Wonder

I’m not sure how to live in a world where kindness is a real possibility. Where gentle things can be protected, nurtured and grown. Where hardness can soften. I’m not sure how to live in a world where winds pick up flags and curly hair, where little girls walk into coffee shops in leotards, and old ladies wear overalls. Where bread rises with yeast and warmth, where people extend friendship and genuine smiles.

I’m not sure how to live in a world where Christ walked. The immovable point… in a stable. The Prince of Peace with a crown of thorns.

Where two trees with separate root systems can grow together, so close that the bark changes and becomes one tree. I saw this once. I felt the bark and it was not just interlaced; the trees had given into one another.

I put my head down on my book a few moments ago after reading about Russian princes ousting the Mongols. It is a history book but I’m too overwhelmed by the romance of it all. And I prayed, because I have to teach tomorrow and that means I cannot just sit here and imagine khans and princes fighting for Russia. And I cannot say every “Ferdinand” and “Isabella” out loud and be shocked by language and by my own tongue.

I love this world, this world of goose bumps (the hairs on my arms react to a touching story… what is THAT about?!) and pinstripes and white wicker porch furniture. Of delightful friends who teach me things. Of the Still Point (Triune, Steady, Good) that makes this dance possible. I know I love this world, but I’m not sure I know how to live.

Cemeteries and Somber Thanks

Tonight I watched the sun bow for the day. "I've finished a day," she said. "I rose this morning and bid the moon good day and goodbye. I stayed high at noon and came back for a brief magic hour after hiding underneath a cloud blanket."  I watched her bow from a cemetery where I felt small and insignificant and modestly grateful. She played her part. Have I played mine?

Learning

My boss, who will not like it one bit that I called him my boss, encouraged me to blog about things I am learning at school. I think this is a very good idea, but I am learning so much that the challenge overwhelms me. Should I tell you about Edward II or Alexander Hamilton? Shall we talk about commas, early American poetry, Transcendentalism? Or the pope! And really what he meant was pedagogy. Do I tell you how humbling it was to learn that I was scaring the students in writing? How exciting it was when my eighth graders identified trochaic octameter in a poem? And LIKED it?! No...

You get the idea. I sit still, the world leaps and flies around me. Again I woke struck with the urge to stop it all. To find the world's pause button (I'll bet it's somewhere so sneaky no one would guess it. I'll bet it's under the bleachers of a tiny high school in Kearney, Nebraska or maybe under  your chair. Everyone check right now just to be sure). I would press pause and then walk around for a year or so. Mostly I would put my hand to the cheeks of people frozen in their tracks. I would push their hair behind their ears, make the sign of the cross on their foreheads and bless them. They are sacred. I would flip through my student's writing journals (which I am allowed to read) and try to understand what they think about their writing. I would pick up trash from empty streets and put all the grocery carts back into their lines so that when I hit the play button again the boys who collect them (they do seem to always be boys) would wake surprised. Other than that I wouldn't move too many things. I would touch everything though, and I would turn all the radio stations to the same channel, and figure out how to play Allegri's Miserere when everyone woke back up. And we would have a holy moment, and I would die for joy.

I think I might leave someone else un-paused too, so that we could look and cry and pray together. This is what I learned this week. I need people so much. This is not co-dependence; it is human. God said, "It is not good for man to be alone." I work with people who give me room to breathe and grow and teach and love my students. This week I scheduled something wrong and my boss, without a moments hesitation or condemnation, picked up what I dropped. And a mentor teacher gave up his lunch to patiently walk me through something I should understand. Tonight I sit alone in a coffee shop, so happy to be here reflecting, but even more happy that next week I'll be able to see all of them.

I also moved this week. My roommate, who I mentioned in an earlier post, left a bit suddenly and I could not find a roommate. So I broke my lease, put my stuff in storage (again), and I moved in with people so precious I am scared to write about them. Last night we smoked Cuban cigars and talked about pilgrimage. Every morning one housemate and I hug before we speak. I can't believe I get to live there.

I learned many other things this week, but mostly I learned I need people. And I'm so blessed to have them.

Sabbath

I work six days a week. From sunrise to sunset six days a week I teach, I grade, I plan and I assess. I pray each morning that God will help me to see the material clearly and to steward well the frighteningly precious students he has given me to teach. And I work as hard as I know how while still trying to be present for my neighbors.

But to my amazement God doesn't want us to work seven days. The God of the Bible commands rest. Our Jewish parents rested on the seventh day after a week of hard labor. One of the privileges of following Yahweh in this age is that we rest at the beginning of the week. We start our work Monday morning from a place of rest.

So on Sundays I Sabbath. I begin the day with Holy Communion at the parish I am attending in Oklahoma City. And then I let the wind carry me, praying thanksgiving along the way. Today I ate lunch after Sunday school with the Parker family and we talked about Ireland and the Book of Kells and theology and music and pedagogy and love. Then a friend asked me to go to Lake Hefner. So we got pumpkin spice lattes and went and sat on stone stairs by our sadly shrunken lake watching rainbow sail boats and reading short stories out loud. A couple sat near us and talked quite loudly. I scowled at them, and then the man pulled out a violin. My jaw dropped and I apologized to God and the angels and everyone in all of history for scowling, and we sat and watched the lake and listened to him play.

And now, Shiner Bock and a movie with a neighbor. A heart full of praise and gratitude. If it were only the Eucharist, that would be enough. Just God's love is enough. But he gives me a family to eat with, a neighbor who loves me and is crazy, and a shimmering Fall sun. Tomorrow I will rise early and put all of my strength into the work God has given me. And I will not get it all done. But today in a leap of faith and gratitude I Sabbath.

Hope

I woke today with hope. And it is not because I have done a good job, or because my apartment is clean, or because things are right. Even as I type a determined and possibly caffeinated fly is having a conniption fit around my head.  And furthermore, I've been praying through a difficult transition I'll have to make soon. And I have a hole in my sweater. Things are not perfect.

I woke today with a glimmer, a memory of fresh bread in France, my Dad saying goodbye in an airport, photos of flamingos in Nairobi. I stood to the sunrise, to one more day, to fresh coffee and a faithful, beat up car who has traveled so far with me.  I woke imperfect to an imperfect world, with the knowledge of a perfect King, and I have hope.

Some Unsolicited Advice

What Not to do When Teaching.

1) Do NOT write an acrostic to help students memorize the thirteen colonies if you do not have in your hand the list of the actual thirteen colonies.

I thought, "I'm the teacher. I know this." I wrote, "Vicious Mice Navigate Mazes..." You get the idea. I then wrote, "Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine..." After I had finished writing them all, and still had Maryland left. I realized quickly that one of two things had happened. Either we had been counting wrong all these years, and would have to get Miss Betsy Ross to add another white stripe to the flag, and I would be a hero, or I had screwed up. Again, remember the fourteen eyes boring into the back of my head. I stepped back, I sighed, and asked for help. Where to put Maryland? It took five minutes for me to remember that Maine was not a colony. I cursed the book for mentioning it at all (silently, in my head), told myself I had made a career mistake but had to at least finish the period, and erased Maine. I will never, ever forget, and I will unfortunately probably not like Maine as much for awhile.. oh sneaky Maine.

2) Do NOT say things out loud for the very first time in front of students.

I constantly "make up" proper nouns in my head without knowing the actual pronunciation, and today I changed Guinevere's father, Leodogran to LeoDRAGON. Yes, I added a dragon to our Arthurian legend discussion. Ugh.

What to do when you do all of the above (or customize your own version of seemingly "epic" failure).

1) Tell your students you made a mistake. If nothing else, they deserve to know the truth about Maine.

2) Get around people who can guide you away from a ledge jump to the pit of self-loathing, and into laughter. If these people happen to invite you over for dinner and to spend the night, and then happen to give you a build-a-bear, and a plastic crown, you're all the better for it. (Thank you, thank you, thank you Dunham family).

3) Eat cake, but just a little.

4) Go to bed. I'm going now. It's 9:21.

Goodnight, blog world. Tomorrow is a new day.

Marina

My neighbor, with peach fuzz hair (growing back slowly after chemotherapy), and framed pictures of Obama all over her house. She loves President Obama, and sent him a birthday card from our apartment complex. I signed it gladly. Right now the floor of my apartment is shaking because she is playing hip hop with a ridiculous base. She is about seventy, and frequently she turns on base heavy rap at apartment-shaking volume, and then goes outside to go swimming. Then I go outside and get her out of the pool to turn down her music which no one can hear but me.  This is one of those moments, and I'm too tired to go get her.

For my first day of school she brought me Kleenex and soap and told me that students are germy. I wrote her a thank you card and she wrote me a thank you card back for my thank you card. When she came over for dinner last week she asked if I were seeing anyone and if I believed in God, and she told me she was Jewish and Catholic and "okay with gays."

"Love your neighbors," He said. Don't mind if I do. :)

Is This My Life?

My life is small now. I am no longer swallowing oceans and climbing up trees and in and out of planes. I walk through the cemetery. I put a pot of coffee on. I read.

I look into the eyes of students and talk to them about the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I talk to them about basketball and I talk to them about grammar. They look at me and write down things that I say. All of the sudden I can't spell to save my life. Spelling with fourteen pairs of eyes waiting for you to step aside so they can say, "What is THAT?!," is a whole new world.

One class at a time. One story at a time. One gerund, one French lord, one American gothic short story at a time. Can I help them to see? I know I can't make them see, but can I help? Them to see their place, their lives, their world? Could I help them to see the man outside asking for a dollar? Could I help them believe that it might be better sometimes just to give him a dollar or two rather than offering him advice, even if they money will just go to booze? I can't say it directly. I have to say it through SAT prep and vocabulary checks. I'll say it through loving them, by God's grace.

My life is small now... eyes and neighbors and bookshelves and homework to be graded. And students. Precious and young students, who might give themselves to something great.

My Saint Bernard Sweater

By divine providence, I came into possession of an over-sized cashmere sweater with a giant Saint Bernard head on the front. It came to me during a fairly reflective, transitional time of life and I wore it for about a week continuously when I first inherited it. I wore it with jeans, shorts, tights, dresses. I would usually start the day in something relatively put together, make it to about 10am and then on would come the sweater.

I took a loonnnng road trip to Dallas when I left Massachusetts this spring and every time I felt nervous about coming back I would bend over, shake out my hair until it was twice the size of my head and dig out the Saint Bernard sweater. It was May, but somehow I managed to be on a mountain or in the middle of a cold front when I really needed that sweater. It's like a cashmere hug. It goes down to my thighs and presents a fierce Saint Bernard to anyone who might try to mess with me. I actually feel protected.

Tomorrow I start teaching. I am going to assign projects on American Historical Figures and the like. I am going to grade things. Don't get me wrong: this is absolutely where I am supposed to be and I don't think I could be happier. But it is a Saint Bernard sweater kind of day... nerves and needing hugs and also kind of ready to fight. Oh Lord, help.

A Leap of Faith

I have wanted to write for so long. I have had stories, lessons, exultations building up in me for months and months, but have sat with them. Today I told my roommate about it. About having experiences that are so precious they shake me, and being torn between wanting to share them and fearing exploiting them. I want to write it all, to tap my fingers and say "THIS, This is what I see." But isn't that selfish? Don't people have better things to think of? And Kate said, "Abby, how much better would the world be if everyone gave each other what they had to give?" She is right, and well, it might not be great, but this is what I have to give. I am taking a leap of faith and returning to my blog to share a bit of my life with whoever might want to read it.

Just Missing my Blog and Wanting to Share

I wrote this on a plane December 11, 2010, on my way to visit my beautiful friends Jess and Stew. It is old, but I wanted to share it.

A Blanket of Blue

When I was little my favorite thing was the sky. I don’t know any other way of saying it. I could elaborate but that wouldn’t do justice to my thoughts about it at the time. I didn’t know that the sky reflected some majesty of God’s, I couldn’t really remember the proper types of clouds, and I didn’t mean by the thought that my favorite thing to look at was the sky or that my favorite part of nature was the sky. Just that my favorite thing was the sky. That was what I meant and while I can’t say it so simply any longer, I still know what I meant. I walked home from elementary and middle school often in awe. I drew pictures of sunsets. I cried when we flew through a cloud on my first airplane trip (I had imagined them a bit more solid). For a while, I cried every time I went in an airplane because I couldn’t believe that I was part of the blessed sliver of the world’s population to get to see above the clouds. Ninety billion people have walked this earth, and I have stood on mountain tops and flown above the clouds, seen them from the top, and almost seen angels hosting elegant balls there, waltzing on celestial carpet.Why should I be so blessed?

My favorite thing was the sky. My favorite Psalm was Psalm 19, dedicated to the sky, and I wished on many birthday candles that I might be able to fly. Even as I review my current bucket list, I find myself amazed by how many of my earthly dreams have to do somehow with the sky. I hope to someday be in attendance of the world’s largest hot air balloon festival in New Mexico, and for about fifteen years now (again thanks to Jess), I have longed to go to Glacier National Park in Montana... to Big Sky Country.

These past few weeks I have been in Dallas, Texas, after spending the fall in New England. My friends there love the natural world and enjoyed my constant state of rapture as the trees lit up and the landscape, burst into flames, and then donned more dignified, elderly gold and purple, and finally brown as they let their leaves swish to the ground. As I prepared to go back to Dallas for the holidays, they wondered aloud how I would do in a city so void of beauty. I tensed a little, ever defensive of my homeland, but didn’t protest aloud. I wondered as well how it would be. I have actually often been thankful that I was from Dallas, because I assumed that my wonder at natural beauty in the world was owed in part to a relatively low standard set early on in the Metroplex. I have now come to see this as a completely unfair assessment.

When I am in Dallas, about 95% of what I see anytime I am outside is the sky. I am covered at all times by immensity, by a dome of blue, and the flat landscape is what gives this to me. We have no mountains soaring toward the sky. We have hardly any reaching trees. I love green, and I do miss it. But most of North Texas in humility bows to the sky, sinking and laying low in deference to that opens space. And I realized that while I loved the gifts of New England, I felt the absence of expansive blue, of rolling storms, and of sunsets bedecked in irrational color combinations. I love both the reaching trees and rocking, arching land, as well as the flat. But this is my home and so perhaps the beauty that first called to me, first beckoned me to my roof as a little girl, and to climb over fences and stand in fields, and to pause daily for sunsets in seminary, perhaps this beauty will always hold a special place in my heart.

I drove every day to work for the past two weeks into sun rises that made me want to get out of my car in the gridlock traffic and kiss the person next to me. To invite them to get down on their knees with me, and just look until they could see. Golden rays pouring though buildings, reflecting on faces, purple clouds and moon behind us. Unfortunately, the sunrises did not help my courtesy as an interstate traveler. I got honked at a few times for not going fast enough and for not keeping my eyes on the road.

And so I have wanted to write about that. To write praise for the Texas skies, and thankfulness for the sprawling flatness that makes that vision possible. This should be the last even semi-comparison I will ever make, for what is the point? Why hold the Rockies to the Boston Harbor or the Grand Canyon to Arches in Utah? But I do wish there were another word for flat (expanse? field? sprawl?) to describe Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, for the flat gives way to mountains of clouds and stars and storms in the sky and while I cannot climb them, when I have laid still and waited long enough, the sky has condescended to me, sweeping me and washing me and calling me into itself.

I Heard a Song that Sounds like Snow

I heard a song that sounds like snow
Notes drifted lightly to and fro.
Filling holes and making clean
At once opaque and glistening.

My toes are cold beside the fire.
I sent them out in weather dire.
They grabbed the cold and brought it in
And will not let it go again.

White Winter Days and Inevitable Clichés

The storm came, and for some reason I feel as though I never believed in snow flakes. I blinked, startled when one found her home on the window where I stood and watched. I’ve been to Colorado many times... The first five years of my life we had snow every year... I must have known that it didn’t always descend in tiny sleet-ish pelts... So I don’t know why I feel so surprised now, that for the history of the world there have been countless, all different, and mine were the only eyes to see this one before she melted. I tried to memorize her lines and cuts but failed, and that is okay. “Have you seen entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail...” God asked Job. Why should snow be so beautiful? I know there is a scientific explanation for these winter jewels, but why should it be so? How extravagant.

The first day of the blizzard I asked for every outside job I could get, and when we had a break I ran outside and for thirty minutes jumped and hurled myself face first into the knee deep blanket that covers the L’Abri acres. I laughed so hard I thought I would choke to death on snow. We screamed and ran across the frozen pond, and I ate snow piles off of the leaves of small trees. They looked like little platters of icing.

This only represents a few hours of a week full of pain, prayer, laughter, anger, repentance and worship. I suppose this will be what most weeks are made up of for the rest of my life. And I can’t avoid cliches. What is there to say about winter, but that it is blueish white and new each year? There are two trees outside of our house that are about four stories high each, and naked they look like gate posts to a world of giants. I imagine myself scrambling around in snow that would only come up to their shoelaces.

There are about 18 faces at each meal now, mostly from Europe and the United States with different questions and prayers, each with their own histories and according to the Bible, each bearing God’s image uniquely. (Genesis 1) I am humbled to be here to serve them. Thankfully, most are staying the whole term, and we can get to know each other slowly, one meal at a time as we laugh and argue and seek Truth.

May you be surprised by your world today. I believe it is a work of art (as are you), made by the Great Artist, that you might draw your eyes upward. And to my beloved friend Julie, who has been ever faithful, ever generous, may you know you are cared for from Boston. I think of you all the time.

Are the Birds With You?

Sitting still at a familiar desk, I stare out the window where I watched the lilies blossom in the summer, the tree above flame gold and red in the fall, and where now the river has iced, locking into place her lumps and ripples. I have yet to see my heron. The lilies have shuddered away and the tree has taken on a solemn height, no longer rustling in the wind, but quiet as winter howls through its limbs.

I returned to L’Abri last Wednesday, and so perhaps have returned to my blog. In coming back to this shelter, I have left behind another. The one of familiar faces, of my sisters and friends who know me well, of a Christmas filled with the quirky intimacies of long-standing relationships; laughter, forgiveness and tears, and much, much more laughter. One shelter for another, but this is the one in which I am placed now, to welcome and face each person that comes through our doors. We number sixteen now, a patched together group, praying, waiting, watching and learning from one another.

In the summer I was bursting with pain and relief and freedom, in the fall on fire with lessons newly learned, and so far, these few days, the winter has brought a stillness to me, even to the moments I have laughed the hardest. Though, even as I write this, I have to smile and wonder, for my emotions at times seem to push me from behind and it is early in the winter to know if it will be a still one. There is much to be learned, and much to be prayed.

A blizzard creeps up the coast to meet us tonight, so we are busy about the work of sealing windows and stocking up on hot chocolate and soup. The birds seem to have alerted as well, for they are nowhere to be seen. I look forward to seeing this aspect of God’s creation, as it is one with which I am less familiar.

Oh, and as you may have guessed, the stoves in the house are lit. The excitement for the blizzard comes from a girl about four feet from a 300 degree wood burning stove. I have not toughened up, or at least, not that I have noticed. I look forward to spending this third season here, and with you all. Once again, if you write me, know I will write you back. I will even send you some snow, if you like! Though if it morphs with the strain of the journey, it is no fault of mine. Grace and Peace.

Abby Lorenc

L’Abri Fellowship Foundation

49 Lynbrook Road

Southborough, MA

01772.