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Dear Ones, Something nagged at me telling me I had to travel to Charleston, South Carolina. I felt there was unfinished business for me if I did not bear witness to the church shootings at Emanuel AME. I took with me a chalice pin and a brief note written on a notecard from our Congregation. I added both to the condolences collecting outside of the church on behalf of us all. I arrived to blocked streets, the Red Cross on site, a large police presence, and barriers creating a confusing path for all wanting to join in our final steps of our pilgrimage. Hundreds of mourners were pouring out of the church and onto the street. I didn't know that inside lay Myra Thompson, dead. She was shot and killed because her skin was black. I walked a block and joined the long line of others wanting to pay their respect. I could smell something sour, something rotten. I discovered that most of the flowers laid in the past week on the sidewalk outside of the church were in decay. The stench filled m...

Dear Ones, Summer is most definitely here. This will be my third summer in Florida and I am pleased to say I think I've adapted to the heat....somewhat! As every summer I will spend a few weeks at our home in New York. I am leaving for New York on June 30. Richard will follow two weeks later. My cousin is flying here from New York and we will drive back together. I plan on seeing friends along the way and will stop to visit the AME Congregation in South Carolina. It's an important stop for me. I simply must bare witness to this racist tragedy and worship and mourn with its people.  I will likely return earlier than planned, as I always do. I am one to recognize when I've had enough vacation and move on. I know that it has a been a joy for the last couple of years to return to the beaches and the home we've made in Florida. I do love it here. In my absence please do email me or call my cell phone if something big is happening or you find yourself struggling. Its no bothe...

I remember the day we brought our oldest son, Antonio, for a neuro-psychological evaluation. We were told that he had a pervasive developmental disability. Richard and I were leveled. You see, when we decided to adopt children we had dreamed of being part of all the typical milestones all of our children pass through like school dances, friendships, graduations, university. In that moment all of it was taken away and each year as Antonio grew we felt the loss of the milestones he was missing in the moment. We needed to be the parents we never wanted to be or expected to be. We were  disappointed. At the time of Antonio's diagnosis we were given the opportunity to "give him back" to return as a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We never considered it. Despite our devastating disappointment we had made a commitment to Antonio and to our family. We trusted each other and decided to see it through. We could never step away from this disappointment, or our son. Today ...

S erious, strange,or silly?  In the original 1984 movie Footloose we journeyed with a rebellious teen who moved to a small town where rock music and dancing were banned. The movie portrays the timeless struggle between innocent pleasure and rigid morality. I offer you this as a segue into one of the most interesting things I've heard during coffee hour since I arrived in the summer of 2013. YOUR MINISTER HAS BANNED DANCING IN OUR SERVICES!  Serious, strange, or silly?  Silly. Tis' silly but allows me to reiterate some things I'm quite serious about. I stated during a Teaching Thursday program weeks ago that I preferred, my personal preference, services where there is no dancing. It's a remnant of my Catholic upbringing. I congratulate service leaders who include such things in worship. I don't have the chutzpah! Why am I entertaining and acknowledging this silliness?  It is because I'm serious about not letting silly become something that divides us. It is b...

I 'm sitting in my favorite spot in a tiny French restaurant. In front of me are two patrons speaking Parisian French. I understand a few words, very few, having a French Canadian grandmother. Beside me are two 50-something women who are obvious colleagues. I overhear religious language, so naturally my interest peaks. They were leaders of the local Catholic diocese responsible for a group of Catholic churches in the area. Between my cafe au lait and salade de la Constance, I was privy to venomous conversation. Worse than my eavesdropping was my discovery that parishes were being pitted against one another, receiving the news that they are not good enough because their Holy Thursday was not up to snuff, not as good as that of the church across town, personal attacks on leaders, all brought together with the ugly bow of insular thinking. Clearly it was a strategy based on competitiveness used to help the individual parish churches become bigger, better, and -- let's face it --...

I'm deeply disturbed by the blinders that are put on to avoid the realities of social and environmental issues of our state and country. Poverty, lack of health care and emergency services, sea levels rising, Christian fundamentalism controlling taxpayer dollars, women's health put at risk, low wages, no work, the super wealthy getting fatter, and on and on. Surely our leaders don't really think that poor mothers simply need to pull their lives together, a child is better left in the system instead of being loved by same-gendered parents, to receive public benefits you need to sacrifice privacy, that the world's top scientists are simply stupid and histrionic, that poor communities create and perpetuate their circumstances, and religion and government are bedfellows. Surely stripped down to basic humanness they see and feel and mourn and weep. I wonder. I believe basic humanness, the fact that you are born into the world, gives us all worth. However, when we decide to b...

I have a dear friend who teaches in an elementary school by day and an adult education school by night. In both instances she is teaching English as a second language. We were recently in conversation about the practicalities of transcription in linguistics. That is, not studying the theory of, but actually doing the work of converting human speech into written text. Listening, writing what you are hearing, and listening even more.  I remembered that conversation and the wisdom of transcription after our most recent annual meeting. Though my spoken words weren't being transcribed, they were being reflected back to me verbally. Advice given for phonetic transcription is to listen to yourself out loud before deciding on pronunciation. Members of our Congregation were reflecting back some of my words amidst a hard conversation. When the words left my lips I was confident they were the words I wanted to use and the words that would be most helpful. That was until a member said them b...