Category Archives: Meditations

The worst

Some time before four in the morning, I was awakened by the quiet. The forecast had been for sleet and rain; did they get it wrong? was it quiet because it was snowing? or was it quiet because the storm was going to miss us? I looked out the window: the street was still dry. I checked the National Weather Service Web site: rain and snow in Connecticut, headed our way. I went back to sleep, and within an hour awakened again to hear something — rain, sleet, wind-driven snow — hitting the windows.

By the time I got up, sometime after seven, the street outside our apartment was covered with several inches of windblown snow. By the time I started walking up to the church, the snow had turned to sleet, and then to freezing rain. I shoveled off one side of the front walk, and got a number of calls on my cell phone: “The town plows haven’t even reached out house yet, I won’t be in”; “Just checking to see if someone was at church”; “I’m on my way, I’ll be a little late.”

Some twenty people showed up for the worship service, less than half our usual fifty-to-sixty people. Many of them lived within walking distance, including the two newcomers, but one person made it all the way from Westport, a good half hour drive. After the worship service, he told me, “I started out following the plow, usually that’s the best thing to do in a storm. But it was raining by then, and the plow was pushing water — the water was deeper behind the plow than in front — so I wound up having to pass the plow.” It was pouring rain during the worship service.

Our plowing service still hadn’t showed up by one o’clock as we were leaving the church. Mark, who happened to be driving his truck with the plow on it, volunteered to plow the church parking lot. His plow scooped up water and slush and snow drenched in water, and at the end of each pass when the plow hit the snowbank, there was a huge splash as muddy water went ten or twelve feet into the air. I finished shoveling the sidewalk and stairs; it got up to almost fifty degrees this afternoon, but it’s supposed to dip well below freezing tonight, and any snow left on the sidewalks tonight will turn into a block of ice that will last until spring.

I ate lunch, tired and sore from shoveling that wet, heavy snow. By the time I went back up to the church for the youth group meeting, the rain had stopped. And when we left after the youth group meeting, the temperature was just about at freezing: black ice forming everywhere.

This is just about the worst weather New England can dish out. In the past twenty-four hours we have seen snow, freezing fog, sleet, freezing rain, rain, mist, fog, and what the Weather Service called “unknown precipitation.” The ground is covered with heavy wet snow, which has been made even heavier by all the rain that fell on top of the snow. Now everything is going to freeze solid, and with the short days and long nights nothing is going to thaw out for a very long time. The heavy snow saps your physical strength; the darkness and dreariness saps your emotional strength; and you long for summer, or a trip to someplace warm.

Boredom is good

Back in August, 2005, I read a stunningly good story by an author who was then unfamiliar to me. The author was Kelly Link, and the story, “Magic for Beginners,” was a sort of magical-realism-science-fiction-fantasy story with characters that were very well drawn. Since then, I’ve read some other stories by Link, and while I feel “Magic for Beginners” is her best story, everything I’ve read by her is good enough that I’m willing to listen when she says something about writing.

In an interview in the November, 2007, issue of Locus magazine, she asserts that boredom is useful, perhaps even necessary, for writers:

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write…. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function in writing — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before….

I don’t know if boredom is useful to everyone who writes, but boredom certainly is useful for me when I’m trying to write. When I get overly busy — and I have been very busy the past month or so — I don’t write much, and what I write isn’t worth much.

Yet another reason for not letting excessive busy-ness creep into my life.

On top of everything else…

December is a busy month for people who work in churches — even those of us who work in post-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches still have lots of Christmas madness to contend with.

On top of the usual Christmas madness, here at First Unitarian we still have a number of building improvements going on. When I first started working in churches, the old battle-scarred religious professionals all said, Make sure you never have building projects going on during December, because it’s just too much — yet here we are, with building projects still going on.

On top of Christmas madness and building projects, we’ve been experiencing 20-30% increase in Sunday attendance each month since May. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — growth is a stressful thing for churches to undergo.

On top of Christmas madness, building projects, and the stress of growth, I’ve got whatever virus has been infecting everyone here in New Bedford. It’s one of those lingering viruses that sticks with you for weeks — I’ve been sick off and on for over a month — and it’s gotten so many people that supposedly one of the clinics in the city had to close down at noon one day because they had so many sick people wanting treatment.

The upshot of all this is that I don’t have time to write anything tonight. I’m going to bed instead.

Return of the laptop

At long last, I finally have my own laptop back again. It’s been three weeks — a week to get a firm diagnosis of the problem (hard drive failure), another week to figure out how best to fix the problem, and then a week waiting for the repair shop to make the repair.

It felt strange to not have a computer of my own at home. I came to realize that I now organize my writing inside my computer. I keep outlines and drafts filed on the computer, and I have different folders in my computer filing system for different writing projects. Over the past three weeks I wrote a good deal by hand, far more than I usually do, and I enjoyed spending more time in the physical act of writing. But I no longer have the elaborate physical apparatus of writing that I used to have — three-ring binders and Pendaflex folders in file cabinets, and even note cards. Separated from my new computer-based organizational system, I wrote less and my writing was choppier than it should have been.

I also noticed that writing by hand produces somewhat different results than writing on a computer. Two weeks ago, I wrote my sermon by hand. Even though it was slower to write it by hand, the sermon needed far less rewriting. In the end, it took no longer to write a complete sermon by hand than on the computer. Yet although I found it harder to read my own handwriting when in the pulpit, in some ways it was easier to preach from that handwritten sermon because the sermon seemed to stick in my memory better. As for my non-professional writing, I think my prose might be better when I write by hand.

In any case, my computer has returned to its accustomed place on my desk at home. Now all I have to do is spend several hours re-establishing my file system and reinstalling all the software I used to have on it.

Late fall

There are many things that I like about this time of year. I like it when the leaves are finally off the trees, and it feels as if you can really see the truth of the landscape and the cityscape. I like seeing the winter waterfowl on the harbor: I saw my first Buffleheads of the season, bobbing in the chop kicked up by the cold north wind. Even though I chill easily, I like the feel of the cold air.

But there is one thing that I truly dislike about this season. I hate the sappy versions of Christmas music that you hear in supermarkets and malls and just about every retail establishment. Christmas carols do not translate well into light rock. The Christmas songs from the 1940’s and 1950’s do not translate well into Musak, or whatever horrendous brand of eviscerated pseudo-music a particular store happens to be playing. I dread going into stores at this time of year, becauses I hate having to listen to debased Christmas music they all play.

‘Tis the season to not go shopping. ‘Tis the season to freeze your butt off outdoors, or to sit at home with a good book from the library.

First snow

About four o’clock it started snowing lightly. By seven, the roads and sidewalks were covered with a thin layer of snow — cat-track snow, just enough to make everything look white.

By ten, when I finally left church to head home, the air temperature had gotten just above freezing. A light freezing drizzle, barely enough to notice, was settling down and making the snow on the ground slippery and crunchy. The freezing drizzle left a thin film of ice on the windshield of the car, which the wipers barely cleared away.

As I walked back from the parking garage to our apartment, I could see the drizzle as a light fog or haze around the street lights. The city was as quiet as I’ve ever heard it.

‘Tis the season

Brief observations from the Christmas season:

  • Even if I’d somehow managed to miss the endless Christmas carols and the hideous red-and-green displays in all the stores, I’d still know it’s the Christmas shopping season because of the sudden increase of spam — both email spam and comment spam on this blog (could it be that the evil spammers sell more Viagra during the Christmas shopping season?).
  • Our church was on the annual New Bedford Holiday House Tour, and we carefully prepared scripts for our tour guides telling about our huge Tiffany glass mosaic and our renowned Flentrop organ — but what people really wanted to know about was why there were doors on the end of the pews (to keep the drafts out in winter).
  • ‘Tis the season to eat rich foods — at our church holiday fair today, the baked goods sold far more quickly than anything else (we bought our share: two jars of jelly and three loaves of pumpkin bread).

Only twenty-five more days before life becomes calm again.

Autumn watch

We started walking back from Dunkin Donuts right at four o’clock. “Look,” said Carol, “There are two sailboats out on the harbor.” Two sloops, both carrying mainsail and jib, were tacking back and forth across the harbor. Most recreational sailors lack the courage to actually sail in the harbor, in the midst of the working fishing boats, tugs, other recreational boats, and ferries, and usually when we see sailboats, the sails are furled and they are being pushed by propellor and motor. But today, perhaps because the winds were perfect and there were no other recreational boats out, these two sloops gracefully sailed back and forth across the harbor. A large fishing boat was holding a position near the swing-span bridge, waiting for quarter after four when the bridge would swing open to let it into the inner harbor. One of the sloops sailed quite near the fishing boat, the top of the sloop’s mast about as tall as the cranes and masts on the fishing boat. “I wonder what they’re doing,” said Carol, “maybe they’re hailing the fishing boat?” I said I didn’t know, but it was pleasant to watch: the graceful white sailboat gliding by the big, tough fishing boat. By then, the sun had gone down behind the city’s skyline, and darkness was settling over the harbor.