A Welcome Message

Being a pastor’s wife doesn’t mean I climb mountains more than the average person, although hiking is a favorite activity in our family.  The picture of our two sons was taken in the Colorado Rockies, where the five of us spent a memorable week in the summer after our first son graduated from high school.  Getting to a high place and enjoying a visual panorama is always a thrilling experience.  My title here, though, refers more to the kind of expansive view I get to have from my vantage point as a clergy spouse with layers of involvement in the secular world. Sometimes there is a lovely blending of elements, and sometimes things collide in a dizzying way.  More and more, I am struck by how often two contrasting experiences keep company together.  And, in the same way that bugs are drawn to a light source, I find myself wanting to get closer to see what is really going on when something bumps up against something else.

This contrast is often just plain funny, and often it has nothing to do with being a pastor’s wife.  Just the other day, for instance, following the freakish October snowstorm we had in this part of New England, our teenage daughter came home from a sledding expedition saying, “I still have my bathing suit on!”  Turns out that following the whooshing down a hill on snow that wasn’t supposed to be there, she and her friends went to a hotel where one of the girls’ families had been staying because of the multi-day power outage.  And there, of course, they went swimming in the pool.  Everything got jumbled, and it was all good.

Another example, more visual:  My husband painted our bedroom recently, and my favorite part is the line between the rich beige (called “Amulet”) and the white of the ceiling.   Over and over, my eye is drawn to where the two colors come together…but stay separate.  These places, to me, illustrate so much that is true about regular life.  Sometimes we can see them, and sometimes we just feel them.  An ordinary moment in the present takes us right back to a time long ago; a person who is known for behaving one way does something completely uncharacteristic; an experience we counted on to be wonderful turns out to be crushingly disappointing.   We are shaken or maybe moved by the juxtaposition of things, and we try to get hold of our feelings.  During the years that I worked at a tough urban high school where students’ basic needs were often unmet while my own kids were choosing among an array of extra-curricular activities, I felt that I was leading a kind of “split screen” life.  It wasn’t a question of which side I was on, but rather an issue of trying to see as clearly as possible what was happening, to make out as best I could the topography of the landscape.

In some instances, blending, or perhaps equalizing, can be beautiful; but, depending on what you’re trying to merge, it might also cause a giving up of an essence.  In that famous poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost begins with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” but his neighbor is adamant that “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ “  It is, of course, ironic that they may meet only once a year to replace the boulders that keep a line between them.  Bring us together if you can, but don’t forget to respect boundaries at the same time.

On this site, I will be exploring all kinds of topics within the theme of duality, adjacency, differences finding common ground  – or maybe at least meeting for a handshake and mutual recognition.   I anticipate that my life as a clergy spouse (with no previous background in churchgoing) will lend a good bit of material on the secular/religious tones in the culture, but that will be just one subject of these essays.  Unlike some of the other pastors’ wives whose blogs you can easily find, I won’t be writing a whole lot about parish life, my own faith or what we clergy spouses have in common.   But my rich experience living alongside an Episcopal priest will, to some extent, affect my vision.  Since I have spent much of the last decade raising three children and taking them to hundreds of practices and games, I have become particularly familiar with the terrain of youth sports.  Indeed, some would say that a whole new kind of religion has been created in this realm.  But what are we worshipping, exactly?  Feeling so many, often conflicting, tugs on our time, how do we best determine what is truly worth doing?

Thanks for joining me as I try to paint the panorama that I see.   I look forward to hearing your responses along the way.