Summer and the Summer Moon Above
Saturday gratefuls: Pavilion L at Denver Health. Travel Clinic. Those two nurses. Typhoid vaccine. Immunocompromised. Joe Mama’s. Alan. Driving down the hill. A cool but clear day so far. Rain yesterday. Rabbi Jamie’s 18th anniversary. The potluck. Ice Cream from Liks. Seeing Sally, Ann, Ellen, Dick, Alan, Cheri, Helen, Rich, Kim, Rich’s mother, Irene, Elizabeth, Susan. A community. My community. An informal conversion. Me. Crossing the Threshold. A ritual. Herme, a one man show. Anemia. Weariness.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Alan and me
One brief shining: Yesterday in a ten foot wide breakfast place Joe Mama’s Alan and I managed a feat worthy of an updated Buster Keaton sketch wherein I arrive early and take a seat at a two-topper right ear against the wall and back to the door order coffee looking at the menu until I decide to text Alan thinking he’s found the place as hard to locate as I did only to discover a text had come in from him saying the same huh so I turn around as Alan gets up from the table behind me where he’s been sitting for ten minutes having just read my text. Oh.
Still laughing about that one. Once a month I drive down the hill and go to breakfast with Alan somewhere in the west Denver metro. This time it was Joe Mama’s. A clever name. I missed it twice. It’s situated between Celebrity Tattoos and The Glass Pipe Shop in a tiny strip mall on busy Colfax. My deaf left ear to noise, my right ear protected by a wall sound comes to me much more clearly, with or without hearing aids. So my back to the door since the two-tops were only on the right side as you enter. Alan missed me when he came in and we sat like teenagers across the table from each other texting unaware of the other’s presence. Funny.
Finished a session with Rabbi Jamie on Jewish prayer. Can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I am. I’m gonna convert. Or, join up. Or, whatever. It wasn’t so much about this session as it was a journey of the heart, a long one. A really long one.
Just sent this note to Jamie:
Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to go through the conversion process. Not so much to convert, I believe I’ve already done that in my heart, but to get more of the shared language of Judaism. That way I can appreciate the opportunities at CBE much more.
Been on my mind for a while, but the recent work with metaphor and this morning’s work with the prayers has opened a way in for me at the human, non-metaphysical level I hadn’t felt before.
Said I was done with joining things. Well, I was. Now, I’m not.
Let me give you a brief synopsis of the journey: As an anthropology student, I had an assignment to visit a synagogue and write it up from an anthropological perspective. It felt very foreign to me. Somewhat foreboding. At the same time I was dating a Jewish girl and met her parents. He was a jeweler, but very well read in philosophy which was also my major at the time. That really impressed me.
After my first philosophy class at Wabash demolished Christian proofs for the existence of God, I exited the Christian faith and became an existentialist vis a vis Camus.
You know already, most of you, about my seminary and ministry experience focused, I now know, on the God as judge metaphor. God judged our society and found it wanting when it came to caring for the poor, the other, the downtrodden. So did I. So do I.
I was a Christian. Yes, I was. But the glue that held me there was weak from a theological perspective. Justice has other roots than the New Testament demands for loving the neighbor. So when I felt the need to leave, it was not a difficult change. Especially since I’d found Kate and she me.
At the time I found Kate I was also dating Caroline Levy and had a connection, never acted on, with Ellen Sue Stern. All three Jews. I had also made a vow to myself during college that I would not seek spiritual guidance outside the Western tradition. Why? Because culture is so powerful I believed we could only reach profound understanding with Western inflected religious tradition.
I mostly followed that. No Buddhism. No Hinduism. Well, almost none. Taoism however did exert a pull on me. And remains an integral part of my essentially animist approach to finding the sacred.
Then Kate and I moved to Shadow Mountain and because of her earlier conversion found Congregation Beth Evergreen. I became an embedded pagan over the last eight years first as Kate’s husband and then on my own right. I was happy with that until this morning. Now I want to move all the way inside the miskhan, the sacred temple that is the Jewish people.
I’ve probably known I would do this since Patty told me Have a nice Easter and unbidden rose within me no, I’m a Passover guy. That was my clue that I’d converted in my heart already.
So I’m gonna do it. Yes, I surprised myself here. Happy to do so. Consistency as my evergreen buddy Ralph Emerson says is the hobgoblin of small minds.
