Another dating "shocker"

You'd think I'd have heard 'em all, by this time.

Swingers.

Felons ("but that's just a part of my life").

The married, the just separated, the phone sex and Wallace Stevens types.

I think I must have some kind of renewable warranty on shock, because I never seem to get over being surprised at the weirdness out there.

The latest?

A guy who contacted me a few weeks ago from -- let's say he was from below.

Otherwise known as the eastern Main Line.

He was polite -- very polite.

Perhaps that should have been a tip off.

He was younger -- but not impossibly so.

However, I asked him if he shouldn't be contacting women his own age with marriage and kids in mind.

Yeah, I'm bossy like that.  But some guys are actually more mature than their years. I try to stay open to possibility, in my own cautious fashion.

Oh, he said, I've had relationships with women my own age -- but I like the wisdom of older women. I always have, he told me.

After checking to make sure he wasn't looking for a "cougar," I agreed to meet him.

In my defense (or because I don't have ESP), let me just say that everything else seemed to check  out -- no clear signs of mental instability.

But when we got together, it seemed like he was "feeling it" and I wasn't.  Nonetheless, no signs of wackodom.

Within a few days, I wrote him to say that while I'd enjoyed meeting him, and he was a very sweet guy, it didn't feel right to me.

Did you know how much I wanted to kiss you, he wrote me? Would you have kissed back?

Nah, I wrote back a little uneasily -- I wouldn't even kiss George Clooney on a first date.

Goodbye. Good luck, he emailed back. By the way, I'm actual 26 years younger than you.

Eeewwww....seriously? Am I getting that bad at recognizing college students? (just kidding).

I don't know what his kink is -- I don't even want to know.  I'll just chalk it up to life experience.

And block him from my contact list, of course.

The way the story gets told...

It still seems remarkable that she doesn't have to stumble out of bed and find matching a matching tunic and leggings every morning.

Today, there is no one to wake up.  No one grumbles, turns over a few times, and asks that his light be turned on, the better to oil his transition from sleepy son to yawning student.  

What was were high school administrators thinking, to ask high school students to wake up so early, she wonders.

Without a child at home today or a place to be on Friday, she falls asleep again as the sun shines through the flowered shades that cover the sliders to the deck.

As so often when she dreams around dawn, her dreams are vivid, more Salvador Dali than Claude Monet.

She is in what seems to be a large parking lot, watching a reporter re-image an ancient civilization that once resided there.

Why then does it look like the New Jersey shore?

Waking and slightly disoriented, she focuses her near-sighted gaze on the cat who slumbers on the edge of the bed.  

Her almost-constant companion in the night hours, as polite and well-behaved in the dark as he is not during the light, he is her signpost back to control and safety.

Not this morning.

Instead, as she reaches for her glasses (she often falls asleep on top of them). she is flooded with panic.

Beneath the panic is anxiety.

Beneath the anxiety, disbelief.

Where is acceptance? Acceptance floats like a cloud across the sky -- glimpsed, then gone wherever clouds go.

Yesterday she had experienced resignation.

Today, in the exuberance of sunlight and shadow on the lawn, it is absent. Perhaps it never existed.

Instead, there is this blind fear.

Underneath all of her worldliness, she has always assumed that there is a straightforwardness to love.

Particularly in the love of a parent for a child.

Before she knew anything about the dangers of the outside world, she knew this, learned it in her mother's lap, her father's eyes.

Her own child, she cannot reach.  There has, oh terrible truth, never been a time when she could say that she understood the daughter whose path to adolescence has been sprinkled with deception, insatiable desire for material goods, and a hidden life she cannot access.

While there was nothing perfect about her upbringing, the truth that remains after all the tragedy and debris is swept away is love.  

But it is this love that her daughter cannot accept, whether it be from her brother, who has grown to mistrust her, or even her father.. 

Tragedy -- ah, that is land the mother knows.

For years, after her brother's untimely death, she awaited the next phone call.

One day she watched her mother write messages on a pad as she awoke from a coma.

The next day the hospital curtains were drawn, and the staff said: "we tried to reach you."

But this living purgatory and terror -- how does she accustom herself to the implacable distance between parent and child?

The wall. 

The gulf.  

The horizon.

Beyond it, there looms, she fears...nothing.

Just the incredulous recognition that she, who is wired to love, who gives thanks every day for the uncomplicated affection in her cat's eyes, who weeps for squirrels smashed on the road -- she is still  banging on the door of her daughter's life.

Look at me in the eye. See me. Let me see you.

She is, simply, a mother who has never been let in. Parent of an absent child.

Never. Never. Never.

It's all about the text, says Lancaster Bible College professor

With modesty and erudition, Dr. Robert Spender of the Lancaster Bible College defends the historicity of ancient texts.

Gracious yet firm, Spender acknowledges how fast the world of Biblical criticism has changed over the past 100 years, but does not cede the game to colleagues on the left who chip away at the historical nature of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The dialogue will continue, undoubtedly -- one hopes that those immersed in study will continue to resist the temptation to caricature other impassioned scholars.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/848247_Column--Understanding-Israel-rooted-in-Scripture.html

Selective outrage can make asses of us all

Benghazi! Mark Sanford! Climate change! Abortion rights defense! Anti-abortion horrors!

My twitter feed sometimes seems clotted with the voices of the ticked off, the morally righteous, the snarky and the occasionally annoyed.

Truth be told, I join them now and then.  Gun control is a reliable hot button issue for me, and I can often be counted on to rise, like a fish to the hook, when somebody NRA-affiliated riffs on the armed revolution that's a comin.'

But sometimes...sometimes I wonder. Why don't I see conservatives posting about the collapse of the Bangladesh factory?  Are there liberals campaigning for better schools in urban areas? Aren't people appalled by the rise in female mortality in more than forty percent of American counties?

In other words -- why can't we agree on anything?

I know who is going to respond to MY tweets or FB status updates on controversial topics (though I try to keep them under control). It's either people who already agree with me (wink, wink, nod, nod, we're club members) or people who vehemently do not.

But what do we accomplish with our rantings?

Whose lives do we make better?

Or are we simply satisfying ourselves -- and that basement dweller in some city two thousand miles away?

Or maybe two basement-dwellers -- we must be pretty insecure, given the volume of self-complimentary retweets.

Information -- that's great.

Some well-sourced opinion -- I've been known to change my mind. That's why I try to read across political fault lines.

But for Pete's sake -- the next time you are about to nail some person you've never met with a well-aimed arrow bent to your own perspective, take a deep breath.

Before you jump the snark, ask yourself who this is going to help in the long run.

Then think about whose blood pressure you might also be raising, and what you are really accomplishing.

In the spirit of "doctor, heal yourself," I'm going to try to administer my own medicine.

If, given due provocation, I can remember my own counsel.

Make me feel like a woman? Are ya kidding?

Dating, for me, comes with a caveat.

Unlike other men and women I've run into into in my online dating chronicles, my kids come first.

I had them later in life. They still need me in their different ways, and preoccupy much of my time and thoughts.

Actually, they will probably always come first, tipping the ledger towards the maternal as contrasted with the amorous.

Not that a little ooo lah lah wouldn't be nice. A glean in the eye, a flutter of the lashes, a flush of the cheeks...I'm not hopeless, ya know.

I also am painfully aware of how fast time rushes by, and how soon even my son will be gone on to his own adventures.  At that point, I'll HAVE to create a life wide enough to welcome them, and yet allow room for adult adventures.

But I don't understand the whole idea that I have sacrificed much, and that it's now "my time" (come to think of it, that's the name of a senior dating site, isn't it)?

Gross me out. Eeewww.  Even the painful elements in this pilgrimage haven't been a sacrifice -- although they have come close to driving me to the madwoman's attic.

Now and then, a man says to me that it's time to think of myself first -- that he will court me and treat me like a woman, not a mom.

Excuse me? Does that mean that mothers are, by definition, not female?

This flummoxes me. By no means a selfless person, or martyrdom's candidate from Chester County, I am not aware of having let anyone else take precedence.

Perhaps it's because I lost my mom and brother in my thirties, before I'd gotten married.

Maybe it's because I am gun shy about romantic relationships.

Could it possibly be that my stammering arises from my inability to separate my well-being from that of my dependent children?

Aw, heck. I know not why.

What I do know is that a guy who imagines that he can make a "real woman" out of this exurban mom doesn't understand that he's got a woman standing right in front of him -- who doesn't need to be set free from her children's shackles.

The tapestries of their lives are part of who she is, and will become -- and the man who accepts this may find that she does not need to be enticed.

Fountain of Sorrow

When I moved out to this semi-rural area about nine years ago, I was spurred in part by the wish to experience small town life.

Having grown up in a large city, and gone to grad school in an Ivy League New Jersey town, I had a rather romantic view of life out here just beyond the Western suburbs.

In our own way, we are a community.  I meet my neighbors waiting for the bus, walking around the track at the elementary school, clambering up and down the hill that I walk almost every day, and now and then for dinner.

Many of us moved out here to avoid too much intimacy with neighbors. But when a gentleman who lives on the private road behind me said "we're here if you need us" -- I believed him, even though it was the first time I'd seen him in around three years.

We are bound, for better and in taxes, by the Downingtown School District, our churches, and our neighborhoods.

All in all, it's been a difficult month.

In April, some dear friends lost a child in a bizarre accident in New York City.  She was more than a contender -- she was a future star. But more than that, she was,  from what people say, a deeply lovable and happy young woman.

This was stunning. And imagine how her parents, both of whom have deep roots in this area, feel as they try to understand and grieve her death with their families and friends.

This past week the former pastor at St. Joe's in Downingtown, who became Bishop McFadden in the diocese of Harrisburg, died suddenly while at a conference in Philadelphia.

This weekend, members of that congregation ( where the young woman's service occurred) will grieve his passing.

Tonight, my cell phone voicemail had a message from the principal at Downingtown West.  Today the school lost one of its English teachers to cancer.

Dr. Mulvey, the principal, called her "one of the most dedicated teachers I know."

My daughter, who can talk the ears off a brass monkey, might never have done a stitch of work in this teacher's academic detention (yes, she took those clowns as well as teaching English) class.  But she really, really loved this woman.

I asked her tonight, as I walked down the street, if she wanted to attend the service.

Yes, she told me -- we were both sniffling.

Another funeral.  Another gathering of the Downingtown school district clan, red-eyed and overwhelmed.

Too much! Too much! I said to myself as I walked down the hill past my friends street on my way to the Farm trails.

Too damn much.

But that's what part of being in a community is all about -- trusting that, as we are brought together by grief, so we are also able to join in times of celebration.

All I could do was pray for my neighbors, joining my sadness to theirs, hoping that in some tiny way our prayers would strengthen those who mourn to bear the gravity of this moment -- and of every moment yet to come.

Israel and Christians: the ambivalence that dares not speak its name (sometimes)

For diverse reasons, mainline Christians and conservative Christians get squirmy on the topic of Israel. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so serious.

Conservatives get nervous because they don't like being tagged as being impelled by self-interest when they support Israel. (After all, the book of Revelations can be read to support the idea that Jews have to be in Israel for Jesus to come back).

And mainline denominations don't wish to be accused of being anti-Jewish when they speak up for the rights of the Palestinians.

There's always a subtext -- and, thus far, the political, moral and biblical subtext has driven the policy conversation.

I discuss these drivers, and how we arrived here, with Professor Julia O'Brien at the Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Take a look -- and please comment.






http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/842635_Column--One-text--with-many-perspectives.html