I've been made an honorary Presbyterian

I spoke about Oprah Winfrey and writing to a gathering of the Presbyterian Women in the Synod of the Southwest this past weekend. I certainly had fun. It was great to be with so many women of energy, discipline and commitment. These are the folks out there providing for less resourced congregations, many of them on Arizona reservations. The theme was "We love to tell the Story," and I heard some interesting stories from women I met, stories of travel, family, widowhood, divorce. The energy was especially remarkable because many of the women were in their 60s and 70s, some in their 80s. In the bathroom, one woman was flossing her teeth. Flossing is a great habit, someone said. Supposed to be one of the secrets of longevity, I added. Huh, said another woman. I'm 84 and I guess I've got that figured out. I was delighted to be made an honorary Presbyterian. They gave me a wooden pin with the PW symbol.

What I'm reading

The Golden Compass. By Philip Pullman.

It took me forever to get into this and I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I don't much like the heroine, Lyra Belacqua; she comes across as somewhat sullen. And goodness, this world is dark, dark, the Aurora Borealis notwithstanding. Given the Miltonic echo of the trilogy, this darkness is appropriate. It's certainly deeply and quirkily imaginative. I adore the daemons and love the panserbjorn. The animals are at least as human as the people, some nobler. Do you want Iorek Byrnison or Lord Asriel as your ally? But I am on to The Subtle Knife, number two in the series.

Cultural religion

The French are supposed to be a secular culture -- it's in their constitution . So I was surprised to discover when we arrived in the city of Lyon on Aug. 15 that the town was pretty much closed down, because it was the Feast of the Assumption. Not only that, the basilica -- Notre Dame de Fourviere -- was packed. We could hear the sermon amplified outside. French historian Nathalie Caron notes the paradox of a secular state with a Catholic culture that celebrates a significant number of religious holidays. But cultural practices don't offer evidence of active belief. France is historically Catholic; hence its beautiful cathedrals. In the U.S., scholars refer to our "civil religion" -- which has been misinterpreted to mean that America is (and was) an actively practicing Christian nation, as opposed to one with historic ties to a large number of Christian denominations.

Step class as spiritual discipline, continued

People have regularly asked me how I found the people I wrote about in my first book, The God of Second Chances. How did I find people with amazing life-changing experiences? Research and radar, the last part meaning that maybe they find me because I'm in the right place. Today my step instructor mentioned in passing that she was in a coma 10 years ago. Ten years ago she had a seizure and aneurysms, and was about to have her plug pulled. The day the plug was to be pulled, she woke up. Then came the work of learning to walk, talk, eat again. Ten years later she's a fitness instructor. Just in case you think that things will never change. I tend to forget that everybody has a story, and some of those stories are pretty compelling.

Pushing the daisy envelope

The critics are rooting for Pushing Daisies as one of the most creative entries in the fall TV line-up. Hoping spiritual significance would flower in a show about a piemaker who can bring dead people back to life, I tuned in. Last night's premiere had a lot of visual fun, very 60s-mod looking colors. There was less verbal fun, altho parts of the script crackled more than others. I loved the deadpan of Chi McBride, who plays Emerson Cod, Ned's private investigator partner. It reminded me overwhelmingly of the film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, with visual exaggeration and above all a narrator, whose ubiquitous drone annoyed me. Ned the baker's Pie Hole restaurant also reminded me strongly of the bakery in the whimsy-romance film Stranger than Fiction. Leftover set? I prefer whimsy to fantasy, because the latter can easily shade over to allegorical. And I love it that weird stories can ask large questions and be quite disarming about it. At the moment I prefer Stranger than Fiction; its conceits and concerns with love and imagination were familiar and yet quite fresh. By comparison, Pushing Daisies is pretty far out there, certainly for mainstream TV. Usually cable TV is the home of metaphysics.

Step class as spiritual discipline


Somebody asked me last week at the Religion Newswriters conference in San Antonio if I blogged about religion. Not really, I said. I don't blog about religion news, I should have said. Lots of others do that quite well -- I enjoy Bible Belt Blogger , Religionwriter.com and the reliably fine work by the team at the Dallas Morning News , among others. But you couldn't pay me enough money to write about the travails of the Episcopal Church over gay marriage. I would much rather write about spiritual discipline in all its modern varieties, and step aerobics is a new and demanding one to me, not terribly trendy, but heck, I'm in the Midwest. Exercise works by faithfulness: you show up, and keep showing up, with consistency. That's the only secret: show up. My Catholic upbringing, with daily Mass attendance, really laid down the tracks for that. By this kind of faith and works are you saved, so tap it out, one-two-three.

New acquaintance

How lucky am I? Last week I returned to the hood and the past, and this week I did San Antonio for the Religion Newswriters Association annual meeting, definitely my present occupation. Former president Jeff Sheler said a few years ago that this group is his peeps, and this year I finally get what he means. I spent less time in panel sessions taking notes that won't yield stories and more time chatting and taking cards of freelance colleagues, since this subgroup is growing in numbers. If religion writers are the weird uncles of the newsroom (thanks to whomever said that), then freelance religion writers are weird uncles, and aunts, at home alone writing to themselves (like now!). How great to be in a roomful of people who read newspapers, have wry senses of humor and can use "premillenial dispensationalist" correctly in a sentence. (I missed that panel, but I can figure out someone to check with.) Free food helps, too.

Old acquaintance

I attended my 40th grammar school reunion last weekend. What fun to see people become themselves. A couple of us definitely resembled our younger selves. I made the short list of "people who closely resemble their 8th grade selves," though didn't win despite staunch support from old friends. It was certainly gratifying to be greeted as the class brain. I'll think about that whenever I feel bad ... . It was especially striking to see how the men have changed -- how solid adults have grown from relatively slight and skinny roots, although a few are far from skinny now. (In fairness I am among the women who have also grown more solid.) The more things change, the more they stay the same. All the nuns are gone, though their reputations live on. (Sister Clara! Sister Sponsa!) The outgoing are still outgoing, the low-profile still quiet, and the class president still confidently exhibits leadership. But everything that was SO important then is long since forgotten, along with a few names of people in the class kindergarten picture. Most amazing is the loyalty; so many people married so many years, so many people showing up for a grammar school reunion, though the fact that most people haven't moved far also has something to do with it. With people inquiring about my siblings and catching up on whose parents were still around, it felt powerfully like extended family from the old neighborhood, where virtually everybody lived in a six-block radius. We used to stand outside a friend's house and holler them out: yo Charlene!

Oprah. Obama. Obama. Oprah.

(to echo a long-ago comment by David Letterman, Oprah's guest on her season premiere this morning)

There's a lot of speculation about how influential Oprah's backing of Obama will be, given the $3-plus million dollar fundraiser she held for him this weekend at her California compound, right before her TV season began. Impeccable timing for her. One poll even shows that 31 percent of people think people they know will be more likely to vote for Obama because of O's backing. I find the wording of the question interesting. The poll doesn't ask if respondents would themselves be more likely to vote for Obama. Instead, they're guessing whether their friends might. Ergo, not a meaningful measure, even though CBS is puffing its own poll. Rita Cosby asked me about this last year (when she was still on MSNBC) when Oprah and Larry King were chatting and Oprah said "He's my guy" about Obama. I said at the time that books and brownies were easier to recommend than political candidates. I still think that's true, mostly. Oprah has never really ventured into highly contentious realms with her recommendations. When she examines Iraq, for example, she will focus on soldiers' families, or interview experts. She does well by playing to people's sympathies, and in order to do so presents situations in a sympathetic light (women in Africa, education, children and predators). Politics is a different realm; many have opinions to begin with, and so she can't give them the edited situation she usually presents when she's trying to get people to care and move them to action. Obama said her backing might give him a hearing in certain quarters. That could translate into, say, 5 percent. And it would come from Hillary backers.

What I'm reading

The Memory Keeper's Daughter. By Kim Edwards.

I put off reading this for a few months, since someone told me that it starts off with a depressing opening: man gives away infant daughter, one of a set of twins, because she has Down syndrome. Well, I figured I was in for a bummer. But it sat on my shelf long enough to make me feel slightly guilty. I picked it up and boy, was I wrong. It took me a bit of time to get used to all the adjectives, since one of the first events is the snowstorm -- rather elaborately described -- in which the main character, David the doctor, delivers his twins. But the characterization is extremely powerful, and I like the structure of dropping in on events as time passes. I also love the symbolic play with photography, light, time, memory. It's a novel that explores choice and consequence, and how much I prefer the novel rather than nonfiction as a vehicle for such exploration. There is no sparing us the grief of loss, the novel says in a clear-eyed way. Ain't that the truth. David's secrecy about his past also resonated for me, having just come back from meeting a heretofore unknown branch of my family in Poland. Branches grow from roots. I loved this book.

A passel of witnesses

We saw so many churches in Europe that I finally lost track of their names. In Poland they all seemed to be either St. Peter & Paul or Our Lady of Something. This one was one of many in Krakow centrum, with saints standing guard.

Access helps

If one intends to blog about one's vacation, it helps during said vacation to have internet access. On the other hand, the whole time I was in Europe (8/6-17), I didn't have a single conversation with anyone about blogging. And I had lots of conversations, most of them not in English. We spent time talking with one another, as well as floating down the Dunajec River and experiencing world-class traffic jams in Krakow. I was too busy doing things to have time to write about the things I was doing.

For me Poland was the Garden of Eden. Verdant and right scale. Nein to Vienna, unless you are fond of the extravagant, baroque, massive and imperial. More later.

Oliver Cromwell on a stick

On the grounds of the Houses of Parliament in London is a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the only non-royal to run the show in England for 8 years or so before he died in 1658. Cromwell's forces won the civil war. (I think those were the roundheads.) The royals took it pretty hard that here was a commoner running the country, and so shortly after the restoration of Charles II, they dug up Oliver Cromwell from where he had been interred in Westminster Abbey and chopped off his dead head and put it up on a pike somewhere over the Parliament, where it sat for 20 years or so. Talk about vindictive. They absconded with the rest of him, and today nobody knows where his remains are, though some have made claims, of course. (Cromwell an early Elvis, perhaps?) Now Cromwell's statue and a relief of Charles II's head (which the king kept even after his death) glare at one another across a street on the grounds of the Westminster complex. History comes alive here. It helps that rotty old bricks and stones are visible. Tomorrow all this Anglophilia vanishes along with familiarity with history and language as we set off for Tarnow, my father's childhood home in Poland. Today, however, I was once again the English lit major.

Off we go

Meg's and my plane to London leaves at 5:40 this afternoon, or 17:40. I have to unplug from this computer (off it goes to the computer hospital) and this culture and on Aug. 8 this language to go to England Poland Austria Switzerland France England. If it's Tuesday it must be somewhere. I've left off the passage between Poland and Austria because I don't know know whether we'll traverse the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Times have changed since I was in Europe (1975) and since I collected stamps (early 60s) and learned geography that way. (Maybe we'll pass through Liechtenstein.) Nevers: never met my Polish family. Never been away from my husband for this long. I've actually been to Austria and Switzerland and have very faint memories from my high school trip there. I make good a promise I made to myself in 1975 to return to England, tho we can't quite fit in a side trip to Oxford. So I'll have to defer taking my daughter to the Nosebag for tea until she does her Oxford year while at college.

Children of the lightning bugs

I have returned from four days of annual sessions of Illinois Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. We meet in an un-air-conditioned historic meetinghouse in the middle of cornfields. That makes it hot and green. The corn was very high this year. I drove back roads between the meetinghouse and my air-conditioned hotel, seeing few vehicles. I did see a bright red-headed pheasant in the middle of the road who certainly took his time yielding to my moving vehicle. Perhaps he had the right of way. I timed my daily departure as the twilight faded and the lightning bugs started their light show. Hundreds of little buggers gave their phosphorescent winks as I traveled their turf. Quakers are historically called Children of the Light. Illinois Yearly Meeting ought to be known as Children of the Lightning Bugs.

Definitely Christian

I came back from fictive England after a 12-hour stay, which is how long it took me to finish Harry Potter VII. Three of us have finished 700-plus pages since 12:50 am Saturday morning. (I was the slow reader.) I had to sleep on it because I felt a little disoriented after closing the book. Today I really like it, although it sure does seem like a book for grown-ups with this volume, which has so many sad things in it that my son doesn't like it. He rightly called some of the character deaths overkill. To me they make literary sense and moral sense. JK Rowling is deservedly enriched by the fruit of her literary and moral sensibility. Hard to see what Christians can complain about after all this is said and done. But some of them do love complaining. Myself, I love having a book the four of us will be talking about at tonight's dinner table, and with lots of others in the weeks to come. I also love that it is good and accessible. Those two qualities don't necessarily go together in contemporary literature. It's positively operatic.

Taking umbrage

My kids and I will be at the bookstore at midnight tonight for Harry VII. Meg is making radish earrings and a necklace of bottle caps for her costume as Luna Lovegood. I am not crafty but do own a good deal of pink, so I am practicing vocalizations for Dolores Umbridge. Ahem ahem.

Harry-ed

I'm on #6 on the Rereading Express, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This time through I particularly like numbers 3 (Prisoner of Azkaban) and 5 (Order of the Phoenix). Azkaban is wonderfully layered, with lots of character development and interest. Phoenix is one heck of a complex book, with all kinds of stories and details eddying around. I find myself looking for clues: why is this character here and is he or she coming back? Kreacher, for example. Fleur de la Cour from 4 (Goblet of Fire) is back in 6 (Prince). How tightly will Rowling finally weave it all together?

We have a betting pool in the family. I have bet that Harry lives, which I wasn't as sure of until I re-read. If he dies, Voldemort lives, right? Whose will be the sacrifice, since Rowling has hinted there is/will be one? Is it Dumbledore's?

Harry will live

Snape will save Harry and die

Voldemort will die

That makes the two dead major characters we have been told to expect.

So why isn't the Bible as interesting as this? Same theme: good and evil.

Cashing in



This morning I went to the bank to cash in savings bonds from my dad's estate to pay for our trip to Poland in August. Naturally the transaction took some time. (I was glad I wasn't behind myself in line.) Purchased by my dad in the early 1980s, the bonds earned 7.5 percent interest. They were worth not quite twice their face value; my dad had paid half the face value. He bought them for his retirement. I think he was 65; he died at age 69. So they now send his granddaughter, whom he missed meeting by three weeks, and me to Poland to see where he grew up and to meet my ciocia Helen, his only remaining sister.

He went back once to visit, in 1966. I remember the cheeses he brought back, which were confiscated at customs. I remember them, however, because they made his suitcase smell horrible. Dad's stinky cheeses passed into family lore. The following year he had another of his episodic breakdowns. That, too, I remember. I fantasize that I will understand his illness better when I go to Poland.

The return on the bonds makes me, for the purpose of this trip anyway, a rich American. I won't have to worry about money. I thought that time and interest had done the work of giving the bonds value. But it was my dad who did the work. I have received a gift from him, long after he died.

My brother-in-law's wife's 92-year-old uncle

had an "Obama 2008" bumper sticker on his car, which I noticed at a family wedding this weekend. There was a "US out of Iraq" sticker, and a few others too. At 92, he's seen a lot of elections, as well as a lot of wars. Late in life, vote early.