives as you can to a question. To incorporate as many pieces of truth as you can get your hands on, when you are making a leadership decision.
Of course, none of us can see the whole board alone. And that is why we need a community. There's a wonderful story in the Jewish tradition about how truth is like a giant mirror that was shattered at Creation, and now we each hold a piece of that mirror...a piece of the truth. The more pieces we put together, the closer we are to seeing a larger truth than that which we can hold onto alone.
I think that almost all of us are more like Sally most of the time, even when we want to be like Jed. It's certainly true for me, and the older and wiser (!) I get, the more grateful I am for community. And I pray that the church may be a place that lives up to that vision of community, in which everyone holds a piece of the truth, whether they're two years old or ninety-two, whether they're homeless or gay or poor or an immigrant or a person with an illness...where we recognize that the truth can only be fully realized if we commit to picking up all the little pieces and putting them together.
And where we remember that we follow a God who DOES see the whole board.
The RevGals are all about location, location, location this week, in honor of the fact that many are meeting up in Minneapolis next week for the Festival of Homiletics--fun!
Today's challenge: name five places that fall into the following categories:
1) Favorite Destination -- someplace you've visited once or often and would gladly go again
The hammock at S&J's cabin in WI, to hear the lapping of the waves and watch the birds as I drink iced tea and read an absorbing book, or cuddle with Beloved. We were there on our honeymoon.
2) Unfavorite Destination -- someplace you wish you had never been (and why)
While on a National Lutheran Choir tour some years ago, we stayed at a truly dreadful, roach-infested motel in South Carolina...don't need to go there again (though I'm sure it's not representative of the whole state).
3) Fantasy Destination -- someplace to visit if cost and/or time did not matter
How many picks do I get?
hey, after yesterday--maybe San Francisco, to get LEGALLY married!
find my relatives in Norway & see the fjords
hike and eat my way through Tuscany...actually, through most of Europe. :-)
seeing the Cathedral at Chartres, as well as some of European choral festivals and opera houses would be nice
two cruises: one to Alaska (before the glaciers melt) and one to the Greek isles (including Lesbos, despite the fact that several of its residents are trying to belatedly reclaim the word "lesbian" as their own; pretty sure that horse has already left the barn)
4) Fictional Destination -- someplace from a book or movie or other art or media form you would love to visit, although it exists only in imagination
I would SO love to have access to a Holodeck, like they did in Star Trek TNG!!
Hogwarts wouldn't be bad, either; I'd like to have a cuppa with Minerva and shake Harry, Ron & Hermione's hands.
5) Funny Destination -- the funniest place name you've ever visited or want to visit
Well, I have a couple of vacation photos of me, Beloved, M and B at street signs for "Dyke Avenue" and "Dyke Street" (in different towns). (see also: Lesbos)
I'm not a Trekkie, but I play one in this post.
