Driving to work earlier this week my thoughts were bouncing around between comments in the blog of Landon Whitsitt about Lillian Daniel, a Chicago clergywoman lately engaged in wrestling the concept of "spiritual but not religious" to the ground.  I read Landon's comments in the context of NPR's recent series on "the nones," the growing number of Americans who do not identify with a particular religious tradition.  Also in the mix were the Conversion of St. Paul last observed last Friday and the sad death of Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey.  Heat, stir, add caffeine and you have a blog post.

Somewhere in my travels since last Sunday I saw a tongue in cheek comment that Lady Sybil's tragic end is what happens when men make decisions about women's health care.  Lillian Daniel's comments come down hard on anyone who claims a spiritual life but practices it outside a religious tradition with a long pedigree.  Is that judgment analagous with Lord Grantham's decision to put his daughter's life in the hands of the posh London obstetrician rather than the local doctor who argued for treating her on the basis of what her mind and body were doing?  Lord Grantham asserted his authority as lord of the manor over the objections of the local doctor and Lady Grantham, one two women present who had actually experienced labor and delivery of a child, again, another triumph of tradition over the evidence before their eyes.  The two stood by horrified as their youngest daughter died an agonizing death.

Who gets to decide or define what legitimate religious belief and practice are?  What are the criteria?   Among Lillian Daniel's many comments on the "spiritual but not religious" is the following:  "It's not all about you and no, you can't make it up.  The beauty of long tradition is that it is bigger than anything we can do by ourselves."  I don't particularly disagree with her about the beauty and value of a long-established religious tradition.  But I wonder if denigrating those who dare to say they pray but have not yet put down roots within a particular tradition does more harm than good.

St. Paul, whose conversion we commemorated last week took the gospel to the gentiles a couple of decades after Jesus' death.  When these new believers wanted to identify with what was at the time the "established" community of Jesus' followers, its elders responded with a challenge to their legitimacy: they hadn't fully undertaken the "long tradition" of the Jews.   How could they be legitimate followers of Jesus without doing so?  Is Lillian Daniel's scorn for the "spiritual but not religious" at least somewhat similar to the response of the Jerusalem church to Paul's fractious and far-flung gentile churches?  

You know the outcome of that argument.  It wasn't long before you could be a Christian without being a Jew first.  In areas where Jesus' followers were part of the synagogue community, the two groups ultimately became distinct from each other with no overlap.  In gentile territory, the churches founded by Paul were, in some sense, "making it up."  We don't see it that way now because their theology and piety are part of that "long tradition" of Christianity, but religious tradition doesn't just happen.  It is brought about through the application of human memory, reason and skill.  Religious conversion and affiliation with a faith community don't just happen.  Surely some inclination to engage in spiritual life has to be present before someone decides to walk through the doors of a church.  

With regard to the "nones" I think it's likely that they're not in the early stages of the process of establishing another world religion.  But think about it a different way.  One of the things I heard from the group of "nones" interviewed in NPR's series on young Americans who are not affiliated with organized religion is that many of them have a lot of respect for religious tradition and practice.  They find attractive the idea of affiliating with a community that is committed to peace and justice and they see the church, in general, as such a community.  Several of them said that they pray, not infrequently.  Many of them said that they had not found a church where they felt at home.  Lillian Daniel seems to question their expectations and to say "get over it" with regard to their desire to feel at home in a church.  She describes the "spiritual but not religious" as being "stuck" and asserts that they "know they are missing something."  She challenges them to "look around" and see the many beautiful options in the religious landscape" and advises them  "you don't have to be out there on your own."  

My experience with "nones" who eventually became church members is that there is great rejoicing over the work of the Holy Spirit for having drawn them into the church.  Is it possible that people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious are in an early stage of the Spirit's work?  Does it make sense to beat them up or say we feel sorry for them because they haven't yet found a faith community?  Would you say the same thing about someone who senses that her vocation is for marriage but who hasn't yet found the right person to marry?  It may not matter who gets to decide at what point a religious tradition becomes long, venerable and legitimate or where lies the dividing line between "making it up" and legitimate spiritual practice anchored in tradition.  But I'm guessing that those of us now inside the churches will appear more welcoming to newcomers if we're willing to accept them where they are rather than ridiculing them for where they have not yet been.

Christianity has a long history of doing just that.  This Saturday, February 2 is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.  The religious holiday commemorates the events described in Luke 2.22-40.  His parents take him to the temple 40 days after his birth.  They do this in accordance with Jewish tradition to complete his mother's ritual purification after childbirth and to sacrifice animals in redemption of their first born as directed in the book of Leviticus.  While in the temple they encounter an elderly man, Simeon.  He has been told by God that he will not die until he sees the Messiah.  He recognizes Jesus as the one.

February 2 is known more colloquially as ground hog day.  There's a reason why it's the same day as the Presentation.  As Christianity spread throughout Europe, evangelists encountered persons who practiced religions that involved belief in multiple Gods and were based in phenomena of the natural world.  They were open to conversion to Christianity, but such conversions frequently involved incorporation of existing traditions into a Christian framework.  The late winter Celtic feast of imbolc coincides on the Christian calendar with the Feast of the Presentation and St. Brigid's Day on February 1.  Imbolc falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox - just about the time we in the northern hemisphere are longing for the warmth and longer days of spring.  Bonfires and candle lighting are among the practices associated with the festival.  A candlelight procession opens the traditional liturgy of the Feast of the Presentation.  The long tradition of the church that Lillian Daniel considers essential to legitimate religious practice has plenty of twists and turns toward earlier groups of "nones."

I have identified myself as a Christian and been associated with the church for most of my life.  I don't expect that to change.   I'm an Episcopalian, a form of Christian belief and practice that considers tradition, in balance with scripture and reason, to be central to the faith.  I enthusiastically encourage anyone who has not found a church where he feels at home to engage with the Episcopal Church.  I've known a fair number of "nones" who have done that and gone on to feel at home and grounded in our four plus centuries of tradition.  One of the reasons why is that we are at ease accepting people where they are and giving them time and space to get where they're going spiritually.  It's a journey for all of us and we all have different starting points.

Throughout All Generations, Part 2

After posting last week about the church's challenge of building community among six different generational cohorts, I've seen two other items about this topic.  Yesterday Jim Naughton's post appeared on Episcopal Cafe referencing a post by Pastor Keith Anderson and the book Congregational Connections: Uniting Six Generations in the Church by Carroll Sheppard and Nancy Burton Dilliplane.  Anderson calls the situation a generational logjam. He references Sheppard and Dilliplane's argument that we are trying to squeeze six distinctive generations into the“old three-generation model (Elders, Worker-Bees raising children, and Children)”

During the interval between this post and that I also had the opportunity to listen to the series Losing Our Religion on National Public Radio.  What I heard more than once from the group interviewed for that series is a strong interest in spiritual life and engagement with community.  I heard more than one participant express admiration for the things churches do, like supporting people in their spiritual practices, doing good works and creating a space in which community can be built and engaged.  What I also heard more than once were words like I have never found a church where I felt at home. It's interesting to note that a lot of churches want desperately to create that "at home" feeling for people in their 20s and 3os.   Some of them are trying various things to make it happen, others are just talking about it.  A lot of them want it so badly that it blinds them to urgent mission opportunities that are begging them to take action.

The parish where I serve now, St. Mary's in Kansas City, Missouri has been able to develop a parish community that unites all six, generations that are alive today.   I wish I understood more clearly how it happened, but much of it is a holy mystery.  Seven years ago, I did a "back of an envelope" calculation of the mean age of our parishioners.  It was around 68 years.  It included a member who was, at the time, 98 years old.  But taking her age out of the calculation reduced it only by a couple of years.  I did it again four or five years later and it had dropped to 48 years.  It's younger than that now.

If you asked one of our parishioners where the center of our parish is, most of them would say something about our worship and our outreach ministry.  We have a 150+ year history as Kansas City's anglo-Catholic parish.  We continue in that tradition with bells and incense every week, an ambitious choir composed primarily of parishioner volunteers and led by one as well.  Our parish liturgist, also a volunteer, keeps our worship well-grounded in the Book of Common Prayer and engaged with the cycle of the church year in a way that people are able to connect with their own lives.  The high liturgy gives us regular opportunities to engage sense and memory in worship.  Every Saturday we open our doors to about 200 people from the surrounding community who come to the church to eat lunch and get a bag of groceries.  Our hunger relief ministry has grown over the past 20 years to serve more than 600 meals every month and provide nearly 80 households with a weekly bag of groceries.  The hunger relief ministry has been a point of engagement with many newcomers to the congregation.

Ten years ago our parish was on the brink of closure.  It was in serious financial trouble and suffered from conflict that seemed intractable.  The anger and ill feeling drove parishioners away and did little to motivate one-time visitors to return.  But the parish is located in downtown Kansas City which was, at that time, beginning to redevelop.  The residential population was growing and the decision was made to try to rebuild the congregation.  Ten years later we are growing, organizationally healthy and more or less financially stable.

We didn't set out to attract young people as members, but it happened.  The population of our neighborhood is among the youngest overall of any neighborhood in the city.  What we set out to do is be a community that people want to be a part of.  On Sunday mornings we're friendly without being aggressive.  We allow people to engage to the extent that they want to.  If a visitor stays for coffee hour we make sure that a parishioner introduces them to people.  When they visit again they have someone they know to talk to.  Our service leaflet is easy to follow.

One of the changes that helped St. Mary's retain its younger new members was the relative absence of an "old guard" in control of the workings of the parish.  The loss of membership that the congregation suffered seven to ten years ago left its leadership more open and fluid than is characteristic of more stable parishes.  Before long half of the members the Vestry of St. Mary's, our council of lay leaders, were younger than 45.  Anyone will tell you that is unusual.  A friend of mine, a parishioner at one of the smaller churches in our diocese, was told that no one could be a member of the Vestry in their church until he/she was 50 years old.  That edict came from someone who was well over 60 at the time.  That kind of dues paying might make sense to a member of the silent generation, but for Gen-X it's an invitation to look for a more encouraging environment.

One of our parishioners, the husband of a couple who retired in Kansas City and bought a downtown condominium said "we became members of this church because we knew you needed us."  That's true.  There's something to do or to offer at St. Mary's for anyone who wants to take part.  Creating that environment of welcome and opportunity to serve was intentional.  It has nearly doubled our membership and Sunday attendance in seven years.

I believe that creating a welcoming community intentionally around mission and worship eased the way for us in inter-generational relationships.  We did make some modifications in our liturgy in order to make it more accessible to visitors, but the appeal was not intended to be specific to a particular age group; it was meant to make it easier for new visitors to participate.  In some ways our high liturgy probably made it easier for us to retain an integrity that has cross-generational appeal.  We take it seriously and that shows.  We are true to the roots of our parish, not because we can't break that habit, but because we recognize and honor what that has meant to the parish and the larger community for a century and a half.

Six generations share in setting the priorities for St. Mary's.  To some extent adults make decisions on behalf of our dozen or so members who are eight years old and younger, but all of them gather with us at the Eucharist.  The parish hall of our beautiful but rather inflexible 125-year-old building is their Sunday school room.  When the adults come to coffee hour after the Eucharist, many of them make their way by the corner of the room to see what the children did that day.  What seems important in our parish is that no one individual, family or generation is singled out.   Even a few years ago when we had only one or two young adults attending regularly, members of the parish welcomed them and facilitated their participation without restriction or favoritism.

I want to note again that St. Mary's did not set out to attract new members of any particular generation.  We did work intentionally to make our parish visible within our neighborhood in a variety of ways.  A large and growing proportion of our neighborhood's residential population is in their 20s and 30s.  Our neighbors have found their way here and felt at home.

At diocesan meetings I've observed members of parishes located in towns where people like to retire expressing the concern that their churches don't have a "future" because they don't have large numbers of young families among their members.  They seem to lose sight of the fact that whether or not there will be a steady stream of infants for them to baptize, children nurtured in the faith by other congregations will eventually reach the age of 65 and live happily thereafter. 

A musician friend of mine who used to teach singing told me what he used to tell his students who expressed the desire to sing beautifully.  He said "Find what is beautiful within yourself, nurture and honor those parts of yourself and then sing."  Seven years ago, when the congregation of St. Mary's set out to rebuild its health, we looked at all of the things we had to offer to people who would want to be members of our church. We made ourselves ready and then offered them with an attitude of welcome and generosity.  A remarkable number of new members have accepted those gifts and joined us in offering them to others.

How Far Do You Reach When You Reach Out

There was an interesting item in my inbox this morning - a request from a photographer who is planning a photo shoot of a local semi-pro women's sports team.  I will not name the sport or the team, but will tell you that it involves skating, aggressive interactions between competitors and sexually provocative player attire.  The email message was a request to stage a photo shoot of the team in the nave of the church where I am rector.  It's a beautiful 125-year old neo-gothic building and we have made it available for photography in the past.  We've also refused a couple of requests.

A couple of years ago we were asked to make the space available for a film shoot.  It was, literally, a shoot. The scene envisioned by the director involved a confrontation in which a female character who flees to the church for refuge is pursued by an assailant who unleashes a hail of bullets and kills her in the center aisle of the church. That one was fairly straightforward.

The message I got today made me think twice.  I felt confident I should say no, but I wasn't exactly sure why.  Although the requested date for the photo shoot is the night before our annual meeting and the night of another big event that I need to attend, I might have tried to make it work.  I really want as many people in our community as possible to have a positive perception of our parish, of the Episcopal Church and of the church in general.  For me that involves challenging the perception that the church is an organization whose main purpose is to scold people for acting like human beings.  

The parish I serve is very generous in its outreach to the community, both in the resources it offers and the spirit in which it offers them.  Our congregation has kept calm and carried on in the presence of some extremely eccentric visitors at Sunday worship and various other events.  We do set limits, but they're generously devised and gently, albeit firmly enforced.   Our congregation is relatively young and we are located in a hip urban neighborhood populated by artists and young entrepreneurs.  The parish's ethos fits in with that of the neighborhood.   Part of our commitment to outreach involves opening the building for arts performances and community events and some of those occasionally push a more typical church's envelope of propriety.  Our congregation is at ease with the standards we have set.

 As a woman who became involved in competitive sports well into middle age (Title IX went into effect in the fall after I graduated from high school) I came to realize the value of athletic training and competition for women and girls at an age when I could truly understand it. 
My sport is tennis.  It has specific clothing that are associated with it.  To some extent that clothing is designed for ease of movement, facilitation of play, safety and care of the playing facilities.  It's also about looking attractive and short skirts are the norm for women players.   

The sport referenced in the email message I got this morning most likely has rules about the skates its players wear.  Beyond that, the players seem to create their own costumes.  I interpret their over-the-top provocativeness as an attempt to spoof our culture's hypersexual portrayals of women.  The irony of women playing a physically demanding and very aggressive sport attired as caricatures of "fallen women" is compelling, in a way.  But in a culture that continues to glorify violence against women, to undervalue their work and to constrain their choices, that irony and humor may be a luxury we cannot yet afford.

Here's my response to the email message:

Mr. ____, 

Thank you for your interest in using St. Mary's for a photo shoot on the evening of January 26.  It happens that that date falls the night before a major event at the church and I am reluctant to add to the calendar on that weekend.  Moreover, our staff will be occupied at another event that occurs on the evening of the 26th and it will be difficult to find someone to open the building.

Should you be inclined to choose a different date, I will comment that although I have great respect for the athletic skill and dedication to training of [your sport's] competitors, the sport in its contemporary form presents an outward image that portrays women in a manner distinctly different from the standards of St. Mary's. For that reason, even if the date you had selected were available on our calendar it would be difficult for me to give approval for the photo shoot in the church. 

I hope your team has a successful season this year.  I am a female athlete and I commend your efforts to promote women's sports in Kansas City.
The Rev'd Lauren Lyon
Rector

This is Only a Test

General Ordination Exams for Episcopal Church seminarians began today. The GOE is made up of different types of questions and administered over several days. When I took it in January, 1994 it ranged from a full-day set of take-home essays on a single, practical topic to a series of short answer questions administered in a timed, on-site setting.

 For students in their final year of study, GOEs await upon return from Christmas break. The night before I left for that break, I filled a carry-on bag with books, intent on studying during the time off. I determinedly dragged it downstairs to the door in preparation for my departure the following morning at which time I left it sitting in the entryway in the rush to get into the taxi. It awaited me there upon my return. It would have broken the springs on the taxi driving me to the airport. No one in her right mind would have tried to move it.

I didn't discover that I had left it behind until a day or two after I arrived home. I was a bride of about two weeks the previous August when I departed Kansas City for my final year at Yale Divinity School, leaving my new husband behind. My first two days at home did not allow time for much studying. But on day three of vacation, I went looking for the carry on bag and realized that it was in New Haven. After a couple of hours of intermittent fretting I came to appreciate having the excuse not to study.

Our 1994 GOEs started on Monday morning, the New Year holiday having fallen on the previous Saturday. I was one of four students living in the house where Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is located. It's an Episcopal Church Seminary that operates in conjunction with Yale's interdenominational seminary. The house is a three-story Victorian mansion about two blocks from the main Div School campus.  Four of us lived on the third floor in what had been the servants' rooms - think Downton Abbey but without the locked door between the men and the maids.  Everyone taking the exam was required to show up at the house each morning  to collect that day's questions.  On that first Monday we were sternly admonished to return the finished product by 5:00 p.m. on pain of dreadful but unspecified sanctions.  At that point we were sent forth to our respective homes, dorm rooms and work spaces to complete that day's set of questions.  We happy few who lived in the house had but to wander down a couple of flights of stairs to pick up the questions and climb back up to the third floor to meet our destiny.

That was an advantage during the legendary winter of 1993-94.  In the northeast the snow lay on the ground from the first week of December through the end of March.  A new batch of it fell at least once a week.  On January 4 it was knee high and the temperature was in single digits.  Being able to pick up and deliver test questions with a round trip of four flights of stairs was much better than clearing off the car and driving to and from home or walking down the hill from the residence halls on campus.

The test covered four days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday with Wednesday off.  It was snowing lightly when we woke on Friday and snow continued to fall all day long.  Outside my window I heard rasp of the snowplow every couple of hours and imagined the entryway of our house caked with the red sand that New Haven public works sprinkled over its icy streets.  At one minute 'til 5:00 I printed my answers and walked downstairs feeling glad it was over.  Classmates hung around the foyer after they had turned in their papers, comparing answers and making plans for the weekend.  We noticed that one guy was missing.

In 1994 cell phones were called car phones and few people had them.   A handful of people used email regularly, but they didn't carry it around with them.  We who lived in the house had our own land lines in our rooms and the staff had phones in their offices, but they were still on winter break.  The house itself really didn't have a phone.  There was no way for someone who was late delivering a paper to call in and explain why.  Half an hour past the deadline, our missing classmate came racing into the house, gasping for air, with his test papers in his hand.  He had parked his car on the street in front of his building and the snowplow had tossed up a berm of snow pinning it into the curb.  Snow had fallen all day and after half a dozen passes, there was a three-foot-high wall of snow between him and the test proctor.  He didn't realize what had happened until ten minutes before five when he stepped out the door.  He had run all the way from home.  The dreadful but unspecified sanctions were not invoked.  Someone drove him back to his place.

That evening the four of us who lived in the house happened all to be sitting in the common area between our respective rooms. The test was over; what was done was done.  Our last semester would begin the following Monday.   We started wondering out loud where we would all be a year from that night.  Now, nearly 19 years later, I think we're all somewhere that makes us happy and we're doing work we believe is worth doing.  Good luck and blessings, class of 2013.

Throughout all generations . . .

Twelve years ago I was in a bi-vocational phase of my work life. I served part-time in a parish as an assisting priest and worked full-time in the marketing department of a non-profit organization whose mission was to further the career development and job satisfaction of working women. In my full-time job, I interacted with many managers, executives and business owners. Prior to that time my work had been in social science research and the performing arts. I left that position for full-time ministry several years ago, but the knowledge of the business world that I developed in the marketing job has informed my work as a parish priest and contributed to my understanding of my parishioners needs and stresses.

The Internet boom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was in full swing at the time when I was doing a lot of reading about business. One of the hot topics was managing inter-generational communication and conflict in the workplace. Members of Generation X were entering the workforce with a very different ethos and agenda than the baby-boomer managers to whom they reported. Low levels of unemployment motivated companies to reconsider policies, perks and benefits to attract workers. Executives were becoming aware that different generational cohorts valued different things.

Inter-generational issues are still a hot topic in the workplace despite a very different economic situation. Businesses in 2013 are challenged with harmonizing the values, interests and work styles of the baby boomers, Generation X and the Millenials,those born between 1981 and 2000. Generational distinctives are as real now as they were when the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" was coined. The man who first said it, Jack Weinberg, will be 73 years old this spring.

Everyone has heard of the mythical northern-California Internet start-up where the employees all bring their dogs to work and all human interaction is mediated by text messages. Banks and professional firms swing the other way with dress codes, strict hierarchies of relationship and serious consequences for rocking the boat. The ethos of a particular business at one end of this spectrum or the other might impact the generational composition of its workforce somewhat, but the ages at which people typically enter and leave the workforce all but guarantee that most business will have employee bases in which a maximum of three generations are represented. There will be outliers at places like fast food restaurants where 16-year-olds can get a job or professional firms where the work is not physically taxing and knowledge and experience acquired over decades is highly valued. But managers of businesses really need only deal with the generational quirks of three cohorts coming together in common life and mission.

In the church, the relationships between staff and members are different and the relative status of any individual members of the community may be determined by very different criteria than in a business. What the two have in common is that they're groups of people coming together to create a common life and pursue a common mission. But six generations are represented within the membership of the church. Parishes still have members eighty-five and older from the GI generation. People born between 1930 and 1945 are frequently the backbone of a church's volunteer and financial support. Baby boomers, well into middle age now, may not support the church as fervently as their parents did, but they are still well represented. Generations x and y are the holy grail of congregational development, the mythical young families and people in their teens and 20s that every parish hopes for more of. And school age children, the offspring of those young families, born since 2000 populate our Sunday school classes and middle-school youth groups.

It isn't easy for businesses to balance the needs, interests and prerogatives of three generations of workers. It's not surprising that the church is struggling to attract and build authentic community among six generational cohorts. Obviously, not congregation has members representing the full range of age within the span of these six generations. But those that do are envied by the "graying" parishes where young people visit rarely, seldom return and whose Sunday school rooms have been empty for a decade or more.

What does it take to create and sustain a level of inter-generational community across a broad range of ages within a congregation? Do businesses offer clues that the church can learn from? How do churches that have built this kind of community do it? More in the next post.

Essay from the Basement During a Storm - Original date May 25, 2011

The sirens are blowing outside. I've gone to the basement of my workplace, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. It's a 153- year-old brick building in downtown Kansas City. We are having a wild day of storms here. One is directly overhead right now. For the last half hour the siren has wailed out its warning. We are all hypersensitive to the weather, with the deadly tornado earlier this week in Joplin.

Yesterday the weather experts warned that Kansas City could experience tornadoes today, developing from a eastward moving weather system that caused a deadly storm yesterday in Oklahoma. I watched today's weather develop from my second floor office window with a view to the south. The roof outside my office gives me a panoramic view of the city east and south. Minute-to-minute, block-by- block commentary from the new television in my office accompanied my real-world observations.

Last night I had spent some time considering where to go for shelter, should the weather turn bad during the workday. The church building has a basement. Most of it is barely below grade with lots of windows. All of it has thousands of pounds of bricks overhead.

The Joplin tornado was very unusual for many reasons and a lot has been written about it already. After reading those articles I know details about tornadoes, their genesis, structure and movement that I never knew before. I am no stranger to them. I've lived in a tornado-prone region for most of my life. My great grandfather, Joel Campbell Lyon, died a century ago when a tornado struck the log cabin where he lived in southern Indiana. I grew up in Hickman Mills, where a large and powerful tornado struck in May 1957. Although my family didn't move there until 1959 the tornado was a profound part of the culture of that neighborhood. When one of us meets someone else who grew up near there the first question asked is whether or not you witnessed the tornado.

When we moved to Kansas City from Des Moines, I didn't know what a tornado was. I became familiar with the routine of summer storms during my school years. A certain combination of heat and humidity, a hint from weather forecasters early in the day and the darkening sky in the afternoon or early evening prompted my mother to turn on the radio. The TV was already on, with local weather interrupting the program for brief updates. But the radio was battery operated and would keep us informed if the electric power went out. The wind grew stronger. Moms watched from the windows. Dads and some kids stood in their yards looking toward the southwest. When the rain and hail began the men stepped inside their opened garage doors and sent the kids inside. The open garages would provide ready access to the basement for neighbors running next door or across the street for shelter. Our houses were built frugally at the end of World War II and only a few of them had basements - ours didn't. When the sirens blew we headed across the street to the neighbors' basement. My mother would shout at us to put on our shoes, grab the radio and she and my father would push us out the front door and pull it shut behind them. The water table under the city of Joplin is very high. One of the reasons so many people died in the May 22 tornado is that very few homes there have shelter below ground.

I am thankful that all of our family's sojourns in the neighbors' basement ended with an all clear. The closest we came to danger was the tornado that struck Overland Park, Kansas in 1967. I heard my sister say "mom, it's a tornado" as she looked through the back door of our house. I ran out the front door and across the street without looking back. I think of friends and colleagues in the Joplin area whose lives have been changed in ways that I cannot imagine.

Today, I thought about those hasty trips to the basement as I made my way downstairs. My shoes were firmly on my feet although peep toes and kitten heels were probably not what my mother had in mind when she warned us to prepare for a possible walk over broken glass and debris. I realized that things had changed walking down two flights of stairs carrying a cell phone, laptop computer and the cordless handset of the church landline phone. As I sat on the basement floor, I exchanged a text message with my husband. My calls to him wouldn't go through - too many people trying to call. I posted a Facebook status along with a picture of the storm taken from the roof and retrieved a steady stream of comments from friends checking on each other. For all of our ability to communicate, we can't stop the wind blowing and the rain falling. Indeed, our heedlessness of the damage we cause to the enviornment likely has increased the violence of severe weather.

I see sunlight out the window. Time to gather the hardware and head upstairs. This storm is headed north and east. Others may be coming our way later today.

"A Year Goes by Like Nothing"

The title of this post is the tag line of a comic book series entitled "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers." I have no idea whether it is still in print. Three hippie roomates and a cat shared a run down house that would make Martha Stewart run screaming into the night. It was published only once a year, hence the phrase a year goes by like nothing.

I use that phrase with this posting because it has been a year since I posted anything on this blog; a really busy year. The demands of my work and family life have consumed nearly all of my creative energy. I like my work and family, but throughout the past year, I've frequently had ideas that I thought would be nice to write about, but little energy for the writing.

I have just reached the five year anniversary with my job. My work requires creativity, executive vision, managerial diligence and good secretarial skills. In addition to everything else, I am called upon to shovel snow, push a broom and water the garden on a regular basis. I like my work. In five years I've taken what was essentially a smoldering crater and turned it into a happy, productive and growing organization that may one day be financially self-sustaining.

During the last year my organization has done nearly $500,000 worth of renovation work. The day to day grind of having construction under foot, scheduling around it and dealing with the surprises it uncovers has been a real challenge, but it has been worthwhile. One of the things it has taught me is that the milestones in an organization like this one are most clearly visible when you look back on them. Miracles come about incrementally. When you're looking at the individual increments you have no idea that it's going to be something amazing once all of the increments have been realized.

I'm more patient than I was a year ago. I'm a lot more patient than I was five years ago.