Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

A hearty welcome to autumn! I am generally glad to see summer end, because I don't like the heat -- even having lost quite a bit of weight over the last few years, I am still not comfortable in summer.  And this summer has been like the "cruel, cruel summer" of the old Bananarama song: we had family drama, work drama, unrelenting heat, bad storms, trees down ... Enough drama. It could always have been worse, but even so, I'm glad the season is over.  In the middle of a violent rainstorm, as I was slogging along soaked to the knees, a fragment of Psalm 73 popped into my mind:           14 For all day long I have been plagued,               and am punished every morning.  So it's time to move to a new season.  As an academic librarian, I have long been attuned  to the beginning of the fall semester: it's a time of higher energy, more optimism, a new beginning.  Let's move forward.

I got home rather late last night, after a long, fruitful meeting with a directee, a meeting accompanied by some excellent General Tso's chicken (the Holy Spirit moves quite often, now as in the Gospels, through a shared meal; or it could be that I simply like to eat, especially Chinese food). To my sheer delight, when I flipped through the channels, there was the 1973 film version of Jesus Christ Superstar , which most people reading this are too young to remember. This film, along with Godspell , actually helped to bring me back to church after a long absence.  I was tired last night and wanted to sleep, but I had  to stay up to hear "Herod's Song," featuring the wonderful Josh Mostel as Herod Antipas. Even in the negative context of the Gospel story, the song is very amusing, especially the immortal lines Herod directs at Jesus:                           "Prove to me that you're no fool --                           Walk across my swimming pool!"

  My Family Home I was in my hometown last Tuesday for a business meeting. And I couldn't help it -- I had to check up on my family's former home, the house where I grew up -- which had seemed abandoned the last time I saw it. To my great relief, it's been cleaned up and is on the market! This is the photo from the MLS listing. The house sits in the shade of an enormous maple tree, almost the only large tree left on the property.  When I was small, however, this scant quarter-acre was my Eden. Back in the day, when my grandparents lived with us, their green thumb and love for trees were in evidence.  On the front lawn you'd have found, in addition to the maple, a blue spruce, a magnolia tree, azaleas, and boxwoods.  In the back yard were a tall birch, a peachtree, a Japanese maple, lilac and hydrangea bushes, a vegetable garden, a rose bed, and yet another maple tree. There was also a slender mimosa tree, planted by my father on the day I was born. I can still fee

I'd like to personally thank our friends north of the border for the beautiful cold front taking over our weather today. The air is crisp and clean, autumnal, the very first hint we have had of approaching fall. My window was open all night. What a blessing the turn of the year is -- the revolving of the seasons speaks directly to my spirit. "This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!"

On a recent Saturday evening, about twilight, I was cleaning up in the kitchen and found myself staring out the kitchen window. The sky was overcast, and the rampant vegetation in the yard lent a peaceful, greenish cast to the light. Birds flocked to the newly-filled feeders. There were the pileated woodpecker, the catbird, the usual flock of sparrows (those good little laborers in the vineyard!), and the goldfinches that I have come to think of as "mine," since I finally figured out how to attract them. Funny, isn't it, how we come to think of things as "ours." I recall my mother and grandmother, in the house where I grew up, standing in the kitchen, aprons on and sudsy water to their elbows, and looking out the kitchen window into the yard that was "theirs." It was a different scene, of course, in addition to being a different window: my grandmother was a great gardener, so in those days they looked out on hydrangea, lilacs, beds of