Christy Potter's Blog, page 3

The Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth: The Real Superhero (Part 4)

A few years ago, I was in England for a book festival. One rainy weekend morning I woke up with nothing on my agenda, so I decided kind of on the spur of the moment to take a train to Oxford.

I wanted to see the town, and the colleges, of course, and the pub made famous by C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien. And something about the fact that it was a gray and drizzling day really appealed to the romantic in me.

So off I went. And I spent the day seeing all the sights I could find. It is really a beautiful, storybook English town, and I loved every moment of it.

But when it got dark I knew I’d better head back to my train and my hotel. I knew my way back to the train but somehow I turned a street too early, and about halfway down the block, I realized my mistake.

So I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, and as I looked around, a movement caught my eye and I looked down. There was a young girl sitting in the doorway of a closed shop. She was somewhere in her early 20s, with dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was painfully thin, with a sweet face. She gave me a timid smile and put out her hand. And it wasn’t until she did, that I realized she was begging.

Now, I’m no stranger to panhandlers. I’ve been approached by them countless times in New York, in Philly, in other states, and in other countries. But for the first time ever, I didn’t just give her money and continue on my way.

This time, I sat down on the pavement beside her. She was, as you’d expect, really surprised and a little bit weirded out. But I introduced myself and she told me her name is Lottie. We sat and talked for more than an hour, and she told me her story, and what life was like living as a young homeless woman in England.

I thought of that night, in that dark Oxford doorway, when I read today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark.

To hear more, click here…

 

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The Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth – The Real Superhero (Part 3)

When I was little, my family used to regularly go for family swim night at our local YMCA. I was probably about five at the time, and I didn’t know how to swim. I’d watch my parents in the pool, and even my crazy little sister was absolutely fearless. Actually that’s probably why my parents were preoccupied whenever we were at the pool.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I was absolutely terrified of the water. To this day, I’m not sure why. I don’t remember any traumatic experiences, no near-drownings, nothing. But while I’d go and watch everyone else splashing around, I was having none of that.

I think this must have been something like how the disciples felt when they were in their boat and the storm was churning around them. This was way more than they’d bargained for when they got into the boat with Jesus. This was his idea – he’s the one who said let’s get in the boat and go to the other side. And now there’s a storm and the boat is filling with water and he’s asleep, all kicked back on a cushion, sound asleep, not a worry in the world.

To hear more, click here..

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The Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth: The Real Superhero (Part 2)

A couple of years ago, a man named Arnold Abbott made the headlines for setting up an operation in a Florida park to feed those in need. Abbott worked with two local preachers and caused quite a stir with what he was doing, particularly because he was at that time 90 years old and defied the authorities by continuing to feed those in need despite being arrested several times.

The first time I heard about Arnold Abbott, the first thing I pictured was this scene from Mark’s gospel, of thousands of people crowded around Jesus and the disciples, all of them tired and hungry. All of them in need.

Aside from the resurrection, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. Obviously, the Gospel writers considered this a significant miracle. Matthew further emphasizes the point by adding that the 5,000 did not include the women and children present. Many Bible scholars believe the actual number fed that day could have been between 15,000 and 20,000 people.

To hear more, click here…

 

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Christy in the Pulpit: The Adventures of Jesus of Nazareth – The Real Superhero (Part 1)

Iron Man wears a powerful suit of armor to protect himself as he fights evil. Spiderman, of course, shoots webs from his hands and scales walls like a spider. Batman uses a bat-inspired persona to fight crime. Superman… Wonder Woman… The X-Men… the Avengers… the stream of superheroes just never seems to stop, does it?

But not one superhero, from any blockbuster movie, can compare to the stories we read about Jesus in the gospels. For the next four weeks, we’re going to look a little more closely at some of these stories, and rediscover – in our own summer blockbuster – exactly why Jesus of Nazareth is the ultimate superhero.

When I told some of my friends I was going to be preaching on why Jesus is the ultimate superhero, I got a fair amount of side-eye. People know all the great stories about Jesus, but I’m not sure most people would have cast him as a superhero. I mean, he doesn’t fly. He doesn’t wear a cape or tights. He doesn’t drive a souped-up cool car. And the fantastic things he does, he does quietly, unobtrusively. But that, my friends, is exactly why he is a true superhero.

For the rest, click here…

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Christy Writes: Blueberries in my Chardonnay

Somehow it got to be August already. I must have blinked. I’m writing this sitting on the back deck in the fat golden light of early evening, a glass of chardonnay with frozen blueberries floating in it on the table beside me, notes of Chopin wafting through the back door, the cat sprawled at my feet, half in the sun, swishing his tail with his eyes closed. I’m wondering why in times of despair we often ask ourselves if this is all there is, yet in moments like this, we don’t. If this is all there is, I’m good with it.

This summer has been exactly nothing like I’d planned. I figured it would consist of sleeping, recovering from my first year of full time grad school, covering a few stories for the paper, sunbathing, meeting friends for drinks, and finally starting the new novel I’ve been rolling around in my head for awhile now.

Instead, I held The Guy’s hand as we battled through bladder cancer – and as of this Friday he is, I’m happy to report, cancer free. They were able to get it all with two surgeries. OUT-PATIENT surgeries, no less. As in, his surgery was at 1:00 and by evening he was at Moe’s eating nachos. What a time to be alive.

The rest of my summer has been taken up by studying for my first ordination exam, which is Sept. 2, and preaching. I was fortunate to be hired for all of July and most of August by a church whose pastor is out taking care of her own ailing hubby. I had preached just twice before – one short homily and one full-length sermon. But this kind of opportunity doesn’t land on the lap of a first year seminarian very often, so I grabbed it. It’s been a wonderful experience, a time of spiritual growth and change for me. I’m not the same as I was in May. I’m not the same as I was last week. Last week I never would have dropped blueberries into chardonnay.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back,” Terry Prachett writes in his book Hat Full of Sky. “So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” That’s my summer, in a nutshell.

I have noticed that as I get older, I’m becoming less set in my ways. I know some people say they get more that way as they age, but for some reason I’m itching for stuff I never even thought about scratching when I was in my twenties. I was all about work then, priding myself on 12-hour days and how many bylines I had in the paper.

These days I find myself jumping at whatever opportunities come my way, however random they may seem and even if I have to bump something else off my schedule.

Last Thursday, I was planning a quiet writing day when a friend asked if I wanted to go with him to tour the new Mormon temple in Philadelphia. So I went. And a couple of hours later, I found myself walking beside my friend – who is the sort of friend who always makes you feel like something awesome is about to happen anyway – in a gigantic sparkling temple, along with a bus load of Amish folks who had traveled in from western Pennsylvania to take the tour.

We stood there, me in my sundress and strappy sandals and my Amish friends in their bonnets and straw hats, and listened as the tour guides told us about  a religion that was so similar to ours in some ways, and vastly different in others. It was one of those moments when I step outside myself and look at what’s happening and think, “I absolutely love my life.”

This is why I grab change when it passes by. This is why I no longer want to be the same person at the end of the day that I was when I woke up.

Here’s to the rest of the summer, my friends. Here’s to life and love and change. Here’s to getting to know ourselves all over again, and to chardonnay with frozen blueberries.

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Christy with a Camera: Solace in New York

I love New York City. I always have. When The Guy and I went today for a last round of tests before his bladder cancer surgery, I had an odd feeling as I watched my beloved skyline approaching me from my perch on the ferry. The weather had that early summer morning heavy dampness to it, with dark skies constantly threatening rain, like a barely suppressed bad mood.

This was my city, my happy place, yet I was going there for an unhappy reason. This wasn’t a shopping spree down Fifth Avenue or a stroll through Central Park. This was all related to cancer, and I hated it. But when I got off the ferry, I noticed that I breathed a little easier. I relaxed a little. This was still New York, my favorite city in the world, and if we had any hope of everything being okay, it would start right here.

By the time we left his final appointment, the sun was out. We walked through parts of the city I’ve never seen before, did stuff like walking through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria and eating lunch at a place I’d never heard of. I swear the city embraced me today, welcomed me, reassured me.

And now, well… I’m back home, I have a bit of a sunburned nose, I’m exhausted, and yeah. I do think everything is going to be okay.

Going in

 

Angled Manhattan

 

Bread

 

Helen Gurley Brown called this “cabbing about.”

 

Holy crapcakes, that’s a tall apartment building.

 

Manhattan

 

The Waldorf-Astoria

 

The Waldorf-Astoria

 

Going home

 

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Christy Writes: On Cancer, Love, and Hope

It’s interesting how fast things can change, isn’t it? How you wake up one morning and the world around you is one way, and by the end of the day, it is completely upside down and you’re not even sure what happened. Or when. Or how. Or when it might be rightside up again.

Three weeks ago, The Guy and I ended up in the emergency room with what turned into a week-long stay for him and walked away with the diagnosis everyone dreads most: cancer. We’ve been on one of those emotional roller coasters ever since. On the up side, it’s bladder cancer, which they assure us is one of the treatable kinds. On the down side, the tumor he’s playing host to is flipping ginormous – it covers about 75 percent of his bladder. On the up side, he is under the care of a urologic oncologist at Sloan Kettering, which is one of the best cancer centers in the country. On the down side: it’s still cancer. The Guy and I have both lost dads to cancer, and seen other loved ones and friends battle it. It’s not pretty. It’s never pretty.

The first night, after about seven hours of emergency room care, they settled him into a room, and I went home, ostensibly to get some sleep. I walked into the dark house, and sat down on the sofa without turning on any lights. The room was still and dark and hot and the feeling that you get when someone who is usually around isn’t – that weirdly vacant sensation in the air – was heavy around me. I sat there for a long time, listening to the silence, and wondering what had just happened.

I thought about how I had snapped at him just the night before for coming home from work late. All at once it seemed like the single most stupid thing in the world for me to have been mad about. That’s when the tears caught up with me. I cried for every little thing he’s ever done that seemed like a big freaking deal to me at the time. In the dark silence of my living room, the memories wavered up in front of me, big and ugly and unrecognizable, like reflections in a funhouse mirror. I don’t even think I was crying because he had cancer – I’m not sure that had fully sunk in yet. I was crying for the time that he didn’t have cancer, and that I didn’t appreciate then how awesome that was.

It’s hard. Everything about this is hard. Major illness is something that happens to our grandparents, to our parents. To our friends’ parents. To celebrities. To other people. Yet when it shows up at your door, guess what? You can’t refuse to answer. It kicks the damned door down.

The Guy has been home for a couple of weeks now, with a tube in one kidney that drains into a little bag. Fortunately, the fact that nature skipped over him in the butt department means all his pants are baggy, so no one can tell he even has it. I’ve become quite skilled (she said, modestly) at flushing the tube with the prescribed saline solution every morning, and changing the dressing and tuning out his endless complaints about the tape pulling his back hair. Two words, buddy: bikini wax.

We are adjusting to our new normal, even with the knowledge that as soon as we’ve gotten the routine down on all this, it will change. He is having surgery in early July at Sloan Kettering in New York, and although they can’t say for sure until they get inside to look, the hope right now is that they will be able to get all of the nasty bugger out of his bladder and that will be the end of it, with no chemo necessary. We are not out of the woods yet, but we are aware that it could have all been so much worse. Funny how what you consider a blessing can change so dramatically. Everyone has been so wonderful to us, visiting us, praying with us, letting us know we aren’t facing this alone. Our friends, our families, our church family, my friends from seminary … people have have surrounded us in a circle so tight nothing but love can get in.

One day last week, I was outside planting flowers. The sun was out but it was a nice sun, not that blistering bastard that shows up in late July. It was softly warm on my arms and face. There was a nice breeze, my phone was inside. And I became completely absorbed in the motion of digging the little holes, pulling each flower out of its tiny plastic container, and settling it into the earth, tamping the loose soil back down around it. Gardening felt familiar. Safe. There was a soothing rhythm to what I was doing, and a feeling of comfort in knowing that soon there will be a colorful row of flowers there, where before there had only been blank dirt. While The Guy and I are focused on his healing, these plants will be focusing on pushing out new blooms.

That’s the beauty of life, I think. That it’s there, all around us, in all its forms – all we have to do is see it. Having dirt under my fingernails never looked more beautiful to me than it did at that moment.

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Christy Writes: What is Your Art?

I was talking with a writer friend this week and she asked me whether I miss practicing my art. I was a little thrown off by the question, because I am still writing – granted, not as much as I used to, what with being a full-time grad student and all that but yeah, still writing over here.

But as I was thinking back over the conversation later, I realized that the reason her question took me so aback is that I consider everything I do to be art. Not in an everything-I-touch-turns-to-art kind of way (she said, modestly) but in a way that celebrates the beauty and art in everything around me.

This is probably true for all of us, if you think about it. Or it should be. When you do something and you want to do it well, that’s art. That’s you creating something beautiful. I don’t care if it’s a ten thousand dollar oil painting or you made your bed hotel-perfect… it’s art. Heck, I decided a few weeks ago that slumping around the house at night in my too-big thrift-store pajamas wasn’t adding anything to the world, so I put them back in the donate bin and bought myself a silky nightgown and matching robe. Just because not everyone can see it doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

I can’t even begin to count how many people have said to me over the years “I’m just not creative” and it bothers me to no end. If you’ve ever said that about yourself, I’m asking you right now to think again. You don’t have to wear a beret and stand in front of an easel. (Although if you do, that’s cool and I’m totally jealous.) Even when I’m studying, writing a research paper or taking notes in class, I consider it art. If you think of the things that occupy your day as art, I promise you’ll start finding a lot more meaning in what you do.

So here’s the million-dollar question: What is your art? If you’ve taken the time to read this, you have time to stop and ask this of yourself. Really think about it. What is your art? Gardening? Writing? Cleaning? Music? Dancing? Cooking? Dressing your kids? Smiling at people? If you do all things with love, and with the desire to create beauty and to send that beauty out into the world, everything you do is art.

A friend at seminary recently said that he thinks all art is a form of worship, and the more I think about that, the more I agree. It is a way to pause, to honor our gifts, to surrender to something bigger than ourselves and find a way to express our gratitude, often without words.

So no… I don’t miss practicing my art. I am practicing it. Every day, every hour, every moment.

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Christy Writes: On Hope and Watercolors

I woke up early this morning with the intention of going out for a run – I’ve been pretty much a slug all winter – only to see that it’s raining. I think I’m going to go anyway. I feel like Pippi Longstocking, when she was planning to water her garden and woke up to rain. She went out and watered her garden anyway, because she hated to have her plans changed. I’m with Pippi.

Yesterday I started the second phase of my student ministry work at a new church. The one I was at during March was more traditional – beautiful building, pews, pipe organ, hymnals, the works. The one I’m at now is more non-traditional – meets at a school, live band, choruses projected onto a screen, lots of interaction between the leader and the congregation. It’s an interesting transition for me, and I will admit that after years of clinging to the idea that church had to be like the church experience I was used to or it wasn’t church, it was just camp or something, I’ve begun to appreciate the non-traditional approach much more than I used to. Now I find that I like these non-traditional setups, sometimes called emerging churches.

I’ve been studying theologians who believe that to be effective, churches need to ask people what they are looking for, instead of sitting in their pews and telling people what they want them to hear. We need to meet people where their needs live, instead of expecting them to come to us and hear the same things over and over that maybe they’ve had trouble relating to for years, maybe why they left the church in the first place. There are plenty of theologians who disagree with this as well, and that’s fine. The important thing is we’re discussing it. Institutional change will never happen without dialogue.

What I’ve taken from both of these church experiences is that the one thing people need most is hope. It’s a rare commodity these days, in a world that is feeling increasingly unstable and hopeless. People may not always feel like they have hope, but they are always seeking it out, and if they’re seeking it out, they know it exists. It’s like looking for your keys when you’re running late. You know they’re around even though you don’t see them, so you keep looking.

When I first decided to go into the ministry, I secretly wanted to change the world. Now I know that if my only role is to help people find their hope again, I’ve done my job. It also helps me hold my own hope a little closer. Hope unites us.

I wonder now if it was hope that nudged my hand toward watercolor paint at the art store this weekend. I wasn’t there to buy watercolors – mostly because I’ve never painted in my life except poster paint when I was running for drama club president in high school, and paint-by-numbers which I did in my thirties while going through a throwback 1970s phase. Paint-by-numbers, poncho, glass of wine. Check, check, check.

But when I saw the watercolor supplies this weekend, I felt something stir in me. I wanted to try it. I wanted to experience something different, I wanted to not only find beauty but to create it. Whether I can actually paint well or not really doesn’t matter. Creating makes me happy, and happiness makes me hopeful.

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Christy Writes: Crocuses, Cataracts, and Children’s Sermons

It’s finally starting to feel like spring here in eastern Pennsylvania. The crocuses are up and lending the first hints of color to the flower beds. Mornings are soft and lemony, and despite being waist-deep in studying and working, I am propelled forward by The Guy’s promise of a day trip into New York City very soon. And caffeine – I think I have developed an addiction to Dr Pepper. Not sure when that happened.

This is my second semester at seminary and the friends I’ve made are starting to feel like family. It’s interesting how the first day of classes made me feel like a nervous 10-year-old at a new school. I honestly had no idea what to expect – all I know is that the idea of sitting alone at lunch is as horrible at 45 as it is at 10. Now we find ourselves wandering in just to be together, sometimes even if we don’t have classes.

I’ve been doing my first few weeks of an internship at a local church, and after Easter I move to a new church for four weeks. I’m having a great time getting to know people, helping out in various capacities, and drinking a lot of church coffee. I was excited when the minister asked me to give a short homily on Maundy (Holy) Thursday. I’m still working on it, but I’ve been told it won’t always take me three weeks to prepare for a five-minute mini-sermon. Let’s hope not.

As always tends to happen when I’m creatively and intellectually stimulated, I have been playing referee to a thousand ideas bouncing around in my head. The problem is finding enough hours in the day to get everything done.

I’ve started a sequel to my book The Bacchae, and those of you who read the first one will not be surprised to find out that Dax is in over his head again, literally from the first page. I’m also jotting down ideas for another creative non-fiction book. I’m also working on a couple of visual art projects for classes I’m taking.

The Guy is recovering from cataract surgery. The only real side effect seems to be a stinging disappointment that they didn’t give him a black eye patch. Something about blowing his chance to finally be a pirate.

One of the decisions I’ve made recently is to write here more. I have tended to not write very often unless I had something deep and profound to say (okay, let’s say profound-ish) but then I’d only write maybe every six weeks or so. Several people have told me they’d like to hear more often about the new path I’m on, and the more I think about that, the more I think it’s a good idea.

For one thing, there are a lot of people who seem to have an odd idea of what my life at seminary is like, probably picturing me living as a nun (yeah, I can’t even tell you how many ways that ship has sailed) or in a somber, restrictive environment in which we wear drab clothes and study the Bible until the wee hours of the morning. I wish people who think that could see us laughing over beer at the local pub, or sitting on the grass outside soaking up the sun, engaging in a raucous discussion in class about everything from the Apostle Paul to children’s sermons, figuring out how to change the world.

So that’s my plan – I’ll be writing here more often, giving you more glimpses of my life as it’s unfolding. You’ll still get the longer, more in-depth pieces as well, of course, but more of a balance now. I’m looking forward to having you all with me on this new adventure.

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