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Glasgow, Scotland
Words are formed by experiences, and words inform our experiences. Words also transform life and the world. I am a writer and Presbyterian minister who grew up in the 1960's in the segregated South of the United States. I've lived in Alaska, the Washington, DC area, and Minnesota. Since 2004 I've lived in Glasgow, Scotland, where I enjoy working on my second novel and serving churches that are between one thing and another. I advocate for the full inclusion of all people in the church and in society, whatever our genders or sexual orientations. Every body matters.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Cheating at Scrabble


Cheating at Scrabble
                                                                      
My family used to accuse me of cheating at Scrabble. My family being my mother who hated losing, my father who rarely took my word on a subject without double-checking its truth, and my brother who inherited our mother’s hatred of losing. A typical scene went like this: I would lay down a combination of letters that conceivably formed a word, I was pretty sure, and leave it to them to challenge its existence in the dictionary.
              “That’s not a word,” one of the sore losers or the skeptic would argue.
              “Yes, it is,” I’d counter, adding—the expression my family will someday have inscribed on a park bench in my memory—“I use it all the time.”
              It didn’t matter what the would-be word was, if they weren’t familiar with it they couldn’t resist the temptation to challenge it. Or rather, challenge me, as I felt I was the one on trial, with my family members serving as judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney. So if my word was questionable, the three of them would first confer as to who among them was to bring charges against me. That is, which of them could afford to challenge me. If I was losing, it was a toss-up and they might even let me off with a warning. But if I was ahead in the game, it boiled down to who wanted to risk losing their turn.
              My mother and my brother were both point-driven, while my father didn’t have a competitive bone in his body. A Presbyterian minister who was the son of Presbyterian minister who was the grandson of a minister, Dad enjoyed winning, but he never gloated. As a boy he wasn’t allowed to play on Sundays and card games were forbidden anytime, except for Rook which used a different deck of cards. Whether it was the way he was raised or how he was hard-wired, Dad had an irrational form of altruism that made him a terrible card player. He thought the best of everyone and thus couldn’t read people much less put on a poker face. Words, on the other hand, proved a person’s mettle, and Dad couldn’t stand biblical literalists and religious fundamentalists for whom he employed the f-word: fundie. Thus Scrabble was his only game.
              In hindsight, if most of my words had turned out to be fabricated I would’ve gone down in the family history as a mediocre Scrabble player. I would’ve lost turns, reducing my scores, and ended up winning my family’s sympathy, even pity. Inviting me to play Scrabble to make a threesome or a full house would’ve altered the dynamics of a particular game, but it would not have turned into a group therapy session.
              “I’m ahead, dammit, and I don’t want to lose my turn,” my mother, who is now but wasn’t then an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church although being an elder doesn’t stop her from uttering four-letter words especially in an election season, would declare. She was raised in Kentucky, not exactly a teetotaling state, and while her parents were of predominately German heritage—because any amount of German blood tends to predominate—my mother admits she takes after her Irish grandmother who, if you didn’t let her win, wouldn’t play any more. Fortunately the German in my mother does want to play again after losing but makes it very clear she’s not happy about it. She plays for blood.
              “I challenged the last time,” my father might state. He was adept at stating facts and remembering certain details and left the task of negotiating to my mother.
              “Yes, and she lost last time, too,” the woman who birthed me would point out in my presence. “Someone needs to challenge her.” She might as well have been calling for a therapeutic intervention to my addiction to cheating.
              My brother, the youngest member of the tribe, would pipe up, “Mom, you could lose your turn and still win.” He and Mom were both younger siblings and always sided with one other. Dad and I were older siblings and used to standing up for ourselves but not necessarily for each other.
              “Okay, I’ll challenge.” I can still hear the defeatism in my mother’s tone. “Hand me the dictionary,” she’d order, just like she used to demand that my brother or I go get the hairbrush which sat on her dresser to be used to paddle him or me whenever we were caught doing something we knew very well we weren’t supposed to do. Like flushing the neighbors' pet fish down their toilet. “What’d she play?”
              “I played ‘fipple,’” I’d assert, defending both my word and my right to be at the table.
              I’d watch my mother glance at the word as though she hadn’t heard me. Then she’d plop down the dictionary and open it up with exasperation. “F, F-I, I, sure are a lot of words, F-I-N, ‘firing squad,’ okay, here we are: ‘finish,’ ‘finite,’ ‘fink,’ ‘finnan haddie’—remember, honey, we used to have that when we lived in Edinburgh.” This referred to the first year my parents were married, that is, before they had a daughter who grew up to cheat at board games. “F-I-N-N, ‘finny,’ ‘fiord,’ ‘fioritura,’ shit!”
              My mother, who was once given an award by the United Way of Middle Tennessee for her many years of service in providing quality day care, sounded like she had just found her name in the Book of Doom. “Fipple’s a word,” she would exhale. “It’s a type of flute.” And then, without further ado, much less an apology, she’d begin adding up my points.
              “I can’t believe it,” my doubting father would remark. “She’s done it again.”
              “She always cheats,” my brother would testify, harkening back to our early school days when I would cheat at the Ten Commandments board game which was just like Monopoly only based on works-righteousness. For every commandment you memorized, you earned a plastic white shekel with which you could buy bushels of wheat, and the first person to memorize all the commandments in order won.
              “I play by the rules,” I offered in my defense.
              “You cheat,” my brother, who saw right through me but also knew I saw right through him, repeated for good measure. He was baptized a Presbyterian and taught never to fight, only he and I used to argue and fight a lot until he outgrew me, about the time I went off to college. As an adult he was re-baptized a Mennonite pacifist, or a pacifist Mennonite. He studied art and works as a professional carpenter; once when he was playing Scrabble with a university professor friend, my brother got a big kick out of how surprised his academic opponent was when my brother won the game.
              “Stop it, you two! Whose turn is it?” our mother would interject as though she were the only grown-up in the room.
              And that’s why, for a good long time now, my family plays Scrabble with an open dictionary. No more guesses, no more challenges, no more cheating. When it’s your turn you can take as much time as the other players give you to look up words. But you have to play a real word; you can’t fake it. Very rarely a misspelled word gets played by mistake, and the game is either forfeited if the winner made the mistake, or the mistake is forgiven if the winner, who didn’t make the mistake, so decides. Those who hate to lose still hate to lose. And my father ended up playing blind, with the rest of us looking up words in the dictionary for him.
              “Is there a word B-O-R-C-K?”
              “No.”
              “What about “C-R-O-B? Or K-R-O-B?”
              “Nope, sorry.”
              “How about corb-with-a-C or korb-with-a-K?”
              “Neither.”
              “Is ‘brock,’ B-R-O-C-K, a word?”
              “Yep, it’s a badger.”
              Then we would count up Dad’s points and add them to his score.  More often than not he won the game.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Understanding words: standing under words


Understanding words: standing under words
                                                           
In every society or organization the people at the bottom, in order to survive or move up, must translate and understand the words and actions of the people above them. The people on top, in order to stay on top, do not need to understand those on the bottom, nor must they work at being understood by those beneath them. Here in Glasgow I am in the position—for the first time in my life as a white, middle-class female—of regularly working hard to understand just about everyone, in order to do anything. (They understand me because I sound like American actors.) Sometimes, when it’s really important, I ask for a key word to be spelled out only to find that the pronunciation of certain letters is different: J rhymes with I (and looks like it, too) rather than K, and the last letter of the alphabet is Zed rather than Zee. But even if I manage to make out a word or phrase I still may not know what it means. It’s very humbling, and I end up asking a lot of questions for clarification and relying heavily on people’s patience and good humor.

As a preacher I intentionally choose to conduct worship from the chancel area, basically at eye-level, rather than from the pulpit that in many Scottish church sanctuaries is one full flight of steps up and looking down on the congregation. I’m sure a sky-high pulpit enabled many a minister to be better heard before electronic microphones and sound systems came along. But I have a visceral reaction against appearing high and mighty. I know that the Word and Wisdom of God not only comes down from “above ye heavenly hosts” but that it also comes from within “all creatures here below.” And thanks to a colleague who lives with a disability I am reminded—and I explain to every congregation on my first Sunday with them—that the church needs to make accessible its positions of leadership, including its pulpits and podiums, as well as its buildings.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Heart! Heart! Heart!


Heart! Heart! Heart!

In honor of the feast day of Saint Valentine I wish to do a little match-making among the spammers who regularly congregate in my e-mail junk file, obviously lonely and looking for love. Without checking to see if their virtual content is safe (the subject line is a tell-tale sign), it gives me pleasure to introduce DearLostRelative (just send your bank details) to NationDirect (100% No Win No Fee) for what promises to be a rock-solid partnership in plenty and in want.

NewsTribuneOffers (great discounts for subscribers), perhaps you could teach ADRIANNA (Hay Were R U?) to spell and become an avid reader of full-length articles in exchange for chair massages on demand; all those fifteen-minutes add up to a lifetime. Hearts@badlymanage.com, it’s not clear if you are a health, dating, or professional soccer club; perhaps you are trying too hard to find that special someone. From the list of presumed singles please meet LenoreWithM*re (wants to meet), as random coupling might do the trick. And while we’re on the subject of asterisk-crossed lovers, F**kBook (private invite), I’d like you to get to know Lutheran*Farmer*With*Wife (this is not a joke); after all, if poly-amorous relationships work for Biblical patriarchs and American politicians, who’s to judge?

I’ve noticed a few of you standing in line together for months now and have often wondered what a coffee date might lead to? OneHourLoans (in$tant ca$h), meet Ticketmiser (discount admissions), and someday you’ll be able to tell your children on ReUnite (family search) how you exchanged passwords on that memorable occasion. While opposites attract until the batteries go dead, common interests stay turned on; thus ShieldHeatSys (heating system), you have a bright future with FreeSolarInstall (home energy). MorePoliticalAction (elections USA!), you need to get a life, and so I envision for you the next-door-neighbor whom you’ve always looked down on but who in fact knows you better than you know yourself: CanadaPharmacy (socialist medicine to go). As you are both extroverted, spontaneous, and fun-loving types, LastWarning! (Ref #2957329874) and RecentPurchase (on-line shopping), there’s a table for two waiting for you (just send me your bank details).

MatchInfinity (on-line dating), you spend so much time and energy bringing lone souls together, it’s no surprise you’ve neglected your own romantic needs. Here are three prospects for you: RubenSandwichSex (Eat me!), JustinThyme (let’s meet), and DamianRuff (I like it!). Odds are at least one person staffing these websites is into serial monogamy, but you’ll have to be open about gender. FlyingHigh (trip discounts), as much as you seem destined for CutRateCruises (travel cheap), I suspect that SunShulPark (Please recommend candidates of $5,000 scholarships) will not be able to survive without you, but don’t forgo the pre-marital counseling when you get to that stage.

With Leap Day approaching, I strongly encourage GuidepostMagazine (trial subscriptions) to propose to ErectGo-NewP*nis (enlarger and enhancer); four years is a long time to wait, even given the power of prayer. And speaking of prayers getting answered, ChristianMenMeet, why not simply come out to each other on February 29? We’ll all be eternally grateful.

Monday, February 6, 2012

What I want said at my funeral

What I want said at my funeral

I quickly learned, when I began serving my first congregation in the Church of Scotland, in 2005, that I was expected to do the funeral service for anybody in the parish area who was identified as Protestant. Anybody. Regardless of whether they were a church member or not, baptized or not, ever set foot in a church or not.

I didn’t cotton to this “anybody goes” policy. In fact, it felt heretical. It went against the grain of my beliefs about church, membership in it, and membership in the here-after. How could I conduct with any integrity what we Presbyterians back in the States profess is a Service of Witness to the Resurrection?

Then I got a phone call from the funeral home about doing a service for a man who, as they put it, “had his office at the local.” That is, he’d spent his days in the neighborhood pub. And as they didn’t know of any family it was suggested that I make contact with the man’s fellow punters.

Great, a funeral visit for a Protestant alcoholic with a group of complete strangers who will’ve had one too many. I asked one of the church elders—because he was male, and he happened to be a teetotaler—to accompany me, and the next morning we called on one of the complete strangers—also male, and he happened to be drinking—in the strange man’s living room. He was able to tell us what he knew about his recently-deceased colleague all the while he stayed glued to a large-screen TV showing one horse race after another. He and I jotted down our respective outcomes.
           
Anybody could do this job, I thought, as I wrote verbatim: He had not been a very nice person, he always had to be right, he died owing money to his drinking buddies, and  they discovered when they went through his belongings that he had family with whom he had burned his bridges. Yet, in the end, they decided to pool their funds to give their pal a decent send-off.

That’s when I figured out that a Service of Witness to the Resurrection is really a service for anybody. Regardless. And the words I said at his funeral are what I want said at my funeral: She wasn’t always nice, she got some things wrong, and she left some debts unpaid, but there is one bridge that cannot be burned—the bridge with God.

Annual Christmas Card Results

Annual Christmas Card Results

Christmas 2011 delivered 74 seasonal cards to our house, not including family photos and newsletters. The religiously-themed cards (36) almost equal  the secular cards (37). One card technically brings New Year’s greetings from a couple of Unitarian friends.

Among the secular cards, 7 are winter scenes of which 2 are snowscapes, and 7 focus on evergreen trees and/or tree decorations. 5 picture red-breasted robins which are a Yuletide tradition here in Scotland. 4 include Santa or a part of Santa; one card shows a cute puppy with a red ribbon around its neck watching a red-trousered leg going up the chimney. 3 cards have a total of 6 teddy bears on them. And then there’s a smattering of unique cards including a drawing of a high school student by a high school student sent by the local high school, a scene involving a spaceman designed by another student at another school, and a photo of orange honeysuckle-looking flowers delightfully described by the sender as “blooms welcoming me to Butter Gap Shelter on Art Loeb Trail in Pisgah National Forest during a solo day-hike.”

Among the religious cards, the most popular by far are nativity scenes (29) of which 4 depict Mary and Joseph en route and 3 portray just Mary and the baby Jesus. The magi (6) outnumber the shepherds (3) or angels (2).

21 cards shine with gold or silver and are mostly religious scenes. Of the 10 cards that have glitter on them only 2 are religious.

But the cards we display year round have a dove of peace or say “Peace on earth.”