Janet's blog

When we look at the lectionary readings around the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, we have a story from Revelations about the Queen about to give birth and from Luke the story of Mary’s visit to her cousin Eliz

"Life got complicated," a friend recently said.

Indeed.

For most of us, life has been entirely too complicated in too many ways. For example, the last four weeks seem like a blur. Oh, there are the high points like four days in Baltimore and Barack Obama winning the election and a financial meltdown, but for the most part, my head has been fog-bound in a much too complicated world.

I keep thinking time will slow down a little - we'll have time to stop, smell the roses as they say.  Only the roses are in their last blooming and I've not had time to get out there lately.

I received an email yesterday that an old friend of mine had died.  She and I were friends when we both worked for Armed Forces Recreational Services in Germany in the mid-70s - she at the Rec Center and I at the Craft Shop. She was two years older than I. 

I've been out of town - and out of mind, for that matter - for several weeks in June.  Our family now consists of six siblings, children, and grandchildren and spouses - about forty all told.  We gather every few years and this year I invited them home to the farm.

The farm is where we siblings grew up and where the older grandchildren spent a lot of summer time.  It's a family corporation and many of the younger ones had no idea what they owned or where it was.  This was the year to find out.

Tonight was our healing service.  After the healing and the discussion and the time together, I came upstairs to the computer and to the next layer of getting the web site operating seamlessly. 

 And as I sit here working on the computer and with the electronic world, I remember the simplicity and silence of the laying on of hands for healing.  Such a simple thing, this laying on of hands; such a complex thing this electronic sorting of pixels and bites to make a web site for you our reader/watcher. 

I've been reading Rabbi David Cooper - his words were a companion on my Lenten journey this year - and I came across an interesting term: post-denominational.  It's interesting because it puts a new image in my head.  When I think "denominational" I see dividers; when I think "post-denominational" the dividers disappear.