My Life, So Far So Good...

A friend of mine who is taking chemotherapy commented about her treatments:  “Well, I feel like the guy who fell off the twenty story building.   Around the eleventh floor he shouted,  Well, so far so good.” That is a comment I often repeat when someone asks, “How’s retirement going?”    Sometimes, I feel they could just as well ask, “How’s it feel being old enough to remember meeting a veteran of the War Between the States?”  Or, “did you really have something called telephone party lines that had to be shared with neighbors?”

Maybe I like the Church balcony because it makes me feel younger.  That is where the youth hang out.    Last Sunday, I made a bold move from the center section of the balcony to the side  section. For those in the center section of the balcony, it’s not that I don’t like you, but  I can hear better on the side and it is also close to the exit, just in case.  Even though I feel younger being near those balcony youth, the reality is I select my pew based upon  its proximity to the nearest bathroom.

To be honest, I suppose I must confess that I am struggling a bit with being retired.  I miss coming back from vacation and not having an office where I can rest and recover from all the fatigue of our family vacation, fun as it was.  I miss not having office colleagues to remind me when it’s time to leave for lunch, or who can fix the computer malfunctions while I have a jelly filled donut, compliments of the local funeral home,  in the work room .  I miss having someone to screen the calls and say “Dr. Herman is not available right now.  Would you like to leave a message?”  I suppose I could do that on my recording machine at home, but  it’s somehow not the same. 

I really hope my wife does not read this blog, because if she does she’ll think of a hundred things for me to do, assuming I am bored.  Actually, I do have a part time job at the hospital.  I sub for the director of chaplaincy and assist on occasion with a clinical education didactic for seminary students.  My boss, the director of the department, is younger than my first born son.   When I appeared at our morning department meeting dressed in my blue shirt, tie, and kaki slacks just like two other students  he asked, “Is this bring your grand kids to work day?”   Some of the seminary students appear to be born during the Bush II era, and may have come from some other planet that speaks a language ladened with words like megabytes, microchips, and gigawhatevers.  In their world of virtual reality, I attempt to ask them to listen to the real stories of hurting patients and struggling, overworked hospital staff, and reflect upon their own narratives that shape their world view.

The retired life is offering lots of opportunities and challenges.  I suppose I’m doing O.K. and am grateful I don’t have to rush off to work most mornings.   But sometimes I feel that I  might just be passing the eleventh floor of the retirement leap right now. I will not complain because so far, so good. 

 

  

 

“On Getting the Butt off the Balcony…”

Family vacation 2013 is now history, documented in dozens of photos filed away electronically where generations hence will discover them and wonder,  “who are these ugly people and where are they and why didn’t  Great Granddad  label all these?”  They will not understand that I am from the post card generation where we sent and received beach photos and marveled, in our mostly black and white world,  at the natural looking colors of those doctored photos of girls in their one piece swimsuits  under palmetto trees.

They will wonder also why most of my 2013 photos show folks sitting on the balcony of the beach house rather than frolicking in the surf and sand.  I’ve noticed that as we get older, we tend to take more pictures sitting in the porch swing, or rocking in those big white rocking chairs. Our sags and bulges are less obvious with  balcony clothes rather than beach clothing, or lack thereof.

So it is that I did most of my vacation, and photos, on the beach house balcony.  It was there that I thought, ever so briefly, of those years where I could hardly rest on vacation knowing  I needed to deliver a sermon on the next Sunday.  I thought of all those commitments I used to have waiting for me upon my return:   counseling; weddings; funerals; administrative meetings; hospital visits.  And then those crucial issues like where to place the  water cooler; the color of the new carpet; and the potential church split predicated on whether to charge fifty cents extra for those wanting dessert at Wednesday night Church meals.  I breathed a sigh of relief at not having to care so much for anyone but myself.  I was feeling absolutely selfish, and was loving every moment of it.

Then I saw Dot, the neighbor across the way. We had gotten to know  Dot over the years of  using my sister and brother-in-law’s beach house.   Dot’s husband had died a few months ago.  I had yet to see her to acknowledge the loss.   I knew it would be a conversation of listening to her grief and struggles of saying goodbye to her husband of sixty-seven years.  “I could rush inside and be out of sight,” I thought.  “After all, I am a retired minister.  Retired ministers, especially those on vacation,  should not be expected to get involved in someone’s grief.”   I yielded to another voice which said something like, “Get your butt off the balcony, Son, and get down there where your years of listening skills might do someone some good, you lazy ….”   Well, you get the idea!  That voice inside me can be pretty rough sometimes.  Guess that’s part of being raised a Baptist in the South.  Sometimes I wish I had been raised a Unitarian in New Hampshire, but perhaps they, too, have that same voice,  only I can imagine it with a friendlier tone than the Baptist one!

I went down from my balcony refuge, greeted Dot, and  listened to her grief .  It was a familiar sound, but fresh with hurt and pain which I felt as she narrated the story of Ed’s last days.  We conversed long enough that my back began to ache and I began to perspire from the relentless sun.  My momentary discomfort was nothing in comparison to the immensity of Dot’s grief. 

When someone asks me what I did on my summer vacation, I will probably answer “ not much.”  I just sat on the balcony of the beach house looking over life and wondering about the past and the future.   On yes, and I heard a voice.  The urgency of the present broke in and I realized that there are no vacations from caring, or being a good neighbor, or offering a simple listening ear to someone who needs it.   

Forgive Me My Fish…

Retirement is like looking at life from a balcony.  Below are all the many memories of events, for better or worse, which make us laugh, cry, cringe with regret, or long to repeat.   I look today from my balcony view at my first years in South America as I struggled to learn Spanish.

Do you know how humiliating it is to go into a restaurant and confidently ask the waitress (translating from Spanish here) “Where is the horse’s bathroom?”   Those who know Spanish will recognize the resemblance between the words caballero(gentleman) and caballo (horse).   After a rather puzzling look on the face of the waitress, and recognizing I may have used the wrong word,  I then asked for the directions to the restroom for cabellos (hair).  This, I suppose, is not as blatant an error as complimenting a dear Colombian church member on her newborn’s lovely hair, ie. “your daughter has a beautiful head of dark  horse.”

It should be a sin that some Spanish words are just too similar to each other.   Speaking of sin, pecado (sin) and pescado (fish) sound amazingly similar, especially in Barranquilla, Colombia where I served as a hospital chaplain years ago. Folks on the Coast are notorious for dropping the “s” in words.   How many people  you know have the experience of praying in Spanish and asking God to forgive us our fish as we forgive those who fish against us?  Two other sinfully similar words are vesicula (gall bladder) and versiculo (bible verse).  Can you imagine the confusion of the patient who tried to answer my question, “How are you feeling after your bible verse surgery?”  Or the congregation who faithfully tried to find the text for the sermon that day as I urged them to turn to gall bladder number three of the book of James , chapter two ?

 The view from my present retirement balcony brings other memories not so amusing.  I can choose to dwell on those stories of failure or misfortune or embarrassment, or I can begin to reframe them in light of the unfolding grace being poured out upon me as I age. Part of that grace may be the ability not to remember accurately (my wife calls this “preacher hyperbole”), or even the gained wisdom that no story remembered is absolutely true.  Perhaps part of grace is finding an alternative narrative to the unfortunate, sad, or painful stories of the past.  Maybe, I think, God laughs at some of our learning, growing, and missteps along the way, just as I now laugh at the errors I made in learning another language.  Or perhaps there is the grace of another narrative of past events still waiting to be discovered and claimed.

On those days when I feel too tempted to listen too intently to sad stories of the past, maybe I will merely look from my present balcony to a higher one and ask God to forgive me my fish as I forgive the fishes of others.

Balcony Backslider…

I  was absent from the balcony, row 2, center section last Sunday.   Instead,  Betsy and I slept in, then went to meet our daughter and her friend for a brunch in Carrboro.  For  those outside the area, Carrboro is the “hippie” village at the outskirts of Chapel Hill, N.C.   As a friend of mine says, “you know you are in Chapel Hill on a Sunday morning if everyone is out mowing their lawn.”    In Carrboro, you know you are there on a Sunday morning if everyone is under the big shade tree in front of Carrboro Mill Mall jiving to a jazz band.

Kids were dancing, led by a bearded man with flowers in his hair.  He reminded me of the professional dancer I met while I lived in Barranquilla, Colombia.  The dancer had returned from New York for his Uncle Clarence’s funeral.  Uncle Clarence’s ashes had been kept on a shelf for a year or two awaiting the day when the nephew could return to pay homage and dance for his uncle.   Having been Uncle Clarence’s chaplain during his hospitalization, I was invited to be the presiding minister at the funeral service, or funeral dance, as it turned out.   It seems the nephew had prepared not just one dance, but had choreographed Uncle Clarence’s entire life.   Uncle Clarence lived  ninety years  and  I feel certain that the dancer did not leave out a single month of his long, eventful life.   By the time the choreographed life of Uncle Clarence concluded, the nephew appeared close to exhaustion.  Automated electronic defibrillators had not been invented, else I would have gone for one .  The crowd  appeared to need an AED as well, but showed signs of  life as they began drooling at the sight of sandwiches and cold drinks that had been brought to the table in the adjoining room.   I took their glances away from me and toward the food as an indication that enough homage had been paid Uncle Clarence and it was time to move on in life.  Forget the sermon!

I missed the beautiful and inspiring worship and my balcony seat under the rose window at First Baptist Church last Sunday.  It was communion Sunday which I love.   But I have to confess that my spirits were lifted as I communed under the shade tree with the jazz band, my family, the dancing stranger, and the memories of  Uncle Clarence’s funeral dance.  Even though I was balcony backsliding, it really felt a lot like worship to me as the practices of music, dance, community, memory, and a concluding trip to the ice cream parlor lifted my heart and made me glad.

A View from the Balcony Resumes...

After an absence of two years I find myself again in the church balcony.  I placed a notice in June of 2011 that I would be on "vacation" from the church balcony as I had accepted an interim pastorate.  That interim has stretched for most of two years and I am once again retired and relegated to the second row, center section of the Raleigh First Baptist Church balcony.  I like sitting there because the beautiful rose window that faces the State Capitol creates this phenomenal halo around the back of my head, I am told by those folks on the chancel, and besides it makes me feel angelic or  messianic, a feeling that preaching behind the pulpit never gave to me.   Also, the antiphonal organ pipes of the balcony surround me and wake me if I have snoozed my way into the postlude.  It's nicer being on the balcony side of the snooze experience.   The pulpit side of the snooze experience is another thing altogether. I was always forgiving of my listeners who snoozed during my sermons as I have actually been known to yawn in the middle of my own sermons!  I need to write Miss Manners and ask her if that is bad etiquette to yawn while delivering one's own sermon, and if a preacher should say "excuse me" or just ignore the whole thing and talk on, and on, and on...

To all my faithful blog followers (both of you), please know I have made several editorial changes in the 2013 edition of balcony blogs:

1.   I will be brief (something I did not practice from the pulpit side of the sanctuary).
2.   I will not bore you with theology.   Instead, I will just talk about God and people, but mostly myself (I fall into the latter category in case you need to know).
3.  I will not embarrass my wife or family too much as I write these blog entries.  They will just continue to ignore me if I do.
4.  I will try not to fly paper airplanes from the balcony of the Church, nor will I drop hymnals off the balcony rail (unless the sermon is unbearably boring) just to write about it in my blog.  I know how folks like to read about irreverence.
5. Nor will I report that I raised my voice (unless it is part of a congregational hymn), nor if I shout (not even an "Amen" or "Preach on") unless there is a fire (in which case I shall probably entitle my blog "Hell Fire in the Church" or "Hell, fire in the Church"). 
6. I shall conclude each blog entry as soon as I have said what I needed to say, which corresponds to point #1 on this list, and one which I should have followed in my active preaching ministry, in which case most sermons would have ended with the announcement of the sermon title.   Once when my daughter was small she criticized one of my long sermons.  "So what would you have told them?" I asked.  Her reply: "You can all go home now!"