My eleventh hour (literary) confession

So (don't you HATE people who begin a sentence with the word "so"? I do).  So anyway.

Let me get this out of the way real fast.

I can't go into a bookstore without coming out with some variation on what so many people (you perhaps?) call "chicklit." Of course, I also read "serious" novels -- either because someone is paying me to do so, or because I genuinely like the author's previous work.

Now, before you get any ideas about how compromised I am, I'm not talking about bodice rippers.  I've read a few in my time, but the clunkiness annoys me so much I can barely make it through the Baroque extrusions of the narrative.

Did all of these pseudonymous authors study at the same online writing academy? Can you get an associates degree in swarthy, hard-faced men, or do a whole semester's elective in 18th century ingenue?

Most of the time,  the premise defies logic -- and is grossly impractical.

 If we had sex as much as those lords and ladies allegedly did, we'd never get out of bed.  How do they ever have the energy to restore their reputation, woo the fair heroine (often an orphan) before bedding and marrying her, or sometimes marrying and bedding her, and save his lordship's abused brother from being kidnapped by the villain, who at first seems like the hero...

But I digress.

Instead, I like modern relationship parables -- fairy tales, actually.  Heroine meets hero, but some obstacle keeps them from getting together.  Maybe at first he appears to be a jerk. Perhaps she is dating someone who is nice, but dull.

It takes about 50 pages for her to realize that, though they have been going out for two years before we ever met them.

Or maybe, perhaps, as in the one I just finished, "Something Borrowed," the sexy hero is engaged to the heroine's best friend.  Fortunately for everyone (except for the best friend, possibly), the heroine's friend is  a classic bitch.  So it's o.k.

Really, it is.

The problem with these narratives is that they bear almost no relationship to real life. Because I have such low tolerance for bad prose, I pick books that appear to have some rationale, some connection to the world in which most of us spend our sometimes dreary lives.

I WANT to be a believer. I want to be sucked in.  At the least, I want to escape.  But then a totally absurd plot twist arrives, and I start arguing with the unseen author.

No point in doing THAT, is there? She's sitting on her private beach in California right now, or in a mansion in Connecticut, doing yoga with her personal instructor, grateful that readers like me, however critical we might become, are still buying her books.

Lest you think that I, too, am pining for a happy ending to my romantic woes -- well, that's just part of the story.

I'm pining for happy endings to novels, period.  And when I can't sniff them out among the writers who feature fantastic reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post on their back covers, I settle.

Yes, dear reader, I settle. I even occasionally buy a well-reviewed love story that has the tag "heartbreaking" on the inside cover.  (Then I sneak a peek at the end to find out who dies so I won't be surprised).

But at least it's not my hard-earned dollars subsidizing Jodi Picoult's lifestyle.

Talk about gloom and doom -- that girl has (almost) cornered the market on writing about things you devoutly hope will never happen to you.

Even to that terrible mother in your son's fifth grade class who kept you from being a chaperone on the school trip.Or her son, who mocked your son every time that he stood up to bat on the Little League team.

Not even she (or he) deserve the kind of awful things that happen to Jodi's characters on a regular basis.

I want to read about two characters working things out -- or at the least plodding on with their lives. I want to be reassured that some families stay intact, some children grow up, find good jobs and eventually marry and raise their own kids.

 I want to believe that for some of us, love lasts, beauty amazes, gratitude touches the heart, and someday, the Knicks will make it past the first round of the playoffs again.

The Knicks? Nothing you can do about those guys.

But that leaves a whole lot of wriggle room, you budding authors -- and whole lot of us out there, paging wistfully through second rate prose or well-crafted gloom, and hoping someone will come along and shed light, and levity, in the literary darkness.

Prayers (and presence) for the bleeding stranger

After reading about the solving of the Fr. Dowling mystery, I started to wonder what other clergy would do if confronted with a situation where someone was lying hurt by the side of the road. Heck, what about the vast majority of us who are NOT be-collared?

After talking to Rabbi Jack Paskoff, I realized that this isn't as simple a question as it might seem. Accident victims might be gravely injured, or dead.  Family members might be overwhelmed, or in shock.

A minister isn't a magician.  But they have a certain role to play - yet that role can also be played, to a large degree, by a layperson.

And some of us would be no help at an accident scene.

Perhaps it boils down to common sense -- if you think you can help, help. And if not, as Rev. Lentz said, call 911, and pray for a quick arrival of an EMT, and an angel.



http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/886544_Column--Praying-with-the-stranger.html

Faith, miracles and the 'Mystery Priest": better at the end than at the beginning

By now many of you have read about the man in the black shirt and white collar (not a black collar, as some reported with a hint of eeriness) who showed up at a terrible accident in Missouri this month.

He appeared, prayed and anointed the young victim, Katie Lentz, and then apparently disappeared as quietly as he had come. When emergency personnel and police tried to identify the be-collared one, he could not be found in any of the pictures taken at the scene.

I admit it. As I read this story, days after it happened, I got a little emotional.  What a great parable, not to mention a hugely feel-good story. God really does work in extremely mysterious ways, and, in a world starved for miracles, it's lovely to see one happen.

Besides, the fellow was, let;s admit it, right out of the clergy office of central casting (and you didn't know we had one?).

But it turned out this week that the mystery priest has a name: it's Dowling.  Fr. Patrick Dowling to me and you.

Here's a paragraph from the CNN version:

The priest said there really wasn't any mystery to it, and he told a deputy before he left who he was. He took no credit for saving Lentz's life. He credited that to the calm of two highway patrol officers and a rescue team that worked "harmoniously."

I'm guessing that some readers were a little disappointed that the ethereal visitor of our fantasies turned out to have flesh and blood. I know I was, a little bit. 

But then I began to think of the occasions on which I have walked into a situation and, whether garbed in black or not, offered to pray with someone.  It happened last spring, when rangers were searching for a runaway in a local Chester County Park.

Clad in shorts and an old t-shirt, I surely didn't look like a member of the clergy (plus, inconveniently for some, I'm female).

I confess that having those initials at the end of my title helps give me a bit more confidence.

Our culture, increasingly, might view clergy as cultural rather than religious figures -- more and more Americans are growing up without any faith at all. 

That doesn't obviate our need for prayer.  Proclaiming and challenging, serving and praying, clergy still have a role to play.

But the larger lesson of this story isn't about what it means to be a priest at an accident scene. It's about how God can use all of us. 

In a way, Fr. Dowling was doing what any one of us, whether collared or not,  would (or should) have done in that situation. 

He saw a need.

 He stopped.  

He asked God for help.

There is nothing mysterious about that.

The only puzzling thing is why more of us, including myself, don't do it more often.

S....f guys say online...and what it might be saying about us

"You are a very beautiful woman."

Uhh hunh.

I thanked him.  While I'm not buying the KoolAid, one of my rules online is: be polite when someone compliments you.

Whether in the dating arena, basement-dwellers commenting on a blog post, or just everyday communication, online communication can bring out the savage in us.  Sometimes you have to bold your messages in the opposite direction, just to make the point that you are not succumbing to the roller-derby rink atmosphere of the Internet. .

He says he's a lawyer for a major Democratic organization (of course, this was all Weiner, all the time week online, so perhaps...). He's fortysomething,  educated, divorced, more than passably goodlooking. His profile showed no overt evidence of any kind of pathology.

  Of course, online, where appearance is everything, any of these factors could turn out  to be false.

We have a desultory conversation, slightly tinged with flirtatiousness on his part (but not enough to drive me away).   As uncomfortable as I am with the disembodied flirtations that go on online, I try to remain in neutral as long as I can.

 Then he disappeared.  Sometimes that's what happens - often that's what happens. Though to the other person it may feel as if you've just walked out on an unfinished conversation, asynchronous communication is just like that.

I remind myself that no one said this would be easy. As a highly educated middle-aged woman, I am in a minority in the dating circus.  Heck, if Anne Lamott has trouble finding the right guy, my case must be even more challenging.

We're all intelligent in different ways, right? You don't have to have a degree to be smart about things that totally befuddle me, like changing a tire, learning German, or painting without splattering.

Thus is it that  I often find myself imagining sitting on the back of a Harley, helmeted and holding on for dear life as my guy careens down Route 100. What price too big to pay for love? Then I wake up, wipe the sweat off my face, and return to my celibate life.

The fact is (guilty on all counts), I'll talk to almost anyone -- not because I think I can date them (they may be in D.C., or North Carolina, or Boston), but because I want to know what motivates them, makes them tick, gets them out of bed in the morning.  My curiosity about other people's lives is profound and apparently unquenchable.

But I digress.

A few days later, my lawyer pal (every lawyer I've ever chatted with online has been a complete freaking lunatic, by the way, so I should know better), contacted me again.

"Where are you going?" he asked me.  I'm on my way to an appointment, I told him, fully cognizant that this might not be an innocent question.

But I still wasn't prepared for what came next.

"Get back into bed," he said (by the way, it's now around 11:30 a.m., r u kidding? ) "I want  you so aroused that you can't see straight" (I already wear contact lenses, thanks a lot).  He asked me for my phone number.

I gasped. I giggled.  Then I made the mistake of asking him ( I ask a lot of questions) why someone with all of his material and educational advantages would spend his time simulating sex.

Let's just say that he took that as encouragement. He was in LA, he said, and "aware of me" (this, to me, was the creepiest element of the conversation.)

Signing off fast, I deleted the chat, and made sure that he couldn't contact me again. To be honest, I try not to get into a contest of insults. It's pretty easy to find me. It's pretty easy to find. YOU.

As I sit in front of my computer, this conversation behind me, it seems, well, hilarious. But it didn't feel that way at the time. I felt disappointed that once more, a guy who could have been a decent person had turned out to be, frankly, worse than a cad.

The most salacious the approach, the more I push back (unless I have met someone, and like him -- even then, I don't go all Danielle Steele on them).

And yet, I wonder whether the beast in us isn't as real as the man or woman of honor. Is it possible that the  sometimes rank opportunism of the internet (which can be revealed in so many ways other than sexual) allows for us to flash our true selves before we clothe them for more public consumption?

These private conversations (or conversations about privates) allow us the simulacra of intimacy without, it appears, a high price. I don't happen to believe that there is no price.  I know I paid one.  And yet I find my fascinated by that intersection where darkness and light bleed into each other, and wondering what takes people deep into such risky places. While I have no desire to voyage there myself, I wonder what takes someone to that place where they must compartmentalize even their desires.

Are you keeping a facet of your life secret?  What are you hiding, perhaps even from yourself?

I wonder, whether, if some other opportunist contacts me, I will keep myself  from asking the questions. I can honestly say that I don't know.  There's always something new to be learned -- even when, like Lady Macbeth, I have to keep washing my hands for days afterwards.

Gay marriage -- a local point of view

My column for the Lancaster papers on how pastors and other leaders are grappling with the American public's upward trending support for gay marriage. One, the Rev. Geoff Kohler, is talking about our sexuality -- and our humanity.

 http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/881187_Column--Debate-over-gay-marriage-far-from-over.html

Lake Ninevah: Dreams from my father (and mother)

If I'd thought about it at all, as a child, I would have figured that there were two places New Yorkers went on vacation--  Long Island (Sag Harbor, Shelter Island, the North Shore, the Hamptons before they were "The Hamptons"), and New England.

(I didn't understand then, of course, that some New Yorkers never had the money or the time off from work to get out of town at all during the summer.  Lucky for them if they could escape to Jones Beach or Coney Island for a day.)

My folks had friends, a few, who went east to Long Island. But they already lived in Manhattan, with disposable income and higher-paying jobs.  It appears that, long before I was born, or my sister and brother after me, my parents had chosen to spend their leisure time in New England.

My recollections begin, shadowy, in Maine, on the rocky beaches of Bailey Island.

But, as I remember, it was when we returned from a year in Italy and England (my father had a Fulbright scholarship), that my parents turned their gaze to Vermont --  specifically, to a lake near Ludlow called Ninevah.

And that's how it began -- two Jewish intellectuals from New York renting a simple two (or three-bedroom, I can't recall now) cottage just yards from the shores of an uncrowded bit of paradise.

In the city, we lived in a four story brownstone (now I can imagine that dad probably struggled to pay the mortgage on his assistant professor's salary).  Our idea of greenery were the majestic trees and manicured lawns of Prospect Park.

Dad had a mind bent  towards questioning, speculating, pondering.  In fact, he never really stopped questioning, whether it be politics, faith or the mysteries of family.  Did he seek out the serenity of the north as an antidote for the anxiety that sometimes troubled him?

But up in Vermont, we didn't have a schedule. There was nowhere we had to be. The options were limited.  

Yards away from our door,  lake and its ancient rowboat beckoned. While none of us were fans of the squirmy bait we needed to cast our lines into the water, we did not question the order of things. If you were on a lake, well, you fished.

Excitement was a visit to a President's birthplace (Calvin Coolidge's home wasn't that far from us), or to the local general store.

Now and then we'd wander up the road to see Mr. Blakely, who oversaw the vacation cottages, and ran the tiny store lakeside.

Worms.  Ice cream. Candy.  That little shack (I didn't see it that way then) was a wonderland of treats to be doled out according to the whim of a benevolent despot of a parent.

The worst thing that happened to me at Lake Ninevah was being caught once for climbing onto the counter to get at the molasses cookies. Wouldn't you have done the same thing?

Later we would move on to Hanover, where my father would spend summers doing research, and my mother work on a master's degree. But it is those summers in Vermont that reverberate. As my mother and father looked at property to buy, I would seize on a Victorian house, or a twenty-acre lot, and plead with them -- buy this one? Buy that one. Just commit.

Buy something that connects us to this time and this place so that we can keep coming back.

Of course, they had their own priorities. But now, at the distance of so many years, I wonder what drew them there, and back. Was it the beauty of the green hills and mountains, the serenity of the quiet lakes?

Was it the charm of the village greens? Was it deeper, more profound -- a fork in the road not taken?

Far more than me, my parents were urbanites, grounded in the teeming, raucous, literate and endlessly fascinating city of their own childhood.

It took me well into middle-age before I realized that I belonged somewhere radically different. Or, put it another way -- I didn't know where I belonged until I brought my children here.

I get to create my own version of the family story, as they created theirs. And then I will step aside, inevitably, and my kids will take the stage.

Already we know that my daughter finds rural life tedious, leaning towards shops and suburbs rather than cows and village festivals.  My son, on the other hand, speculates that he may end up in a small town with a village green, stores and a church. I tell him that such places exist.

I have seen them with my own eyes. They are the landscape of my childhood.

We went back to Lake Ninevah once -- Mr. Blakely and his family received us graciously in his home.

Years later, I returned with my husband, to find the family long gone, and the lake itself different from the enchanted refuge I recalled.

Yet still, it is beautiful.

For that, and other reasons, including many hikes and rambles around the state,  I have a life-long love affair with Vermont.

Whether what I recall is accurate can be debated, because childhood memories, all memory is selective. But whether it is true? Of that, I have no doubt.

I only wish I knew now what my parents were seeking on the shores of Lake Ninevah, in that bucolic setting so far from home. What did they find in Vermont that beckoned to them so much that  they dreamed of creating a summer life there? It is a question that I must throw out, and let it rest, alone, a monument to memory.

Gay marriage and the evangelical hinge

 I love the idea that we live in "hinged" moments...that there is a whole reality about to unfold just beyond our line of sight.

Thus the conversation about sexuality engages me at the same time that it makes me anxious, because neither I (nor you, my dear) can control it.

 We can't get ahead of these changes.  We don't know what's coming.

Decadence or reform? Redefinition or a new traditionalism? And who gets to define either of these?

So take my Reuters "Guestview" as a snapshot of what's going right now, not necessarily what is to come...which may be much more exciting. Or scary. Or both, depending on where you find yourself.

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2013/08/08/guestview-gay-marriage-and-u-s-evangelicals-conciliatory-tone-traditional-doctrine/