Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

So we're learning this morning, incrementally, that there's a good likelihood that Andreas Lubitz, the promising young pilot who apparently crashed a Germanwings flight on purpose, suffered from a mental illness of some sort. That his doctor had signed him out of work for the day of the flight. That he flew anyway. And during that flight, something in Andreas's head went terribly, terribly wrong. Now 150 people are dead. Moms and daughters. Opera singers. German schoolchildren. Little babies. It's all very tragic and terrible. But Andreas wasn't a monster -- he was a person like you and me. And he had an illness which he did not want his employer to know about. And you know what? Although I hold him responsible for those deaths, I don't blame him for that impulse to keep his problem secret. In an age when ads on TV deal with issues like painful intercourse after menopause, erectile dysfunction, and overactive bladder (do you see a theme here? We're e

I wouldn't ordinarily put a smiley-face into one of my posts, but I really am happy over something, so there you have it. A happy daisy. Our Head of Reference demonstrated, at a staff meeting this week, how he uses a certain database to track people down through public records (all nice and legal!). So ... I tried it. you see, at the tender age of 20, I got married for the first time. What was I thinking? I wasn't. The marriage lasted just short of three years, though we didn't live together quite that long. Our divorce became final in January of 1977. I did hear from my ex twice after that, in the summer of 1977, and again in the summer of 1978, as we both moved on with our lives. I moved to Philadelphia, and he went to work abroad. But I always wondered, you know. And I felt more than a little guilty, because the source of unhappiness in the marriage was me, all me. I went through that marriage like a dose of epsom salts, and emerged pretty much unscathed, I don&#

Well, let's hope so. In scenic South Jersey, we have had our largest snowfall of the year (so far) -- about 9 inches, in my yard. I took the easy way out and stayed home yesterday, catching up on the end of Downton Abbey's 5th season, and crocheting like crazy on a blanket I'm making for my son. The snow fell, the dogs reluctantly went outside when asked, and after dark the brutal cold descended again. 5 degrees this morning -- I believe that's a record-breaker for us. On the subway, all the riders looked cold and tired. We are all tired of this Endless Winter. And as for Boston -- I can't imagine how tired of it they are! Relief is apparently on the way, and will arrive next week in the form of much milder weather and a lot of melting. At lunchtime, I felt some actual March warmth in the sun (as I foraged for food across the ice). Let spring come quickly!

I get around round get around I get around, I get around (ooh--OOH--ooh) I get around .... I'm dating myself, of course, but nobody says this like the Beach Boys. And that's not my car in the picture, either, just one I stole from Google Images. I'm more the humble Honda type than the Mustang type. Well, the New Seminary has kept this Olde Seminarian on the move. In addition to a lot  of writing, first-year students are charged with observing, or participating in, varying types of religious services. Though I was a bit intimidated by this at first (I am Episcopalian, after all!), I've come to love worshiping with people of different faiths. My first forays were in traditions close to my own Christian tradition, which let me put a toe into familiar waters. My initial experience was attending a service at Union Church in the Wilderness. They aren't kidding about the wilderness -- the way there took me a long way down an unmarked, dark country road tha

It's been gray and dark here, last weekend especially. The skies hovered close above my house, while the rain poured down. It was so dark, even near the noon hour, that my electric window candles in the living room remained lit. Then the rain ceased for a while, and the skies lightened. I ventured outside, because it was unusually warm. The light is different in winter, I think, especially on a gray day. Trees' branches stand out sharply, black skeletons against the sky, and their every movement in the wind is visible. The lawns are bare of leaves now, and the grass dormant, yet every tuft of grass stands out in sharp relief, every undulation in the lawn is now visible. These details are not so easy to see during the riotous growing season, when all my lawn becomes a mass of seething green. Looking around, I saw squirrels' nests in a couple of trees. If the trees were in leaf, I would not have seen them. And then I saw it, in a neighbor's tree, about three house

As Christmas gets closer, I feel the weight of the season on my spirit. "Happiest time of the year?" not in my universe. I have seen too much death in December, buried too many people in snowy cemeteries. I'll pass. Except there's not really that option, is there? The family expects Christmas to arrive with all good cheer. My church expects the same. So I go along, even though I would rather be sitting on a sunny balcony in Mexico, looking out at a calm sea and reading a very long, fat, interesting book. But I went to two services this weekend that helped me a bit, that lifted that December weight for awhile. The first was a "Blue Christmas" service at a  nearby Episcopal Church. My own parish doesn't offer this, but I think it's a wonderful tradition to start. The few in attendance sat in the choir stalls, which were abundantly supplied with boxes of tissues. The readings were consolatory, referring to the brokenness of grief and disappointm

Yesterday we finally finished eradicating the chaos in our house that came about through having painting done and all the floors refinished. The last task was moving the two huge bookshelves out of my study and back to their home in the upper hallway. With my study restored, I should be able to get some serious work done. I don't do well outside of calm, orderly environments, which is why this autumn was a real challenge for me. In moving books back onto their shelves, I had to stop to reflect. As a medievalist, 35 years ago, I had to know a fair number of languages. Am I ever really going to open the Old French dictionary again? How about that fat Welsh dictionary -- am I going to read the Mabinogion  again? And my short detour into Russian -- what was that about? Do svidaniya! So I got out some reusable grocery bags and started filling them up. I kept all the gardening and craft books, figuring I would use them in retirement. But the dictionaries, language readers ... into th