The Scenic Route

It seems like a long time ago now, but it was really only two or three weeks ago, on a Friday.  I had just gotten back from an overnight trip to another congregation in another state, where I met a lot of people and had conversations and ate dinner.  On Sunday morning, they would decide whether they wanted to call me as their pastor.

But that Friday morning, after traveling south and meeting the people and coming home again, I officiated at the memorial service for the son of a member of my congregation.  I didn't know his son well; he had lived in another state.  But I had known this man and his wife for many years.  They were old friends of my parents.  I used to bring his wife communion.  She had died two years earlier.

After the memorial service, and after the luncheon, a few members of the family drove up to the cemetery, on the north end of town.  It is the same cemetery where my Swedish grandparents are buried, although I haven't been out there in many years.  I rode with the father of the man who died and his daughter.  It was a beautiful afternoon.

After the committal service, we walked around the cemetery a little bit.  The family got me a map, so that I could come back and find my grandparents' graves, if I wanted to.  We walked around and talked about who was buried next to whom.

Then we got back in the car and headed home.

The daughter said to her father, "How should we get home, dad?  Which way should we go?"  She had lived away for many years, and genuinely needed directions.  Her father, sitting in the back seat, told her she should turn right instead of left.  He wanted to avoid the highway.

He's legally blind, but he's lived in this community all of his life, and he remembered exactly which roads to take.  He gave us directions all the way home,  around familiar parkways and through some of the beautiful city parks.  "Just keep going," he said, whenever his daughter asked a question.

We began to drive around some of my city's chain of lakes.  I hadn't driven by Cedar Lake since I was a child, when my parents would take us swimming there.  But there we were, and after that we drove around Lake of the Isles too.  We came to Lake Calhoun, and another of the beaches where I used to swim, as a child.  I took my first swimming lessons at one of those beaches.  I got an ear infection afterwards, too.  But I learned to float, so there's that.

I thought to myself that this was just the right thing to be doing this afternoon:  taking the scenic route, after the funeral.  I couldn't tell them that in a couple of months I might be moving away from the lakes and rivers and parks that had been my home for so many years.  I couldn't tell them that this just seemed like the right way to spend the afternoon.

I couldn't tell them why it was such a gift, taking the scenic route.

I have always thought that I was formed, at least in part, by this particular geography -- the city lakes.  I have been formed by the water, this particular water.  There's a great river that runs through my city,  but when I lived in Japan, I didn't particularly miss the Mississippi River.  I missed the lakes.

So we took the scenic route that day.  Because I wasn't driving, I could take time to notice things I never noticed, and to remember.  I could remember the earache and what it was like to learn to float.  I could remember picnics on the beach, and walks around the lake, and the time (when I was a young woman) that a single dad sent his two young daughters over to where I was sunbathing to ask me out (so long ago that was).

Most of the time, I confess, I do not take the scenic route.  I am anxious to get where I am going, and I am afraid that I will be late.  But every once in awhile, even during these past two weeks, I will take a small detour, and pay attention, and remember.  I will look at a picture, or some words on a page.  I will hear a few notes of music, or hold a construction paper heart in my hand, and for a moment, I will allow myself to float.  I will take the scenic route.

Of Rivers and Lakes

Here's an occupational hazard for pastors:  arguing with a preacher in your head while you are a guest in another congregation.

It happened to me last winter, while I was visiting family out of town and had the luxury to participate rather than lead worship for a change.  This should be a good thing, right?  It was a congregation of mostly young adults and young families.  The music was just a little edgy and well-done (although I may be just a tad biased; one of my own family is in the band).  I loved the play area for children in the back of the church, and the fact that after the first fifteen minutes of the service, there was a fellowship break with time for coffee before settling in for the sermon.

Then came the sermon, very long, and earnest, I remember, although, I will confess I don't remember much more about it any more.  I do remember, however, an illustration about the difference between rivers and lakes, and how, in God's way of thinking, it is much better for us (as individuals) to be like a river than it is to be like a lake.  Rivers are good; lakes are bad.  Why?  A river flows.  It is healthy; it has a source and a destination.  A lake just sits there.

Well.

In my mind I understood that this was a metaphor, and as a metaphor, I suppose it was just fine.  He was trying to say that we too need to know our source, and be flowing toward a destination, rather than just sitting there, keeping it all to ourselves.

And yet….

I kept thinking, he is being unfair to lakes.  Lakes don't just sit there.  If they are healthy, they also have an inlet and an outlet.  Just because they are (often) deep and you can't seem the bottom, and just because you can't see them flowing, doesn't mean that they are just sitting there.  Think about Lake Pepin, after all.  Lake Pepin is a lake inside a river.  The river flows into the lake and back out again.  Or, think about the chain of lakes in my own hometown.  There are four lakes that flow one from the other.  They are not stagnant, although it is true that they are not so healthy any more.  But that is not their fault.

I grew up loving lakes, although, like the young preacher, I didn't understand them.  I loved the lakes in my city, and up north, where we would go to camp, and swim, and fish, and play.  I didn't understand then where the water came from and where it went to.  I didn't know that there were consequences for the lakes that more and more homes and businesses came near.

This spring I picked up a book by a retired college professor and ecologist, Darby Nelson.  It is called For Love of Lakes.  The book is part memoir, part geology, as he writes lyrically of his boyhood love of lakes, and yet exposes how many of them have become degraded.  How can we say we love lakes, and let them fall to ruin?, he wonders.  Is it because we don't understand them?  In a lake, so much happens under the surface, where we cannot see.

Two paragraphs in his introduction struck me:

If I think of time as a river, I predispose myself to think linearly, to see events as unconnected, where a tree branch falling into the river at noon is swept away by current to remain eternally separated in time and space from the butterfly that falls in an hour later and thrashes about seeking floating refuge.

But if I think of time as a lake, I see ripples set in motion by one event touching an entire shore and then, when reflected back toward the middle, meeting ripples from other events, each changing the other in their passing.  I think of connectedness, of relationships, and interacting events that matter greatly to lakes.

I don't know why I was so obstinate in my mind about this young preacher's river and lake analogy, why I couldn't just go where he was trying to take me.  A lake is not a person, after all.  He was not engaged in some sort of "Lake Profiling", or "Lake Stereotyping".  I don't know if it was just that I am from a region famous for its lakes (although we have some awfully fine rivers too).  Was I, perhaps unconsciously, aligning myself with a different sort of spirituality, one more in tune with lakes than with rivers, more inter-connected and interacting?  Maybe I just worried that even a well-intentioned metaphor can contribute to misunderstanding, if it is not quite true.   Perhaps I just think that some things, like lakes and rivers, are not 'either/or', but 'both/and.'  Maybe I see a better, truer metaphor in the different kinds of waters.

Both lakes and rivers are good; they teach us different things.  A lake can teach us how much of life lies beneath the surface; like the Spirit, we do not always know where it comes from, and where it is going, at least from close up.  A river teaches us the movement, the dance that we can see, the journey.

I did not approach the pastor after the sermon to argue with his metaphor.  And even though I disagreed, I'll grant that he made me think:  there's something to be said for that.