Here I sit basking in sunshine on the south side of Pinnacles, with amazing rock formations spread below and around me, and raptors enjoying the wind currents above. I’m about 2,400 feet above sea level on a brisk spring day. As the sun warms my body, I am surrounded by silence. No phones, computers, cars, muzak – nothing but the humming of insects, the calling of birds, and the sound of the wind.

This is sacred space. Pinnacles National Monument near Soledad California was formed over 25million years ago from “an ancient volcano and movement along a rift zone.” Jim and I have hiked here since the late 1980’s and over the years, it has become an especially sacred place for me – a place to challenge my body, to reflect on my life and to gain perspective.

The hike is steep, climbing about a total of 1,200 feet. This is one place where I’ve learned to really treasure the journey itself – so I stop and rest at numerous places and enjoy the wild flowers, watch for California condors, and drink in this eco-system – pines, scrub oaks, lichens on the rocks – in all its uniqueness. By the time I’ve made my way to the top, I’ve given my muscles a good workout and I’m ready to sit and be. I am filled with peace and grateful for the stillness around and inside me.

                                        *******************************************

Fast forward 24 hours: I'm seated about 1,800 feet above sea level on the Rocky Ridge trail in Garrapata State Park, just south of Carmel. The Pacific Ocean is spread before me and even at this distance I can hear the surf crash below.
Sweaty from the steep climb, I sit on the bench Jim had described as being about 2/3 of the way up this very strenuous hike. We’ve been bathed in sunshine all the way up through the low undergrowth of the chaparral and the beautiful wildflowers. I’ve taken about 25 close-up shots of California poppies, a favorite flower since childhood. Sunshine, sweat, and silence and magnificent vistas heal and renew my spirit.


A friend asked recently what I was doing for Lent. She’s a priest so I was a bit embarrassed to confess that I wasn’t doing anything at all. But now I’ve found the answer to that question. My Lenten journey this year is sunshine, sweat and silence, vast panoramas and the tiny details of flowers.

May it be so. Amen.

Preparing the Godscape

 ( preached in Craig Chapel for the final worship service of the semester)

Most of you know me well enough to know that patience is not my middle name! I would usually prefer to get something done efficiently if at all possible. So it may come as a surprise to learn that Advent, the season of waiting and expectation, is my favorite part of the liturgical year. I love the advent candles on my table at home; I love advent hymns; I love the images of fertile darkness that emerge from this season and I love the poetry – like the poem we read as the call to worship. But for an academic, this first week of December brings a real calendar clash. For just as I should find myself in an expectant and waiting mode, I am in the actual “end times” of the semester with a dizzying array of expectations and activities. My calendar for the week leaves little time for reflection or silence – I’m living with the mere hope that next week has to be calmer! And then there is the secular world where Santa has arrived and we are expected to be busy elves.

Into the midst of these calendar clashes come the marvelous texts of advent reminding us that Advent is about something more active than just waiting – it is about preparation. I’d like to reflect for a while this morning on “Preparing for what?” This is a question that has occupied the curriculum committee during the semester as we have discussed the mission of the Master of Divinity degree. Now before I worked in the theological school I could have given a very simple answer to the question of what seminarians were preparing for – for service as ordained ministers in different denominations. But after many years of working here, I have learned that the reality is much more complex. Even the m div students who are proceeding apace towards ordination are asking the question “preparing for what?” The church of the past? The church of the future? A dying institution? Would Jesus really want me to be supporting this institution? And certainly the many m div students who are called to forms of ministry that take place outside of the parish are asking “preparing for what?” (along with “why do I have to take that class?”) Do I really need pastoral care in order to serve as a community organizer? Do I need to take preaching if I’m going to be serving as a pastoral care giver? And many students are still discerning the “what” of their call to be here at this time.

The church gives a lot of lip service to the idea of the “ministry of all the baptized.” And yet we offer little guidance as to what that vocation looks like. The lessons for this week call give us a wonderful clue to this question – we are called upon to be John the Baptist. Now we can probably get away with avoiding the locust and wild honey part of the job and the camel’s hair, but surely we are called upon to “prepare the way of the Lord” each in our own unique way.

The gospel reading, from the very beginning of Mark’s gospel, begins with a title, an announcement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” I like to think of this sentence as not only a title but also an indication of our role as preparers – we are called to begin, to introduce people to the power of God as revealed in Jesus, to be part of the line of prophets and preachers that stretch back to Isaiah and forward into our own time. We aren’t called upon to be the leading figure in this work but to get things ready.

As I was working on this sermon, I was interrupted by a question from Ernie who works for our food service. He wanted to know exactly where he was supposed to set up the food for the interfaith dialogue lunch. This is just one step in the preparation for a meal around seminary hall which also includes ordering the food and delivering the food. Ernie’s job this morning was to set the table. As the Message paraphrases our gospel passage,

John the Baptizer appeared in the wild, preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins. People thronged to him from Judea and Jerusalem and, as they confessed their sins, were baptized by him in the Jordan River into a changed life. John wore a camel-hair habit, tied at the waist with a leather belt. He ate locusts and wild field honey.

As he preached he said, “The real action comes next: The star in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will change your life. I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. His baptism – a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit – will change you from the inside out.

Ernie was serving as a stagehand. A lot of times we aren’t satisfied to be the stagehands. We think it would really be much more fun to star in the dramas of our own lives than to be in the role of preparers. I’m certainly not immune from this myself – in fact, I’m here preaching today because I thought that if I were playing the role of “acting dean” for a few months, I should certainly get to preach the last chapel service of the semester as Dean Beach does!! I find that it is often helpful, especially when I get a bit irritated or frustrated, to remind myself that it “isn’t all about me” – that in fact, I’m a stagehand or maybe on stage as a figure in the crowd scene.

The epistle writer asks, “what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” What sort of persons indeed? The answer to this question perhaps lies in two Wesleyan concepts of personal and social holiness. We need to live the gospel in our own lives and we need to seek to change the social order to reflect the reign of God. Often conservatives and liberals have emphasized different sides of that equation rather than seeing the interrelationship between personal and communal. It is hard to keep them balanced and very easy to get so focused on one side or the other of the equation that we fall into the mode of judgment rather than preparation.

I’d like to suggest that Advent is not a cozy season of happy anticipation but a time to consider seriously the “godscape” – what the world would look like if each and every one of us were able to embody the love of God fully and at all times. How do you envision the godscape as revealed through Jesus?

I’ve seen some wonderful signs of the godscape this week. I’ve heard it in the tales of people who are working with people with HIV/AIDS that we heard in chapel on Tuesday. I saw it in the brave young Turkish woman who sat at a table in Seminary Hall 101 and dialogued with three Drew students and me. I felt it in the candles raised high in the air in the Advent Lessons and Carols service. But most particularly I felt and experienced it at Edna Mahan prison on Tuesday night where I was privileged to share in the semester end celebration of the “Search for the Good Community” class. This course, a class which Dr. Graybeal has taught at Drew since 1956, took place in the prison all semester with 10 of our students and 13 inside students. Together they learned and shared and opened their hearts. The inside students learned that outsiders could value their insights. The outsiders have new friends, friends whose faces will come to mind whenever people talk about prisoners or convicts or ex-cons. No one who has met Sonja or Mary or Angela will ever be able to forget their grace and power. No one who has heard Cynthia talk about having a son graduate from Drew and how she plans to graduate from Drew too will underestimate the abilities of an inmate. There was no question but that every woman in that class had experienced a truly wonderful community and had been changed by it. For me it was a deeply exhilarating and incredibly humbling experience. The laughter and joy in the room was palpable. As one of our students expressed it, she had always felt that she had to be the savior of the world but now she had really experienced the truth that small actions can make a mighty change.

So how might you prepare this godscape? What kind of life would you lead? Are you someone who is called to gently carry the lambs? To preach repentance? To dance the presence of God? To help us reduce our carbon footprint? To lead people into a deeper knowledge of God? To sing us into harmony and peace? How can you kindle the divine spark within to be a light for the world?

This season of advent is about preparation for the coming of Jesus- then at the first Christmas and now in 2008 in this time of bombings, financial crises, greed, and destruction of the natural order. Each of us is called to prepare for the coming of Jesus by embodying the light of Christ through our own gifts and graces. Preparing the godscape  is hopeful and terrifying work if we take it seriously. The creation of “good community” can make it possible and powerful. I invite all of us, gathered here in community, to find ways of deepening and enriching the communities of which we are apart.

A cocoon is a protective covering for the pupa of moths and butterflies as they gain strength to be able to face the world on their own. Cocoons are spun from silk that the pupa secretes and they vary in size and shape and texture. I’ve been thinking a lot about cocoons because I feel as if I spent the first few weeks after my father’s death in a very comforting and complex cocoon woven by the communities of which I am a part.  

Cards and emails and baskets of food came pouring in from the Drew community in wonderful numbers offering me the important fiber of prayer for my cocoon. I felt and continue to feel uplifted in ways that are hard to describe but amazing to feel.

The people of St. Peter’s Church likewise offered amazing expressions of sympathy and their own memories of my dad as a choir singer and church member. Casseroles, tailored for the vegetarians in the family even, took care of feeding the gathered family. The choir stalls were filled at the memorial service with current and former choristers and musician friends, weaving an incredible musical strand in the cocoon. Brian Harlow managed to pull it together in about 75 minutes of rehearsal time! I’ve listened to the recording of their beautiful music innumerable times in the last few weeks as it has continued to comfort me.

The clergy have been there in real and wonderful ways as well. In his last two hospitalizations, Dad was visited by Jason Haddox and Stephanie Wethered and Bob Shearer.  During the memorial evensong, Stephanie wove a  magnificent tribute to dad using words from the family and her own words and the poetry of John Ciardi.  Jason chanted the evensong and led the service with grace. And my parents’ dear friend Bob Hollett offered the closing prayers.

The love of my family has been the consistent, strong, and omni-present thread of silk throughout. My mom is simply the best – strong throughout the gut-wrenching days in the ICU, clear about her own wants and needs, and an amazing source of grace. We gathered on the Saturday before the memorial service to meet Cecilia, my nephew’s daughter, and the first of that generation. My dad had been eagerly looking forward to meeting her in person. Instead the rest of us were gathered, appreciating on some level the beauty of the cycles of living and dying. My siblings, inlaws, niece, nephew, and my own three children all contributed their love to this cocoon.

Throughout it all Jim has been there, answering the phone, shielding me when I needed to rest, and just loving me.

So there it was, a beautiful cocoon that held me up and protected me during the first few weeks after his death. But cocoons aren’t meant to last forever. According to Wikipedia, “insects that pupate in a cocoon must escape from it.” About ten days ago, I just about crawled home one afternoon after work, unable to do anything. I knew the cocoon was opening. And I figure that the metamorphosis into a butterfly will take some time.

A few days after this, I was driving between Morristown and Madison back to work in the middle of the day after taking my mom to a doctor’s appointment. I was musing about cocoons and butterflies as I was stopped at a stoplight. And there, in front of my windshield, was a large monarch butterfly flitting around. It was a beautiful sight.

Last week was a week for new vocabulary words – thoracentesis, pneumo(thorax), pleurodesis – words I didn’t really want to learn! My father’s congestive heart failure had cause fluids to build up in the pleural cavity once again and we were set for a “thoracentesis” on Tuesday morning. This was the third time he had this procedure and it was being done on an outpatient basis. Some air got into the cavity in the procedure however, leading to hospitalization the next day and another procedure to remove the air, leaving him hooked up to a pleur-evac. And then the doctors decided they should do a “pleurodesis” to close up the cavity between the lung and the pleural wall hopefully keeping any fluid from building up in the future. That was done on Friday morning, my parents’ sixty-second anniversary. So I spent most of the week driving back and forth between Morristown (home and hospital) and Madison (work) taking my mom to visit my dad and waiting as the procedure were done. I was pretty self-absorbed and not taking much time to look around me.

Imagine my surprise when I set off on a bike ride early Saturday morning and discovered the vibrancy of the mid-summer landscape. In addition to the many cultivated flowers that are in bloom – including our own black-eyed Susans – the abundant blooms in the Great Swamp caught my attention. I love taking pictures of flowers, trying to capture the incredible palette of colors and the play of light. And so I reveled in turning my attention to these blooms.

As I rode along on my bike, I couldn’t help thinking that so often it is easy to ignore the blooms that are around us. Today’s gospel reading on the parable of the sower talks about seeds falling on different types of ground. So often my own preoccupation keeps me from even noticing the seeds, nevermind working to make the soil rich and well aerated so that seeds can bloom. When a co-worker comes into the office with a new idea, do I celebrate the bloom that could be or think of it as just more work? Our own worries and obsessions can work like blinders, keeping us from seeing the blooms around us.

As I reflect on the past week, I can see that even in the hospital I experienced blooms – the nurse practitioner who explained each step of the procedure carefully, the woman from the food service who really cared about whether my dad liked his meal, the clergy visitors, and many other doctors, nurses, and aides who took care of my dad.

But the best bloom this week was seeing the rich, deep love my parents have for each other as they sat in a hospital room on their 62^nd anniversary and reminisced about a long-ago anniversary (their 4^th) when they went out for both lunch and dinner just two days before my dad received his orders to go to Korea with the navy. Blooms like that are as bright as any of the beautiful flowers I saw  on my bike ride!

Type “servant leadership” into Amazon.com and you will find no shortage of books about leadership that are modeled on this concept. Talk to people within the church today and it is clear that servant leadership is a very popular model for leadership. I confess that I haven’t read any of the books but the image always strikes me as getting at only one part of what it takes to be a good leader. Having found myself the only naysayer in the room when this concept is brought up, I’ve discovered that to be against servant leadership is nearly as bad as being against motherhood, apple pie …. So why do I persist in opening my mouth?

The concept of servant leadership has been, I believe, a great corrective against traditional styles of power-over or top-down leadership where the leader thrusts his or her will upon the rest of the group without consultation or collaboration. I’m definitely in favor of consultation, collaboration, listening to the will of the group. The servant leadership model has also helped identify abuses of power – the ”I’ll ride in a limo but the rest of you can take the subway” approach to leadership. I think that is helpful too. I even usually describe my own work at Drew by saying “I serve as the associate academic dean.”

But I remain profoundly uncomfortable with leaving the image at servant. I think this discomfort stems from an understanding of power. In reality, servants have to exercise power indirectly. They do not decide the agenda, they do not choose the arena, they don’t decide on the tasks. The servant does what the master decides. So of course, the servant can manipulate things and affect the outcome through a certain amount of conniving. And that sounds all too familiar with the way women have had to exercise power through the years – working indirectly to make their husbands think that the idea was theirs, saving money out of the food money in order to buy something they want, etc. Sure the traditional woman has some power in the situation but only by acting in a passive-aggressive way.

Take the position of rector of an Episcopal Parish. The rector has certain powers that the church has assigned to the position. The rector has absolute power over hiring and firing staff. The rector has complete power over the main public presentation or the church  -- worship. To pretend that the rector is just one servant among many is to ignore the reality of the situation. In a healthy church setting, the rector can often work collaboratively 99% of the time, sharing the power to make those decisions. But there are times when the leader has to use his/her power to make the tough decisions. The rector is the one who decides to fire the organist who has embezzled funds or the youth group worker who acted inappropriately. Sometimes those decisions need to be made with minimal consultation in order to protect privacy. Is that servant leadership? Not in a common understanding of what a servant is. Does it serve the best interests of the parish? Hopefully. But it is not a servile act.

Good leadership requires service but it also requires much more. What am I looking for in a rector?

I am looking for a person with spiritual power. The church sets apart clergy because it believes that they have spiritual gifts. I want to be able to sense the vibrant spiritual life of the rector.

I am looking for a person who ministers into the needs of others more than out of his/her own needs. If the tasks of the rector are done to shore up the rector’s ego, to help the rector to look like a good clergy person rather than out of real compassion for the needs of others then the ministry feels fake. I don’t think most of us ever act from pure motives – but someone who is secure in her or his own identity is able to appreciate the gifts of others.

I am looking for someone with imagination – the kind of imagination that allows them to listen to others empathetically, to think beyond the current issues in the church, to hear suggestions from staff and lay people and catch their visions.

I am looking for someone who can empower others to act in ministry in the world.

I am looking for someone who can act decisively and intelligently when needed.

And I’m looking for someone who can inspire the parish to think more broadly and more deeply.

Is that a servant? Yes but so much more. Jesus did wash the feet of his disciples but he also healed the sick, threw the money changers out of the temple, preached the Sermon on the Mount, and offered such a persuasive vision of what humanity could be that we continue to try to live up to it 2,000 years later.  I’m not willing to settle for just a servant.

January 15, 2008

Hospitality is a word that has been on my mind a lot in the last ten days as I have travelled in India with a group of Drew students. We’ve been led by Professor Wesley Ariarajah, a true practitioner of hospitality. His experience and reputation as someone who can discuss and negotiate difficult topics with genuine care and concern for others is legendary. So we have been greeted warmly and treated well on his behalf.

A few days ago we had two encounters in the morning that pushed me to really think about the notion of hospitality. Late in the morning we listened to a lecture on globalization and its negative effects on the poorest of the poor. As part of the presentation, the speaker showed us a video that portrayed the USA in an extremely negative light. It was satiric and flippant but clearly conveyed the message that US foreign policy, especially under Bush, has been destructive.

In many ways, this seemed like inhospitality – mocking ones guests – with little or no discussion of the piece amongst us. Yet in other ways it struck me as a deeply honest act, a willingness to let us see how we are viewed by many around the globe. The action has sparked a lot of thoughtful discussion amongst the group – some people upset at the simplistic portrayal, others pointing out that our own news media regularly portray people in other nations in simplistic, stereotyped ways. While I wouldn’t classify the act as “hospitality,” I definitely appreciate the courage of the speaker.

This session followed upon the most amazing experience of the journey for me. We met that morning with the retired metropolitan of the Mar Thoma Church, His Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Philipose Mar Chrysostom Mar Thoma. Chrysostom (as others seemed to call him) is ninety years old. He joined us on the second floor porch of his residence on a beautiful Monday morning. One of his assistants had already welcomed us. As the bishop joined us, I was expecting him to speak for a while and then ask if we had questions. Instead, after a few preliminary remarks, he looked at the students and asked, “What do you mean that we are all one?” Clearly this was not a rhetorical question – he expected an answer. One student bravely stepped up to the task. He responded with yet another question. Soon the students began edging closer and closer to be sure they could hear the questions and his occasional pearls of wisdom.

He shared with us that he had eaten the prasad that his personal assistant, a Hindu, had brought back from a pilgrimage. He had been criticized by some in the church for this. Did God love this Hindu as much as he loves Christians? Does God love the person in jail as much as he loves Wesley Ariarajah? With these and many other questions he probed at the issues with which our students have been grappling. Occasionally he gave answers (“God doesn’t love anyone more than anyone else”) but more often he drew out reflections by posing questions.

We had met a real guru, a truly holy man, with a playful sense of humor and a deep understanding of the spiritual issues raised for Christian seminarians. He too them seriously and engaged them at a deep level. He told parables to elicit responses. This is true hospitality – to enter into deep dialogue with another and to share from the soul.

As we crowded around to take pictures afterwards, I knew that I was not alone in hoping that the picture will remind me of his powerful spiritual presence.

Jim and I got into the taxi and handed our taxi driver yet another name of an obscure location for a Carnatic music concert. We headed off to the right section of Chennai with the driver still mumbling the name of the hall as if constant incantation of the name would make it materialize. (Of course, two days earlier, he had deposited us at the wrong hall and then had to find the right one!) As we approached the appropriate section of the city, he pulled the cab over, avoiding puddles left by the heavy rain earlier in the day, and summoned a bystander. Brandishing the notecard with the name YGP Auditorium on it, he asked for more directions. The bystander looked blank but took the card over to ask yet more people. Receiving their collective wisdom, without ever getting out of the car himself, the driver grunted and headed further down the street. We had successfully arrived! 

This event was the final Carnatic music concert of our visit to Chennai. The artist Sowmya was performing as part of the annual music festival. We first met Sowmya several years ago at Drew when my colleague Karen Pechilis sponsored her in concert. We were looking forward to hearing her perform again. 

The world of Carnatic music, the venerable classical tradition of South India, has had an appeal for me ever since I first learned about it as part of a course I taught on "Music of the Whole Earth." On a visit to Chennai in 1996 I had succeeded in turning Jim into a fan also. Now 12 years and several concerts in New Jersey later, we were back in Chennai for a few days of "the season" where one can spend all day, everyday, going to concerts. Sowmya was our sixth artist in the last four days. 

I had spent time during the day reading reviews in the local newspapers of concerts we hadn't heard. I read about the performers who lacked the right spirit of bhakti (devotion), the ones whose voices weren't good in the upper register, the ones who had beautifully negotiated the svaras, etc. The reviews had only reminded me of how ignorant I really am about this vast tradition. The music is both composed and improvised, essentially devotional and vocal although also performed instrumentally, traditional yet always changing, bound by complex rules yet open to the creative spark. The repertoire is handed down from guru to student, much of it in Telugu, not the language of this region which is Tamil. The music is an integral part of the Hindu devotional tradition. The concert stage is both performing venue and sacred worship space. 

As Sowmya started her first piece, humming a few key notes of the raga to tune to the electronic drone and moved to explore the raga (scale) of the piece, I reflected on the variety of meanings in music. Due to the nature of music, it is hard to pin down specific meanings - that is the beauty of the art form! But that doesn't mean that we all understand it equally well. I've listened to just enough Carnatic music by now to know that without detailed study and a knowledge of the texts I am grasping only a small portion of the meaning of this performance. 

There is no written program at a Carnatic music concert. The performer just sings and the cognoscenti happily turn in their little books to find the piece if they don't already know it. Sometimes the performer will make a verbal announcement of the title, raga and tala (rhythmic pattern) but that is more the exception than the rule. You are just supposed to know! 

Each raga comprises a part of the world view - more than just a set of notes, it implies a particular mood or emotion and a complex set of musical figurations. My ear is too untutored to identify the raga but I nevertheless thoroughly enjoy the exploration of the raga that can be as short as a few seconds or as long as 15 minutes in the performance of a piece. Sowmya and her accompanying violinist explorerd the raga, starting low in the range, working up through the important notes to the highest notes and then descending to the very lowest notes before settling back on the fundamental tone. Through this process she conveys to the audience the complex synergy of devotional feeling and musical expertise. 

You may wonder just what draws me to this music that I only dimly understand. I love the different ragas. I love the way in which the performers shape a concert experience. The same piece can last for five minutes, if played straight through as composed, or for forty-five if the performers insert all of the types of improvisation. The mridangam (double-headed drum) offers an amazing rhythmic counterpoint to the basic tala pattern that performer and audience members "keep" with hand clapping and waving. While many of the pieces are in the 8-beat "adi" tala, three, five and seven note talas are also part of the repertoire, lending some wonderful assymetry to the rhythms. The musicians often come together just for the concert. They rely on their own knowledge of the shared repertoire to create something new when they come together. And the sounds are wonderful. 

Music - a universal language? Not really. While I can imbue the music with my own understanding, steeped in years of the European classical tradition, I am aware that when it comes to understanding Carnatic music I'm at the basic linguistic datge of "buenos dias" and "que paso?"! I am humbled by the beauty of this tradition and the integrity of its practitioners. I am ever more grateful for the variety of musical languages that allow for the compelx expression of unique cultures around the globe.

Twelve years ago I slipped out of our hotel room in Chennai at six am, unable to sleep any longer. As I walked through the neighborhood near the hotel I was drawn by the sounds of music near a temple. There, processing through the streets, was a small group of bhajan singers making their way through the neighborhood. I had my video camera with me and captured their singing of these Hindu devotional hymns in the early morning hours. 

This morning Jim and I left the hotel at 5:50am to revisit the same area. Wes topped at one of the neighborhood temples which had recorded music playing, took off our sandals, and entered into the temple precincts. We were warmly greeted and invited to walk among the shrines. People entered in increasing numbers over the next hour, walking clockwise around each shrine. Where a priest was present, people surged forward to receive a blessing. As we watched, the darkness grew lighter and the vibrant colors of the statues emerged. 

As we left the temple we stood outside taking pictures of the temples, of the beautiful kolama on the pavements, and of the awakening street life. (Kolama are geometric patterns made of rice flowers which Indians make outside their homes in the morning to ward off evil spirits) Still looking for our bhajan singers, we asked a man on the street if any groups would be singing. His face lit up and he cordially invited us to follow him into an open room. Here a group of about eight men and women were already seated, singing bhajans. We sat on mats on the floor joining where possible in call and response sections of the singing. 

After about ten minutes, the group rose to head out into the streets singing. We were invite to come along, leaving our sandals behind and heading out barefoot into the streets. Others joined us including a man we both recognized from our video of 1996. As we walked along singing people (mainly women) came out from their houses and apartments to make an offering for the poor. They poured rice into a bag carried by the leader, then walked all around the group of singers back to the leader to receive a small amount of something (coconut?) that he gave them in return. Sometimes they also offered money which he handed back to another singer to take care of. 

People shared greetings as we walked along - clearly they knew each other and looked forward to this ritual. Meanwhile the singing continued throughout, the lead passing from one singer to another in no discernible order. The "sruti box" provided an electronic drone pitch and one singer also played the finger cymbals. Of course bicycles, motorbikese, and cars honked and passed, the group grudingly moving over just enough for the vehicle to drive by. We stopped at three different temples in the neighborhood, chanting as we moved forward to touch the fire, and to receive ghee, coconut milk, herbs and red powder. We were clearly welcome, almost obligated to participate. 

After an hour of wending our way around the block, we re-entered the hall and sta ourselves in front of the shrine. One of the singers, a priest, offered puja as the singing continued. Then the group shared a hot steaming drink (coffee and coconut milk?) and prasad, the food offering. 

We were of course mindful of all the advice to westerners traveling in India and tried to accept the warm hospitality without actually ingesting anything. When the priest pours any of the liquids into the hands of people, they drink some and then put the rest on their hair. We tried to lift it to our lips but not drink and then dump it on our hair. (I did this successfully enough that Jim thought I had actually drunk some but I hadn't!) We returned to the hotel around 9am, our foreheads smudged with red powder and grayish powder, our hair filled with ghee and our feet filthy. The new year has clearly gotten off to an auspicious start! 

• my parents for their wise counsel and amazing love
• my husband for his love and support and wonderful sense of humor
• my siblings who understand what it means to be “a Bagnall”
• my children who have taught me so much about life, learning, and love
• deeply satisfying work and smart, articulate colleagues
• music in its myriad forms and styles
• the variety and beauty of the universe
• friends old and new
• those who disagree with me and challenge me to grow