In Memoriam: Virginia S. McLaren, 1927-2019
My mother, Virginia S. McLaren, passed away yesterday, at the age of 92. This is a poem I wrote while sitting by her bedside over the last few weeks. Rest in joy, Mom! (February 11, 1927 - June 29, 2019)
For all who knew and loved her, we hope to organize an informal memorial service in Maryland sometime this fall. In lieu of flowers, please make a generous donation to her beloved Cedar Ridge Community Church, here: https://www.crcc.org/.
Your Places
The corner of the dining room
In Rochester, New York,
Where you put blankets over chairs
And made a pretend house
Where you played dolls with your sisters
In the early 1930’s.
The hospital room where you visited your father, who
Had taken up house painting in the middle of the
Great Depression,
Who fell from a ladder too old to keep using,
Broke his back,
And smiled from his Stryker frame whenever
He heard a little girl's voice say, "Hi, Dad."
Your back porch on Petrel Street where your father sat,
Home after ten months in hospital,
And fed what they used to call hobos,
Giving them the dual gifts of your mother’s home cooking
And his friendly presence, so they didn’t have to eat alone,
Marking you for life with generosity and hospitality.
The familiar pew in the church of your childhood
Where you sat beside your mother,
In her Sunday best of pearls and perfume,
And sang hymns: I Love to Tell the Story,
When I Survey, In the Sweet By and By,
I Surrender All.
The doorway where your dad would squat each day after work
At the piano factory,
Leaning against the doorframe,
And you would rush to him, hug him, and tell him about your day
At school and at play, leaning on his knee.
Your high school, where you won
Shyest
As a “Senior Superlative.”
The office at Kodak where you worked after graduation,
Using shorthand to take dictation,
Typing fast, dressed smart,
Proud to be part of a professional world.
The volleyball court at a church youth camp,
Where you met a young man
In medical school, who quoted Shakespeare and said,
“The fates have been kind,” and who became your
Beau, and then your fiancé, and then your husband
For sixty-four years.
The kitchen on Sherwood Avenue where your mother cooked
Chicken dumplings and baked grape pie,
And after you left, where a perky parakeet reminded her of you,
Your going away gift to her
When you followed your husband far away.
The window of a train you took cross country,
To board a ship where you stood at the railing
And watched flying fish thread the blue Pacific waves
En route to Japan
Where your Army-doctor husband was stationed
During the Korean War.
A mobile home where you lived after the war,
While your husband got a degree in public health,
And then your first house on The Windfall Road,
Where after a long wait, you gave birth to two boys,
Your pride and joy.
A white pine tree beside that house
Where a robin built her nest,
Where you watched your husband
Lift your sons, again and again,
So they could see four perfect blue eggs
Cupped inside.
Picnic tables,
Campsites,
Canoes,
Trails,
Beaches.
A table in a church basement where
You taught Sunday school classes, with
A flannel graph board on an easel,
And Jesus, surrounded by children,
Red and yellow, black and white.
Your cars … a quirky Nash, a trendy Pontiac,
Then, practical Chevy and Chrysler station wagons, and later,
A thrifty Chevette and used Ford Fairlane
When your boys learned to drive,
Then a Toyota, then a Buick … with their seats of vinyl and cloth,
Where you were ever the skillful navigator and co-pilot,
A map on your lap,
As the world flew by so fast.
Your living room on Russett Terrace,
The floor boards sagging with teenagers,
You setting out cookies and punch for
the Monday Night Fellowship,
The foyer full of shoes,
The air charged with Spirit-joy.
Beside a hospital bed in the living room of
Your parent’s last house on Blackwell Lane,
Your mother fading as cancer slowly
Took her breath.
Then, a few years later, the kitchen of that same house,
Still full of the aroma of coffee,
And the scent of your father,
The morning of his funeral.
Your kitchens, always crowded with gadgets,
Your dining rooms, with an abundance of china tea cups,
Where you served
So many roast beef and mashed potato Sunday dinners, with
Your perfect gravy, yellow corn, warm rolls with melted butter,
Always a pie or cake or brownie for dessert,
Set on that big walnut table, always with lit candles.
The swimming pool on Martins Lane, the space
Resounding with
your grandchildren’s
Laughter splashing everywhere:
“Watch this, Grandma!”
RV's, yours, your sister's, for cross-country
Adventures in retirement,
The Smith girls reunited again,
Discovering America, campground by campground,
Beach by beach,
Mountain by mountain.
Beside another swimming pool, after your move to Florida,
Quiet, but for the
The rustling palms outside the lanai and
An ebullient mockingbird on a telephone wire in the distance,
A Bible and Our Daily Bread on your lap,
Your last years with Dad.
Doctor’s offices during Dad’s decline.
A move to assisted living.
The mango trees that shaded his grave,
Where on that fierce hot day in May,
You could hardly stand.
Your many desks in many homes
Where you paid bills, made lists,
Saved nearly everything, wrote notes of love,
Chronicled your family’s history with annual Christmas letters, and
That last glass-topped desk where you
Showed your first stark signs of aging, moving papers back and forth,
Back and forth, from one side of the desk
To the other.
Your recliner where you spent the last five years, content,
Filling word-search books circle by circle,
Making puns with your table mates at meals,
Then back to your recliner, the past flooding in,
Memory upon memory,
A jumble of gratitude upon joy, like
Beloved books fallen from the top shelf.
Now, in this bed, breathing unevenly,
Tended by caring hands with distant indistinct voices,
Your frail body tired, bruised, torn from falls,
Yet resilient,
This strong body that bore two boys
Who love you more than words can say,
In whose hearts you will always have
Your places.
At the end of a driveway,
Me, driving away, you,
First with dad, then alone,
Standing outside, waving until after
I am out of sight.
“Bye for now,” you always call out,
Already anticipating the next reunion,
Never wanting a goodbye to be final.
One more place:
Here, in this vacancy,
This room inside all of us who love you, and have
Felt your love, and feel it
Still.
0 Comments9 Minutes
What I Shared in West Chester, PA
It was a pleasure being with the UCC conference May 31-June 1. Here are the slides I shared.
great spiritual migration Part 1
great spiritual migration part 2
great spiritual migration part 3
great spiritual migration part 3b
0 Comments1 Minute
An event that always sells out … January Adventure. You can register this Monday at 8 am!
Here's the information:
This is a last minute reminder that this Monday, at 8:00AM ET, the online registration for January Adventure 2020, conducted Jan 17-19, 2020 and held at Epworth By The Sea on Saint Simons Island, GA will be activated. Early Arrival (Thurs, Jan 16th) and Late Departure (Mon, Jan 20th) are offered. In recent years, the event has filled quickly, so we urge you to register right away.
Our speakers this year are again outstanding. See the "Save the Date" announcement below and our website for more details. Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, activist and public theologian. He is passionate for a a new kind of Christianity. Though awhile, he has been a previous January Adventure speaker. You can visit his website by Clicking Here. Dr Wil Gafney is a speaker, biblical scholar, professor, author, Episcopal priest, and former Army Chaplain. We are privileged to have her as a first time January Adventure Speaker. You can visit her website by Clicking Here. Our 'early arrival' event speaker is Buddy Sullivan. Author and local historian, he has written several books about the history of the Golden Isles and will provide a Friday morning lecture covering "Saint Simons Thru The Ages".
0 Comments1 Minutes
What I Shared in Minnesota
What a pleasure to be at Hennepin Ave UMC, Wayzata Community Church, and the Festival of Homiletics last week.
Here are slides from my talks. You should be able to get audio soon at their websites -
At Festival of Homiletics ...
preaching as science fictionFoH
Scaring the Hell Out of Rich Folk
At Hennepin Ave UMC
At Wayzata Community Church
I'm grateful to all the hosts and folks who came out. An encouraging week!
0 Comments1 Minute
From America’s greatest theologian (in my opinion) –
One of my favorite quotes, from Howard Thurman:
From Commencement Speech, Spelman College, 1980
There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…
You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…
The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.
You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself
Now there is something in everybody that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people… I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.
There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you…
I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.… that I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.
So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.
Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.
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Here's a song that I think is the perfect complement to Thurman's insight, from the ever-gifted Andy Gullahorn:
http://www.andygullahorn.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Andy-Gullahorn-Lyrics-Beyond-the-frame.pdf
0 Comments5 Minutes