King David in an hour and ten minutes

The King David workshop for which Jennie Kiffmeyer and I have prepared so long finally happened today, and I’m still feeling joyful and thankful about it. Thirty people came! We couldn’t believe it! We had (of course) enough material for at least twice the time – but conversations started that I hope will continue. I loved seeing people start to wrestle with the story. It’s so important that we don’t let the harshness of the story drive us away from it so that we don’t hear what it has to teach us.

I need to go to bed. I’m wiped! But I am so thankful that it went well.

Shoulder-Deep in the Late Bronze Age

Spring has arrived in Bloomington and this Saturday Jennie Kiffmeyer and I will present our workshop Shepherd, Dancer, Poet, King – Teaching and Telling the Stories of King David at a diocesan conference in Indianapolis. We have worked hard, thought hard  and entered deeply into the story – and I am looking forward to sharing it.

Then I have a telling coming up for some girl scouts, and then Holy Week and Easter, which is a kind of embodied storytelling in itself. I will be telling the first Creation story at the Easter Vigil. And then Eliot and I go to the Netherlands for three or four weeks – he has business there and has graciously invited me to go along.

There is nothing going on in my head except King David, Saul, Samuel, Abigail, Hannah, and so forth. The story is so big it’s like a magnet, pulling reality towards and into the story. I can’t find closure for this pathetic little script of a post except to say that I am shoulder-deep in the Late Bronze Age.

Have I Said Anything Interesting Lately?

We kept the feast, we told the story – it was, as always, exhilarating and exhausting. On December 21 we read my Nicholas story at the public library to a small but enthusiastic audience – we had story-related crafts afterwards and I was astonished and delighted at how well these went. Christmas Eve was lovely and on the evening of Christmas Day we had friends over for a meal and sang some of the old carols from the Oxford Book of Carols. It was a time of great peace and richness.

Before Christmas I met for a session with Jennie Kiffmeyer from Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond - we are doing a workshop together on King David at Under One Roof, an annual Indianapolis event offered by the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. And for Hilltop I’m preparing workshops for children in February and March on telling gardening stories.

But the big news is Weirdbird’s ordination! God willing, on February 6 our daughter will be made a priest in the Episcopal Church. I’m finding this to be an event that is going to require a high investment of energy & emotion – and appropriately so! – but I am trying to press on with King David. Here he is, playing his harp, as envisioned by Marc Chagall…

I have a problem with Phillips Brooks today, people.

We meet tomorrow to go over the music for Christmas Eve

and I am feeling good about our choices - EXCEPT FOR THIS:

Where children pure and happy pray to the blessed Child,

where misery cries out to thee, Son of the Mother mild;

where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door,

the dark night wakes, the glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.

The first line of the penultimate verse of O Little Town of Bethlehem

just plain grates on me. What about all those unhappy

children? How about the impure ones? Frankly-

speaking as a mamma, here – aren’t they all kind of impure?

Born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

The children don’t fit with the rest of the verse, which

I think fits darn well with Christmas as we do it in

beautiful downtown Bean Blossom. It makes me wonder

if Phillips Brooks started with something different in line one

and changed it because it was such a downer.

I don’t mind editing hymn texts.

[That's me you see, waving at you, hiding behind the (alt.)]

I have a rewrite of “Let us with a gladsome mind”

that I am quite chuffed about. But I am not

coming up with anything for this line – indeed,.

I’m finding it hard to think about the question.

Starving children keep climbing onto the page.

Later – I left it in, we sang it as written on Christmas Eve,

it was creepy, Next year this verse might get quietly dropped.

A wild, rainy day in December…

…with the wind wuthering around the house. I’m preparing a program on the history of Christmas carols for a gig on the fourth Sunday of Advent at a retirement home here in Bloomington, and I have been considering the folly of attempting such a program ten blocks or so from the Jacobs School of Music at IU. How many retired music professors will I have among my listeners? Best not to worry. Maybe they will be polite to the storyteller.

The church where I worship is preparing to give a group reading of my Nicholas stories on December 20 and I am immersed in that project – as an organizer, not a teller. Right now I am working on collecting six brooms. (We used to do it with two brooms, but we’ve expanded the janitorial staff. )  The program begins by claiming the performance space – a meeting room at the library – with a Christmas Sweeping Poem. I’ll put that up over on the same page as the script, later today. Not much to do today but stay indoors and hone the perfection of various web sites.

Actually, there might be one or two other things to do, and I’ll go do some. Eat breakfast, for instance.

Recovering…

(Spelling errors corrected 12/9, with apologies to all you Euors.)

I had a couple of storytelling gigs in October that fell through – and then another one appeared unexpectedly – so I got to do some telling about Moses. The Society of Biblical Literature’s journal Semeia – no longer published – had a special issue in the 90s on slavery in the Bible with some wonderfully confrontational writing from African-American biblical scholars discussing how white European and American biblical scholars pretty up slavery in the Bible. It felt wonderful to read their passion and their honesty, and to look at the Moses story again with a livelier sense of the story as an escape from slavery.

And the tiny, determined Bible study I am in is reading 1 Corinthians, where slavery is on Paul’s mind as well. To read him wth understanding, we need to know how ugly and degrading it was to be a slave. When Paul says, “You were bought with a price!” to affluent, privileged people it is intentionally and deeply challenging. To them and to me.

I have one telling coming up in December and I’m also working on our church’s annual telling of Nicholas, A Garland of Stories for the Nights Before Christmas.

And what am I recovering from – me and everyone else I know? The election. What an amazing, intense, emotional experience!

A fast-moving month…

Bingo! September’s gone!

Not really, but it feels that way. I am on the Building Committee at our church, which turns out to be a disturbingly big commitment that eats time in sizeable chunks. Oh, but it’s fun, though. And I am working on our new welcome brochure, exposing hitherto unexplored and vast areas of technical ignorance. Baba Yaga is overfunctioning, but this is a September tradition. Also n October tradition.

I had a wonderful time telling stories for the WELCA group at Saint John’s Lutheran Church in Louisville, Kentucky on Monday, September 8. WELCA, for those who don’t speak Lutheran, is Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It was deeply moving to watch how they took care of each other – understanding and tending one another’s weaknesses without making a big deal out of it. And they took care of mine, too – came over to New Albany to fetch me because I wouldn’t drive in Louisville, put me up for the night – the program chaiman slept in her spare room so I could have her bed – took me out to breakfast – gave me jewelry, carried my suitcase. It was like being surrounded by Jesus. I’d go there again if I had to crawl on my hands and knees.

Did I mention they took me out for breakfast?

I’m reading Holly Hearon’s The Mary Magdalene Tradition: Witness and Counter-Witness in Early Christian Communities. What an astonishing book – and beautifully written, too. She’s a Biblical scholar with a storyteller’s heart, I think. I had been putting off buyoing it because she’s so young (compared to, say, Walter Brueggemann) but you know, I am coming right up on my 60th birthday which means a bunch of smart, creative, productive people are younger than I am.

Some of them are even my children.

Go figure.

I want to tell you about the cake at the WELCA telling. The church had had a reception the day before, so fo the collation following the meeting/telling there was a generous supply of cake. At cleanup, there was still quite a lot of cake – which was packed carefully and taken away by five or six women, for destinations where it might be appreciated. Quiet voices in the kitchen. “You’ll take some of this to XXX, won’t you?” “Could ZZZ use this for the children?” Again, no big deal was made. Just diaconal ministry at work.

What am I doing this for, anyway?

When I started thinking of myself as a storyteller, there were two approaches to the role that I saw in use around me. There are professional storytellers, people like Tracy Radosevic and Dan LeMonnier who make a living from telling and travel all over the country to tell. Then there are people whose professional roles can expand to include storytelling – teachers, librarians, pastors.

It seems like I fall between these approaches. I don’t have an existing role that can expand to include storytelling – and although I approach storytelling with a professional level of commitment and energy, I really don’t want the kind of career that Dan and Tracy have.

Also, our children are grown up and we live just fine on our existing income. I don’t need the minuscule extra income that storytelling provides. Still – other performing artists say that, if I say I’ll work for free, people will assume I’m terrible. Also, if I don’t have any income, the IRS will cease believing that I’m a business – I do have income from editing, but it comes & goes; this year it has mostly gone.

I have been brooding about this for a while and spent some prayer time about it last week. What I’ve decided is to donate all my storytelling earnings for the rest of this year to organizations working towards the UN Millennium Development Goals. And since making that decision, I’ve gotten two gigs! I’ve changed my web site to reflect this policy. So – we’ll see where this takes the project. Right now, it feels good!

The Best Thing Out of Lambeth So Far -

I have spent way too much time this last week reading blogs and news reports out of the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion’s every-ten-year convocation of all of its bishops. This wonderful picture is from Sunday’s Eucharist – click on it to see a bigger version. These Malaysian Christians, singing and dancing and playing shakers and panpipes, have brought forward the Gospel book in a miniature canoe decorated with flowers. Every time I look at this I feel a surge of joy!

Telling Tales at Waycross

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of the day at Waycross [the summer camp and conference center of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis] leading two storytelling workshops. Beautiful place, beautiful young people, and a beautiful spirit – the campers seemed calm and mellow. Something in the water, maybe?

With each workshop I talked a bit about reading vs. telling. I told them a very bare-bones Goldilocks and the Three Bears and then we had fun elaborating on it using details, voice, and body.