Blue moons and grace

Tonight the moon is full - it is darting behind the skeleton of the liquid amber out the study window. I want for it to be to me a reminder of this resolution.

I want to choose to be gracious...to quarantine the angry "what about me" part of my psyche to live like the moon is bright white and rounded not yet turning in on itself...i want to live like that...live in a way that gives out rather than being crippled by fear about my own future.

I don't know if it's possible, i mean, can you really choose grace or does it choose you? I took this role using my thinking aware of what i wanted to learn...perhaps even on the eve of the beginning this is a reminder that we don't always grt to choose what we learn but learning involves a posture towards the unknown and always changing that is open hearted and handed.

I see this also in Elisha who had to take up the cloak that mysteriously floated down from the flames of the receding Elijah chariot - this is the cloak that i now take up....and i learn from elisha that it doesn't always take the first time either.

So, when is it ministry?

Yesterday all was fine. I'd been called. But in honesty now it's not.

And the good girl part of me knows that it shouldn't be all about the pay. But the hard headed mortgage paying part of me wants to scream.

Last week's pondering about "is what i'm called to ministry" or is it only ministry if you do it full time have crashed into the SACS grade 3 award and the reality that "if this is ministry if you don't take the package" then i can't afford to be called. How can this be? Yet even the synod agrees, we who "help" the minister are to be considered SACS 3 but of course without the loadings that make it possible for my tafe students to get employed at this level while they finish their studies.

so do we think that you can't do ministry as a lay person? or is it really that you can as long as you married and have someone else earning a higher than averge wage so that they can pay the mortgage? or even the rent? I know i need to get rational about this - and advocate - but why do i have to.... why aren't recognised?

or am i not called because a called person would somehow find time to have another almost full time job to pay their way to serve the church?

Doing something for myself

Refreshment comes
In Thursday night's
Salon scented massage
In a single service Sunday
And the inspiring music
Swelling sonorously
Through Swedish subtitles
In the art deco detail
Of a friendship reviving.
It comes in making plans
For cooking
And unexpected dinner guests
Whose companionship nurtures
While couch lounging
With old stories and recent learnings
Soul deep honesty of a call to wait
And the silence of God
The spring is coming my friend
For both of us
As the leaves of the best of us
Being their unfurling in midlife

On death and dying

perhaps in hospitals there is a protocol or a procedure for declaring death...like whose call is it to make and how it is to be done. In the church there isn't such a process to fall back on. despite our familiarity with things funeral and memorial we don't have much of a grip on death when it comes to a congregation. at best we ask the patient to make the call themselves - and how can they....

so i have been the palliative care nurse these last thirteen months. and today we declared death with prayer around the bedside. as befits a good long expected death there was a rally at the end a doubling of numbers for the final moments. and together we performed the last rites - partook of unction. walked away from the corpse.

and like at funerals it mattered very little what i said, it mattered what they said. my anger of the last months has dissipated, so this morning was all about making the space, letting the words and tears of the people be the eulogy. and like all good funerals the truth comes out "we have been such a wonderful little clique". truth will out even in death. and they stood around the building touching objects that meant something, every single one of them finding words, it was fitting. and the priest choked over their names in the distribution - it mattered so much that they heard their names "the body of Christ broken for you".

and later this week will come the wrangling over the will and the property but for now we acknowledged that life had finally slipped from this place; the life in a place is more than just the remaining two awaiting a funeral service; and if not for them then for me the recognition that it had been comatose for some time. and that in palliative care we ease the transition to somewhere else we never save a life. we enable people to die with as much dignity as possible, we are the leaders who minimise their pain, we are the ones who brush back the hair from the forehead and wipe away the tears that sneak out crepey lids, we make it a place so others may come and enjoy the final hours, we are the ones who get close to the patients and call them by name, we are the ones who sign the paper that says: "this life is no more".

and there is not training enough in the world for this, only the steady small voice of intuition, run the race with perseverance towards the goal for despite appearances you are surrounded by a cloud.

flying without the net

Some people think i should say more

some other people would also say its a girl thing that you can't feel ok about saying i did something that was good (you should know I've edited this back from "might be")

i guess this is a chance to say the good stuff - the thing that keeps me there after the Saturday terrors of futility and worthlessness.

i flew without the net on sunday - i used the ot reading and asked the congregations what questions they had and what they thought about the characters - and it worked ... people talked back - we laughed about the uses of power, hopefully we laughed because we saw ourselves....was this too confronting? was this is ok way to communicate? on reflection it was actually some of the older members of the congregation who actually talked - the same ones who declare that they like the older style of worship in the ncls results!!!

And it went even better the second time when i didn't use notes at all. there is something about having the readings and the thougths on where you'd like it to go in your head that was liberating i wonder about this being a good way of communicating with pacific islanders...the melanesians in particular liked it.