I love the spring-the lengthening days, new growth on the trees, flowers starting to poke their heads above ground-bunny rabbits hanging out in the garden that is my special project, trying to figure out what particular flower they will eat once they bud. But this spring was difficult, with my dad's decline and the now realized threat of illness facing another family member. In an email I sent out a couple of weeks ago I asked for prayer-but no phone calls. I am blessed to have a few friends with a genius for practical help-which is what is needed, and will be increasingly needed in our little family as time goes on. Having received my most recent email naming the illness and asking, again for prayer, a friend wrote back inquiring whether he should put our name son the prayer list at my old parish.

Yikes, please don't, I wrote him. Even after five years, the thought of having sympathy mixed with curiosity from parishioners who remember me is troublesome, like an unhealed wound. And yet...last night I dreamed I was invited back to work on the staff, reconciled with my boss, a welcome presence in pulpit and parish house. I felt such peace-and belonging. I haven't felt I have really had a church home since we left. Waking up and realizing nothing had changed was disappointing. But perhaps this is a taste of what it might be like in that other realm, where reconciliation is the only way in-or the only way one gets to stay.

Meanwhile, I posted our family member's name on a very neat website I found:


http://www.24-7prayer.com/


Read that chapter on the "Punk Monk"-guaranteed to at least get you thinking!

The Scooter defense

Driving to pick up Sian from camp yesterday, I listened to someone on NPR (all I know was it wasn't infectiously enthusiastic Neal Conan) take calls about President Bush's choice to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence.

Predictably enough, the calls ran the gamut, from those who thought it was a travesty, to those who felt Libby really hadn't done much, if anything, awful enough to be jailed, to callers who felt (a sentiment with which I agree) that Libby was a fall guy for VP Dick Cheney.

Because he was a fall guy (and because many of them don't feel what he did was a crime) conservatives would like a full pardon. Because they are furious at this Administration's notion of executive branch power, liberals want a full scale dissection.

Asked for his newspaper's opinion by the host, a gentleman from the Wall Street Journal editorial page staff opined as how the newspaper felt that the original punishment wasn't fair to begin with-because the crime wasn't that serious. After all, he argued, Libby hadn't outed Valerie Plame as a covert agent-and prosecutor Fitzgerald knew that from the get-go. Regardless of whether Plame was or wasn't, my beef with the WSJ guy is that the trial wasn't about the original leak-it was about the cover-up. Even if the prosecutor couldn't prove that a crime was committed, perjury is a serious enough offense to merit a serious punishment.

If members of the White House West Wing staff were on trial for trying to cover up the truth, most of them would be gone by now. This is one of the most secrecy-addicted administrations since that of Richard Nixon.

That being said, it may not be wise for former Prez Bill Clinton to be talking about this subject, given his own issues with lying to a grand jury-but that never stopped him before.

President Bush's commutation decision is apparently wonderful news for defense lawyers who want to argue about the draconian nature of federal sentencing guidelines. But it is also an indication that for George B., when loyalty and policy collide, loyalty wins-even at the sacrifice of his own principles.

Are men like plants?

I have developed the bad habit of forgetting to put on my gardening gloves when I go out to pick the beans or to survey, with wonder, the yellow squash that now threaten to take over my vegetable garden.

Inevitably I see a weed that must be pulled...and where there is one, there are 100, flaunting their skinny green bodies with the deep roots. Though I know I will never win this fight, I have succeeded in keeping the foreigners from choking my beans and carrots and whatever it is that I planted by the sides of the garden.

My only problem with the enigmatic visitors in the eastern and western walls? Figuring out when they are ripe and ready to be eaten.

Tonight I spent hours outside, mowing the lawn (another task never done) and turning up the dirt in my side garden. The former owners put down a weed barrier, which does nothing, in my opinion, but keep the perennials from rooting deeply.

As I pulled up yet more weeds in the front, night fell and the garden lights glowed in the back, yellow, green and pink.

For some reason, as I pulled weeds and replanted some of the annuals in other beds, I reflected with bemusement on the connection between gardening and my male pals.

I had written two of them and gently suggested that distance made a romantic relationship impossible. OK, they said, but can we keep writing you? Counselor, interrogator or simply friend, I seem to serve some purpose in their lives at the moment. As if to compensate for their temperance and general good citizenship, another, mostly in the spirit of mischevious fun, keeps trying to lure me into his arms. I'm not bored, for sure.

In these relationships, as in the ones I don't name here, willingness to weed, to fertilize with humor, and the skillful manipulation of good pruning shears to promote growth are all neccesary ingredients for healthy plants. When one blooms, whether the flowers are reliable everyday begonias or exotic orchids, it is wonderful. But the next day, the weeding, and fertilizing and pruning start-all over again.

Maybe tomorrow I will remember to put on gloves.

The anguish of exercise

When I picked up the children at their dad's yesterday, I told them we were going on a hike. Sian wept. Colin felt her pain. Her dad and I exchanged knowing looks.

We had come to a sad pass when the children didn't expect to go on a hike every Saturday-we'd be ready, whether we had to take sneakers, skis, or a stick to scare away the bears. Actually, there don't seem to be any bears around the state park, so we didn't really have to frighten bears. But it always helps to be over prepared.

I should have told the kids that. Maybe they would have been more cheerful. There's probably a huge number of ferocious animals that we cannot find in the park.

As it happened, they had a fabulous time-getting covered with mud, exploring the ruins of a house, running along the old railroad track (very old-there are few tracks left) and climbing over the rocky hills. As they ran ahead of me, flying over rocks and clay without a glance downwards, I wondered which was more healthy-their lack of caution or my focused attention?

Sian, a the girl of extreme emotions, wanted to go much further than we had planned, doing her best to convince us that we really should go the extra half a mile or three down to Marsh Creek Lake.

I really do think she might have a future in acting. I don't think she appreciates her innate ability.

The prospect of dinner at Carmines lured Colin and Tyler and even Sian back to the car-and the pleasures of the world they usually inhabit. Next time, I told my bonnie pre-teen lass, we could go further. The hardest part for Sian is getting her out of the chair.

True Colors

WASHINGTON, June 28 — In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.

The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet “their heavy burden” of justifying “the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments,” as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court.

Today’s decision, one of the most important in years on the issue of race and education, need not entirely eliminate race as a factor in assigning students to different schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a separate opinion. But it will surely prompt many districts to review and perhaps revise programs they already have in place, or go back to the drawing boards in designing plans.

New York Times, June 28

This decision is another illustration of the fact that many conservatives live in another country-one constructed only in their imagination.

It is one where the playing field is level, and opportunity is equal.

There is no need for societal remedies for bigotry and unfairness.

Or let's put it another way...

Everyone needs to seek their own remedy: victory goes to those with enough money to sue and appeal, and appeal, and appeal.

The five-man majority paid lip service to Brown, the landmark case that made integrated schools the law of the nation. But their decision to almost rule out race as a factor in making decisions about where students go to school eviscerates it.

To be fair, the justices have the germ of a point when they criticize a "binary" way of looking at race- as though integration was only about making sure poor black students have a chance to attend school with white students in wealthier districts.

And sometimes individual injustice emerges from an effort to make a societal injustice better.

These are the examples that often seem to produce lawsuits-as seems to have occurred here.

So the "remedy" of integration might not be just for individual kids, who are going to get trapped in the vise of a large institutional remedy for an even bigger social evil.

But it's even less fair not to do it. The fact is that institutional racism thrives. African American kids in poor neighborhoods (all children who live in poverty) deserve the chance to find better lives for themselves-and how are they going to do it if poverty is all they know?

I don't see our bloc of lockstep conservative Justices coming up with another, better way. They are just making it less possible for students who already have to grapple with challenges that seem enormous to overcome them. Where would Clarence Thomas be if he hadn't had affirmative action? Where would Clarence Thomas be if he hadn't had Arlen Specter?

Fortunately, many school districts have leaders who actually care about racial injustice. They may now decide to move to districting according to income, rather than race. Strangely enough, the results may end up being substantially the same.

Near death experiences: beyond belief?

I'm reading a book by a Christian author on what happens when we die. It is full of stories from folks who had those "near-death" or "post-death" (in other words, they were clinically dead) experiences. The man who wrote the volume sounds pretty conventional-there is nothing vaguely New Age about his exegesis. He is actually fairly reticent about his ideas, but offers them as his own. It is a bit harder for the faithful to dismiss him as a nut case-but as he says, not everything in his stories fits neatly into an orthodox Christian package.

At the same time, life after death experiences are a very controversial topic-both among scientists and among traditional Christians.

Scientists who don't belief in life after death keep trying to find chemical or biological explanations for the experiences-and it is possible that some day they will, in a way that convinces believers that they are just a vision of the dying brain. On the other hand, there is a lot of variety to the ones recounted by this writer.


I'm personally not sure what to make of this authors theology or beliefs. His thoughts and hermenuetic makes me a bit uncomfortable, in part because I can't dismiss him as a New Ager with whom I have no doctrine in common. Not that dying is a topic most of us enjoy pondering. But it's not bad to ask (again) what I believe-and why.

Home

Pulling out of my street to go down to the Lake, I notice the lady across the street (the wealthy one, with the big ol' house) is standing by the fence, watching her horse. The donkey (Sian admits now it is one, instead of a miniature pony) runs across the pasture. It's a fabulous night, cool, a little windy, a great night for the summer solstice.

I crank up a Chris Daughtry song, which just happens to be "Home"...I'm going home, to the place where I belong, where your love has always been enough for me."

I walk, and then I run, past the fishermen and women, watching the boats on the lake, reveling in the beauty. I knew as soon as I ran down the road to the Marsh Creek Lake that I belonged. I wonder why it took me so long to find the place that reaches out to me in memory even when I am miles away-my spirits lifting when the Wallace sign shows up right before the bridge.

Coming home, I almost run down a man and a woman walking in the dusk down Fairview. Idiots, I think to myself. Then I recall the first time I came through Glenmoore on Creek Road.

Down the empty road a woman and her children walked, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I want to live here, I thought-so close to suburbia and so far.

Go for it, I say silently to the couple as they walk out of the darkness of the trees. Have fun. Just be glad I saw you this time!