Aging becomes them:

...They want it Or: Jesus and the disciples meet "someone who had been all...

...other member of the team, quietly purposeful...

...Saturday Mass...

...With everyone else I a balm, physically pleasurable in a way, reassuring...

...The summer before he died, Grandfather McRea Sometimes I have this feeling serving as a Eucharistic sat in the tall grass of the blueberry patch while Minister at the 5:00 P.M...

...We process in with the priest, singing, and bow one of those perfect July days, clear and still...

...and the sons have bethe aesthetic categories...

...In front of me a giant snag points out of maple One"-a translation which Joseph Fitzmyer, S.J., editor of the and oak, the twisted stem of a fir cracked off in a storm or bro- Jerome Biblical Commentary, assures me has no foundation in ken under its own enormous weight...

...But priests and parishioners, parscenes come into view-the stream, the glimpse of the valley, ticularly on college campuses, are meeting them now through the little grove of maple...

...This is not a case against giving women power in the church...

...Silences were possible, and in those silences a kind of openness, a kind of exhaling...

...Depending on my position around the altar I can serve ley...

...We at the altar...

...It could be anyone...

...I feel small among them, clarified by their bination of an Aramaic term Jesus uses once in the Garden of indifferences...

...It's not that I have spiritual insights usually but simThe rest of the vacation I did my usual babbling about the ply that I come away at case...

...It's about five or six miles away, in Commonweal 13 August 1993: 5 one of the upper northern draws...

...Light filters down in the scholarship...

...this sin-is lost...

...The smelling of aftershave, shoes shined, silver hair combed back lawns swept up the hill, the sun shone down, and Grandma behind his hearing aid...

...6: 13 August 1993 Commonweal...

...It was of us usually...

...There are hemlock etched on Grandfather's gravestone, and The lectionary's operating criterion seems to be the dethere are hemlock growing in the forest behind the cemetery termination to eliminate masculine words wherever they apwhere he is buried, and I think about those trees now, eating pear, with little regard for what the original authors of the my sandwich, dangling my feet over the bridge...

...Characters in the New Testament, often vividslower, deeper thinking, the emergence of the old themes and ly etched by a combination of the Gospel context, Jesus' words, images...

...Their growth is so slow, their movement so grad- Gethsemane (meaning "Father," or "Papa") and "God...

...CHRIS ANDERSON tion may be allowed to hear them, even though those sounds Chris Anderson teaches English at Oregon State University may have originally come from the voice and imagination of in Corvallis...

...There was sadness, too, that final What's occasionally so satisfying about these rituals is their trip, as we prepared for Grandfather's dying, but more than that, silence and the scriptedness...

...and I made our way among the markers, talking of the big It seems a more-or-less secular feeling, I should say, even fire...

...Let's be clear...

...Sound (Matthew 5:16), the Greek anthropos could just as well be f familiar...

...What come "children...

...Father"-has not been allowed to stand in this lectionary...

...And many a neutral term in the Gospels can easily be translated as "brothers and sisters" or "men and man had two children...

...God is not masculine, God is spirit-neither He nor She, yet She as well as He...

...But it's me...

...the same way, week after week, inventing none of it, never imLater that week on the other side of the state, in Spokane, provising...

...We might enrich both our public and private prayer by dwelling on God's femininity as well as on our own...

...Now and then a horse would nicker in the near distance...

...It The huge firs have something of the dwarfing, humbling ef- has been transmogrified into "Abba God," a concocted comfect of a starry sky...

...Nor is this an argument against adapting the LET'S GO TO THE TEXT liturgy so that both women and men are comfortable with the THE GOSPEL WITHOUT SEX prayers...

...The assumption seems to be that the through the gap, the snag twists out of the maple, and I am think- sounds of "he," "man," "son," or "Father" are so offensive ing of Grandfather buried on the hill, slower even than the trees, to one part of the congregation that no part of the congregaas slow as the earth...

...Most of the members of the team are older, in their sixties "A clean house just didn't seem important after that...

...adultery...

...If I'm giving the wine, I say ened then by the bone cancer that killed him, he leaned back "the Blood of Christ," offer the cup, then wipe the rim with against a fence post and talked while we worked, clasping his a purificator, twisting the stem counter-clockwise with my right knees like a boy, pausing now and then to look out at the val- hand...

...can't stop trying to justify and impress, my words getting away From our house I can take a long walk through the forest to from me, straining and sticky...

...I feel moving into the old trees is very close to the calm and In Ash Wednesday's Gospel (Matthew 6), Jesus tells us to release and deepening I felt with Grandfather McRae in the blue- pray and fast in secret and the Father who sees us in secret will berries and Grandma Gottwig at the graves, with Ruth and reward us...

...There are five or six my daughter and I gleaned the last berries...

...After the homily we bring up the wine and hosts, were working in the shadow of the hemlock and stand behind the priest during the Lamb of God, and after takcedar Grandfather left standing when he logged the place thir- ing Communion ourselves, pick up a plate or cup and move ty years ago, but the meadow was full of light, the valley bril- to our assigned position (there's a chart in the back room with liant...

...Being posed to say, stand where I am supposed to stand, in exactly with him was like taking the waters at some secret spa...

...And God the Father...

...Yes and no...

...blackened furniture...

...the Old and New Testaments, a title which again and again I always eat my lunch on a footbridge overlooking a ravine, Jesus seems to apply to himself, has become the "Promised my feet dangling...

...The ritual and the community are year's struggles and accomplishments...

...the effect somehow of luxury...

...If so, the Deer fern and vanilla leaf grow from the bank of the stream valid feminist insight into the story-that a male-dominated rebeneath me, where Max comes bounding up, muddy and de- ligious power structure would literally execute a woman for lighted...

...Even bread, I lift each host, say "the Body of Christ," and place it in his eighties he could do the work of three men...

...If I'm giving the I had never known Grandfather to sit down like that...

...Your ual and massive, they seem fixed and stationary, given, and in Abba God...

...I sit and eat and look at the snag's scarred wood and enjoy the woman taken in adultery has become the person taken in even the absence of bird song, the dusky quiet among the trunks...

...PEOPLE, RITUALS, TREES Grandfather and Grandma Gottwig came from knowing I had nothing to prove...

...His Edge Effects: Notes from an Oregon Forest Jesus...

...people" or "human beings...

...For example, in "Let your light shine before men" younger of them said...

...The familiar and our own imaginations...

...and seventies, though there is no pulling of rank...

...I speak rarely, usually with othunexpectedly, spreading all around us, seeping into us, was a ers, and the words I speak are not my own...

...and the light poured down on the meadow, and Maggie up to fifty people...

...What I feel is not awe but calm...

...Meanwhile, the "Son of Man," the midst of that slowness and solidity I am slowed, too, qui- one of the most mysterious and complex characters in both eted...

...In a sense the ceretom-dusting and polishing and folding-and then the fire in mony is entirely impersonal, apart from what I've done or failed the attic that night, flames shooting into the hallway, Lettie to do that day...

...the "patriarchal" world the Scriptures portray...

...help drink the remaining wine and lock up the leftover hosts, I hadn't expected to take such pleasure in the company of a then we process back out after the announcements, two by dying man...

...I had the same sense of silence and release taking Grandma There's a sense of participation...

...But the word Father-either here or in the "Our Mildred and Ray standing around the altar...

...I remember thinking, with sudden clariON BEING QUIETED ty: here I am, picking blueberries with my daughter, and Grandfather is sitting in the grass...

...a lectionary published by a Washington D.C., group-called There's been a lot of hyperbole lately about old-growth forests, Priests for Equality-as vague, indeterminate, unsexed "someand in reaction some of the vested interests have questioned ones," "persons," and "individuals...

...At Aunt Lettie's grave Grandma is my presence-all that matters is that someone is performing told the story again: cleaning the house one day, top to bot- my task...

...Our greetings are genuine: Ruth in her gray suit, week...

...All that matters The air was dry, aromatic...

...Are we to visualize this person as a man...

...Max trots on ahead, nosing in the brush...

...will reward you...

...Light filters texts wanted to achieve...

...The sun was hot on the church, the organ playing, children fussing in the back pews, broad lawns of the cemetery, so I kept Grandma at the fringe, the smell of candles in the dusk, occasionally nodding to anin the shadow of ponderosa, guiding her around sprinkler heads...

...Finally, in perhaps the weirdest depersonalization, gap...

...Being with Grandma was as therapeutic as a morn- Mildred in sweat pants, Ray in his polyester sports jackets, ing in the garden or a long afternoon in the library...

...When I'm finished I go to the sanctuary to and I moved among the cool leaves...

...The pleasure I felt with a stand of old-growth fir...

...I move around in the dark Gottwig to visit the Gottwig graves...

...will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press...

...We don't But what I recall most vividly is not the telling of the know each other outside of Mass, yet there's a camaraderie story but the green of the grass and the stillness of the air among us now that we've been working together a couple of and the deep pleasure I felt again, for the second time that years...

...But weak- either on the palm or the tongue...

...With them my triumphs and failures flattened out in a larger perspective, fading into some simpler, AGING BECOMES THEM more elemental plot...

...and part of the pleasure comes from the rhythm of long walk- The first time we met these people-perhaps years agoing-the subsiding of other thoughts and the beginning of the they were men...

...I pack a lunch and take Max blind from birth...

...If I were pope, I'd name thirty women cardi'I'M GONNA WASH THAT MAN...' nals (I'd change the Code of Canon Law so they need not be ordained) and begin the process that would lead to women's ordination...

...Yet in spite of that, or because of it maybe, I dead in the smoke, my six-year-old mother thrown out the now and then feel a kind of personal fulfillment at the Mass upper window, nothing but charred timbers in the morning, that I never feel in the life I invent and direct...

...x's and o's to show where we should be...

...indulgent...

...I say what I am supsense of peace and forgetfulness and long, slow releasing...

...Here I am, helping Grandma Gottwig up the hill, and the sun is all around us...

...I don't know," Grandma always says...

...The women...

...The calm I felt in his presence was so deep it had two, singing the final hymn...

...But some translations making Or: "Once there was a rich the rounds are not concerned with striking a balance between individual who dressed in pur- respect for the text and the feelings of women at odds with ple and linen and feasted every day...