It's Community Dinner night, which we love! Over 30 people show up for a delicious meal and time together. W and I integrate the topic and a game activity (resourcing your time). Our game pieces are round colored candies - yum.
Josh and Clau have brought games as centerpieces, so when we leave after 8, the games are just beginning. It's so much fun - and so great to have a big family that loves to hang out together.
Sunday
We're at the Gathering site by 7:30, along with a bunch of volunteers. Today Clau speaks on the book of Ruth (way to go!) and someone is baptized. Her friends pray blessings over her. Of course, then it's time for a long visit around the Community Table.
It's so pretty that it feels like being on a tropic holiday - oh wait, I get to live and work here. How blessed I feel! (For me, no tulip field erupting after the long rainy winter in the NW will ever compare to this ongoing beauty and warmth, week by week. "Thanks, God. You know me so well.")
Since it's a song for the imagination = a "fantasy", the musicians encourage us to relax and visualize the music. It comes alive for me as one day in my life as a 30-something mom ... with 4 kids and a 3-job husband. The music dances and pushes forward full of dissonance, recombinations. Britten reimagines the violin, viola, and cello by knocking, plucking, tapping, bowing the instruments.
In the music, I hear W leaving for work early in the morning before the kids get up. They're coming to meals - talking talking, arguing, and working together. I feel the 101 things that have to be organized in a homeschool family. I'm herding the kids into the car, dealing with freeway traffic and carpools. W walks back in during the evening with his hands and head full of to-dos. And finally the family comes to rest: the kids go to bed, I finish my chores, and W puts down his work papers. The house is a mess but it's late at night ...
... and the composition is over. I doubt that's what 17-yr-old Britten had in mind when he wrote the Fantasie, but that's what I felt in the music.
I'll have to listen to it again - my empathy on the ride home is with mothers/house-fathers with a houseful of small kids. I haven't forgotten the jagged pace, the pieces we juggle, the traffic, the activities and noise, and esp. the fragments and dissonance that resolve into occasional bliss and harmony. I especially remember the love and energy needed to cover it all.
Of course I can't fall asleep right away. It's way after midnight when I turn off the light and listen to the devotional reading on my phone.
Monday
At 6, W and I take the dogs for a walk before one of my favorite times of week: a call with a mentoring peer. LOVE and feel renewed by our time. As always, thanks K.
By 9:30, the study group has gathered on the porch with pots of tea, cookies, conversation, and scripture... and the week is off and running.
Read more:
*See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god beside me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand. Deuteronomy 32:39
*Jesus said, “I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?”
But Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:24-26
*Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” John 20:21
Moravian Prayer: Heavenly One, there can only be one god. It is you. Help us to shed the baggage of our pride and independent ways, so that holding no hand but yours, we might slip effortlessly through the eye of that needle.
Help us to remember that we cannot be saved by the good works we do - the cost is too high and the gap too wide between a Perfect Creator and fallen creatures We thank you for the price you paid to bridge the gap between us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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