MSH basement sentences:

-- "Does that bike belong to somebody?"
-- "We need to have another goop party."
-- "Should this bag be on the floor like that?"
-- "Which of these air conditioners did we take last year?"
-- "That? It's just another random trash container next to the other trash container."
-- "I mean, I thought a Christmas tree couldn't hurt, you know?"
-- "We used to use the one Tom left but now we use the one Phil left."

We're in a transitional week here at the house -- in fact, the second floor is out of town, our new third floor resident is on a mission trip, and the remaining third floor people don't move in until next week. I'm taking the chance to make a retreat, leaving in a few hours, since no one is here, which means this will be the first week we've not had public group recitation of the office since -- I think late December 2006? Mark will, however, be holding down the fort....

Jason Clark, who was one of the speakers at a conference I went to in June, has been posting some reflections on it and has a helpful piece today on bricolage, i.e. in a church context the piecing together of new forms from parts of old or new structures or whatever's at hand. (Includes a reference to my favorite French chain store name!) He points out that "within a consumer culture, that so often collapses everything into lives of isolation, centered around what makes me happy, rather than what is best for us all, [bricolage] becomes about the shallow use of resources around us." While bricolage is inevitable, it's worth calling attention to "how shallow and superficial" the way it's now being done is.

This resonates strongly with me, although the metaphor I have usually employed is of grammar: you don't have to use some unchanging form, and it doesn't much matter what pieces you draw on to put together a sentence, as long as the various elements of your sentence flow coherently and send a "grammatical" message. ("This vase is pretty" or "Love your urn!" is as grammatical as "Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity." SMS language has its own grammar. True bilingual blending of 2 languages has its own grammar. Sign language, dance, and video have a grammar. It all depends on context.)

However, a great deal of the bricolage I see within Christian communities today throws pieces of tradition together based more on their "feel" or personal appeal, without having taken time to study them and find out their grammatical function -- that is, what they do when used within an assembly. The result is that the pieces are, as it were, de-clawed, robbed of their power to confront, to re-narrate our world, and made (as Jason says) part of the personal flea market of cool stuff I've gathered around me.

One example of this: a contemplative service I attended now and again used to use a very ancient text which arose out of the rhythm of daily worship gatherings, particularly marking the moment of sunset. The text defines this cosmological change as a moment to reorient the community (who pray the text as a group) to God's presence, and refers to the evening's illumination of lights within the worship space as a metaphor for the reliable presence of God's light in contrast to natural and cosmological changes. (It's a text I've said around sunset every day for whole seasons of my life, and it's used to draw people into the beginning of a vespers service in more than one Christian tradition.) However, with the classic bricolage mentality Jason writes about, this contemplative service inserted the same text as a generic closing blessing said privately by the leader. The text was no less "pretty" or "holy-seeming" there, but it didn't do anything that any other "pretty, holy-seeming" text couldn't have also done. This lack of any understanding of the grammar of the action, this complete de-contextualization, removed all its native formational power. You could hear that prayer read out by someone else, stuck randomly at the end of a service, 100 times, and it would never form you the way it does when used grammatically in context, with the sunset happening, lights being illumined, and everyone around you joining you in confessing God's bright eternity amidst the kind of change you're watching. (And then remember that the 78th or 142nd or 257th time you do this action, your mother will just have died, or your house will just have been burgled.)

Now, do you have to recite some particular fixed version of the text? Do you have to stick to the articulated structure of readings and prayers that followed it in its original expression? DO you have to say it in Greek for it to "work"? Of course not. Could you mime it, or turn it into a video piece, or reconfigure it as an action shared by the whole community like a silent lighting of candles? Of course. But all of those things require understanding of the action itself in its context first, and won't happen if what we have is shallow bricolage that appropriates it as nothing more than "a nice prayer which I'd like to work in sometime."

Brian Walsh, targum guy and empire guy, has written this targum on James 1:1-18. Full of his usual insightful application. Excerpt:

I know. I know.
We seem to lack what it takes
to believe that we could lack nothing.

So pray.
If you lack the wisdom to embrace trials in joy,
then pray.
Ask God.
His generosity is infinite,
and he won’t come down hard on you
because you can’t quite accept all of this.
Just ask.

But one caution, my friends.
When you ask, really ask.
Don’t try to keep your options open,
saying,
“Yes, God, give me the wisdom to live with such faith,”
while secretly trying to control things on your own.
“Yes God, help me to face these trials with joy,”
while anxiously imposing your own agenda on things.
In a well-managed world of control,
faithful and honest prayer is a rare thing.
So don’t go playing these kind of games with God.
If you ask, then ask with integrity.
If you pray, then mean it.
Don’t be double-minded,
trying to have your cake and eat it too.

I know, I know.
None of this makes sense.

I'll add this to my previous post, for fun. When this video came out a couple days ago, it filled me with sheer delight, and I remarked to a friend (who probably didn't understand the remark, but I couldn't resist) "In the long run, they have the same job I do." I wonder how the folks who view liturgy as something that's enhanced by discursive explanations would respond to that?

Or to put it another way, can you possibly imagine Bono saying, "We now turn together to a symbolic action which expresses our commitment to non-violence both physically and verbally. During the instrumental interlude, which we thank the Edge for his ministry to us in providing, please join me in a brief chant. I encourage you to respond heartily, No more!"

"The basic law of liturgy is, 'Do not say what you are doing; do what you are saying.'" (Louis-Marie Chauvet, 1995).

I was at a conference recently and got into a conversation with someone nearby in the talkbacks who was strongly put off by a series of presenters who made essentially this point. Over against their repeated exhortations not to interrupt the liturgy and impede everyone's participation with personal commentary or explanatory extemporizing, this attendee insisted that explanations of what was going on from the leader, reiterations of page numbers, advice, and customs, and other discursive interruptions were very important to help people in the pew. I'm with Chauvet; such things seem to me precisely to infantilize people in the pew and to send the whole event crashing out of its own genre and into another activity entirely -- one which has its place, but which if inserted into leitourgia can only usurp and undermine the work of the people.

I often think after the fact that when this point gets raised (and evangelicals raise it a lot! Doing what you say is unpopular period, and doing what you say without saying what you are doing is clearly a very concerning, hot-button issue of some kind; I am out of my depth in diagnosing what kind) I should just tell the person: Before we spend any more time on this, go to a Roman Catholic Mass in the lowest-income, most educationally disadvantaged area you can find, one where people barely read and perhaps do not even speak the language the Mass is in all that well. Don't look for your definition of intentionality and fervor, because I guarantee you will not find it. But watch for raw congregational competency in holding up the laity's parts of the skeletal structure of the Mass without needing help from somebody up front or a printed cheat-sheet or book to clutch, and then try and make the case that your congregation of college-educated, Bible-toting, religiously-serious white folk can't possibly be expected to know they're, say, supposed to join in on the Nicene Creed without an official leader telling them that it is coming, what page it is on, and in what posture to recite it every single week.

Anyway, I have been thinking that it would be interesting to have had time to excavate more of the presumptions underlying this brief break-time conversation. It would be instructive to discover, if we could have, just how far down the vein of theological disagreement between us went about what the Body of Christ is doing in its corporate gatherings. My guess is that it goes nearly all the way down. That if we'd had time and grace to get there, we would probably have discovered we meant something different by "liturgy," by "participation," even by "the Body of Christ."

I was sitting at the computer yesterday working on something, and I heard voices of a group of kids approaching. As they passed by our garden, one of the girls boasted to the others, "I helped mulch that!"

The clouds cleared this afternoon after three days of rain, and I hopped in the car and drove to Connors Farm in Danvers, where the fields are overflowering with very ripe strawberries. Wow, are they ever good. I'm trying to remember a strawberry recipe I got somewhere that involves lemon zest and lavender...

Tomorrow our street is having a shared yard sale (well, some of us are.) A nice community event that we instigated; hope the weather holds and hope we get a lot of traffic.

I went to the early Eucharist recently at a parish in whose building I had not set foot since June 5, 1994, the day after I was ordained (yesterday was my 15th anniversary). It was interesting to experience the space again, and think about all the time I spent sitting there, and how totally miserable a situation it was, and everything that has gone on for the intervening -- well, 22 years since we first got there, and especially the last few.

As the service went on I kept noticing a stronger and stronger sense of peace and relief, which I couldn't quite figure out. I was in street clothes, but nevertheless at communion the celebrant did that thing clergy in my tribe (at least well-trained and well-mannered ones) do for one another: he laid in my outstretched palm not one of the consecrated wafers, but a piece of his broken priest's host, which he'd saved for me. No fanfare, no acknowledgement, just a quiet ordinary moment of empathy and collegiality. Outlandishly, my eyes welled up with tears at this.

Within a few minutes after returning to the pew, it hit me what was going on: all my years in that place were marked by dealing with one ordained person's cruelty -- verbal and emotional abuse of myself and (harder for me) my husband. Just for the tiniest of examples, I was never allowed even to read a lesson, much less function as a seminarian, and almost nobody knew I was being ordained. Being in that nave was so painful for so much of the time.

And yet there I was in the same nave, two decades later, knowing without a shadow of a doubt: I am safe. He cannot hurt me anymore. He will not come through that door. In this church where I once was torn down, I am now an honored guest. This place cannot be stolen from God's people and God's love in the long run. I am at home.

Reigns of terror or hypocrisy may pass through, priests arrive and depart, but the church goes on and on. And healing comes, eventually, even when you're not looking for it.

We had a marvelous day off today. Rode the bus to Haymarket from Salem (way cheaper than the train) and walked the Rose Kennedy Greenway, which is so spacious, intuitive, and rich in views of/access to tourist-friendly landmarks that we really could hardly believe we were in Boston. It just doesn't feel like it counts to buy pastry in the North End if you don't have to risk life and limb walking through a hard-to-find dank tunnel under a noisy superhighway. And you can SEE Quincy Market from the Greenway! And you can SEE the path to the Aquarium! (which we also visited, playing tourists.) It's almost as if the city WANTED to be hospitable! What has happened to us?

Lunch at Chinatown's Winsor Dim Sum Cafe (highly recommended) for turnip cakes, congee, spicy salted squid, etc. We then ambled around the Public Garden, spied on swan boats and ducks, had some green tea at Tealuxe, dropped in on a friend who works in Copley Square, and rode the bus home. Perfect weather. A perfect day.

A bit more on How God Changes Your Brain. Just some facts that struck me:

--Contra a lot of recent bestsellers, the notion that "religion" is bad for people, makes them hateful and violent, etc is an assertion with absolutely no empirical evidence. All the empirical evidence goes exactly in the opposite direction. However, what is bad for people and culture is anger and fear. Most spiritual practice demonstrably reduces the brain's propensity to act out of these, but if someone chooses in life to focus on and feed anger and fear, whatever reason they cite to justify that choice ("religious" or otherwise) then the stress chemicals kick in, the ability of the frontal lobes to reason things though declines, "fight or flight" starts, and so on.

--When doing thousands of interviews about spiritual epiphanies or religious experiences, the authors initially assumed that participants would give similar narratives, with a few common themes, that used basically the same kind of language. In fact, no common vocabulary emerged, and the descriptions people gave were so diverse that most of the words were used less than 1% of the time. The cool thing about this for me is that it really echoes my experience in spiritual direction: God uses methods and metaphors that are unique to you, but (as the authors also found) the longterm effects of contact with him are similar.

--Spiritual experiences seem to simultaneously stimulate the sympathetic (arousing) and parasympathetic (calming) nervous systems (e.g. "I felt completely safe and at peace but it was the most overwhelming thing that ever happened to me"), which is extremely rare and has a unique effect on the brain.

--One of their research tools is a "draw a picture of God" test. One famous iteration of this (earlier than their work) found that little kids typically begin by drawing a person, and then gradually mature to drawing symbols like spirals, eyes, open hands. However, this is fascinating: non-religious kids don't mature in this way! Even by age 16, 80% of them are still just drawing a person. This interests me so much because (and this is not to fault the way legitimate unanswered questions also hold people back from risking encountering the Divine) it so often seems that a poor/immature mental concept of God is tied in with people's denying or reporting a sense of disconnection from him.

--This made me laugh. The authors did an event where they asked people for their "secret desire" upon coming in, and then again after one hour of contemplative practice. Here are a couple samples of particular individuals' answers: "Before practicing: Sell my paintings. After: Become self-accepting. Before: Be a megamillionaire. After: Live in grace and harmony. Before: have a happy marriage. After: serve humanity."

Our chapel is on the 2nd floor and there is a bay window which forms a sort of triptych right behind the altar. It looks out on a medium sized tree which grows out of the sidewalk in front of our house, and whose seasonal changes form a huge part of the visual experience of the worship space. This morning at MP I discovered in horror (having been out the whole day yesterday) that the center of the tree had been cut out to clear the power lines, leaving not just a gaping hole at the heart of our green living reredos, but also the light-colored shock of multiple severed stumps looking right at us through the window. Omigosh. I'm sure there will be metaphors to make meaning of this (John 15 came up in conversation immediately) but my first reaction is Nooooooo!

I finally got a hold of the book How God Changes Your Brain, which I blogged about quickly after reading a review of it. This topic clearly must interest me because it turns out that nearly 3 years ago I blogged an article on the first stages of the research (before they moved on to studying changes in the brain over time), which compared brain scans of people speaking in tongues and practicing contemplative prayer. (Totally different.) So I wanted to say a bit more about some things I found interesting.

A couple caveats if you read the book: the authors are not trained theologically, so some of their attempts to rephrase what various spiritual traditions actually teach are off base. (They also stumble into a few ridiculous, easily falsifiable claims like "to see God as primarily loving, a person must embrace a liberal interpretation of the Bible.") The book also doesn't have much room for the suffering, resistance, and pain that go along with staying on a spiritual path; its main interest is human-centered, simply helping people experience personal positive benefits. (One review I read pointed out how this neglects the fact that it's almost always passion for truth, not a desire to feel better, that actually motivates people to commit lifelong to the kind of practices the book talks about.) The authors also filter their research through the (self-refuting) concept that relativistic opinions about spirituality are objectively superior to all other opinions. But all this is just the cultural water we swim in and should be easy to smile and read past. Smiling has positive neurological benefits, anyway ;-)

The second half of How God Changes Your Brain is sort of a how-to, giving revisions of practices for people who want the demonstrable neurological and personality benefits without the religious content. Not of big interest to me (other than just watching how they de-Godded some practices I know). They also introduce their own dialogue practice for partners, which might be interesting to try.

But the first half, the actual presentation of the research, fascinated me. They start with an anecdote: improved memory, social awareness, and cognitive function in an aging patient whom they had do 8 weeks of a yoga practice called Kirtan Kriya (for only 12 minutes a day). They then sketch the key neural structures that shape and/or respond to our experience of God (there is no one area that covers spirituality; it involves our whole brain in very subtle ways that vary from person to person). The thalamus, for example, seems to be the key organ that deals with God feeling objectively real to a person, and it looks different in someone who has practiced spiritually for years than someone who hasn't. The parietal lobe manages the separate sense of self, and this area shows decreased activity during some kinds of sustained prayer, in keeping with a sense of the boundaries between you and God dissolving. Several kinds of spiritual practice correlate with lowered activity in the amygdala, a primal part of the brain that generates fear, and with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps generate empathy and compassion. And if you do these practices often, and do them over years, your brain demonstrably changes and so does your thinking and behavior.

There's a lot more along those lines. They point out that intellectualized interaction with religion/God (studying doctrine, reading, purely cognitive verbal prayer, etc) is all frontal lobe stuff -- it does not benefit people holistically in the same way classical prayer practices do, because it does not affect all these diverse brain structures. This should come as no surprise; I've had more than one person describe to me how everything changed when they finally started, say, doing Centering Prayer rather than just striving to build correct thoughts about God. And I expect many of us have also seen examples of execrable behavior from people whose frontal lobes are obviously quite thoroughly competent in religious information. And the book is full of stuff like this. "Here's the neurological explanation for what happens in the brain to cause these changes you've observed in people for so long."

I'll put some more specifics in a separate post. In the meantime, you can see one of the researchers on C-Span's BookTV here (paired with a meditation teacher!) He shows his slides of people's brains and so on.

I made this amazing Mark Bittman recipe for Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding today. It's extremely easy; I had never worked with silken tofu before and was suspicious of it, but the texture is amazing and the taste is delicious. (Half of it is left; will have to discover how to make a smoothie or something out of it later.) I used agave nectar instead of simple syrup, mostly because I wanted the dessert to be lower-glycemic, but the agave probably fits in better with the Mexican theme anyway; also added a little more chile than he recommends. For some very appropriate chocolate, Boston-area folks, just nip down to Ocean State Job Lot and pick up a few bars of the Santander single-origin dark chocolate -- which is fairly traded from Colombia and selling right now for something like a buck twenty-five.

A directee recommended the book The Holy Way to me, and I've had it out of the library for awhile. It's described as a book on "voluntary simplicity," though I associate that term less with the kind of interior practices Huston writes about and more with deliberately living on less economically.

The book is presented as a kind of autobiography, but it also presents practices like silence, awareness, confidence (and saints associated with them) and narrates the changes doing them made in the author's life.

"My first experiment took place in the writers' group, in the den of the scintillating conversationalists. I sipped at my wine, smiled at the right places in their stories, but stayed mum. Instead of talking, I listened in a way I never had before to what they were saying. I was astonished -- not because I hadn't heard it all before (in fact, I'd said most of it myself) but because I'd never let it sink in exactly what we thought was so funny. Two things immediately came clear: I often laughed at persons who were not present to defend themselves, and the reason I laughed was because they were in some way or another not measuring up."

This autobiographical aspect makes it a different kind of book than several others on the topic, because it means Huston focuses on the self-awareness and subtle interior impact of practice in a way most of the more historical or how-to books don't. In a sense, it's a log of a series of experiments on the self. There is some very clean, reflective honesty about human nature in here which is refreshing and authentic -- yeah, it's exactly like this -- and serves, to me, as a great illustration of why practice is so incredibly worth it.

"As soon as I began looking, I became aware that the stamp of my desires was firmly impressed on everything that surrounded me, including other people. I saw that others -- [my husband] for example, or the kids, or my friends -- were aware of how I liked things to be, and they changed their behavior in a hundred small ways to please me or avoid conflict. This realization led me to count up the times in a given day that I found myself wanting something: the number was astonishingly high. My wantings, I discovered, evern the most innocent ones, were a constant interruption to my concentration. They pulled me away from my writing desk for a handful of almonds. They sent me upstairs in the middle of a serious conversation to change into a warmer pair of socks. They sent waves of self-rightous anger churning through me when a colleague failed to correctly 'read,' and then capitulate to, my unexpressed desire to teach the class he'd been assigned."

I also like several of the moments which point out how tiny an action can be and still have a deep effect on the soul. In fact, a tiny action practiced with quiet awareness and without drama is almost always a more powerful fulcrum for change than a big one that may feel praiseworthy and larger than life.

"All my reading in Cassian's works about those admirable spiritual athletes, those ascetics who survived on a nightly meal of bread and salt and water, had not prepared me in the least to give up a simple cup of coffee. This constituted my first lesson about ascesis: it can't be read about or thought about - it must be practiced to have any effect whatsoever."

"The Holy Way" is perhaps not the best introduction to the nuts and bolts of the practices themselves, but it is a unique field guide to how they work on the self and why they are indispensable.

A post about movies!

First, I'm interested in adding the French film "Summer Hours" (whose title really should be translated "Daylight Savings Time," by the way) to the queue based on Rod Dreher's comments about it. The IMDb summary of it is "Two brothers and a sister witness the disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother's succession." Overall, it apparently deals with the cost of our having given up history and metanarrative in favor of individually defined fulfillment. (RD: "A beautifully rendered portrait of the individual under globalized liberalism. It suggests that we really do feel the pains of nostalgia for the world we have given up, but that in the end, nostalgia and sentiment are not enough to keep us from moving forward into a world of privatized pleasure. We will climb over any wall, and respect no boundaries of custom or memory, for the cause of putting distance between ourselves and anything -- places, things, other people -- that would keep us from doing what we want to do. That is what it means to be modern, and all of us -- certainly your correspondent here -- are far more compromised by it than we may care to think.")

Second, and not unrelated to the above, we saw "Star Trek 2009" yesterday on a mini-house-outing, and it was just great. Interesting to me that the film is basically fanfiction writ large (and writ very well). Surely others have commented on this, but these characters have become for our culture what the Greek myths, the Bible, or the great heros of antiquity were for classical dramatists and their audience. Shakespeare had Julius Caesar; Racine had Andromaque; Handel had Jeptha; Purcell had Dido; we have Kirk and Spock. They are a shared narrative, shared archetypes, that we can just keep on creating art based on, now that all the other narratives and archetypes have been lost. And of course "Star Trek" is far from the only example!

I didn't mention that we had a visit this week from most of the leadership team of a relatively new house church in town. A couple of their members live in the neighborhood and were interested in talking with us about our life here, and seeing what we had to say about making friends, investing in the community, and trying to do ministry relationally rather than programmatically. A nice group of twenty-somethings, whom we hope we'll be getting to know better.

Happily we made it through last night's frost unscathed. We're eating a lot of salad around here!

clipped from www.dilbert.com

Couldn't resist linking this post about a London bookstore (of sorts) called The School of Life.

Stock is limited in the School of Life, since all the books are on display and facing out, rather than on shelves. No alphabetical order here either. Here you’ll find “a shelf for those who want to change the world, a shelf for those who worry about death, a shelf for those who have recently fallen in love, a shelf for those in search of their own company, and even a shelf for those with a short attention span.”

There’s more going on here than a shop. There are posters for courses on work, play, love. There are conversations, meals, holidays, and sermons. This is a centre for ‘ideas to live by’.

The holidays sound great, all about discovering new things at the local level, by touring them with artists and writers. There’s a tour of Heathrow airport, a ‘philosophy by bicycle’ day, urban gardening days, or how about a weekend learning to identify clouds? As they say - “cheaper, more sustainable and infinitely more rewarding than rushing around foreign lands in air-conditioned coaches.”

Sounds marvelous, and then we learn this delightful piece of information:

The School of Life is the brainchild of Alain de Botton, and runs as a non-profit.

That is too great. I haven't read a lot of his work, but I love the idea of someone like him wanting to help people live an examined life.

Here is the info on The School of Life from Botton's site. And here is the thing itself.

Atlantic! Pacific! Indian! Arctic!

Finally got to see Pomegranates live last night at T.T. the Bear's in Cambridge. Mark compared their music to that of Olivier Messiaen, which I think is actually quite on target. Having listened a fair amount to their studio work I was more impressed by their presence onstage than I thought I might be; the music comes across as fairly cerebral on disc, but their unexpected whole-body investment adds a lot, as does their tight ensemble. Also, they show no self-consciousness or diffidence about their quirkiness. There were probably 40 people there, and most of them were really listening.

I meant to post that last weekend I went to the Taza Chocolate factory tour. (It took me about 40 minutes to get to Somerville and 40 minutes to find their building once there. Yikes.) Taza is a tiny business that makes stone ground, organic chocolate (Mexican-style) while compensating growers fairly for their work. (They're not Fair Trade certified, but they work directly with co-ops.) We got to learn about the roasting and sorting processes, taste a lot of unbelievably good and rustic chocolate, and make any purchases we cared to. I bought one of the chocolate rounds, this one made with three ingredients: roasted cocoa beans, cane sugar, and guajillo chili powder. It took us about a week to eat it, it was so rich and complex. If you're reading this and you have somewhere to sell a product like Taza, consider it, seriously.

"And now we begin to see, perhaps, that after all judgment and forgiveness are not two quite different things, but two ways of saying the same thing, both of them following directly from the Easter victory of Jesus Christ, through whom all things are put to rights and in whom all who believe find themselves put to rights in advance of the final great day. If God’s judgment is the form his mercy takes when faced with a world out of joint, God’s mercy is the form his judgment takes when faced with penitent sinners." -- NT Wright

This is so true. On a cosmic level and on the level of daily life as well. The sweet, washing release, the piercing mercy of experiencing or bestowing forgiveness is completely contingent on truth, on coming clean, on admitting what happened happened -- which is exactly the same as judgment, isn't it? The bringing together of what you did, and who you are, with clean and holy Truth. Speak that disparity out yourself, and mercy rushes to engulf you. Resist self-awareness and honesty, and in the end the Truth that could have come across all mercy will feel like judgment. But Truth is one.

If you have ever tried to relate to somebody who manipulatively used the idea of "forgiveness" to mean its opposite (let's not put this to rights, let's you and I pretend I didn't hurt you) you know exactly what I'm talking about.

We went to a little open house this morning about urban chicken-keeping, something we've fantasized about for perhaps a year now. It looks as if we could pull it off, though not in the space we'd originally thought of; however, there is a permitting process in our city, with permisssion needed from abutters and so on. May continue to stay in the realm of fantasy.

Transition time is here in the house, with a new crop of people moving in on the third floor over the summer. We haven't quite got all the details settled yet, but this is the time when we have to rely on the Holy Spirit having way better logistical chops than we do (a characteristic of the Spirit that I was pleasantly reminded of yesterday).

Also: just came in from sitting on the porch with a child I don't think I've given a nickname on this blog - he is intensely needy but demonstrates his neediness by making endless grandiose-yet-whiny assertions about himself and the feats he has accomplished (his uncle owns FedEx; he has an iPhone; he can make tiny kangaroos appear with his magic kit; the dog next door actually belongs to him; he grew a watermelon in his yard two weeks ago that was so big his family ate it for three weeks.) I usually respond to this by telling him he has a good imagination (which only makes him protest that no no I really DID....); it occurred to me today that perhaps I might try saying, "You don't have to make up stories for me to like you. I like you without an uncle that owns FedEx," but I did not actually attempt this.

One of my RSS feeds this AM had information about Cape Ann Fresh Catch, a new community supported fisheries program in Gloucester which offers shares just like a CSA would. If you're in the Boston area, you might want to look into this 12-week share for the summer; I've just sent an application. Decent price for fresh local fish every week, and having pastored a fisherman's family in my former church, I think it sounds great for the fishermen too.