Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

Tomorrow I will turn 60. At 9:00 in the morning, I will wake up to cronehood! I plan to spend the day with my husband in Cape May, strolling on the beach (will I be old enough to avoid a beach tag?), wading in the surf, collecting stones and shells for a small cairn in my study, and enjoying a meal by the ocean. I live no more than an hour from the closest beach, but I never seem to get there. That must change! My mother hated this 60 year milestone. In her mind, turning 60 represented the beginning of the end: encroaching ill health, weakness, depression, isolation. She had seen this happen to her own mother, and she went down the same path. This was a typical path for quite a few of our mothers. For every woman who saw the "golden years" as an opportunity to be free of the workplace or the responsibilities of family and to pursue other interests, I knew as many (or more) in my mom's generation who saw not the interesting features on the road ahead but only the thund

Chaos, chaos everywhere, and I no longer even drink (to paraphrase Coleridge -- badly). All my family members are going through transitional times -- all, hopefully, leading to fruitful outcomes, but change is still stressful, especially when it comes all at once, and when you can do nothing to affect any of it except offer support (financial and emotional) and unflagging encouragement. I feel like the calm eye of a small hurricane. To use a more common, kitchen metaphor,  I am a tiny little potato, bouncing around in the family stew, tossed around by the boil. Just call me "Spud." I now understand why some of my friends feel family life is a lot more stressful once the kids are adults. Five or ten years ago, I'd have laughed at that. A friend, the parent of two, said to me recently, "I've been parenting for 42 years! Enough already!" I think Spud will go to the yoga center and meditate for a good, long while tonight.

"My God," my mother said generously, "You're the worst housekeeper I've ever seen." That comment resounded in my head during today's Gospel reading about Mary and Martha.  Martha is the housekeeper, the practical, capable one. Mary is the mystic, the student, the dreamer. Mom's comment was made during my first, short-lived marriage, which took such a rapid downturn that cleaning hardly seemed a real priority. I was young, I was a college student, I was ... hardly in the mood to scrub. I should explain that my mom was a real fan of cleanliness, and she took a dim view of anyone who wasn't. She cleaned relentlessly. Spring and fall housecleaning were real in my childhood home, not the vague memory that they have become in my own. Mom took down the venetian blinds once or twice a year and scrubbed them in the bathtub, then carried them out to the clothesline, where they flapped helplessly until dry. I never saw a dish in mom's sink; I t

I grew up surrounded by prejudice. Race, socioeconomic status, education -- it was all there, a judgement just waiting to happen. Prejudice was, in a sense, a generational thing, and though both my parents overcame it to an extent in later life, some of their fixed, negative ideas lingered to the end. Not me. As a child of the sixties, I had been convinced in recent years that all prejudice was dead or dying. Working for 30+ years in a liberal university environment, I had pretty much convinced myself that prejudice, at least along the enlightened East Coast, had become a dark shadow from the past.  I work with all kinds of folks: people of all colors, faiths, educational levels, and political opinions. All seem to blend pretty well in the educational melting pot. We make a stronger whole because of our differences, which are mostly superficial. In a similar fashion, J. had colleagues of all varieties in his IT job.  He has a wide circle of friends and tennis buddies from diverse

The evening started off wrong, and got worse. The commuter train, normally so reliable, had a thirty-minute delay due to a fire of unspecified source and location. It's so annoying when you never find out what really, really happened! We want all the details, and we never get them. But that's fine. After a looooong wait on the platform, I did manage to squeeze onto a train, with several hundred other people, where I stood with my face practically jammed into a large man's sweaty armpit.  Ah, the disadvantages of being short. At home, it was a lively scene. Somehow our wireless router, as well as our four laptops, had all been hacked. I assume this is unrelated to the train fire, haha.  Family members clutched their cellphones, in various stages of having credit cards canceled and bank accounts checked. Microsoft charged us several hundred dollars to clear everything up. It was a costly security lesson. Then I went into the kitchen. There, in a shoebox on the counter,