Meet Jan and Lee--Domestic Heroes

We have a policy here at the church that says wedding ceremonies will not be conducted for a couple until they have gone through three hours of premarital counseling.  It's a good policy--and on least one occasion prevented train wreck of a marriage!  But the same policy does not hold for folks who want to renew their wedding vows.  Usually it happens after twenty-five or fifty years, but earlier this winter I got a phone call from a woman named Jan who asked if I could officiate at such a ceremony for her sixtieth wedding anniversary.  I quickly agreed.  Sixty years is pretty impressive!  If we'd done any pre-ceremony counseling I suspect she and her husband could teach me a thing or two!

All that said, I never met them until about twenty minutes before the ceremony.  It was to take place in their rented vacation home here on Sanibel, with their children, grandchildren and a few friends in attendance.  I was greeted at the door by Jan's husband Lee.  As well as the family dog, who made his way in and out of the room throughout the ceremony.

Lee had prepared something for me to read at the ceremony, that was a bit of a history of their relationship.  They met in high school in Kansas City, MO.  In their senior year their lockers were just down the hall from each other.  Lee wrote that he "fell in love with Jan the first time he saw her."

They sang together in the school choir--and Lee made sure to sit right behind Jan.  When the class picnic was scheduled, they made a deal--if Lee would drive, Jan would make some lunch for them to share.  It was their first date.

They got married in 1959, and honeymooned in a borrowed cabin in the Ozarks.  They had two children, a boy and a girl--Joe and Lynn.  And they are enormously proud of both of them, as well as their adult grandchildren.

Earlier in the year, Jan told Lee that wedding vows expired after sixty years, and that they would need to re-up.  He happily agreed!

The vows they actually used were written for the occasion.  Lee vowed to "continue to love you, honor you, and care for you forever."  And Jan declared that their years "together have been a blessing to me."

I suppose none of this is especially extraordinary--yet in this day and age in one in two marriages falter, I for one think we should hold such folks in great esteem.  They are, in so many ways, domestic heroes!

I am pleased to have met Lee and Jan--and to have helped them celebrate their many years of marriage.  (The veil, by the way, that Jan is wearing in the photo, came from the original wedding ceremony!)

Blessings on them both!

Climate Change and Confirmation

This past Sunday my oldest granddaughter was confirmed.  Along with five other young women, all around fourteen or fifteen, she took vows affirming her desire to follow the way of Jesus as an active member of her church.

Each one of the confirmands offered very thoughtful statements of faith.  I was especially impressed by their honesty.  No one seemed to pretend that they had all the answers.  One of the young women even began her statement by saying "Christianity is confusing."  And so at times it is!  Theological explanations are often rather circuitous.  And stated beliefs are not always realized in actual practice.  Confusing indeed!

My granddaughter shared some of her classmates hesitancy.  "I am going to be honest," she said, "at first I wasn't sure if I wanted to be confirmed, I went back and forth on it multiple times.  I didn't really know why, but I figured out it's because I don't necessarily believe all of the religious stuff."

We didn't have  a chance to unpack what she meant by "religious stuff"--I suspect it has to do with Virgin Births and walking on water.  But despite her questions, her doubts, I think she's got what it takes to be part of the church.  "I believe in the human race," she said.  "I believe in what we can do as a whole . . . if we all come together to work."  And that, she says later, in her statement, can happen in and through church.  Working together.  Being community.  "[A] welcoming community," she says, where "everyone takes care of each other."

There's not a lot of God talk in her statement--but from where this proud grandfather/preacher sits, there is all sorts of religious stuff.  And, heavens, this child's statement even includes a word about climate change!  It's a problem, she says, "and [it's] not going away unless we take action fast."

Today I feel better about the possibility of that happening because my granddaughter, and others like her, just got confirmed.

Distracted from the Truth

I was glad to hear our local sheriff say last week that the people carrying guns in school should be people with badges--not teachers.  Some counties in Florida have been encouraging training and arming teachers, but it just makes no sense to me.  There that could too easily go sideways.  And besides, teachers today have enough on their plates, enough worries, concerns and responsibilities without adding all those that would come with being charged with responding to gun violence with a weapon.

I thought about this after hearing about the latest mass shooting in Virginia Beach.  Not that it had anything to do with schools. In fact, it feels even more random in some ways than some of the other mass shootings.  Perhaps a motive will be discovered.  Perhaps mental illness will be revealed in the investigations, but for the moment it seems like some guy simply decided to shoot up his co-workers for no particular reason with no particular warning.  But what seems to have happened is the conversation has quickly gotten sidetracked to a discussion about silencers and ammunition magazines.  Just like the school shootings quickly get moved to discussing things like arming teachers and "hardening" schools.

Don't get me wrong, we need to discuss all of these matters,  But in a comprehensive manner.  Why do we allow ourselves to be distracted from telling the truth?  Why do we keep shying away from the real issues?  Like the simple fact that there are too many readily available guns in this country?  Like the simple fact that we live in a culture permeated with violence?  Like the simple fact that we do a lousy job of taking care of people's mental health issues?

As long as we avoid the larger issues, as long as we get sidetracked by a piecemeal approach, we will more than likely continue to experience these horrific events which, as I said to my congregation yesterday, have gotten so commonplace that we are not even shocked by them anymore.  And that, in some ways, is almost as tragic as the incidents themselves.

Graduations and the Like

I have been to a couple of graduation ceremonies this past week--and have another one on the schedule for this Friday.  Three grandchildren.  One finishing elementary school, one graduating from Middle School and one who is now a high school graduate.

I must admit having a grandchild now out of high school has made me very self-conscious about my age.  It seems like only yesterday, to use a cliché, when he was a newborn in New Jersey!  Now he towers over me by a good four inches (at least!)

Life is full of such markers.  Special occasions when we stop and notice the passage of time.  Birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, anniversaries, funerals.  Such occasions remind us just how precious a gift life is.  Especially when we get to share it with people we care about--young and old!

I don't know what your days ahead hold for you, but no doubt you've got one or two such occasions on your calendar as well.  Enjoy them!  And remember to offer God a word of thanks for those you celebrate.

Using Up the Stockpile: An Environmental Warning from 1952

I didn't know my mother's father very well.  He died when I was just six years old.  He had served in World War I, was Harvard educated, and made a living before the great depression as a chemical engineer.  And he loved to read.  One of my most precious possessions is his complete set of the works of Charles Dickens.

Recently my mother shared a letter he had written to her about one month after she and my father were married.  She was just nineteen at the time.  I hadn't seen the letter and was astounded by his prescience.

It is written on a three sheets of stationary that were already twenty-eight years old when the letter was written in 1952.  They were personalized not with my grandfather's name, but rather his father's name.  Winfield T. Sherwood, along with the town where he lived, Sidney, NY.

He starts the letter greeting my mother with his pet name for her, "Dear Squirt"--I never knew that was what he called her!  I knew she adored him, and clearly, he adored her.  He begins by talking about the stationary itself, recounting the history that had transpired since its creation.  The Great Depression.  World War II.  And what he calls "a nice social revolution taking place in the US."  "Which," he wrote, "mostly goes to show you that you can keep a useful article over quite a period of history if you spend a dozen minutes of care on it."

And then he makes an observation that sounds like something right out of today's environmental movement.  "This country is going to have to revive the ability to take care of things before many years.  They have cut down, dug up and blown in a very respectable part of what was given them in this country when we inherited it from the Indians.  Over the last fifty or a hundred years scientific methods of use and manufacture have made some progress in utilizing renewable things, but no faster than the population increase.  Mostly the new knowledge has just helped us use the stockpile faster by creating new gadgets and keeping us alive longer to blow them in."

Wise words of warning, Grandpa.  Might we all pay heed!

Israel, Part XI: Back Home

We are back!  After a wonderful trip to Israel, many of us are back.  Some stayed longer to visit other places or to spend time with family or friends.  But many of us flew back together and then took a bus home from Miami, stopping first at Shell Point, and then coming here to Sanibel, where parked cars awaited their owners.

It felt good to be back home.  I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, the group was great, the sights and people we met fascinating, the food fabulous--but still, there's no place quite like home.

On the trip we were reminded by many things just how fortunate we are.  We were reminded that we live in a relatively safe place, with more than enough to eat, with roofs over our heads, with a sense of personal freedom.  But we were also reminded how fragile all that can be, and that only by committing ourselves to working for a better world will we be able to assure that there will be a place for ourselves within it.

Come November or so, Rabbi Fuchs and I will present a program here on Sanibel reflecting on the trip--but for now just this.  When I studied French in school I learned more about English grammar than I had ever known before.  When we travel to far off places we don't just learn about others who live in distant lands, we don't just learn about those foreign countries, we also learn about ourselves and the place that we call home.

Israel, Part X: Saving Lives, One Kindergartener at a Time

Ora Balha

Her living room floor was carpeted with colorful carpets.  Two or three cats wandered in and out of the space.  And we sat on cushions, in chairs and on the floor as she spun her story, as intriguing as one told by Scheherazade.  And like those of Scheherazade her story was lifesaving.  But there was one key difference, hers was true.

Her name is Ora Balha and she is a young Jewish mother of three living in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv in Israel.  Her story told of how she and her now husband, Ihab Balha, first met in the Sinai desert.  Filled with sand and stars in the dark desert night, the story drew us in.  As a Jew and a Muslim, their marriage is extremely unusual in Israel, and their respective families, especially their fathers, found it almost impossible to accept.  But in time, they did.  And as the two of them worked to bring about peace and reconciliation between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Holyland, it was Ihab's father who eventually offered them space in his home for a proposed interfaith, multicultural kindergarten.

Ihab Balha

Each class was to be led by both Hebrew speaking and Arabic speaking teachers.  The children were to be instructed using the Waldorf method, and taught the rudiments of all three of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Not in order to convert, but rather to develop in their young charges an understanding and appreciation for "the other."  The program has grown to five schools in Jaffa, as well as two in Galilee. They've been at it now for well over a decade, and some of their first students are now leaders in the peace and reconciliation movement.

They call their organization The Orchard of Abraham's Children.  And the fruits of their efforts are boys and girls better equipped to move through the world not in fear, but rather with an appreciation for people of different backgrounds.  And that, as I said, in a land like Israel, is lifesaving.  Indeed, learning to live peacefully with those who are different is lifesaving in any place and time.

Ihab Balha

(Photo Credit:  Elaine Pace)