Late Summer and Love-Smiling

It’s the end of the summer and I am reading, reading, reading. Planning, thinking up sermon topics, and reading 1-3 books a day plus dozens of articles. I adore study time like this, I am a super fast reader and I’ve learned to accept that I don’t retain all that much of what I read, which is why I always have a highlighter and pencil handy to mark favorite passages and make notes in the margins.

My little godson is going to be one year old in a couple of weeks, which is very happy. He has been in the hospital with croup and I’m worried about him, and will head up to visit with him and his very wonderful mama in a couple of days. There are times that you simply want to be with a person in the flesh and a phone call won’t suffice. It’s a line I use a lot when making hospital calls: “Please don’t try to talk or entertain me, I just wanted to see you with my own eyes and make sure you were alright.” And then I just stand by their bed and maybe hold their hand gently if I can and give them a nice love smile. A love-smile is just that smile you get when you’re plain glad to see someone alive and that’s really the only reason for the visit. I mean, you can pray with the people who want to share prayer (a lot of my folks don’t, they’re spiritual but not religious) but really the thing you’re there for is to give them a big love-smile.

Someone once died while I was love-smiling at them and they smiled back at me with the most sweet face and that was pretty much it. They never regained consciousness. Since then I have always held the love-smile in the deepest tenderest part of me, how much it can mean. I have seen nurses do the love-smile but mostly they’re pretty busy and they do their procedures without making eye contact, even if they say nice things while they do. They’re quite bustly, though, whereas a pastor is the opposite of bustling.

I cleaned out my closet when I came home from London. I am donating a TON of clothes to the local women’s closet. Just things that don’t feel like me anymore. I am definitely moving into a different look. I just feel completely done with most patterns and fussy things and feel very much like black blazers and black pants and boots. I am collecting black jackets that have Victorian elements to them, and my hair is finally long enough to wear up in a poufier updo that I like to wear with a double headband. I have heavy signature onyx beads that I am wearing all the time, and one big turquoise ring on my index finger. That’s it for professional appointments that require some degree of formality. When the church year starts again I’m not sure what I’ll be wearing for everyday but I know it will be lots of black and much less choice in my closet than formerly. I found that I loved having very few choices in London, sticking to the same ensembles and changing things up with accessories.

I have had my hair color brought down into a more brunette tone and I’m experimenting with bright red lipstick. So far I don’t like it but I like the idea so I’ll keep playing around with that look. I am wearing fairly heavily-winged eyeliner which just feels like me, and although it is too dramatic for this setting I continue to do it. It’s just my look right now.

I’m doing something physical every day and eating less. I’m not paying close attention to this, I am just doing it. It’s time. I walked a lot every day in London and felt marvelous. I have signed up for a salsa dance class.

I saw the dermatologist and had a big mole removed but two other moles aren’t going anywhere and they don’t bother me. I got through the whole summer without burning once, yay for me. That took some vigilance.

I am the program leader for our Christian Unitarian Universalist clergy group and will see those colleagues once a month, and have committed to a weekly gathering of colleagues to meet at the Boston Athaneum for study and sermon prep. Exciting things are going on at church, too – some new programming.
It is lovely not to have my dissertation hanging over me any more. I am trying not to let the pressure to publish my dissertation hang over me!

My desk and study are a mess and that will get attended to this week. I am preaching a sermon called “Loot” this coming Sunday, an exploration of the spiritual issues around the London looting (I was in London when that was going on, and I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on it and do a lot of reading about the situation in the city). As one colleague put it, lack of hope + rage + materialism = looting.

I have been answering a lot of your personal e-mails but haven’t posted much lately so I thought I would check in. How are all of you? What’s new, pussycats?